I have both anxiety and panic attacks. Anxiety expresses itself via a lot of physical symptoms and are usually built up, whereas my panic can come for no reason and is more a mental experience. My personal experience with anxiety attacks includes sweating a lot, hot flashes, my heartbeat going up, crying, hyperventilation, and sometimes…
My symptoms have existed for as long as I can remember, and I spent most of my teens under a CAMHS team. Despite this, I was well into my twenties, my teaching career and my umpteenth crisis before an eagle-eyed psychiatrist recognised I have Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). I also…
I think I have always known I had OCD, but never really knew a life without it. With people saying, “Oh, I’m a bit OCD’, I thought that everyone had a bit of it in them. But just before Covid hit us, I realised that my compulsions were taking over my life, my relationship with…
I am a teacher and I have depression and anxiety. Sadly these days, this is a sentence that is true not only of me but also of the majority of my colleagues. I was diagnosed back in 2019 and to be honest I was quite fortunate, because all it took was a trip to my…
I’ve had health anxiety for as long as I can remember. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever lived an anxiety-free life. My health anxiety is by far the worst type of anxiety I have. I can’t quite say when it started, but the first memory I have of being sure I was going to…
For as long as I can remember, my life has been dominated by a very specific and embarrassing form of anxiety- driving anxiety. Even writing it down makes me cringe because it feels so trivial and silly. But for me, it can be very debilitating. Even as a child I remember being terrified of being…
It’s about 4am on a Sunday morning in June. I’m filling my time sat in a toilet, trying to calm myself from having what seems to be a never ending attack. My heart feels like it’s racing at warp speed and also feels like it is not beating at all, my breathing feels like it’s…
When I was 19, I lost a close friend to suicide towards the end of my first year at university. He was a delightful young man who was very outgoing, very inclusive, funny, and an immensely talented musician. He always had a cheeky smirk on his face, as if he was absolutely loving life. So…
The first time I visited my GP regarding my mental health, it revealed a very unnerving thought. The GP knew my dad as a patient, and jokingly said, “Well you’ve not got much hope really, have you?” I laughed along, however the thought stuck with me. Due to a genetic susceptibility to mental illness, do…
I am a secondary school teacher and I have been diagnosed with anxiety. A number of doctors have suggested other mental health diagnoses, from OCD to schizophrenia, but I have not stayed in one service long enough for a definitive diagnosis. I have been through CBT, where each session was spent reviewing the same questionnaire,…