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Hello and welcome to recommendation number five of Blogmas 2020 with I’m NOT Disordered!
Today, I’ll be talking about the importance of self-care for your mental health and how vital it has been to stabilise my own. This post is in collaboration with Superdrug, so I’ll also be recommending some bits I’ve picked out from their website!
In 2011, my Mum and I found out about Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) after a Psychiatrist mentioned that it was the recommended treatment for someone with my diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). She and I were baffled as to why I’d had the diagnosis for two years and had spent those years in and out of psychiatric hospitals, self-harming, and attempting suicide, yet we’d never even heard of DBT!
Unfortunately, the mental health services in my locality were very limited in supporting someone with BPD and there really wasn’t anyone specialising in treating someone with the diagnosis through DBT. It meant that when a suicide attempt left me on life support in intensive care, the professionals were sort of forced to transfer me to a specialist psychiatric hospital over 100 miles away from my home and my loved ones. It wasn’t that infuriating until a member of the hospital’s staff commented that if I’d lived in their locality, I would’ve had the treatment so much sooner. Postcode lottery.