Disability History Month – Heidi’s story

Mental health isn’t really something that is associated with children and whilst there is less of a ‘taboo’ around the subject now, 16 years ago it wasn’t spoken about, which was probably why nobody could recognise what was going on with me.

At the age of 11, the transition to secondary school came around and about three months into this is when things started going wrong. Moving from a small village primary school to a much larger high school was understandably a huge adjustment and I think this is what triggered everything that was to follow.

It all started with waking up for school in the morning and feeling like I physically couldn’t get out of bed. Everyone assumed this was me just not wanting to go to school and causing problems and I remember feeling sad that I was letting everyone down, but also frustrated as I couldn’t control it.

This daily battle continued and a trip to the doctors didn’t prove very helpful either. One day, my dad had been talking about the situation with someone he worked with, and they had posed the question ‘do you think it could be anxiety?’ This sparked another visit to the doctors and being referred to CAHMS (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services).

I was quite lucky in that I was given a therapist who would visit every week to try and figure out what the correlation was between school and my anxiety. Part of this was choosing some of my favourite lessons at school, so that I could try going in just for those to see if this would help. Unfortunately, it didn’t, and it was at this time that I started home schooling because we weren’t getting anywhere with returning to school, part time or full time. We were advised that because I hadn’t been able to confront my anxiety around school, it would more than likely start to enter other parts of my life.

I was given a home-schooling tutor on certain days to begin with which was great, but eventually there wasn’t enough funding to keep this going. That’s when I started doing e-learning instead, where teachers would upload work for you to complete and give you feedback on what you sent back.

It didn’t take too long before the anxiety started to manifest itself in my everyday life. A common symptom of anxiety is feeling sick and that is something I was experiencing daily for a long time, but I’m not sure if I knew what was causing it. I didn’t tell anyone about this until it was so bad one day, I couldn’t leave the house and then I couldn’t hide it anymore.

Although I was somewhat embarrassed and didn’t want people to know I had been feeling this way, I felt relieved when it was finally out in the open. After talking to my therapist, she confirmed this sounded like anxiety and that meant I could finally get some help to manage it and hopefully start feeling ‘normal’ again. It was after this that I began struggling to leave the house at all and remember a trip to the supermarket where I have never felt so on edge and such a strong urge to leave.

We had a couple of therapy style sessions with CAHMS, as they wanted to see if talking therapy would help. I remember hating these because it would always end in tears and feeling no closer to a solution than we were before. After a few of these we started discussing the option of medication, as we didn’t seem to be getting anywhere with the talking therapy.

At the end of one of our sessions, they handed us a prescription for some anti-anxiety medication, and it was the best feeling in the world. It obviously took quite a few weeks to take full effect, but I started feeling more normal and less sick every day as time went on.

This is just an insight into my journey with anxiety as a child and teenager, fast forward to today and I’m still on the medication. This doesn’t mean that I don’t experience anxiety anymore (we all feel anxious sometimes!) and there are days where I wake up and feel on edge for no reason at all. I really don’t think there should be any stigma or embarrassment around being on anti-depressants long term if it allows you to live life as you should be able to.

I’m proud of what I’ve been able to achieve – and it’s a lot more than what the incredibly anxious teenage me could have imagined! Please talk to someone if you feel you’re experiencing anything similar, it’s hard, but it’s worth reaching out and people want to help you.