"Redefining Resilience": Launching my Campaign to Redefine what Resilience Means and End Mental Health Stigma

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My campaign to Redefine Resilience - Launched Today!

Resilience is in fashion: organisations are talking about the need for employees to build resilience to succeed and enable them to progress in their careers. “Resilience is that ineffable quality that allows some people to be knocked down by life and come back stronger than ever.” [PsychologyToday]. I recently wrote a blog post for @brizzlelass on #Resilience. 

Read my guest post here

Because I do not meet that description of resilience above, or the dictionary definition of it. I don’t agree with it. I am not ‘stronger than ever’. But I am here.

In the past year I’ve continued to suffer from acute depression (I’ve been hospitalised and continue to have day patient care and take a whole fistful of medication), broken my back, elbow and had countless days when I wished I would not wake up the next day. But I do.

I am now launching a campaign of my own: Redefining Resilience – where I will speak to as many schools, businesses and charities in the UK (and beyond) as I can to tell my story and offer a different perspective of what ‘resilience’ means. I have had depression and anxiety for twenty+ years. I have been bullied at work, I have been taken out of projects at work for admitting to depression and stress. I have been told to lie about being stressed to colleagues as a point of performance feedback. And I am still ill with depression and anxiety today despite treatment. But I am still ambitious, still working, and I still will not give up living.

I have spent the last year campaigning to end the stigma associated with mental illness by writing a blog about my day to day experiences living with depression, anxiety and borderline PTSD. I campaign for Mind, Time to Change. I have written for the press and appeared on television talking about my experiences and raising awareness.

I am also a full time city professional – a management consultant manager specialising in helping organisations transform their businesses in various ways. I manage teams, work with clients and contribute to the success of the company I work for (KPMG). At the same time I advocate mental health support through being a managing member of our Be Mindful network which promotes and supports a mentally healthy workplace because everyone has mental health.

I am listed on Brummell Magazine’s 2015 list of Inspirational City Women who are Champions of Diversity, and I am one of five women (including Woman’s Hour Power Lister Nimco Ali) to be shortlisted for the Women of The Future 2015 Community Spirits award.

Do you work at a school, university or organisation who would like to hear my story of what resilience means for me - what my resilience story is?

I would love to have the chance to share my story with your school, business, group and help to redefine resilience. We don’t all bounce back. But we do keep fighting as much as we can. We know that young people are self harming and suffering with mental illness now more than ever. We know that suicide is the highest cause of death in young men aged 20-34. Mental illness is a killer. I want to raise awareness of this condition and tell anyone who has survived another day: you are resilient. you are not a failure. You are winning by surviving. 

Please contact me using the contact form at the bottom of this blog or at my new email address: redefiningresilienceforall@gmail.com I can't wait to get more conversations started about what resilience really means for all of us to help improve our health, our children's health, our colleagues' health. Because everyone has mental health just as everyone has physical health.

Short Post - Shortlisted for Women of the Future Award 2015

It is such an honour to be shortlisted for a Women of the Future award - thank you

I'm surprised, delighted and somewhat speechless and overwhelmed to announce that I've been shortlisted for a Women of the Future award in the category for Community Spirits. Congratulations to all the other women who are shortlisted with me and for the amazing work that they do.

You can read the full nomination listings here

This comes a few days after it was announced that I am also now named as 1/30 Inspirational City Women Champions of Diversity by Brummell magazine.

You can read all the 30 listed women's profiles here

Being recognised by both of these organisations / publications is a tremendous honour. A year ago I still wasn't being fully open about my mental health because I was terribly afraid of the stigma I might receive from others, as I had experienced in the past. I still see that stigma and experience it both personally and through the accounts others share with me. But now I talk about it. I won't accept it. I speak out and up and will keep speaking until this stops.

I support @mindcharity and @timetochange 

as a media volunteer, a campaigner, a runner and more.

Please read more about the work of these two amazing charities here: 

Mind and Time to Change

This stigma has to end. Mental illness is a killer and not being able to talk about it makes it worse. If you can start a conversation in your work place, your family, with your friends or with someone on the bus where we talk about being more accepting, understanding and kind to each other, whatever our differences are, whatever illness or disability we may have, we can make this conversation part of a bigger national and international discussion where we can highlight the dreadful stigma around mental illness and  - together - end it once and for all. I represent a person who is living with a mental illness but I am living with it. I am not a psycho, a nutter, a mental case, a head case. I am not a #headclutcher. I have an illness and I need respect for that. And then I need respect to get on with my life as I choose to. And one of the things I choose is to speak up for others suffering with mental illness (and stigma) who do not feel they want to or are able to speak for themselves.

Read more here about @Rethink_ and this statistic

I hope you will join me and have a conversation about this today, tomorrow, or someday soon. #MentalHealthMatters. We all have it, and we need to look after it. Our own and others'.

Thank you for supporting my blog where I will continue to share my story and perspectives on what mental illness is really like. And thank you to @womenoffuture and @BrummellMag for recognising me. I am overwhelmed, delighted and inspired. I hope it will help to bring more people into the conversations we need to have about #MentalIllness and the actions we need to take to change how we care for mentally ill people - the millions within our country struggling and surviving (or not surviving) - better.

Thank you.

We Can Work It Out...Or can we? Talking About my Mental Health at Work

Stephen Fry, Patron of Time to Change and mental health advocate

In June, when Stephen Fry appeared on Desert Island discs (which, if you haven’t heard of it, is a fantastic way to glimpse the biographies of the world’s good and great through their reflections on life and 8 discs they would choose to accompany them if they happened to be cast away on a desert island). He talked about the impact of his mental health on his life. He also talked about his decision to be open about his condition, recognising (to paraphrase) that he is never free of thinking of his mental health or others’ through his decision to be open about it. 

Stephen Fry on Desert Island Discs

I sympathise with this perspective, because I would very much like to be free of my own mental illness and to go through life with a normal amount of woe, (whatever a normal amount is) balanced against a reasonable ability to cope with whatever life may drag, toss, push, cajole or offer into my path.

This is the kind of conversation I can so easily have with myself, again and again.

At the moment, however, I am still handling poor mental health every day, and I am more than happy to speak about it in the hope that it will help me to accept myself as I am, rather than embracing all the defective qualities I find it so easy to discover in myself. More than this, I hope that my decision to be open will help other people at work be more open about their illnesses, and I especially hope that it will help managers, leaders and HR professionals (the people whose job it is to support us at work) to see that depression and anxiety do not exclude a person from being able to make a valuable contribution to the working world.

I “came out” at work last year after realising that to go on hiding a condition that left me at times debilitated and unable to get out of bed from my employers only fostered my own strong sense that I was actually a failure, hopeless, useless and no good for anything or anyone. I set myself extremely high standards, nurtured since my earliest memories, for everything that I do, and when I considered the risk that, in coming out with my depression, I might find visible proof that others saw me as “less than”, “weak”, “to be avoided”, I only wanted to crawl further beneath the duvet, to barricade the windows with blackout blinds seven fold and never to come out again, rather than to take that risk.

It's not actually wallowing. It's drowning.

I had had bad experiences at work previously when struggling with my depression, which you can read about earlier in my blog and also in the piece I contributed to Buzzfeed this week about my precarious route along the tangled wiry cables of a life spiked with barbs of depression towards being honest about it to myself and others. It was when I experienced bullying from people outside of my company which left me so destroyed that I did not want to live, that I finally got help in hospital. And it was during recovery and return to work that I realised that I would only protect those bullies and harm myself if I didn’t try to put across my point of view, and show that I was still Jessica, depression, anxiety, and all.

Sometimes I feel this way; mostly I have to work not to hide it, 

as well as deciding whether I have the energy to smile

I have heard many negative stories from people who have been terribly treated by someone from their employer when they have tried to express their needs for support because of their mental illness. It enrages me when I imagine the huge step a person has to take to ask for help because of a (still very much stigmatised) mental illness. I am ashamed for the human race that people wilfully (at times) harm people with mental illness when they refuse support or (at best) to ignore requests for help. 

Despite the funny message intended, being a boss 

who doesn't support colleagues and staff's health needs  is not acceptable.

An atmosphere at work where there is too little support is toxic and unproductive

What makes it worse is that when I am struggling with depression the last thing I want to do, instinctively, is to draw attention to it publicly, because my self-loathing and acute awareness of everything weak and bad in myself is so heightened that I am seething with the physical sensations that this brings, and feel sure that others must be able to see that I am totally worthless. To be refused support only perpetuates this notion. To be told to “pull yourself together” makes me fall farther apart.

It's easy to believe this when you are struggling with depression.

It's so easy that I can believe everyone else will have the same low opinion of me

that I can have of myself

So what would I suggest to those people? Not everyone will have a positive experience when speaking about their mental health at work…but if you are ill you need to take whatever steps are needed to try to get well, whether that is medication, therapy, time off work, adjusted working hours, adjustments to the way that you work. You should be able to get these. 

I believe that everyone has the right to support at work, with illness

and that everyone has the right to work without fear of discrimination

I understand that you might not want to speak up or ask for help, naming your need as a mental illness, because you feel the weight of your own self-hatred holding you back, and you are afraid that you’ll be met with stigma, be shamed, be devalued, perhaps even lose your job.

I can only say, you are not wrong to ask for help. You deserve help. You are worth it, even if you have never felt more worthless. You can seek help from Remploy (in the UK) and other mental health work information sites which provide information for you on your rights and give helpful advice on how to speak to your employers about your needs. (And, on the Remploy site, there is also a downloadable advice leaflet for employers, so if you’re reading this and wondering how better to support your staff, please take a look at this, and use the Mind website and helpline for further information.)

Remploy and other sites can help to reassure us that we do have rights,

and can (and should) expect support for our needs

(Mind's legal line can also advise on what to do, you can reach them on 0300 466 6463) 

In my experience, I continue to have to “come out” throughout my working life, because my job means that I’m frequently working with different teams of people who don’t know me or the fact that I have health reasons for needing adjustments to the way that I work. I try to do this in a fairly ‘light’ way, because I have work to do, firstly, and if we have a thirty minute conversation about my depression and medication, that’s not something I’m going to be able to put on my status update to my manager as a positive outcome. (Although, I can put it in this blog and feel a little bit glad that I continued to be honest when it was hard!) I want to be seen as the sum of my parts, and depression is still just one part of who I am, the pink and purple hair-streaked business woman who likes to write, sing, paint, eat good food and drink good wine, buy far too many pairs of shoes, run in the park and watch endless films and TV shows on Netflix, and read good literature and totally crap novels.

The crucial point: I am not denying that my mental illness is part of who I am.

I am who I am...depression, pink hair and all

Towards the end of that episode of Desert Island Discs, presenter Kirsty Young asked Stephen Fry, “You’ve more than hinted earlier that much of the torment you’ve gone through is why you are the person you are. If you had the choice to live without your bipolar condition, what choice would you make?”

“Interesting" he answered. "I wouldn’t want anyone to underestimate the seriousness of a condition like that it can shorten lives, sometimes traumatically and terribly. It can have a terrible effect on families and people around you, but it’s so hard to separate it from oneself. W. H. Auden perhaps put it best. He said, “Don’t get rid of my devils because my angels will go too.””

My story on Buzzfeed. Read more here

I am still trying to be well, and on and on it goes. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow perhaps my depression will go. I am so lucky that I have had the chance to learn that, whatever I may think of myself in my darkest times, my illness is real and worthy of treatment, care and respect. And because not everyone has that experience (not even me, all the time, from everyone) I am going to carry on talking about it. Here, and on Twitter @volette and on Facebook, and face to face. I hope you might be able to join me one day.

Thirty Five Candles. Celebrating, Not My Life, But Being Alive

Yes, THAT many candles

A year ago to the day I decided it might be a good idea for me to go into hospital for a while, because of my depression. I realised that my ability to cope with the day-to-day had become severely impaired, and that I had been more stressed than ecstatic to have my friends over to ‘celebrate’ my birthday (which is today, by the way.)

Me last year

The worst symptoms of my depression and anxiety were in full flow: I was trying to do everything possible to make everyone at my party have a good time. It had been a miserable failure of a plan, since the bouncy castle I’d organised for the fun of it and trip to the park with friends and their children all had to be called off on account of rain (just like most sports days I remember) and I was rushing around our flat instead, frantically getting drinks, food, conversations going and feeling my heart beat quicken and quicken in my chest.

Enough. Time to talk. Time to act. Time for the truth.

The final straw was when I had a wobbly moment with a good friend I thought I had offended. To a people pleaser like me, to please is the goal (a short term goal, because I believe I’m only as good as my next act of goodwill towards others) and to displease is catastrophe, causing internal combustion.

Ugh. Hate displeasing people. 

So, the next day, sitting on the sofa and tidying after the night of many drinks, laughter, conversation and lovely people, I quietly called the hospital where I see my psychiatrist and enquired about in patient care for the first time. I wasn’t a suicide risk, and I knew from past experience that my mental illness was not (is not, has never been) bad enough for me to be admitted under the NHS. I learned that there are usually beds available at the hospital. I learned I needed to speak to my insurer. I

learned that I could arrange the whole thing with relative ease. (Thank goodness. I was not well enough to do anything difficult.)

It was the first step towards admitting to myself that my depression (and anxiety, which I hadn’t even realised I had, despite running around like a headless chicken and running (literally) myself into a skinny nervous wreck of a person) had become so debilitating that work was becoming impossible, and social gatherings also a major challenge.

It’s pretty bad when you see your best friends around you and you feel utterly disconnected from them, and from the world you’re living in. Yes, I was smiling and laughing and passing around drinks, making conversations happen and passing the canapés, but all at top speed, almost as if to slow down and drink in how I genuinely felt would be as calamitous as a car smashing into me at top speed, obliterating my whole being into the mess of blood and cells and harmful thoughts that I was subconsciously aware were what made up ‘me’ at the time.

I didn’t know anyone who had ever been in hospital for mental illness, except a distant cousin’s mother of my mother, years ago, when that sort of condition meant a long term stay in the type of institution that can rarely be found anymore. I made that phone call to hospital because, practical as always, I wanted to know what my options were. I realised I couldn’t go on. It’s not ‘just the way life is’ to cry at spilled milk, spilled anything in fact, all the time, or at a lost book, a broken pencil, at the thought of getting off the sofa and walking to Marks and Spencer just across the road. It’s not normal, i.e. healthy, to dread going to work and to cry every morning about it because of the untouchable contractors who are ignoring you or bullying you with snide comments and belittling at every opportunity (well, it would be normal to dread going to work, but I would certainly say to anyone, don’t put up with it if it’s happening). I am a planner, I am practical, I am resourceful even in the face of damnable, draining and dreadful depression, and I suddenly realised that perhaps there was an option not to feel so terrible every day; not to wake up and wish that I had actually not woken up at all.

The steps on from there have been mostly documented in my posts over the last nine months or so. I have morphed into someone who not only accepts her depression as something acute and (currently) looking like it may be with me forever, despite best efforts to relieve the symptoms through medication, rest and cognitive behavioural therapy. I have also, in the last year, spoken out about it, and with every conversation (and I don’t have that many, I’m not one of those people who, when asked “How are you?” gives you a twenty minute account of the minutiae of having depression) I have felt a little more self-accepting, which is the biggie. Everyone else has been lovely. I have been hard on myself, as I always am. Do better. Do more. Do everything. Do it now.

Okay, okay, depression, I'll do it, I'll do it. Now please sod off out of here.

I’m still that person who wants to do it all, now, to perfection. I have my manic phases where my brain goes into overdrive trying to predict every possible outcome from every upcoming conversation or exchange to ensure that I have planned my behaviour to be ‘correct’ (and, really, what the hell does that mean?). If I am on a non-sedative night my legs will shake and shuffle around with restless leg syndrome that stops me from sleeping and my brain will kick in to that mode of restlessness, endless opening and closing its many filing cabinets to pull out all the items on my various to-do lists, work to be completed, meetings to be held, weight to lose, events to organise, friends to see. It’s exhausting. It’s impossible to maintain.

Take that, Depression (and, naturally, David Bowie)

That ‘me’ can’t last, so I’ve allowed some other characteristics to enter my personality: the ability to relax (okay only sometimes, but sometimes is a lot better than never); the ability to be honest about how I’m feeling, even at the risk (in my mind) that people will judge me for it and that I may never get promoted at work because I have an acute problem complicated by a catalogue of physical injuries.

You said it Cher.

But it’s worth accepting those risks, those potential, may never happen but possibly might risks, because I can’t live without changing into the ‘me’ that is sitting here, typing this on her thirty fifth birthday. I don’t know that I’d be typing anything, doing anything, if I hadn’t taken that risk and started being honest to myself and others about the fact that I do not have an unbreakable exterior shell. In fact I’m all eggshell, to be broken again and again and again.

Just because it's an awesome song. Nothing's gonna stop us!

When I blow out my candles today (and yes, of course there will be candles, because I do love birthdays even though celebrating the fact that I’m alive seems like a bad idea to me (sometimes) because I (sometimes) wish I were not) I will sit and acknowledge the past year. I’ve said ‘Here I am’ and then jumped off a cliff into the rocky seas of honest living. It’s terrifying and tricky and hard to stay afloat, and I will keep being bashed around by depression a while longer. But I made it, and if that doesn’t deserve a hot dog with all the trimmings, Champagne and a day where I celebrate being still here at all, then I don’t know what does. Happy birthday to me. Jessica, you made it. One foot in front of the other and maybe you’ll make it to 36. 

Me this year. Well, not quite, but time to dance!

Help, I Need Somebody, Help, Not Just Anybody...Or Any Drug...I Just Need Help...

I've said it before and I am sure I’ll say it again, after I say it here: recognising that you need help when you have depression, and trying to understand to what extent you need help, is incredibly hard.

I wake up most days and sort of mentally poke at myself: “How do you feel today?” “What’s you mood?” “Do you feel depressed?” “Do you feel okay?” “How do you feel about the day ahead?” “What’s your anxiety level?” As I lie there for those first couple of minutes after waking there are usually two different general responses to this: either I feel totally anxious and un-rested after (another) eight hours or more of nightmares, usually connected to the traumas I've recently experienced, or experienced in the past, or I feel okay. 

For two minutes. And then after those two minutes are up, I get to know exactly how I feel, really. My heart can start to sink; my stomach can curdle and recoil inside me with fear or unrest; my head can feel empty or too full, or both. My limbs feel sluggish and exhausted. My heart might start to race and I might start to feel sick at the thought of the day ahead, even if it’s just thinking about having a shower or eating breakfast.

If only it were that simple!

Mondays are the hardest because there are five whole days to get through before the weekend. And it’s not even as if I like the weekend, or find it easier to cope with. Sometimes the thought of seeing friends and putting on makeup and a happy (or vaguely happy) (or just not crying my eyes out and scaring everyone!) is too much to take, and the anxiety that I experience at the thought of this is almost enough for me not to go.

But as always, with all of the above, in 99% of cases I make myself go through with it. I know that I’m supposed to be brave and I’m supposed to get on with things, using all of the cognitive behavioural strategies that I've learned to support myself with. And I have my medication too (even though the anti depressants make my legs shake so badly that even with a sedative I can find it hard to sleep because they won’t stop moving).

Today I’m at hospital about to get help because I realised a couple of weeks ago that I was struggling again and that issues I was facing were escalating and bringing out the worst (or the best, if I look at this from the perspective of my fabulous type A personality) in me. I am going to go to groups that will help me look at my anxiety and depression and try to reinforce all those practical strategies I know I can apply when times are tough.

The day begins with group support, where we all have to name the emotions that we are feeling. Today I feel sad, angry – both at being here and needing to be here - and at the external issues that have helped bring me here again. We all speak our feelings. Usually it’s hard for some people because depression can leave you totally numb, so that the ability to experience any feeling seems untouchable, and incomprehensible. To be able to feel – it’s some cloudy far away concept – it doesn't mean anything.

Sometimes hope feels just like 'tomorrow'...something that never comes.

The best thing about support group is that it’s a free flowing conversation about our struggles, rather than a strategic almost-lecture on how to make ourselves or keep ourselves well. The rest of the day is much more tiring because of the things we need to learn – ways to control our anger, anxieties, how to adopt healthier coping strategies, how to use drama or music to articulate our difficulties.

I don’t know how I’ll feel at the end of the day, but I suspect I’ll feel very, very tired. Being ill is hard; getting the treatment is draining, and instead of the beautiful picture or essay or solved maths puzzle one might take home after a hard day’s work at school, I go home with the raw feelings unearthed by a day of delving into my past difficulties and disappointments, my demons and tormentors alive and well and brought into my consciousness from which ever compartment in my brain’s filing system I had buried them away.

But I have to go to hospital. I have to get help. The alternative is to stop living at all, or to continue with all the terrible symptoms of depression that make me want to stop living. So I go. I’m lucky to have the treatment and support. And I've recognised that I need help. So here I am. I'm getting help. It's another first step.

You're Not Alone...with Depression...Keep Fighting

In response to the many news articles on the recent tragedy of the Germanwings plane crash I considered writing something today about my views on the way that press coverage of this awful event has set back progress towards developing better understanding of depression.

However, I find that in this New Statesman article, Stephanie Boland (@stephanieboland) says what I want to say, and picks out the same nuanced stigmatising language from (for one) the Daily Mail's coverage of the crash. I would like to recommend that everyone read this article for an analysis of journalistic styles, and how inappropriate these are at times.(In case you're wondering, I was actually incredulous at the massively inappropriate and misleading use of the word 'Incredibly' in the Mail's article, like Boland, and I also took great exception to the word 'heinous' being used to describe what appears to be a completely fictionalised version of a statement of ambition that the co-pilot Andreas Lubitz made to his then girlfriend, a few years ago.

What really stands out for me from reading all the press coverage of how lonely it is to be depressed. I feel this especially when people make assumptions about what you can and cannot do based on your diagnosis of 'depression' without understanding more about how each person's symptoms manifest themselves and how severe they suffer, how often they present with symptoms, how this affects their life etc.

I have felt like this. But there's more to it...

I only started talking openly about having depression last year because of behaviour from others that I - rightly or wrongly - have perceived to be negative perceptions of me. I experienced various occurences where I felt there was a question as to my ability to perform work in a quality way, to be able to continue to function at a normal or above normal level, linked specifically to the fact that I was in therapy or that I had previously suffered with depression or was suffering from a low episode where my depression was worse than normal.

Spiralling negative thought focus is one of my worst symptoms,

worsened when I shame myself again and again for every wrong I've ever committed

I found that when I was ill with depression it was particularly exhausting to function because of my self-imposed rule that I must at all costs conceal it. Trying to live each day and say 'I'm fine' when actually I was anything but greatly aggravated my condition: I was not only unwell, but I had shamed myself and felt shamed by others into hiding what I believe to be a condition that many others suffer from, and that is nothing at all to be ashamed about.

What's more, while having depression over the last twenty years, I made it through school (just), got into Oxford university, managed to achieve a 2:1 degree, then was accepted onto the TeachFirst programme and taught hundreds of pupils aged 11-16 at two outer London comprehensive schools over three years. I then left teaching to become a management consultant at one of the largest and competitive firms in the market. I developed sufficient business acumen to be promoted there - twice - and to be accepted as a transfer candidate with sponsored visa to live and work in New York. I moved back and gained my current job with another large and prestigious consultancy firm.

Me, 2005, punting on the Cherwell in Oxford.

I was suffering from depression when this was taken

The year I got into teaching I was still grieving for a dear friend lost a year before, my father had cancer and I suffered from depression as a result. I had also moved to London only a year before and was in a new relationship. All this was made more challenging by the fact that I was working extremely long hours to become a teacher in a learning curve I can only describe as 0-60 in 10 seconds. The children I taught were at times very hard work: most were keen to succeed but reluctant to learn! I had six weeks of training (combining some practical and some theoretical elements in a crash course) and then started on an almost-full teaching timetable.

Most children were very easily distracted and many had all kinds of special educational needs ranging from dyslexia, non-verbal autism, other levels of autism / aspergers, having ADHD (either diagnosed or non-diagnosed), suffering from trauma, coming from abusive homes, coming from foster care, coming from many different other countries and not speaking English. I could go on and on.

Bristol 2006.

I was on medication to treat depression and sleep problems at the time.

It was wonderful and awful in equal measures on many days but even though the stress of that work helped me develop terrible psoriasis all over my head and brought on worse symptoms of depression I still managed to do the job and qualified with the highest possible grade as a teacher, and was awarded a 1(the highest assessment) during our Ofsted inspection when I was teaching year 8 (the WORST year 8 in the school's history) Romeo and Juliet. I spent weekends planning lessons which would (I hoped) engage the individual needs of every child. I produced many new resources and worked with other amazing teachers to try to grow into a teacher who would give the children the success they wanted. The majority were able to improve their English (I taught English) in spades and for GCSE students achieve the Cs or above they were looking for.

While I was in teaching I took medication for depression but rarely took time off.

Most time off was related to bugs caught from germ-sharing at my schools!

After the first 7 weeks I was burnt out to use the familiar expression used by others to describe Andreas Lubitz. I went to the doctor and received antidepressant medication to help me to improve my mood, cope with work (I missed one week of work due to sickness, including but not limited to depression) and get back on track. Things did improve. I got better and life went on. I didn't miss more work for depression (I did get terrible flu and tonsilitis from schools which remain for all who are parents, students and teachers a breeding ground for all manner of lovely germs!).

2010, after running the London 10K. 

I was suffering from depression at the time.

I finally left teaching for management consulting because I wanted to make more of a difference. My ambition at the time was to lead an education charity one day. Now (8 years on) I still want to run a charity, but currently would prefer it to be one linked to mental health services, though I'm still equally passionate about education / children, so perhaps I'll find a way to do both. It would be a highly appropriate statement for me to say, as Lubitz is reported to have done, ‘One day I will do something that will change the whole system, and then all will know my name and remember it.’

Sydney, 2010, at a wedding. 

I was suffering from depression at the time.

Since joining consulting I've worked in 6 different countries in many industries to learn about how business works. I have worked long hours to produce quality work for my employers and my clients, and I've tried to build a CV that shows my passion for people, for technology and my intellectual curiosity.

2011, just after returning from 3 months working in Ghana and Ethiopia.

I was suffering from depression at the time.

 I've also mentored students through the HEAPs scheme, iMentor (in New York), have coached teachers and other professionals and have supported Mind and Time to Change as an advocate for better understanding of mental health and by being a media volunteer. I was in hospital last year with depression but took only a limited amount of time off from work, because I find work (and activity) supported by others, makes me flourish rather than flounder. I hope that my non-profit activities give value to those whom I work with - I certainly enjoy them because I love people and want to do as much as I can to help people out - it makes me happy to do this. 

Cape Cod, summer 2014.

I had just come out of hospital after suffering a severe episode of trauma-related depression

All the while, I have still had depression. I've taken different varieties of medication, I've attended and still attend CBT with a fantastic therapist who helps me try to get through tough times. I still feel like not being alive on quite a few days. I didn't particularly want to wake up on Thursday morning, just gone, for example, because - and I will not lie - depression can feel unrelenting and it is bloody knackering to keep going with your life when you're worn out from all the negative feelings that you wish would just sod off so that working, exercising, eating, seeing people, and just functioning weren't so drainingly difficult.

Sometimes the simplest activities are as hard as any other task imaginable.

They represent how hard 'living' compared to not living can be.

I am now not alone. I have friends from my support groups to hang out with. I have my beloved husband who supports me even though - I feel - it surely must get quite old when your wife greets you at the end of each day in floods of tears and can't make a decision about what she wants for dinner, despite having polished off a high quality bid and managed multiple projects and written a blog post during the day. I have my other friends who send supportive messages and put up with me being flaky when I can't always make appointments if I'm suddenly unwell. I have my family who are loving and kind. I have a lot. And at work - importantly - I have grown in the confidence to say when I'm not well and expect (and demand) that people to treat me without discrimination because I happen to suffer from depression. I speak out here. I speak out wherever I can. I believe I have the right to a life and the right to work, respect (as long as I show it to others) and fair treatment as an individual.

On days like today, when I feel 'okay' - not great, not terrible, I still hold on to my ambitions and think about the future I want to have. And I say, honestly, and with hope, ‘One day I will do something that will change the whole system, and then all will know my name and remember it.’

Just Breathe...Live.

And I really hope that I do - something positive that allows me to be the change I want to see in the world.‘One day I will do something that will change the whole system, and then all will know my name and remember it.’ And, "incredibly", I will do with depression. 

Me 2015, on medication and seeing a Cognitive Behavioural therapist to help with my depression.

Working, writing, coaching, painting. Living.