Mental Health Advice
Mental health issues can affect anyone at any time in their lives, however statistics show that mental health issues are more common within the LGBTQ community. The resources below cover common mental health issues and are designed to help you identify problems that may be affecting you or people you know. They also offer advice on who you can turn to for help. Mental health issues are not a sign of weakness or something to be ashamed of and there are people who can help and understand, including our welfare officers who can be contacted details are on the Welfare Page. There also details of external welfare services on the welfare links page.
Thanks to our former welfare officer, Ben, for contributing the guides below on depression, anxiety, psychosis, eating disorders, ocd and substance misuse.
Depression
Everybody feels unhappy from time to time, and lots of things can cause that. Lots of different things can set us off feeling sad. For some people when this happens they can lift themselves out of this low, but for some people it’s more difficult. They can feel sad for a long amount of time, or when they do feel sad it can be such a deep dark low. You can feel numb, sad, guilty and upset. You can not be able to enjoy things you did before and feel alone even when with people. You can be crying a lot or not feeling like you can cry at all.
When you’re feeling depressed it’s easy to get into a vicious cycle. Something can happen leaving you feeling low. That starts to make you feel gloomy and you feel less good about yourself. Then because of how you’re feeling you start to do less, and by doing less you miss out on doing things that could make you feel better and you can just feel worse. It’s easy to see how the cycle can go round and round. Breaking this cycle is one of the ways you can start to make yourself feel better.
People who are depressed can also get into always thinking about things negatively. The way this can happen is from when a something happens they think badly about themselves, the environment and the future. For instance if you fail an exam its easy to think its because you’re stupid, because everyone expects you to fail anyway and that you will never succeed at anything anyway. It’s easy to forget that maybe the exam was extra hard and lots of people failed or that you might have had a lot of other things going on that meant you couldn’t do well in the test. When you’re depressed the negative thoughts can just become automatic, and the positive can get ignored.
It’s important to remember that sometimes its natural to feel unhappy. After losing a friend or a family member, losing a relationship or something else feeling unhappy allows you to come to terms with what’s happened.
If some of these descriptions are feeling familiar and are troubling you it may be worthwhile contacting your GP or the Samaritans on 08457 90 90 90.
Anxiety
Anxiety is something that can make you feel worried, stressed or frightened. Everybody experiences anxiety, often in situations where we are facing something challenging or threatening or feel that we are under pressure. This could be when taking exams or attending a job interview. Normally anxiety can be a good thing, as it makes sure you’re alert and ready for what’s ahead of us. This is because our body produces a hormone called adrenaline. However, some people experience anxiety at a much a higher level and this is when anxiety is no longer helpful, and can cause a lot of distress for the person experiencing it. These people experience anxiety at a very high level and it can last for a long period of time and it may begin to interfere with and disrupt their everyday lives.
Anxiety can become a vicious cycle, because when you start to have worried thoughts then your body will react and your thoughts get stronger and you feel anxious which makes you feel worse. Also you can start to avoid what makes you anxious and this can make your fear stronger, because you’re not confronting your fear, instead your mind can exaggerate the effect your fear will have on you.
There are lots of different types of anxiety. These include things like social anxiety, phobias or general anxiety. Lots of things can cause anxiety, like experiencing a distressing event or just naturally being an anxious type of person.
Phobias are the fear of a specific thing, which can set off an anxious response. Typical phobias include fear of spiders, heights or snakes. Phobias can vary in how troubling they are, from having a mild discomfort around their phobia to being unable to leave the house for fear of encountering their fear.
One kind of phobia is social anxiety. Social anxiety is very distressing and difficult to cope with. You can feel extreme shyness, intense worry and stress in social situations and fear that other people will think of you in a negative way. If a person suffering from social anxiety is faced with a situation that makes them feel very anxious, for example getting on a very busy bus, they might become very panicky or avoid the situation altogether. Different situations will cause varying amounts of anxiety, a person may be relaxed talking to close family members or friends, but extremely anxious when sat in a room with people that they have never met.
If some of these descriptions are feeling familiar and are troubling you it may be worthwhile contacting your GP or the Samaritans on 08457 90 90 90.
Psychosis
An individual with psychosis is typically someone who somehow has lost contact with reality. The symptoms can affect how you behave, believe, think and feel. It can occur at any time but typically starts in late teens to early thirties. It’s more common than a lot of people would think with a lot of research suggesting 3 in 100 people will go on to experience some form of psychosis. With psychosis you can start to feel:
• Irritable
• Suspicious
• Worried
• Angry
• Tense
• Sad
This can then lead on to you feeling like:
• You're having troubling concentrating or speaking. People might struggle to understand you speech because it’s jumbled, slurred or unclear. Your thoughts can seem really fast or really slow.
• You can have vague sensations of feeling like some things not right. You can feel like some things changed. You can also feel like things aren't real or you aren't real.
• You can also start to have some unusual thoughts that you’re not sure whether or not they’re real. Like thinking the static on the radio is a secret message for you.
• You can become paranoid, worrying about what other people are up to and feeling like you have to be on the guard all the time.
• You may start to see, hear, feel, smell or taste things that aren't there.
• You can start to hear voices. Voices can range from anything from someone calling your name to a voice telling you to do things.
• You can have mood swings or feel cut off from your emotions. You can find yourself laughing at things that aren't obviously funny or crying for unexplainable reasons. You may stop expressing emotion.
• You can lose the motivation to do anything, even if you were very active before.
• Sometimes you can not be able to see that anything is wrong.
• You may feel you have special powers or are unique somehow.
These ‘early signs’ could simply be a one of to an overwhelming event like falling out with friends, or settling in a new environment like college or university. But they could also be early signs of developing psychosis. It’s important to remember that the quicker these symptoms are recognised and treated the better the outcome. It is possible to recover from psychosis; it is not necessarily a life long problem.
A lot of people have worries about psychosis. The media has contributed the unhelpful idea of people with psychosis being mad and dangerous. The reality is that very few people are a danger to others, and that the media focuses on these events rather unhelpfully.
If some of these descriptions are feeling familiar and are troubling you it may be worthwhile contacting your GP or the Samaritans on 08457 90 90 90.
Eating Disorders
Eating is a big part of our lives, after all its something we typically do 3 times a day. Food can be seen as the fuel for our body, giving us the energy to carry on with our day to day existence. Is it any wonder then that sometimes when people have problems it presents itself as problems with eating? Or that the effects can be so devastating when food is so important?
There are many different ways our eating can become a problem for us. What all people with eating disorders have in common is that eating or not eating becomes a way to control painful emotions, situations or stress. Eating disorders can occur in both males and females, it is not just a problem for females.
Lots of different causes can lead to an eating disorder, and there can be more than one. It’s actually more likely that a combination of causes have lead to the eating disorder. These could include things like low self-esteem; problems with family or friends; the death of someone special; problems at work, college or university; lack of confidence; sexual or emotional abuse. Many people talk about simply feeling ‘too fat’ or ‘not good enough’. It’s important to see that eating disorders are about trying to cope; they are not about trying to end it all. Instead, eating disorders are an unhealthy way of trying to deal with a lot of overwhelming situations.
A lot of people with eating disorders say that their illness is the only way they feel in control. By eating too much or too little they say they are taking control of something, when they feel that everything else that is going on in their lives is not in their control and not making them happy. But is it that the eating disorder is really what’s in control? By starting on this path the compulsion to control your eating can get stronger and stronger and leave you unable to stop even when the consequences may be life-threatening. It’s important to realise that it is possible to learn other, more healthy ways of coping and that by getting help and support you can learn to change. There are lots of different eating disorders.
They include:
• Anorexia Nervosa
• Bulimia Nervosa
• Binge Eating Disorder
• Compulsive Overeating
If some of these descriptions are feeling familiar and are troubling you it may be worthwhile contacting your GP or the Samaritans on 08457 90 90 90.
OCD
Many people have little rituals and superstitions that they do, like checking the door after you’ve locked it or touching wood. Doing these things make us feel more at ease and help reassure us. However for some people completing these reassurances becomes so time consuming, so energy consuming and even disturbing that they start to get in the way of their day to day life. It can become so that we become obsessed with getting these rituals right and it’s only when we have done the task lots and lots of times does the anxiety diminish. This is when these things become an obsession or a compulsion.
What makes up an obsession or a compulsion can differ from person to person. What they all have in common is that the person doing them believes that if they stop doing them something bad will happen.
Some common obsessions and compulsions include:
• Worrying that something terrible might happen all or a lot of the time.
• Counting or repeating words and phrases.
• Doubts that you can’t stop thinking about and leave you unable to do anything else.
• Excessive cleaning.
• Repetitive checking.
• Ritualistic touching, e.g. gas hob, door handles etc.
• Hand washing.
• Arranging objects such as toys, books, etc.
• Hoarding.
• Skin picking and hair plucking.
It’s important to recognise that these obsessions and compulsions can be treated. We often perform these rituals to ease anxiety we may feel, and by tackling that underlying anxiety the obsessions and compulsions can be reduced.
Many people are familiar with the diagnosis of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). OCD is where the obsessions and compulsions have reached a clinical level. This means the problems are incapacitating enough to be classed as a mental illness. This too can be treated but if you feel your problems reach this level it may be worthwhile seeking professional help.
If some of these descriptions are feeling familiar and are troubling you it may be worthwhile contacting your GP or the Samaritans on 08457 90 90 90.
Substance Misuse
Lots of people can start taking drugs for lots of different reasons. It could be just curiosity or it could be a way of coping with things going on. Either way once you've started taking a drug it can become difficult to stop and that’s when it can become an addiction. You may feel you have it under control, but it’s easy to overestimate how much control you have and things can quickly spiral.
Lots of things can lead you to have problems with drugs. Are your friends’ pressuring you into taking drugs? Do you feel like you won’t fit in? If this is the case it might be a question of asking whether these are the right kind of friends for you, and whether you need to look after yourself and get yourself out of that environment.
The way the drug makes you feel can make you develop an addiction. If a drug seems to make you feel relaxed or to help forget about your problems and worries it’s easy to see how you can become addicted to it. However while this might seem better in the short term you can soon find that you need more and more of the drug to feel that way and you need it all of the time. You can quickly find yourself addicted, in a downward spiral with a whole load of new problems on top of the ones you had before.
For some people drugs are a way of dealing with a mental health problem. This can be something like drinking when you feel depressed or taking cannabis to make voices go away. It’s important too to think about whether this is helping. It could be that down the line you end up with an even worse mental health problem, plus dealing with all the problems associated with an addiction. It’s really crucial to realise when you do have an addiction.
Signs to look for include:
• Do you think about drugs or alcohol everyday?
• Is it hard to say `no' when they are offered?
• Would you drink/take drugs alone?
• Do the drugs get in the way of doing anything else?
If you are finding yourself saying yes to these things you could have an addiction and need help. The most common sign of an addiction is a feeling of not being in control, not feeling like you can choose not to take the drugs. The important first step, after realising you have got an addiction, is confiding in someone. This can by anyone you trust like a friend or family member or your GP or teacher. This person can then help you get the support you need. Your GP, or other health specialist, can refer you to ways of dealing with addictions. These could include things like rehab, medication or group therapy. Rehab is where you get admitted into a specialist clinic that will work with you to try and stop you from taking any more drugs. Because you will be in a place with lots of other former addicts there will be people there who can understand what you've gone through and can provide support. Similarly groups like Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous works on the basis of people trying to get past their addictions together, using a 12 step plan.
It’s important to remember that whatever the addiction there is help for it out there. If some of these descriptions are feeling familiar and are troubling you it may be worthwhile contacting your GP or the Samaritans on 08457 90 90 90.
Thanks to our former welfare officer, Ben, for contributing the guides below on depression, anxiety, psychosis, eating disorders, ocd and substance misuse.
Depression
Everybody feels unhappy from time to time, and lots of things can cause that. Lots of different things can set us off feeling sad. For some people when this happens they can lift themselves out of this low, but for some people it’s more difficult. They can feel sad for a long amount of time, or when they do feel sad it can be such a deep dark low. You can feel numb, sad, guilty and upset. You can not be able to enjoy things you did before and feel alone even when with people. You can be crying a lot or not feeling like you can cry at all.
When you’re feeling depressed it’s easy to get into a vicious cycle. Something can happen leaving you feeling low. That starts to make you feel gloomy and you feel less good about yourself. Then because of how you’re feeling you start to do less, and by doing less you miss out on doing things that could make you feel better and you can just feel worse. It’s easy to see how the cycle can go round and round. Breaking this cycle is one of the ways you can start to make yourself feel better.
People who are depressed can also get into always thinking about things negatively. The way this can happen is from when a something happens they think badly about themselves, the environment and the future. For instance if you fail an exam its easy to think its because you’re stupid, because everyone expects you to fail anyway and that you will never succeed at anything anyway. It’s easy to forget that maybe the exam was extra hard and lots of people failed or that you might have had a lot of other things going on that meant you couldn’t do well in the test. When you’re depressed the negative thoughts can just become automatic, and the positive can get ignored.
It’s important to remember that sometimes its natural to feel unhappy. After losing a friend or a family member, losing a relationship or something else feeling unhappy allows you to come to terms with what’s happened.
If some of these descriptions are feeling familiar and are troubling you it may be worthwhile contacting your GP or the Samaritans on 08457 90 90 90.
Anxiety
Anxiety is something that can make you feel worried, stressed or frightened. Everybody experiences anxiety, often in situations where we are facing something challenging or threatening or feel that we are under pressure. This could be when taking exams or attending a job interview. Normally anxiety can be a good thing, as it makes sure you’re alert and ready for what’s ahead of us. This is because our body produces a hormone called adrenaline. However, some people experience anxiety at a much a higher level and this is when anxiety is no longer helpful, and can cause a lot of distress for the person experiencing it. These people experience anxiety at a very high level and it can last for a long period of time and it may begin to interfere with and disrupt their everyday lives.
Anxiety can become a vicious cycle, because when you start to have worried thoughts then your body will react and your thoughts get stronger and you feel anxious which makes you feel worse. Also you can start to avoid what makes you anxious and this can make your fear stronger, because you’re not confronting your fear, instead your mind can exaggerate the effect your fear will have on you.
There are lots of different types of anxiety. These include things like social anxiety, phobias or general anxiety. Lots of things can cause anxiety, like experiencing a distressing event or just naturally being an anxious type of person.
Phobias are the fear of a specific thing, which can set off an anxious response. Typical phobias include fear of spiders, heights or snakes. Phobias can vary in how troubling they are, from having a mild discomfort around their phobia to being unable to leave the house for fear of encountering their fear.
One kind of phobia is social anxiety. Social anxiety is very distressing and difficult to cope with. You can feel extreme shyness, intense worry and stress in social situations and fear that other people will think of you in a negative way. If a person suffering from social anxiety is faced with a situation that makes them feel very anxious, for example getting on a very busy bus, they might become very panicky or avoid the situation altogether. Different situations will cause varying amounts of anxiety, a person may be relaxed talking to close family members or friends, but extremely anxious when sat in a room with people that they have never met.
If some of these descriptions are feeling familiar and are troubling you it may be worthwhile contacting your GP or the Samaritans on 08457 90 90 90.
Psychosis
An individual with psychosis is typically someone who somehow has lost contact with reality. The symptoms can affect how you behave, believe, think and feel. It can occur at any time but typically starts in late teens to early thirties. It’s more common than a lot of people would think with a lot of research suggesting 3 in 100 people will go on to experience some form of psychosis. With psychosis you can start to feel:
• Irritable
• Suspicious
• Worried
• Angry
• Tense
• Sad
This can then lead on to you feeling like:
• You're having troubling concentrating or speaking. People might struggle to understand you speech because it’s jumbled, slurred or unclear. Your thoughts can seem really fast or really slow.
• You can have vague sensations of feeling like some things not right. You can feel like some things changed. You can also feel like things aren't real or you aren't real.
• You can also start to have some unusual thoughts that you’re not sure whether or not they’re real. Like thinking the static on the radio is a secret message for you.
• You can become paranoid, worrying about what other people are up to and feeling like you have to be on the guard all the time.
• You may start to see, hear, feel, smell or taste things that aren't there.
• You can start to hear voices. Voices can range from anything from someone calling your name to a voice telling you to do things.
• You can have mood swings or feel cut off from your emotions. You can find yourself laughing at things that aren't obviously funny or crying for unexplainable reasons. You may stop expressing emotion.
• You can lose the motivation to do anything, even if you were very active before.
• Sometimes you can not be able to see that anything is wrong.
• You may feel you have special powers or are unique somehow.
These ‘early signs’ could simply be a one of to an overwhelming event like falling out with friends, or settling in a new environment like college or university. But they could also be early signs of developing psychosis. It’s important to remember that the quicker these symptoms are recognised and treated the better the outcome. It is possible to recover from psychosis; it is not necessarily a life long problem.
A lot of people have worries about psychosis. The media has contributed the unhelpful idea of people with psychosis being mad and dangerous. The reality is that very few people are a danger to others, and that the media focuses on these events rather unhelpfully.
If some of these descriptions are feeling familiar and are troubling you it may be worthwhile contacting your GP or the Samaritans on 08457 90 90 90.
Eating Disorders
Eating is a big part of our lives, after all its something we typically do 3 times a day. Food can be seen as the fuel for our body, giving us the energy to carry on with our day to day existence. Is it any wonder then that sometimes when people have problems it presents itself as problems with eating? Or that the effects can be so devastating when food is so important?
There are many different ways our eating can become a problem for us. What all people with eating disorders have in common is that eating or not eating becomes a way to control painful emotions, situations or stress. Eating disorders can occur in both males and females, it is not just a problem for females.
Lots of different causes can lead to an eating disorder, and there can be more than one. It’s actually more likely that a combination of causes have lead to the eating disorder. These could include things like low self-esteem; problems with family or friends; the death of someone special; problems at work, college or university; lack of confidence; sexual or emotional abuse. Many people talk about simply feeling ‘too fat’ or ‘not good enough’. It’s important to see that eating disorders are about trying to cope; they are not about trying to end it all. Instead, eating disorders are an unhealthy way of trying to deal with a lot of overwhelming situations.
A lot of people with eating disorders say that their illness is the only way they feel in control. By eating too much or too little they say they are taking control of something, when they feel that everything else that is going on in their lives is not in their control and not making them happy. But is it that the eating disorder is really what’s in control? By starting on this path the compulsion to control your eating can get stronger and stronger and leave you unable to stop even when the consequences may be life-threatening. It’s important to realise that it is possible to learn other, more healthy ways of coping and that by getting help and support you can learn to change. There are lots of different eating disorders.
They include:
• Anorexia Nervosa
• Bulimia Nervosa
• Binge Eating Disorder
• Compulsive Overeating
If some of these descriptions are feeling familiar and are troubling you it may be worthwhile contacting your GP or the Samaritans on 08457 90 90 90.
OCD
Many people have little rituals and superstitions that they do, like checking the door after you’ve locked it or touching wood. Doing these things make us feel more at ease and help reassure us. However for some people completing these reassurances becomes so time consuming, so energy consuming and even disturbing that they start to get in the way of their day to day life. It can become so that we become obsessed with getting these rituals right and it’s only when we have done the task lots and lots of times does the anxiety diminish. This is when these things become an obsession or a compulsion.
What makes up an obsession or a compulsion can differ from person to person. What they all have in common is that the person doing them believes that if they stop doing them something bad will happen.
Some common obsessions and compulsions include:
• Worrying that something terrible might happen all or a lot of the time.
• Counting or repeating words and phrases.
• Doubts that you can’t stop thinking about and leave you unable to do anything else.
• Excessive cleaning.
• Repetitive checking.
• Ritualistic touching, e.g. gas hob, door handles etc.
• Hand washing.
• Arranging objects such as toys, books, etc.
• Hoarding.
• Skin picking and hair plucking.
It’s important to recognise that these obsessions and compulsions can be treated. We often perform these rituals to ease anxiety we may feel, and by tackling that underlying anxiety the obsessions and compulsions can be reduced.
Many people are familiar with the diagnosis of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). OCD is where the obsessions and compulsions have reached a clinical level. This means the problems are incapacitating enough to be classed as a mental illness. This too can be treated but if you feel your problems reach this level it may be worthwhile seeking professional help.
If some of these descriptions are feeling familiar and are troubling you it may be worthwhile contacting your GP or the Samaritans on 08457 90 90 90.
Substance Misuse
Lots of people can start taking drugs for lots of different reasons. It could be just curiosity or it could be a way of coping with things going on. Either way once you've started taking a drug it can become difficult to stop and that’s when it can become an addiction. You may feel you have it under control, but it’s easy to overestimate how much control you have and things can quickly spiral.
Lots of things can lead you to have problems with drugs. Are your friends’ pressuring you into taking drugs? Do you feel like you won’t fit in? If this is the case it might be a question of asking whether these are the right kind of friends for you, and whether you need to look after yourself and get yourself out of that environment.
The way the drug makes you feel can make you develop an addiction. If a drug seems to make you feel relaxed or to help forget about your problems and worries it’s easy to see how you can become addicted to it. However while this might seem better in the short term you can soon find that you need more and more of the drug to feel that way and you need it all of the time. You can quickly find yourself addicted, in a downward spiral with a whole load of new problems on top of the ones you had before.
For some people drugs are a way of dealing with a mental health problem. This can be something like drinking when you feel depressed or taking cannabis to make voices go away. It’s important too to think about whether this is helping. It could be that down the line you end up with an even worse mental health problem, plus dealing with all the problems associated with an addiction. It’s really crucial to realise when you do have an addiction.
Signs to look for include:
• Do you think about drugs or alcohol everyday?
• Is it hard to say `no' when they are offered?
• Would you drink/take drugs alone?
• Do the drugs get in the way of doing anything else?
If you are finding yourself saying yes to these things you could have an addiction and need help. The most common sign of an addiction is a feeling of not being in control, not feeling like you can choose not to take the drugs. The important first step, after realising you have got an addiction, is confiding in someone. This can by anyone you trust like a friend or family member or your GP or teacher. This person can then help you get the support you need. Your GP, or other health specialist, can refer you to ways of dealing with addictions. These could include things like rehab, medication or group therapy. Rehab is where you get admitted into a specialist clinic that will work with you to try and stop you from taking any more drugs. Because you will be in a place with lots of other former addicts there will be people there who can understand what you've gone through and can provide support. Similarly groups like Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous works on the basis of people trying to get past their addictions together, using a 12 step plan.
It’s important to remember that whatever the addiction there is help for it out there. If some of these descriptions are feeling familiar and are troubling you it may be worthwhile contacting your GP or the Samaritans on 08457 90 90 90.