Tea, Talking, and Mental Health Awareness

I’ve seen so much on my twitter feed about Mental Health Week, and Lyons Tea, and the HSE’s #LittleThings campaign. I’m only one person, and in the mental health lottery I came out ahead of a lot of others, but I thought I’d offer my voice anyway, in the hope that some of this might be useful.

I have severe generalized anxiety disorder, dysthymia, and am a recovering anorexic. All three of those are serious mental health conditions — anorexia and other eating disorders have the highest fatality rate of all mental illnesses — and yet the HSE’s advice is not only useless but in some cases actually dangerous for people with those conditions. At the lowest point of my anorexia, when I was eating 500 calories a day and spending several hours in the gym, if you’d told me that “the more you move, the better your mood”, I’d have passed out on a treadmill and considered it perfectly justified. I would have heard that you can “boost your mood with healthy food”, looked at the single apple I was eating for dinner, and felt that the HSE thought I was doing the right thing.

I will not deny that it’s healthy to get enough sleep and eat vegetables and go outside. These are things that are important in my life because they help me manage my mental health. But they make up maybe five percent of the very real work I have to do every day to stop myself falling apart, work that often completely fails for no real reason other than that my brain chemistry is being stubborn.

Growing up, the first and most predominant message about mental health I got was that you have to talk about it. Talk to your friends, talk to your family, talk to the people you care about and tell them what’s wrong. So I talked to my friends — and ended up with a bunch of worried friends and mental health that had not improved a bit, because, unsurprisingly, telling the people you love that you wish you were dead leaves them very afraid, and you still wishing the same thing, but with an extra layer of guilt on top.

I took a medical leave of absence midway through my third year of university because my mental health was through the floor. I was pretty much unable to function normally — I oscillated between not being able to sleep and not being able to wake up; I ate everything in sight and then hated myself and ate nothing for days; I cried almost constantly; I sliced up my own skin with a razorblade; I tried to jump off a bridge. I spent several months pulling myself back together — getting real medical care for my real medical problems. I shuffled back and forth between psychiatrists and GPs and nurses and counsellors and occupational therapists. I got on some proper medication, and went to therapy multiple times a week, and had to stay with my parents for several months while they helped me work out how to eat at regular intervals and not spend 18 hours a day sobbing in bed. Do you know what they didn’t tell me? To “add friends to my tea”. Because that would have done nothing. An umbrella is not enough against a hurricane.

I was lucky enough to be a student at a university with a great health centre, and to be noticeably unwell enough to get on the right lists at the right times. I got a psychiatrist appointment fairly easily; I spent some time on the counselling centre’s emergency list, meaning they would find a same-day appointment for me any time I called; I got a referral to a therapist who charged a cheap student rate; I was given not only a prescription but access to medical professionals who could change it and tweak it and make sure it worked best for me. Even with all of this, I barely made it out of college, but without it I’m absolutely certain I would not be alive today.

The thing is, I shouldn’t have to thank the gods that I made it to a university where my mental health would be taken seriously. I shouldn’t have to pour gratitude on my long-suffering parents who still pay the medical bills that my salary won’t cover. Nobody should have to wonder how they’re going to find a doctor to take them seriously, or have to weigh up the cost of expensive therapy that keeps them stable against their grocery bill for the week. We need real mental health care in this country, and we can’t afford to wait any longer.

Don’t pander to us. People with mental illnesses are not people who somehow are magically unaware that it’s a good thing to get a full night’s sleep, or eat fruit, or see their friends. We are not people who are a bit down because we don’t know that “the more you move, the better your mood”. We are people with serious illnesses, and telling us to “boost our mood with healthy food” is just a way to blame us for our illness.