I Had A Breakdown In High School
During my high school years, I had a breakdown. At the time, it seemed to come out of nowhere, and just suddenly crept up on me. But looking back at the situation, I started to hate school. I hated waking up for it, I hated making my way there, I hated having to go through it, and I hated having to come home again afterwards. School made my stomach hurt and my gut churn, and the thought made my heart pound like crazy, and I wanted to throw up most of the time when I was getting ready for it.
So, when I was in Year 9, I started to refuse to go to school. I would have been about 13 years old at this point, and absolutely done with the fact that I had to wake up in the morning and get dressed into a uniform that made me uncomfortable. I hated the way I had to tie my hair back, and how it made my chubby cheeks pop. I hated how I was always red-faced when I checked my outfit in the mirror. I even hated the shoes I wore, and how clunky and slow they seemed to make me move, but they were school regulation and my parents wouldn’t buy any other pair.
After getting ready, I would head out for 6 hours of classes that made absolutely no sense to me. I would have to walk to school most days, and the walk made my legs ache beyond belief. When I walk, I get this (so far unexplained) cramping in my lower legs, and I still have trouble walking now, even for just a couple of minutes, and often need to stop to wait for the pain and strain to dissipate. When I was 13–14, however, I had zero pain tolerance for it, on top of how much I hated the reason I was going through it.
I would sit down in a lesson, most of my friends in other classes, and I could barely understand a word that was being said to me. Maths and science were the worst; chemistry specifically, where the teacher would single me out and make an example of just how wrong I had sketched out the way water molecules acted under certain conditions.
Safe to say, I faked being ill quite a few times, and my attendance steadily dropped. I don’t quite remember how low, but it was definitely below 80%. Two teaching assistants came out to my home one day, to check if I was actually ill. I remember being pulled out of bed, and how tired and bleary-eyed I was when I was brought downstairs to show my exhaustion. They left without any issue.
I remember feeling so lonely during these times. I remember writing a note on my phone about how isolated and horrible I felt; that I had little to no friends, and that no one actually wanted to be friends with me. I didn’t know how to go about making new ones either. I imagined them all hanging out without me, and laughing at me, and talking behind my back — I had very little real evidence to actually corroborate these claims swirling around my mind.
Eventually, I was diagnosed with school phobia and generalised anxiety, and I was signed off of school for 2 weeks with stress. When those 2 weeks were up, I was reintegrated, bit by bit, back into the school day. I would go in for 1 lesson one week, then 2, then 3, and so on and so forth.
It’s safe to say this didn’t work. I didn’t see the point in going into school for just a single lesson a day, and my refusal only seemed to get worse.
So when I was 14, and just about to go into Year 10, the proverbial hit the fan. I was just coming out of another review meeting, where teachers and other assorted authority members would collect together to go over my education plan. I never quite understood these meetings, and I was never, ever heard when I tried to talk in them.
And it was at that point in time, on that random Tuesday or Friday, that I finally seemed to understand that. They were going to make me go back to school, in classes I couldn’t cope with, surrounded by other kids who didn’t know or like me, and just knew I was the name on the register that rarely ever got an answer to.
They were going to regiment me into GCSE option classes I didn’t actually choose, and I knew I would have to sit quietly in the corner with no one around to support me, or chat with me, or make jokes to keep me laughing. I barely had anyone to text from my phone either, and any internet friends I had turned to (because I had recently found it a lot easier to chat to a faceless stranger on the internet) couldn’t possibly walk into a class with me.
It felt like I couldn’t breathe. It felt like I was being attacked by all sides. They had even mentioned prison at one point, seeing as I’d missed so much school, and seemed to have no viable reason for not being able to come in and attend a full day of lessons. Both my mum and I were in the firing line.
I was so out of my depth and overwhelmed, incredibly ill (physically and mentally), and not in a place to consider coming back to school and getting right back to handing in top quality homework with a smile on my face.
So I came out of that meeting, my mum right behind me, seething with quiet rage over the way my school kept ‘letting me down’, in her words. I was asked if I could stay to complete the day of school, only about 3 hours of it left, and that question alone made me burst into tears. Tears that were hot and heavy as they came out of my eyes, that wouldn’t stop coming, that wouldn’t let me speak, and I even had trouble staying standing. My mum pulled me into her arms and said she was taking me home. I never went back to school.
From this followed another 2 years of desperately searching for answers, attending online lessons from home, and trying to claw my way back into some kind of formal education setting. I wanted to learn, truly I did, but I just hated how a classroom was set up, and how long it took for that final bell to ring at the end of the day.
I rarely left the house, I rarely talked to anyone, and I often turned to forms of self-harm to get me through the night and day. I couldn’t sleep, I either overate or didn’t eat at all, and my lack of interest in control over my diabetes made sure I had hypos during most nights of the week. Most noticeably, my eyesight started to deteriorate because of the ups and downs of glucose in my bloodstream.
I was eventually diagnosed with depression. About 7 or 8 years later, I’m still feeling the effects of these school years I missed, of those connections I didn’t make, of the career advice I never received, and the never-ending feeling of what I might have missed.
I’m not the only one who’s had an experience like this.
A survey of 38,000 university students brought a lot of startling statistics to the forefront of the news. It reported that 50.3% had thought of harming themselves to cope, and almost 34% of the sample had experienced a serious psychological issue they felt required treatment.
But I didn’t even make it to university before my mental health seemed to go completely up the spout. I was in high school, or secondary school here as it’s known here in the UK, and only made it about halfway through the 4 years of classes I was told would fly by in a flash.
But then again, in 2017, a survey of the CAMHS system told us that almost 13% of children aged between 9 and 17 were found to be suffering with at least one mental disorder. I was out of the system by that point, but it’s clear that the prevalence of mental health symptoms and official diagnoses in school-aged children is on the rise.
It’s hard to look at those statistics and think everything is just fine with the education system. It’s hard to look at those statistics and think that what I went through was abnormal. And it’s very hard to realise that I really wasn’t the only one; that somehow, the school system does this to kids up and down the country, and across the world.
I was 14 years old when I had a nervous breakdown. Because of that, it’s important to me that we acknowledge that breakdowns happen to anyone, at any age, and that every single one needs to be taken seriously. It’s not just a child throwing a tantrum. It’s not just a child being petulant and moody, and going through puberty, like we dismiss a lot of valid feelings as.
It’s certainly not just a phase. Trust me when I say that the memory of it is going to be felt for years.
Of course, in the UK, schools get funding based on the number of pupils they have in attendance, and maybe they saw me as someone who was letting the entire system down. I wasn’t in school, I was refusing to go, and they might have been losing money because of it.
I don’t want to try and come up with a valid reason for the way I was treated, because looking back on it, it seems they just didn’t know how to handle me, and wanted the problem that I was to go away. It wasn’t entirely their fault, and it wasn’t mine either.
What it does is really illustrate just how broken the education system is forced to be. Teachers don’t get the right training to deal with someone like me. Schools don’t get the funding to set up support groups for kids like me; a place to collect us together and offer the classroom setting that’s essential for making school a friendly place to be again. And the ones that do exist are few and far between, and can only handle a few cases at a time.
I was fortunate enough to be sent to one, but I was referred to them via a psychiatrist; imagine what happens to the kids who were just as bad as me, but are quieter about their suffering, or have a reason to not want to be at home either.
