As a Time to Change Champion, I wanted to share why I do what I do and how talking about mental health has helped me overcome my own challenges. I am an (almost) 50 year old mum of two, and I have experienced anxiety and depression for most of my adult life as result of the trauma I experienced dealing with an alcoholic parent who has mental health challenges of their own.
I felt a lot of shame as a child watching my parent being sectioned and taken away in the ambulance after a particularly distressing domestic violence situation aimed at me. After they came back home they started attending service user day care centres. It was quite overwhelming and exhausting hiding it from my friends because nobody spoke about it then and it was quite embarrassing to admit that my parent had a mental health problem.
I was really lucky that that I had a few really close friends at school who knew my situation and I could talk to when I needed to. I guess looking back at it now we helped each other through the regular teen challenges of growing up.
I was also lucky to have a trusted adult to talk to and also to be able to share so my experiences with somebody who knew my situation. I still couldn't share everything though, because I didn't want to cause trouble, and I was terrified of being taken into care, but it helped me to offload some of my worries.
Looking back, it seems unbelievable that nobody spoke to me about my own trauma. My way of coping was to withdraw into myself and focus on my school studies, so I spent most of my teens working hard to get away to university.
Once I was away from the home situation, I struggled with my mental health as I started processing everything I had experienced and faced new challenges of living independently. I really didn't know where to go or who to turn to for help then and just muddled through.
At the time I didn't have my PTSD diagnosis, but I tried in my work to reduce the stigma about talking about mental health to make it easier for me to disclose my own challenges, I guess.
Because of the stigma I had felt at home, I was still too scared to admit my own problems, even when I became an Equality rep for my Trade Union and started properly campaigning to reduce mental health stigma.
Even after getting my employer to sign a pledge working with the SeeMe campaign in Scotland, I was subject to discrimination and felt stigmatised after a period of ill health in a back-to-work interview and the manager mentioned my 'problems' in a euphemistic way.
That is when I realised that I really need to work more on smashing stigma, so I started talking to public health groups and set up a peer support mental health team at work. At the time, the only way to get help was to go to HR or occupational health and that was only available when you're actually in crisis or off sick, and for and some people that was just too late.
The peer support mentors were so effective! People with smaller concerns could talk in confidence to trained and trusted colleagues about them before they got too big, and could be signposted for additional support.
I am still trying to do everything I can to end mental health stigma, so I've talked about it to as many people as I can and become a Time to Change Champion and trained as a mental health first aider. I've done public speaking events and spoken on local radio.
To protect my own mental health after a particularly challenging period in my life recently, I moved away from health and safety work and built a wellbeing consultancy, and now I teach people about beating burnout and looking at their physical health in the same way as their mental health.
It's really important right now, with the Covid-19 crisis, to make sure that we all look after our mental health and look after each other, because isolation from our friends and family is really damaging to our mental health as we need social contact to keep us feeling well.
l volunteer as Time to Change Champion as it has helped me connect with my community and I have some really interesting conversations about looking after our mental health when attending events. We lost a friend to suicide two years ago and it was so hard talking to his family and those left behind.
It's vital to make sure that anyone can find someone to talk to when they're not feeling so good, and to make them know that is ok not to feel ok because the pressures of social media, which only shows our good side, can make people who are feeling low feeling worse about themselves.
If there was one piece of advice I could give to my younger self it would be this: Your mental health journey is your own and you can't really compare it to anyone else, so accept yourself for who you are; some days will be good, and others not so good, and that’s completely OK.
I still battle with feeling low and managing being a working mum and looking after two teenagers who need their own emotional support. As a parent is really important that we look after our own mental health so we have the strength and headspace to properly look after our family's health.
Last year I set up a support group called MUSE-(Mother's United in Self-Employment) which provides a support network for mums who were feeling isolated and overwhelmed about running a business and looking after their families. We focus on self-care and having really frank and honest conversations about our mental health. It is so refreshing and really nice to be able to have this support network because living in a rural area in Somerset sometimes it's really hard to properly connect with people when we have all our other commitments to fulfill like school runs and running a business, a home, and just managing the family.
The Time to Change Hub has been great help as a Champion so we can connect with other Champions and feel like we're working from the same page and doing a really important and vital job in supporting positive mental health in Somerset.