HOW I’VE MADE IT THIS FAR | MY NEW BOOK IS AVAILABLE TO BUY NOW!!! | PART 2 OF 4

*This post is the second of 4 which will be posted every day for the following two days!*

Buy You’re NOT Disordered NOW!!

The three most obvious, go-to answers that you seriously just expect to hear when you ask someone how they have recovered from their mental illness: hospital, medication, and therapy. Fortunately – or unfortunately, I guess, depending upon how you look at it – for me, all three are true…

When my mental health deteriorated it did so in the form of auditory hallucinations, which I somehow ‘tolerated’ for around ten days before finally making my first suicide attempt. After passing out at school I was taken to hospital in an ambulance and then I ran away. The Police were called and when they found me when I had almost reached the nearby bus station, they detained me under section 136 of the 1983 Mental Health Act and I was pretty much thrown into their car and driven back to hospital where a Mental Health Act assessment promptly took place in a little room I’d never been in before in A&E. I honestly don’t’ remember much about it, just that I was told the Police could finally go and if I continued to try and leave the hospital then the staff were now allowed to restrain me, sedate me, and force me to finish the necessary, potentially life-saving medical treatment to counteract my suicide attempt.

THE 3 MOST CHALLENGING ISSUES IN WAITING FOR A PSYCHIATRIC APPOINTMENT

Still struggling with my mental health, a month after a ten-day psychiatric hospital admission (which I talked about here), meant that on March 28^th, my Mum came with me to a meeting with an NHS Psychiatrist, and a member of the Step-Up team. The appointment has inspired this post which will provide insight and advice around psychiatric appointments/meetings, in the hope that it will help service users about to attend their first appointment, existing service users who still struggle with theirs, and others who might just be genuinely interested to know or understand what can go on in these instances…

A HUGE CHAT ABOUT THERAPY

So, the inspiration for this post has come from a very recent, disastrous first therapy appointment and so initially I was just going to concentrate on that experience, but I found myself thinking of so many more bits about therapy that I want to talk about too…

When the first Psychologist (as far as I can remember) became involved in my care/treatment, I was very much in agreement with the us vs them culture when it came to psychiatric service users and certain professionals (most often the Police and Crisis Team though).

That mindset mostly stemmed from instances where I had been a psychiatric inpatient, because I think that it can be incredibly easy to build relationships with others on the ward and then see them in a number of different situations that could lead to intense thoughts and feelings towards the staff. I mean, it could vary from seeing someone being restrained and being angry that they were being deprived of their freedom and choice, to seeing someone self-harm or attempt suicide and ending up full of resentment for the staff who had been ‘useless’ in protecting and helping that person.

So, needless to say, I saw cooperating as a sign of weakness and defeat, and I developed a fear that engaging with professionals would make me more vulnerable. After self-harming, so many people would ask why I hadn’t called for help before doing it and I’d say that I hated the thought of seeking help and then those I’d spoken to, responding in ways I didn’t want or expect. I mean, there were numerous occasions where people – in general – have voiced that someone can’t genuinely be suicidal if they’re asking for help; but then you’d make a suicide attempt, and the first question would be “why didn’t you ring such-and-such?!” And that ironic sense of being unable to do anything ‘right’ no matter what you do, can really add to the frustration and contribute to the us vs them outlook.

AFTERMATH & MENTAL HEALTH

"The world breaks everyone and afterward, many are strong at the broken places."

Ernest Hemingway

With Christmas becoming extra special this year for lots of people seeing it as a huge cheer-up through the lockdown and coronavirus pandemic, it’s sort of been inevitable that more people will experience a ‘Christmas Come-down!’ Realising this, I thought I would blog some tips for making it through that time, and then my thinking sort of snowballed into me thinking about aftermaths in general. And aftermaths can be so connected to a person’s mental health that it feels worth talking about the entirety of them…

aftermath

[ˈɑːftəmaθˈɑːftəmɑːθ]

NOUN

The consequences or after-effects of a significant unpleasant event.

 

SELF-HARM

If I’ve labelled the aftermath of self-harm difficult or bad in any way, I’ve sometimes found people surprised by this because they’ve assumed that if I’m self-harming it’s to help myself in some way and so surely, I should consider the aftermath of it to actually be pleasant. And that if I didn’t think of it as enjoyable, why would I continue to self-harm? My response to this is an attempt to get across the desperation that a person usually feels when they self-harm. Especially where it isn’t the first time…

You can become so desperate to escape the motivations to hurt yourself that you don’t stop for even a moment to consider how awful any previous aftermaths have been. And it isn’t really about denial and blocking out those memories, it’s just that… Well, personally, I have the mindset that no matter what the aftermath, it’ll be worth that very short, momentary feeling of relief that I experience immediately after self-harming. So, it’s not as though all those memories about unhelpful responses in the aftermath of self-harm aren’t in my head; just that in the grand scheme of things, they mean nothing. Honestly, in the past, there’ve been times when a professional’s response to my self-harm has left me saying ‘I’m never going back to that A&E!’ or ‘I’ll never speak to the Crisis Team again!’ Yet, those instances don’t change my decision to self-harm.

WHY I DIDN’T TAKE PART IN DIGITAL DETOX DAY 2020

https://www.digitaldetoxday.org/

I first heard about Digital Detox Day when I visited Zoe Sugg’s Instagram account and read her post on the campaign she’s created alongside I Am Whole to shed light on the negative impact social media can have on your mental health and life in general. Zoe explained that the thought process behind the campaign was based on the realization that we are ‘endlessly scrolling’, comparing, judging, being cyber bullied, losing boundaries, and don’t know when to ‘switch off’ from social media. She says that all of this can be a cause of Anxiety, Depression, Sleeplessness, Loneliness, and low Self-Esteem.

Initially, I almost automatically decided to join in, read up on the campaign, and do the digital detox on September 5^th, 2020 (tomorrow). Then I started writing a post about the campaign for LEAPS (you can read the post here) and talking about my ‘digital journey’ really left me reconsidering my decision and feeling hugely tempted not to partake in the event. Writing about how I’ve progressed through social media and my blog really made me realize just how important the digital world has all become to me and that this isn’t necessarily unhealthy or unsafe.

BUT AM I READY TO BE DISCHARGED? | DISCHARGE FROM MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES | IN COLLABORATION WITH CUMBRIA, NORTHUMBERLAND, TYNE & WEAR NHS FOUNDATION TRUST | AD

This post may come as a shock to some people but it’s actually something that’s been talked about behind-the-scenes for about two months now and I just hadn’t told anyone it was a topic of discussion amongst me, my Community Psychiatric Nurse (CPN), and the rest of the Community Mental Health Team (CMHT).  As part of these discussions, my CPN suggested I write a blog post about discharge from mental health services; the technicalities behind it, the thoughts and feelings around it, the importance of it, and advice I’d give to others going through the process.


WHY I STILL NEED THERAPY

So, the talk about discharge actually came up when I got a new CPN; she was asking me what I thought I needed to do and what she could do for me to help me be ready to be discharged from services, and I told her that there’s still a lot to talk about around the abuse. You’d think that somewhere among all of these blog posts would have been the point where I’d worn out talking about the abuse but actually, I’m very short of that mark. And I think that’s because the most detail I’ve ever gone into it about it was to the Police; and for all their amazing work, they aren’t the best people to support someone with that. For them, it’s all about the technicalities in using the proper words – who cares about the words that make you uncomfortable or that you find triggering, you better be prepared to talk like you’re in a Biology class(!) – and naming absolutely everywhere and everyone that was even remotely involved. Now that that interview is over, all I can do publicly is say at one point in my life it happened… I can’t tell you his profession or the location of it because people will easily guess – my point with this though, is that, if you can guess from just those details then maybe that says more about him than it does about me oversharing! And there have been so many times when those details have been relevant to blog posts and I’ve just had to bite my tongue! So, having the ability to tell one person absolutely everything would be so refreshing and comforting that I feel it’s the one necessity missing for my mental health recovery. I have the support system, I have a positive attitude, I have safe coping mechanisms… all of that isn’t the answer if you haven’t worked on the root cause though.

BLOGMAS 2019 – POST FIVE : BEAR IN MIND PSYCHOLOGY | ETSY COLLABORATION | AD

Thanks to a poll on my Twitter back in November, my wonderful followers decided that I should publish a blog post and film a vlog every day for the entirety of December! 

So welcome to December 5th…

Today is all about my collaboration with one very special brand on Etsy, in this post I’ll be reviewing the products they sent to me and on December 23rd you can enter a competition to win these products and the remaining eight that I’ll be reviewing every other day this month!


The second product are these very handy Schema Therapy Flashcards by the incredible Bear In Mind Psychology, who are based in Watford, England. 

I first heard about Schema Therapy in 2011 when I began seeing a Psychologist through my Community Mental Health Team (CMHT) and it ended up being my most well period in the three years before I was admitted to the long-term, specialist, psychiatric hospital.


For those who don’t know, to put it simply, Schema Therapy is all about identifying the different sides to you, understanding what they mean, realizing how they differ, and figuring out why they’re there. So, the Psychologist and I found that I have about three main Schemas; one that it angry, one that is sad, and one that is happy. 

HOW I MADE IT TO 28 | THE FIVE THINGS THAT HELPED SEE ME THROUGH

I’ve been thinking a lot about how grateful I am to still be alive and able to celebrate my 28^th Birthday (yesterday).

The sad thing is that I’m not being dramatic when I say that a lot of people thought I’d be dead by now. From when my mental health really deteriorated in 2009 to my long hospitalization in 2012, my records showed that I’d taken over 60 paracetamol overdoses. And even though not all of those overdoses were suicide attempts – sometimes they were just a desperate bid to silence the voices that commanded me to take it – they all could have ended in death. At the age of 21, I could have died more than 60 times. So maybe it’s understandable that I’m a little bit emotional about making it this far!

Now I know that I have a lot of readers who can identify with those very dark days and I’d like to think that in doing so, they might find some hope in the fact that I’ve managed to recover from that time. So, I thought I’d put together a little post with the top five things that I think have gotten me to 28!

WHY THERE IS NO PLACE FOR EXCUSES IN MENTAL HEALTH

ex·cuse

[excuse]

VERB

·         attempt to lessen the blame attaching to (a fault or offense); seek to defend or justify.

synonyms:

justify · defend · make excuses for · make a case for · explain (away) · rationalize · condone · vindicate · warrant · mitigate · palliate · apologize for · forgive · overlook · disregard · ignore · pass over · turn a blind eye to

·         forgive (someone) for a fault or offense.

"you must excuse my sister" · "he could be excused for feeling that he was born at the wrong time"

·         overlook or forgive (a fault or offense)

So, I was watching Pretty Little Liars on Netflix and one of the characters said, “don’t make excuses for her; it’s demeaning.” And it led me to thinking a lot about instances where excuses have come up in mental health – in my mental health. I think that people in general are pretty much notorious for forever providing excuses for their behaviours, attitudes, thoughts, and feelings; no matter what they are. Positive or negative. ‘Right’ or ‘wrong.’ No matter what the situation.

24HRS WITH... INSIDELIAMSHEAD BLOGGER & FREELANCE METRO UK REPORTER LIAM BAINES

24 hours with... Liam Baines – Blogger at insideliamshead, Freelance Reporter for Metro UK

Date: 01/10/2018

Why have you chosen to write about today? First day of the month, a fresh start!



Good morning!



What time did you wake up?

9am


Why did you wake up at that time?

I had a few things to sort out in the morning



Did you have a dream?

I had a dream! It involved the concert that I went to last Friday!

HOW I USED DBT AT ENGLISH HERITAGE SITE: BRINKBURN PRIORY & MANOR HOUSE | AD

I can remember when I was sectioned once whilst down south and my Mum told me about a phone call she’d had with a member of staff from the psychiatric hospital I was admitted to. During the call he’d asked whether I’d had Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) and when my Mum told him she hadn’t heard of it, he explained his surprise as it is the recommended treatment for someone diagnosed with a Personality Disorder (I had been diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder). After that, my Mum questioned my Community Mental Health Team as to why I hadn’t had it yet and why it hadn’t even been suggested.

NATIONAL SERVICE USER AWARDS 2018 | #NSUA2018

[Note to see who won each category; follow #NSUA2018 on Twitter!]

I remember when I was in Cygnet Hospital Bierley and they first mentioned the National ServiceUser Awards (NSUAs) and I couldn’t have been more interested! It was only the second time that Cygnet Healthcare had hosted the NSUAs and so there wasn’t much experience or knowledge when it came to the invitations I was involved – and by that I mean that I hand-made every single one!

The following year, I attended as a finalist alongside YoungMinds in one of the categories and we won!

So, this year, when I got told that I could have a spot doing the social media for the 2018 NSUAs I was over the moon and very excited! After many talks I was finally named the Event Blogger and then the Head of Social Media took poorly on the actual day of the Awards, I stepped up and attempted to fill his shoes with a barrage of tweets (each with the #NSUA2018 hashtag!).

HOW I STOPPED THINKING IN BLACK OR WHITE

I’m sure this it quite common for writers/bloggers; but I can draw inspiration for blog posts from the random of things. This post comes from a ‘challenge’ doing its rounds on Facebook. Every day for seven days, you’re meant to post a black and white photo. It can’t be of a person and you can’t explain it in the photo description/wall post. You also have to nominate someone on day one (you’ll have been nominated yourself from someone else, obviously!) to keep the challenge rolling.

Obviously, you’ve seen the title to this post I’m sure there’s no need to point it out, but the ‘black and white’ aspect of the challenge inspired me to write about black and white thinking.

PRE-LAUNCH Ad | LINES FROM AN UNFINISHED LOVE SONG BY GAIL CURRY | Ad

Hopefully you’ve all read my previous post (http://www.imnotdisordered.co.uk/2017/09/coming-soon-line-from-unfinished-love.html) about the author Gail Curry who I’m working closely with for the release of her new book Lines From an Unfinished Love Song.

The release event is on 05.10.2017 but I wanted to stir up a bit of excitement in you guys to coax you all into joining both the Facebook page and Twitter account to keep up with all the latest on the book and to find out where you can buy your own copy.

HOW I TURNED MY HATE FOR MY ABUSER INTO DETERMINATION

♭ By the time I'm finished, they won't even know your name ♭

There are 28 posts in my 'Drafts.'

Looking through them is basically like you've glanced into my head every so often.



One of them was named TTIWICSBC - The Things I Wish I Could Say But Can't. It was going to be a little series of posts aimed at different people in my life - or who have been, in my life. People I'm unable to - for many different, complicated, confusing reasons - talk to. Things that I'm unable to say out loud and so the words float buzz around my head. [I changed my mind with 'float' because that implies that all is calm; and it isn't. Not all the time. Not where this is concerned.]

The post remains empty - but for the title and idea behind it...

HOW I KNOW THAT MY 'BOLT HOLE' HASN'T BECOME MY 'HIDEY HOLE'

"Don't tell me you haven't heard of that phrase!"

"Well, no!"

"A hole is somewhere you can go and hide; and 'bolt' is... like when you're running away."

Last year, I visited Scarborough with my Mum and since I've never shut up about the amazing hotel room we stayed in (at the Ambassador Hotel) it'd had the most incredible view but it wasn't until a day before we were due to leave that I actually started to make the most of - and appreciate - the chairs placed directly in front of the bay window. So when I found out I was going back to Scarborough but that it was to stay in a different hotel (the Crown Spa Hotel), I wasn't sure if I was going to enjoy it so much; I'd thought that it'd been that hotel, that view, and that little area of the room that had me feeling content and peaceful for the entire holiday.

A QUARTER OF A MILLION READERS!!!

BEFORE I BEGAN TO BLOG…

Having been abused when I was younger I internalised all of the mental (and physical) pain; and held onto the anger through my reluctance to tell anyone it had occurred. Over the following two years I tried various dangerous and unhealthy coping methods before I began experiencing auditory hallucinations in 2009, and out of fear; I took an overdose.

Over the following three years I self-harmed (in many different ways), took (according to my files) over 60 overdoses, and was sectioned under the Mental Health Act on countless occasions where admissions to Psychiatric Hospitals lasted from anywhere between a couple of days, to several months.

WHEN I BEGAN TO BLOG

In July 2012 I attempted suicide and woke up in Intensive Care. There (once I came off life support) I agreed to go into a long-term (the average stay was claimed to be 12-18 months) hospital specialising in Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD). The hospital (Cygnet Hospital Bierley) was based over 100 miles away from my home, my Mum, my family, friends; and everything I knew…

POST FIVE: MENTAL HEALTH AWARENESS WEEK 2017 | Ad

IN COLLABORATION WITH

THE WORSLEY CENTRE

FOR MORE INFORMATION SEE: http://theworsleycentre.com/living-with-anxiety/

The Things Turning 26 Made Me Think About [MY BIRTHDAY]

                               

Turning twenty six kind of caught me by surprise...

Obviously I dont mean that I forgot it was going to happen! It was just that I was hit with the realisation that it would be completely normal for me to start thinking about - and talking about - time frames (not sure if that's the best way to phrase it) for a lot of the important milestones in life: a house, marriage, and babies!

I think that a huge factor in making this such a shock, was the amount of time - years; I've spent, being convinced that I had no future because there were so many times when I'd do something that could, potentially, make it impossible.  

All of these professionals; Psychologists, DBT therapists, Occupational Therapists, Community Psychiatric Nurses (CPNs), and pretty much every member of staff whilst being an inpatient with Cygnet; would be asking me to think of goals. They'd have this generic 
form that demanded five short-term goals and three long-term, how they could be achieved, and by when I would like to have achieved them. Of course I understood that the purpose in doing this was to give you motivation on days when you felt hopeless; but, realising that for me, at that point in my life, 'short-term' meant however many hours were left in the day; and 'long-term' was within a week, it made me feel even less hopeful. 

My life was like that for such a long time that finally being able to say 'in the next few months I'd like to...' or 'in a years time I'd like to...' was overwhelming! This might sound strange to some of you, but; accepting that you have a future... It's - not hard... But... It's not how some people might imagine that straight away it's like 'yay! This is so good!' I feel like this is an aspect of mental health recovery that you might never think of or consider unless you're told or you experience it; because, in all honesty, it threw me off a little bit. It made me embarrassed; feeling that I now had to almost play catch-up with my friends. Those I'd studied my A Levels alongside were on the verge of becoming fully qualified Lawyers [the career path I'd planned to take] and those who'd gone on to do an apprenticeship were now permanent and full-time employees. And if I wanted to stick to the whole 'Law-route' thing then I'd need to re-sit all of my A Levels before I could even start considering University. 

Happy Fourth Birthday, I'm NOT Disordered: 4 Things I'm NOT Disordered Has Taught Me In 4 Years

It was I'm NOT Disordered's Birthday on January 6th and after having published a post (with each featuring a list of the good and bad moments from the previous 12 months) on that date every year, I'm a little embarrassed (but it is still the Birthday month!) that this post is going up later; but I decided that I'd rather risk embarrassment than not post it at all...
First Birthday (2014)
Second Birthday  (2015)
Third Birthday (2016)

In all honesty, I was a little surprised - and not in a good way - when I went back over these previous Birthday posts and saw that each one had the same kind of theme and layout. It only served to fuel my absolute determination to give I'm NOT Disordered a makeover and over-haul for 2017 (I haven't made even half the changes I plan to). In recent months I have put a lot of thought into my content and began making a conscious effort to update it, play around with it, and just mix it up a bit (I really hope you guys have noticed! Or that you will notice if you look back through recent posts now that I've told you!).

So, in making so many changes, I think it only right that...1. The Birthday post be different. And... 2. I talk about the lessons I've learnt from the past four years with I'm NOT Disordered; because you only making changes after having learnt something that inspires you to do so.

Photography: RJ Photography

Passion

"What do you want to do when you're older?"

Until 2014/2015, I'd had a lot of different answers over the years.

It's something that I've always felt quite embarrassed about because I thought of it as quite a childish quality in that most children frequently change their minds on what they'd like to 'be' when they grow up. Like most children, my ever-changing fixations with careers was brought on by changes in my life; e.g. when my trauma began to take place I wanted to become a Lawyer. Then when I finished Sixth Form with no good A Level grades; I turned to fashion, thinking of it as a different kind of smart... Less book-ish! When I had my most stable period in my mental health (in 2011); and knowing that I wasn't well enough for full-time employment, I volunteered in some charity shops and became determined to become a Visual Merchandiser. And then along came I'm NOT Disordered! One of the many positive things to come from blogging is the feeling that I've finally found my 'calling in life!' And that is something that is so incredibly special and overwhelming after having felt like I wanted to end my life for so long.

Never panic, stress, or worry if you feel like all of your friends know what they want to do, and they all have ten year plans or if you don't know exactly what you want to do in life. You'll know, when you know.