"It's a summers evening. You've just been to town to do some window shopping, now you're walking home, alone. A naïve teenager, you believe that you live in a relatively safe neighbourhood. That's when he confronts you."
My mental health story begins when I began secondary school.
Flashback to 2010 - self harm is a growing trend in school. My peers were harming themselves simply because everybody else was doing it. How upsetting is that? Children as young as 11 were putting scars and bruises on their fragile skin just to 'fit in'. That's probably a contributory factor as to how my self injury began.
A few months prior to my development of mental health issues, my father upped and left home. We were in the middle of renovating, and I didn't have a bedroom at the time - I was sleeping on a mattress on the floor. So as you can probably guess, circumstances were difficult. I was already a stereotypical angsty teenager who believed the world and all of its inhabitants were against her, so the situation at hand didn't exactly help my mood.
I've never really fit in anywhere, whether it be due to my obsessions, my style, my looks or my personality. The bullying started the same day that I started secondary school. I only had one friend, but that was enough for me. My classmates always seemed to find something wrong with me, something they could use to belittle me and hurt my feelings. I wasn't the type of person who could just block out derogatory comments; I'd go home and cry almost every day.
When I was 14 years old, I was attacked by a stranger when I was walking home. Do you know one thing that really gets to me? It's when people say that women provoked the attack by wearing provocative clothing. I was wearing a baggy red hoodie, denim jeans and a pair of ratty trainers - I wouldn't class that as 'provocative'.
Then, I met a new girl at school. She was lovely, I thought, until I saw her arms. I'd never heard of self harm before, let alone seen it, so her scarred arms were a shock to me. Despite our differences, we became good friends. We'd play our guitars together and introduce each other to new music. Our friendship blossomed and we started sharing our secrets. Unfortunately, she decided to share a little more than was necessary. She told me that self harm makes you feel better, and taught me that it was a good coping mechanism. Eventually, she even began supplying me with sharps. This is when my self harm began.
Since she told me that self harm made her feel better, I thought that it'd take away my problems, too. Little did I know, it'd only create more problems.
Fast forward a couple of years - my doctor has referred me to CAMHS, the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services. I'm still self harming, and it's gradually getting worse. My cuts are getting deeper and I've stopped eating. My weight has dropped drastically and I'm incredibly depressed.
I eventually meet a psychiatrist who prescribes me Fluoxetine, an antidepressant medication. One of the side effects of Fluoxetine is suicidal thoughts, and just my luck - that's the one side effect that I developed.
A couple of weeks later, after a steady spiral of depression and psychotic episodes, I took an overdose that landed me in hospital. My mental state continued to deteriorate and I was admitted to my first mental health unit.
Long story short, things got worse still and I was sectioned and transferred to a Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit in Maidenhead. This experience was honestly horrifying and still haunts me to this day. I was drugged up to my eyeballs on Levomepromazine - I couldn't walk, I couldn't talk, I couldn't eat and I was sleeping 23 hours a day. I became so distressed that I was restrained and injected with a sedative. Eventually I realised that the only way I was going to leave that place was if I put on a brave face and acted like everything was okay - so that's exactly what I did.
A couple of months later, I was discharged from hospital and I went back home with my family. I had a relatively good 8 months in which I went back to school, started going out with friends, stopped self harming and although I wasn't entirely happy, I wasn't completely depressed, either. We called this the 'honeymoon period', a period in which everything seemed blissful. Unfortunately, as you can probably guess by my most recent hospitalisation, this period didn't last.
I fell back into a terrible pattern of self harming behaviours and was spending the majority of my time in hospital. I was reported as a missing person numerous times until eventually, in July 2015, I made a serious attempt at my life. I was taken to hospital by the police where I was sectioned under a section 2 of the mental health act and required 2 operations.
When I awoke the next morning, I was shocked to find private ambulance drivers waiting for me. Nobody had told me that I was being sent to another mental health unit. After a violent struggle and several sedative injections, I willingly walked to the ambulance where I was transferred to a hospital nearly 200 miles away from home.
I spent the next six months in Alpha Hospital where I underwent therapy and learned to cope better with my emotions. And here I am, six months later. Some days, I still get depressed. And yes, I still self harm occasionally, but all in all, I am a million times better than I ever imagined I could be.
