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that my problems began.

      I vividly remember Mum and Dad dropping me off at Lancing on the first day of term. Instead of feeling excited, I felt a sense of dread and was really struggling to hold back the tears as I hugged them goodbye. However, I made friends quickly and spent more time socialising than concentrating on my studies. From the outside everything appeared to be going well, but inside I struggled to feel happy and I would frequently cry in my bedroom, although I had no idea what the problem was. Another student told me that I would feel better if I cut myself, and so I did, carving the name of an ex-boyfriend on my forearm.

      Some people are horrified and scared of self-harm, and I can understand why. It seems like such a destructive and horrible thing to do to yourself. Self-harming made me feel better because it distracted me from feeling down. Seeing my own blood was such a release from the negative thoughts in my head. I continued to self-harm intermittently during my first term at Lancing, but then my mood improved and the next two terms were better.

      Ants and I spoke regularly during my time at Lancing, and she was very supportive. Sometimes I would just be in tears on the phone and she always did her best to cheer me up. I really missed my friends at Wycombe and wondered whether leaving had been the right choice, but Ants assured me that I wasn’t missing out on anything.

      Things started to go really wrong during the first term of my second year at Lancing. The feelings of sadness that had plagued me the previous year returned with a vengeance. I couldn’t concentrate on my work and life felt utterly pointless. I spent a lot of time crying and began to cut myself frequently. My housemistress became concerned about my behaviour, and I was sent to see the school’s GP, who referred me to a psychiatrist.

      I had no idea what depression was or why I felt miserable and cut myself. I didn’t know anyone who had visited a psychiatrist and thought only seriously mentally ill people did this. I think my comment at the time was ‘I’m not crazy’. I recall being told that I had a depressive illness, and I asked what it was called. I knew nothing about mental illnesses and assumed that there were lots of different types of depressive illness, just like there are many viruses. Mental health was not in the news so much a decade ago—the recent increase in media coverage has raised awareness, which is surely a good thing.

      At the end of the winter term I was really struggling to cope with my depression and was admitted to psychiatric hospital for the first time. I naively thought that I would be there for five days, take some pills and then be back to normal. Unfortunately, the pills I was taking didn’t make me feel any better and three weeks later I still felt the same. I was discharged from hospital over Christmas, but then I returned in the new year. I think the five days of my second admission formed one of the lowest points of my whole life. For some reason I got it into my head that I couldn’t wee, and so I stopped drinking properly. This made the problem worse because I became totally dehydrated. I remember lying on the floor feeling terrified that I was going to die.

      Over the next four years, I was in and out of different psychiatric hospitals like a yo-yo, spending over two years as an inpatient. I tried every type of medication they gave me, various forms of talking therapy and even a course of ECT (electroconvulsive therapy, whereby the patient is given a short general anaesthetic and an electric current is passed through their brain). The ECT didn’t work, but I enjoyed the general anaesthetic, because it meant a few moments of respite from the depression. Most of the time I felt like absolute shit, but a couple of things kept me going through these years: first, my ferrets, and, second, something that my first psychiatrist had said to me when I was 18: ‘Jo, I promise you won’t feel like this forever.’ This comment may sound quite insignificant, but when you are in the depths of depression you cannot see a way out and without this small glimmer of hope I might not be here today.

      I got my first ferret when I was 19. It was all Ants’ fault. We had always called each other ‘Ferret’ at school, and Ants suggested I get a pet ferret to cheer me up. Little did she know that this was to be the start of a total obsession with the smelly little creatures. I named my first ferret Ants in her honour, which I’m not sure if she saw as much of a compliment, because Ants was a smelly little white thing with red eyes that bit anyone who wasn’t me. They say that a pet is good therapy, and Ants certainly kept me company when I felt low. My second ferret was called Zed, an amazing animal who wouldn’t leave me alone when I was really depressed. If I cried, Zed would lick away my tears; when I was too down to do anything other than lie on the sofa, Zed slept down my T-shirt. Mum and Dad would bring Zed to visit me in hospital and she pottered up and down the corridor on her lead, providing some light entertainment and face-washing for the other patients.

      I wasn’t severely depressed for the whole four years that I was in and out of hospital, but I always felt low. I used self-harm to distract me from my feelings and it became an addiction of sorts, although when I was challenged about this I denied it. Even though I hated the scars that I got from cutting myself, I also felt that I deserved them. I was so frustrated with myself for not getting better and feeling like such a useless person.

      My admissions to hospital usually happened after my behaviour became unmanageable at home. One time I had gone for a late-night walk and decided to take an overdose of diazepam to try and get some sleep. The next night my parents locked me in the house to keep me safe. I had other ideas and tried to climb out of my bedroom window, still half drugged from all the diazepam I had taken the previous night. As I tried to lower myself from the first-floor window, I fell on to the concrete and was found wandering the streets half a mile away with a broken wrist. This time they wouldn’t discharge me and I was taken to the local psychiatric hospital. I never tried to kill myself, despite the fact that my behaviour sometimes seemed to indicate otherwise. However, I did think about death frequently and would often wish that I could just fall asleep and never wake up. Even when I took overdoses, it was to get some uninterrupted sleep rather than to die.

      I don’t know how I survived those four years, but I am not sure I would have survived if my family and friends hadn’t been so amazingly supportive. Friends would phone and visit me in hospital. My family almost had their lives taken over by my illness. They provided such unconditional love and support and frequently visited me in hospital. One thing that I will always feel guilty about is that the people I love had to deal with me when I was depressed. When you are depressed, you don’t care about yourself, let alone anyone else. During my illness, I feel I was a crap daughter, sister and friend. I can’t even begin to imagine what it was like for the people who loved me to see me ill. If I try and put myself in their shoes, then I think it must have been awful and they probably felt so helpless, because I didn’t respond to any treatment. I think Ants sometimes got frustrated with me, because she always phoned me and I would rarely get in touch with her. I felt that I had absolutely nothing to say for myself and couldn’t bring myself to pick up the phone.

      However, I don’t regret being depressed, because living with regrets is not the best way to live your life. It is important to try and learn from past events and then move on with the knowledge and wisdom that you have discovered. Furthermore, suffering from depression has helped to shape the person that I am today and provided me with opportunities to meet some truly inspirational people. Who knows how my life would have panned out if I had never suffered from depression?

      I often wondered whether I would ever truly feel better, but after trying nearly every antidepressant available my doctor finally found one that worked. This was such a shock and relief, because although I always dreamt of feeling better I often wondered whether I was going to feel depressed for the rest of my life. The medication lifted the dark cloud sufficiently for me to feel more stable and human, and the need to self-harm disappeared. I had always thought that the opposite of depression was happiness, even though my mum insisted that people who aren’t depressed do not feel happy all the time. As an adult, all I had experienced was feeling low and I had forgotten what ‘normality’ felt like. I discovered that Mum was right and that life is not a continuously joyous experience—merely the day-to-day living, punctuated by some very happy moments and times when you feel a bit down. Not feeling depressed was like having the shackles of mental torment removed properly for the first time in my adult life. At last, I now felt able to start planning for the future.

      During the following five years, I threw myself into

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