Dear Rishi Sunak

The prime minister of the UK yesterday outlined his plans for reforming the benefits system and reducing unemployment. In it he specifically targeted the mentally ill and talked about making it harder for them to be fully signed off work as well as access disability benefits. Under his plans patients will have to go through an assessment by some as yet unnamed ‘specialists’ to be signed off rather than talking to their GP. You can read the full speech here.

Dear Mr Sunak,

I have been one of those people who has been signed off work due to mental illness. As I write this I am in the midst of the draining and exhausting process of phasing back into work after six months off. Maybe the fact that I’m returning to work would redeem my absence in your eyes, but I suspect not. I imagine all you will see is my six months of ‘economic inactivity’.

Normally I tune out of politics. The sense of powerlessness and anger I feel watching the dishonesty and division caused by our so called ‘leaders’ is bad for my mental health. But I watched your speech last night. As I watched I found myself crying with anger, frustration and a growing feeling of despair. Listening to you I tried to keep the hate from rising in my heart, I tried to ascribe to you good intentions. Honestly as your words hit me, I felt so alone. I could feel the stigma clinging to me like ink I knew I would be unable to wash off. I can’t hide from your judgment that I am a part of the problem.

My mental health has always been complex, that’s what you get when you mix depression, anxiety and an eating disorder with debilitating chronic fatigue. I fall in the category of ‘high functioning’ mental illness. Most of the time I push through and manage to present a mask resembling some semblance of normality to the world. But pushing through costs me a great deal and it isn’t always an option.

Last year was one of the hardest in my life. I survived a painful redundancy season at work but came out of it stressed, bruised and depleted. It didn’t take much to trigger a relapse of the Anorexia which had been lurking on the sidelines ready to lend a hand. For four months I kept working. Somehow I held it together even as my body was starving and I was losing my hold on sanity. You see, eating disorders can be powerful like that, they can be coping strategies that allow you to do the seemingly impossible. If you follow their rules you feel powerful and in control even though in reality the prison walls are closing around you.

But I knew I needed help, I understood I was relapsing and required specialist support. Throughout this time I was open with my GP but there was nowhere she could refer me to. You see, dear prime minister, decades of underinvestment in mental health services means that early intervention doesn’t exist. To get NHS support you have to get sicker and hope that when you’re eventually allowed on the waiting list it’s not too late. Rather then treat the tumour straight away you are told to come back when it’s life threatening. If I could have accessed eating disorder support in those early weeks I could have stayed in work and saved myself mountains of pain.

Fast forward to September and I was completely out of my depth and going downhill fast. I knew that whatever my BMI may have said things were becoming dangerous. My only option was to pay for private eating disorder treatment. But by then we were long past the point of early intervention, meaning that the road to recovery would be excruciatingly difficult. As you said in your speech “you don’t get anything in life without hard work” and on that point I do agree. However, what you don’t understand is that recovering from an eating disorder or other serious mental illness is some of the hardest work anyone will have to do in their lives. At times wrestling my life back from mental illness has been a full time job.

I am already weighed down with guilt and shame about my absence from work without your stigmatisation. Guilt and stigma can be a massive hurdle to recovery. At first I was determined to go back after just three weeks but the medical professionals around me managed to talk me out of it. I was simply too unwell. Eventually I came to the realisation that if I was ever going to get back to living a meaningful life I had to take this time away from work to focus on my recovery. Those sick notes may just have saved my life.

Disability is financially challenging not just in terms of extra costs like therapy or care but also due to reduction in income as you’re more likely to need to work part time. In your speech you made it sound like the disability support payment, Personal Independence Payments (PIP), is easy to get and out of control. Anyone who has been through the gruelling process will know how untrue that is. I am currently in the process of applying for it myself after putting it off for years knowing how difficult it can be. For me and for many it could be a lifeline, a way of staying in work whilst still having some quality of life.

You talked about “the risk of over-medicalising the everyday challenges and worries of life”. In those words lies the implication that people are being too sensitive, that they’re getting diagnosed with mental illness when they should be pulling themselves together and getting on with life. It’s clear you’ve not lived with clinical depression or anxiety. It doesn’t sound like you’ve encountered the hellscape that illnesses like these create. I would give every penny in the bank to only have to deal with the ‘everyday challenges and worries of life’ rather than crippling mental and physical illness. The idea, Mr Sunak, that without a medical licence you can decide that people, who you have never met, are not genuinely ill is insulting and demeaning.

We’ve fought so hard over the years to get mental illness the same respect, funding and recognition as physical illness. We’ve worked hard to challenge the idea that mental illness has anything to do with laziness or being ‘work shy’. Your rhetoric in that one speech is catapulting us in the wrong direction.

I have no doubt that following your speech yesterday some people struggling with mental illness will decide not to reach out for help. This can be life and death. Suicide is the leading cause of death in males under 50, a statistic that should be an urgent call to action. It’s also looking like the suicide rate increased in 2023 to a level we haven’t seen for twenty years. If you make it even harder for people to have space to recover, and force them to jump through hoops or reduce their income, it’s inevitable that more people will die. Mental illness can be devastating, it can take and destroy lives.

Throughout your speech, Mr Sunak, your catchphrase was ‘that’s not right’ but we differ on our definitions of morality. In my opinion it’s not right when those in political power target the most vulnerable and marginalised groups for political gain. It’s not right that instead of fixing the failing mental health services you are blaming those unable to access the treatment they desperately need. It’s not right that you’re attacking unemployment rates amongst young people without addressing the devastating impact that the social isolation of the pandemic had on their wellbeing. It’s not right that rather than adequately understanding and addressing the mental health crisis you are adding further financial burdens onto those already at breaking point.

The sceptic in me thinks you are trying to unite the UK around a common enemy in order to distract from the political train wreck your party has become. But that’s enough now. Please stop. Don’t target those who are already suffering, those who lack the resilience to overcome any more obstacles. There’s nothing right or moral about that.

Faith is Messy

I’m not really sure where I am in my faith at the moment. I believe in God and am a Christian. I would say I have a relationship with God but there have been times over the last year where it hasn’t been one where either of us were talking to each other. I can talk to Him about other people, pray for those I love and our hurting world. But talking to Him about myself has felt like opening a box that I don’t know how to close. Maybe I fear rejection if I bring Him the depths of my anger, hurt and confusion. Maybe they are still emotions that I struggle to validate, own and articulate. Maybe I’m afraid that I will pour out my heart and He simply won’t answer, leave me sitting in the silence.

There are days when I feel like a fraud of a Christian. I can go through the motions but inside feel so conflicted. Some days the big name worship songs turn my stomach. The words sound naive and superficial. I can’t find myself in the liturgy or the rituals. Far from coming to God with joy sometimes I can muster no more than a grimace. I don’t feel like I belong. Is it worse to come to God with resentment than with indifference?

The journey of unraveling my mental health has forced me to confront all the negative things I have mixed in with my faith over the years. My relationship with Christianity has been at best complicated and worst toxic. I have wondered if it was inevitable that I would lose my faith on the journey to finding myself. If Atheism were the key to good mental health would I take it?

The reason I’ve kept wrestling with my faith, rather than turning away from it, is that I care about it a great deal. My faith is something that is central to who I am, it gives me strength and hope in dark times. I believe it is powerful and important. But there have been times where not having faith may have been easier and left me with fewer questions. How do you reconcile a God of love who allows so much suffering? It would be easier to believe He’s not there at all. For years I’ve made sense of it in my own life by doubting my worth. Maybe I’m just not lovable enough. I’ve believed my struggles are my fault, punishment for some crime that I’ve long forgotten. But if I reject that then there’s no easy answer to the question. There is so much brokenness in our own lives and the world around us.

It would be simpler to gloss over it and move on. To stop wrestling and just hope the hard times don’t come again. But they always do. I know I’m supposed to be content in all circumstances but how can you when you’ve been caught in the depths of depression? I want to believe that God is all powerful and all loving but there’s no denying that life can be overwhelmingly difficult for many of us.

Sometimes I can see the beauty in life, other times there’s only darkness and despair. Some days I can celebrate the blessings and the good that’s come from hard times. Other days I don’t want to be here any more. There are times of hope and optimism. And others where despite my best efforts sadness wraps itself around me like a shroud and obscures my vision.

I am angry and heartbroken, hurt, confused and so very weary. If there was ever a time to turn away I think it would be now. But I can’t.

I can’t turn my back because I know God and I know one inescapable truth about His character: He is good. Life is hard but He is good. Both of them exist together, two seemingly contradictory statements at the heart of so many of our struggles. One doesn’t answer the other. God’s goodness doesn’t explain the suffering in the world but neither does life’s hardship exclude the reality of His goodness.

There is much that I have no answers for, much wiser people than me have written on the question of suffering. But I have seen God at work. He’s been there helping me navigate the labyrinth of decisions to get the mental health care I needed. He’s been with me in the kindness of friends who love me when I can’t love myself. He’s been there on the darkest nights trying to hold me whilst I beat my fists on His chest in fear and frustration. He’s still whispering hope to me even on the days I doubt His love and His plans.

The testimony I have is not the one I wanted. I have longed for a story of transformation, of God intervening in powerful ways to remove life’s challenges. I want to write of healing and wholeness, joy overflowing and beautiful new chapters. My testimony is less about when and how I became a Christian and more about all the storms we’ve travelled through together. I would like a different narrative, something cleaner and happier, painted in brighter colours. But this is the only story I can tell. I don’t shout it from the rooftops but I will whisper into the dark “you can get through this”.

Faith is messy. It’s a love story woven through the tangled threads of human hearts. It’s a divine message spread by undeniably flawed men and women. It’s found in the darkest, dirtiest holes we fall into and washes clean the grimiest of stains. It both makes absolute sense and none at all depending on where you stand when you view it. Faith beckons me forward, with all my pain and confusion, into the loving arms of someone who will weave these bitter threads into a tapestry, one more beautiful than I can imagine.

Letting Yourself Feel

Emotions are difficult things. No matter how old we get many of us still struggle with our feelings. We can find it hard to understand what we’re feeling and where it’s coming from. We can allow ourselves to be controlled by them so that our lives become an exhausting rollercoaster of ups and downs. Or we can ignore our emotions altogether and pretend they aren’t there, operating in a state of denial.

At some point in our lives all of us will have had our emotions invalidated. Maybe we were labelled as ‘too sensitive’ as children and so found ways to hide our pain from others. We could have experienced rejection from friends who shut down our attempts to talk about difficult things due to their own discomfort. Or we might have done the invalidating ourselves, not giving ourselves permission to feel particular things.

I am finding my own emotions difficult to manage at the moment. As last week’s post indicated I’m working through some trauma which is bringing a lot of raw feelings to the surface. This is the reality of having therapy. You go into it with the naive hope that it will take away all your challenging feelings. But often in the short term it intensifies them as you have to experience emotions that you’ve pushed down and invalidated. Long term these emotions will fade but still remain and you will instead be equipped with the tools to manage them. It is definitely worth it in the end but it is not a magic solution to get rid of things you don’t want to feel.

It’s hard to describe emotional pain but that doesn’t mean it’s any less valid than physical pain. For me at times it’s like a dull ache in my chest, other times it’s excruciating and feels unendurable. As it lives inside of your head you can’t escape it. It feels like it will last forever, more real than anything you’ve ever experienced. It brings with it this feeling of being completely lost, like you’ve fallen off the map into a landscape that you don’t recognise. It’s disorientating and lonely.

When you are struggling with painful emotions your mind can be screaming at you to find some way of suppressing them. I have used my eating disorder as a means to do this over the years. Eating disorders can dull or warp your emotions until they’re focused solely on food. You push away the sadness with binging, restricting or purging. With Anorexia I found restriction to be a drug that gave me an artificial high that became addictive. My life felt under control as long as my food intake was under my control. It’s so tempting to fall back on that or other unhealthy coping strategies right now.

Yet no matter how hard we try we can’t avoid pain. It’s a universal human experience. And pain has to be felt. We can’t fast forward through the processing of it or bury it indefinitely. We have to find a way to sit with it and allow it to be there because it already is. We have to weather the storm it throws at us so that we can learn the powerful lesson that no emotion, no matter how agonising, can destroy us. We are not sugar mice that dissolve in the rain but boulders that can endure against the elements. We’re stronger than we think we are.

So this week I have been working on allowing myself to feel whatever I’m feeling. That instead of fighting these unpleasant emotions I’m letting them exist in the background, to be checked in with when I’m feeling strong. At the same time I’ve been reaching for healthier coping strategies. Currently I seem to be coping through a combination of jigsaws and sewing. I don’t know how many stitches or puzzle pieces I will have slotted into place before I can piece myself back together again. But I do know that these things can only be done one piece at a time.

When a Pizza Is Not Just a Pizza

Eating disorders aren’t really about food. Food may be the stage on which the disorder plays out but the strings are being pulled by a complex mental illness. It’s less about the chocolate bar you’re eating and more about the guilt and shame you’re feeling whilst you eat it. It’s why therapy is needed alongside nutritional support, you can’t recover from an eating disorder unless you’ve dealt with what’s going on inside. One of the things I find hard about recovery is that people judge how well you are by how you look on the outside, your weight, what you eat or don’t eat. The mental turmoil is invisible and as such often forgotten.

Yet four months into recovery much of my life and thoughts still revolve around food. No matter how determined I am to stick to the plan agreed with my dietitian my eating disorder puts up a good fight. Every meal or snack time there’s a viscous voice in my head telling me I’m eating too much, that I’m fat and greedy. I know at the heart of it is my struggle to nourish and nurture my body, not feeling like I deserve to enjoy food. But in the moment it is easy to blame everything on the bacon sandwich you’ve just eaten.

It’s made harder by how much we as a society moralise food. I had a friend question why my dietitian was challenging me to eat ‘bad’ food like chocolate and crisps. Surely I would be ‘healthier’ without those things? I can’t read the news without being reminded of the ‘obesity epidemic’. There’s so much focus on weight and size that we lose sight of the fact that the real issue is that many of us have an unhealthy relationship with food. We struggle with emotional eating, or feel shamed into binge eating. Food is something easy that we can use to fill the void.

It’s hard to build a healthy relationship with food when fat and carbs are being viewed as the enemy rather than nutrients that we need to stay healthy. As a society our perception of a ‘healthy diet’ has shifted to being less about balance and more about restriction. We are ‘good’ if we say no to that piece of cake and have fruit instead. We beat ourselves up if we have a takeaway. We justify any extravance against the amount of exercise we’re going to do to combat it. We laud those who are thin or survive mainly on fruit and veg. We are constantly bombarded by a diet industry that has no incentive to actually solve our problems and instead feeds into our dissatisfaction with how we look.

In the UK the government and NHS seem to have succeeded in creating a hostile environment for eating disorder recovery. There’s the inaccessibility of treatment where your worthiness of help is based solely on your BMI, despite statistics saying that fewer than 6% of eating disorder sufferers are underweight. Then there’s the anti-obesity campaigns that can easily miss the mark. More recently the government has introduced calorie labelling in most cafes and restaurants. I can’t even order a coffee anymore without being informed how many calories are in it. I know as well as anyone that an obsession with calories does nothing to fix your relationship with food. Instead it’s far more likely to raise up another generation of kids with eating disorders.

Eating disorder recovery isn’t as simple as following some predetermined pathway, every person’s recovery journey is unique to them. One of the decisions you have to make is what you want being ‘recovered’ to look like. In this day and age it is easy to be functionally Anorexic, there are so many diet products on the shelves that you can maintain a restrictive diet and keep your health stable. You can construct a life out of the foods that feel safe to you, avoiding all others, staying within the rules of your eating disorder. For some it’s the only life they can envision but it has never been my desired destination.

The alternative is to throw out the rulebook and challenge every lie your eating disorder is telling you. Instead of avoiding the foods that cause anxiety or fear you confront them head on. It’s completely and utterly exhausting because food is still very much tied to your emotions. Not only do you have to be on your guard against any manipulation by the eating disorder but you also have to sit with the guilt and shame after eating. It’s not an easy option. But then I don’t want a diet that doesn’t involve chocolate or puddings, I don’t want to be fearful of peanut butter and hot chocolates. I know deep down that I can’t be kind and compassionate to myself if I won’t let myself eat things that I enjoy purely because I enjoy them. I know I won’t be free if I humour the eating disorder, allowing it to keep taking up space in my head, pacifying it every now and again.

This week one of the challenges I had chosen to confront was takeaway pizza. It wasn’t something I ate as a child so eating it as an adult involves an extra layer of guilt. But I love pizza, particularly any with BBQ topping. And so on Wednesday my friend and I ordered our favourite pizza and side and ate it together. I’d been looking forward to it all week and enjoyed every mouthful but that didn’t stop the crushing guilt and panic afterwards. It was hard to quieten the voice in my head that tells me I didn’t deserve it and that I will put on so much weight as a result. But I didn’t let that stop me.

Having done it once I know that next time it will be just that little bit easier. Over time as the fears prove unfounded they will subside. One day it will be just another meal. But this week it has become a symbol of the daily battle I’m fighting.

Sometimes a pizza is not just a pizza. Sometimes it’s a victory.

Sleep Training My Cat

I have an eight year old calico rescue cat called Poppy. I would define our relationship as ‘codependent’. I adopted her the weekend before the UK went into lockdown. I took her home and then we were shut up in the house together, without being allowed to see anyone else, for twelve weeks. She became my fluffy little shadow and I her favourite napping spot. When she’s coming back in from outside she will walk through the house crying until she finds me again (seemingly forgetting she was the one who chose to leave). She likes to spend as much of the day as possible attached to me.

We’ve had some rough years since then. One global pandemic, two eating disorder relapses, one redundancy season at work, worsening chronic fatigue and more episodes of depression and anxiety than I care to count. She often feels like the glue that holds my mental health together.

That’s not to say there haven’t been some stressful days as a cat guardian. Poppy is not one to back down from a fight with another cat and has never learnt to run away from trouble. Over the years we’ve had multiple cat bite abscesses each requiring at least one trip to the vet. Normally these come to light at the least practical times like when the vets are closed for a bank holiday. Poppy is also a prolific hunter. I am used to coming downstairs to find birds in various stages of destruction. She likes to call me so I’ll come watch her eat them, I would prefer she does that activity alone. The mice of course are brought in very much alive and then released into my house. If I’m lucky she’ll catch them, but I’ll admit to having caught more than my fair share.

But none of this seems to matter because I love her, pure uncomplicated love. I love the smell of her fur as she snuggles into my shoulder. I love all her different chirps and meows that she uses to chat to me. I love watching her exploring and living her best life. And I love the sleepy warmth of her asleep on my lap.

However there is one last line that she had yet to cross and that was sleeping in my bedroom. My room has previously been out of bounds to her. She’s slept in there with me the odd night where I was particularly unwell but mostly her bedroom is downstairs in the dining room. Our bedtime ritual would be picking her up for some last snuggles, taking her to the kitchen to brush her teeth (which she just about tolerates) and then I put her downstairs for the night.

My decision to separate her from me at night has been based on the belief that together neither of us would get much sleep. For her first night in my house I had put her in the spare room and she cried for most of the night. So the next night I moved her to my dining room where I couldn’t hear her and it’s been like that since then. Sleep has been a struggle for many years now. It’s something I desperately need but often eludes me as I wake multiple times a night from vivid and sometimes upsetting dreams. It’s been drilled into me that I should do everything I can to have good ‘sleep hygiene’ which means no cat in my room at night.

But I decided on the run up to Christmas that my primary problems at night were sadness and loneliness which Poppy could help with. I could sacrifice some sleep to feel a little less lost in the dark. And let’s face it my sleep isn’t great to start off with.

So the experiment began and instead of putting the cat to bed I left my bedroom door open to see what unfolded. The first night was chaotic, having spent so little time in my room Poppy was eager to explore. She’d wake up every couple of hours and move around. In between adventures she’d tuck herself behind my knees. It was very cute but I was exhausted.

Following this we introduced some playtime before bed to help get some of her energy out. Despite my best efforts and purchase of new toys she’s only really motivated by the laser pointer. But she enjoys hiding behind the curtains to perform a sneak attack on it (my curtains have enjoyed it less).

This seems to be successful and for the most part Poppy will curl up at the foot of my bed and not move all night. When she sees I’m awake she’ll come and sit on my shoulder or chest to remind me that it’s breakfast soon. I am concluding that she is a much better sleeper than I am. I thought I was sleep training her but I think it might be the other way round.

The exception to this is when she, being the stubborn cat that she is, needs the toilet. She has a clean and perfectly adequate litter tray for her to use. But she would much rather go outside where she can upset my neighbours. This means we reach a standoff as she has a nighttime curfew to lower the risk of her being hit by a car. So she will yowl at me in protest for hours in an attempt to wear me down. This is definitely not conducive with sleep and that night saw her evicted back downstairs.

All this probably seems silly but when so much of life feels difficult you try and find pleasure in the little things. And some days that’s having a quietly snuffling cat asleep by your feet. That gentle noise that reminds you that you’re not alone.

Memories of Christmas Past

I have a complicated relationship with Christmas. I couldn’t tell you exactly when it started only that I was still a child. I dreaded the arguments that would arrive like clockwork every November over which family we’d see when. I hated the fractious atmosphere that accompanied the readying of the house for the day itself. There was always so much cleaning to do. Christmas shopping felt like a task that I was destined to always get wrong, particularly in that age before online shopping. It’s true I looked forward to the presents themselves but with my negative self-belief I didn’t feel as though I deserved them. I remember one year I said I didn’t want presents and wanted the money to go to those in need instead. On the outside it looked like a selfless act of charity, I was the only one who knew it was actually a symptom of my self-hatred.

Once I left for University Christmas became about returning to my childhood home which felt heavy with memories, some of them difficult. With my independence temporarily confiscated I would regress to my teenage self, sullen and moody. The annual pilgrimage to my home town would trigger days of comparisons. I would compare myself to my more extroverted sister whose socialising and outgoing nature made me seem dull and boring. The Christmas service at my home church was a chance to compare myself to the peers I grew up with, all of whom seemed more successful and accomplished.

Mental illness can make Christmas feel exponentially more difficult. My depression always worsens as the mince pies fill the supermarkets and the festive countdown begins, earlier every year. It looks starker in the light of the fairy lights and supposed Christmas joy. You cannot escape the dissonance between how you feel on the inside and how you’re expected to feel. There’s only so long you can plaster on a smile before you need to lie down in a quiet dark room. My eating disorder gets louder and angrier with so many celebrations revolving around food. The recovering part of me wants to eat all the seasonal food and embrace it but the other part is always telling me that we don’t deserve nice things. It means that hour by hour I feel more conflicted than ever. And with the parties and emphasis on being together with friends and family my social anxiety becomes much harder to contain. It’s as though I know I don’t belong and so am constantly looking for the nearest exit.

I feel the added pressure of Christmas being a religious celebration for my faith. I want it to be about Jesus’ birth but we wrap it up in so much other stuff that it’s hard to see the baby in the manger. Even if you do get to hear the nativity story the version we’re told has often lost most of its relatability. It’s too picture perfect, too beautiful, too clean. It’s the story of Jesus’ birth told how we wish it had been. We sanitise the pain out of it, clean up all the dirt and cover the grime with snowflakes. Mary becomes this perfect saint rather than the scared teenage mother she must have been. We lose the jeopardy that as an unmarried woman the virgin birth could have been her death warrant. We don’t see Joseph’s conflict and confusion as he wrestles with feelings of betrayal. We take the terror out of giving birth surrounded by animal manure with no family or friends around. We will never know how many times they questioned if they had heard God right or if they wished He had chosen another couple. And the infant Jesus, when he arrives, supposedly doesn’t even cry.

By cleaning up the Christmas story we take away some of its beauty and comfort. We can miss the hope we get from knowing that Jesus came into the chaotic messiness of our world. That God loves us enough to be born in the stink of a stable, His arrival heralded by shepherds who were the social outcasts of their day. We can miss the way that God uses flawed and damaged people like us in His eternal plans. We can wrap the occasion in the weight of so much tradition and ceremony that it becomes inaccessible to those who so desperately need to see that infant king. We make it out of reach for those who need to know what that baby will grow up to do.

The true story is less comfortable but more powerful. Jesus didn’t come to offer you a life of only joy, instead He says that in your pain and despair He will be with you. He doesn’t promise a life without pain or sickness but that He’ll be by your side through every illness and heartache. He doesn’t offer gold or material riches but instead enters into our poverty and hunger. He doesn’t guarantee a picture perfect earthly family but that He will never leave you or forsake you. He saw all our mess and our brokenness, every mistake we have made and will make, and He still came.

This year you can leave the presents and the celebrations, you can ignore the shepherds and the wisemen. You can even forget about the angels and the stable and the teenage mother. At the heart of it all you need to remember is one word: Immanuel. God with us. Now and always.

Toxic Christianity- Part 1: Mental Illness

Before I begin I want to be clear this isn’t me turning my back on my faith. It’s integral to who I am and has seen me through some incredibly difficult times, it’s probably saved my life a few times. But part of the work I’m doing in therapy is unpacking things in my life and my past that have contributed to where I am today. As part of this I am starting to explore how the expectations and pressures in the Christian communities I’ve been a part of have impacted me and my mental health.

The thing about this kind of work is you have to focus in on the negatives. I know this is only part of the picture. I’m asking you to hold alongside the negative things I’m going to talk about that this is a faith I love, shared by people I love. On the whole I have been a part of great churches and loving Christian communities who have had nothing but good intentions towards me. This post isn’t pointed at any one in particular and is as much about Christian culture than church itself. This is my experience and mine alone.

I’m aware that toxic is a strong word. My use of it is centred around the idea of toxicity being something that builds up over time. The odd unhelpful idea in a sea of positives isn’t going to do much harm, swallowing the odd apple pip won’t give you cyanide poisoning. But for some people the toxicity can build to a point where it’s hugely damaging. Maybe it’s just one idea that grows or multiplies or an accumulation of issues but either way it can leave scars.

I am also in no doubt that the lens I’ve filtered my experiences through has not been a self-compassionate one. As with any confirmation bias I will have absorbed the things that match my low view of myself. I am adept at picking out the criticism in a speech full of compliments. But I don’t think that my experience is unique and I do believe it is worth shining a light on even if my perspective is a little skewed. I thought I’d be able to fit everything into one post but several hours in I discovered that was overly optimistic. This first post will explore the unhelpful attitudes around mental illness.

One particularly painful thing I’ve come up against over the years is that many Christians treat the concept of mental illness as something they can opt in or out of. They view it as some kind of minor doctrine issue that it’s okay to agree to disagree on. If you read the gospels you’ll see that Jesus did a lot of delivering people from demons and some of those people described sound like they have some symptoms of mental illness. This has lead some Christians to believe that mental illness is a result of demon possession. You can’t always spot these people from the outset meaning that those you go to for support may actually want to pray to set you free from whatever force has taken root in your life. It’s not a roulette wheel you want to spin.

I first encountered this thinking when I was at University, battling depressive episode after depressive episode. It shouldn’t be a surprise that someone who was acutely unwell would find the idea that they were possessed by some kind of demon to be scary and incredibly upsetting. It made me feel like some kind of abomination, branded and stigmatised. Mental illness is already terrifying, your mind becomes a strange and foreign place, filled with thoughts that alarm you. I did not need another layer of fear and shame.

Other Christians view mental illness as some kind of spiritual failing of the person who is struggling. I have been told before that if I prayed and read my bible more then I wouldn’t be depressed. Or that Christians shouldn’t struggle with depression as we should be joyful all the time. This narrative has embedded itself so thoroughly in my life that I still feel like my mental health challenges are entirely my own fault. I must not be trying hard enough. I’m not a good enough Christian. I must be doing something wrong.

This can be worsened by the teaching around healing. The bible tells of many instances where Jesus healed people. Personally I do believe that God can and does heal people. But some Christians twist this to say God will heal anyone if they have enough faith. It’s only a short step from there to imply that if you haven’t been healed then it’s due to a lack of faith, you don’t want it or believe in it enough. It is your fault you aren’t getting better.

This creates an environment where you feel like you have to go up for prayer in every church service. It’s emotionally exhausting building yourself up to a place where you believe that maybe today you could be healed only to feel the crushing disappointment when it doesn’t happen and the guilt that you must be doing something wrong. Once I was prayed for by two women who asked me how I felt afterwards. My honesty that I felt more peaceful but not miraculously better was met with the insistence that I sit back down and we try again.

I am extremely grateful for all the people who have prayed and continue to pray for healing for me. I can’t know the impact that those prayers are having, the things they might be sparing me from. But we have to be realistic that God doesn’t miraculously heal the majority of people. Sometimes what I’ve needed is to be allowed to accept my illnesses, to grieve the impact of them and come to a place where I manage the cards I’ve been dealt rather than wishing for better ones. Blaming people for their own illness stigmatises them to a point where they may not reach out for the help they need. It can be deadly.

Christianity has come a long way in the last decade in terms of awareness and destigmatisation of mental illness. But as you can see there is still some way to go. We have to do better for the vulnerable people who line our streets and churches. Our churches should be safe places to feel broken. I believe in a God who is close to the broken hearted, comforts those who grieve and offers a peace that passes understanding. In His arms I have found acceptance and comfort, I have been held in His love and grace. He embraces and walks alongside the mentally ill. He asks us to do the same.

“You look well”

It’s been an appointment heavy week for both myself and Poppy the cat. She has been fighting again and won herself another cat bite turned into a nasty abscess. So she’s on antibiotics and painkillers and stuck indoors with a plastic cone around her head. It’s safe to say she is not amused and has largely been following me around the house screaming at me. Not ideal.

I meanwhile had appointments with my psychologist and dietitian. But it was my review with my GP that has been on my mind the most. I have a lovely GP, she’s kind, empathetic, warm and patient. I’m really grateful for her support and that I get regular face to face appointments (which is rare in the UK right now). However, in her efforts to help me to see the positives she can say things that I find unhelpful. On Wednesday it was “you look well”.

Lots of different people have said this statement or variations of it to me over the years. I know it’s said with nothing but good intentions and I try to clock it up to people not knowing what to say and then move on. But that statement is hard for a number of different reasons. Firstly in eating disorder recovery, particularly when there’s some weight restoration going on, your warped brain interprets that as “you look fat”. Any comments on appearance are dangerous territory as you are hyper alert to the way people look at and talk about your changing body.

For me I think it’s the invalidation that is the most challenging to deal with. When you have spent time explaining to someone how you’re doing, allowing yourself to be vulnerable, it’s hard for them to then turn around and give an assessment on how you’re doing based on outward appearances. It can feel like someone saying that your lived experience of your health and illness isn’t valid, your words not enough. Someone who has spoken to you for all of ten minutes can pronounce their own verdict on the state of your mental health.

This is particularly triggering for me as I’m currently signed off work due to my mental health. This is something I feel very guilty about (guilt is often my default emotion) and wish I could have avoided. Having someone tell me I “look well” sends me off in a spiral wondering if I’m doing the right thing or just making a fuss about nothing. If I look okay then does that mean I’m better? Why don’t I feel better?

The irony of “looking well” is that none of the illnesses I struggle with are visible from the outside. I have mostly been high functioning whilst battling mental illness. I can get dressed leave the house and attend an appointment, making conversation and smiling at the right points. I have had years of practice. At the moment I can only sustain this pretence of normality for a limited amount of time. But mostly I can hold it together until I am on my own in the house again.

There’s so much that other people can’t see. There’s the eating disorder yelling at you because you’ve gained lots of weight, making every meal a mind game. There’s the restless nights with anxiety dream after anxiety dream. The meltdown you have before a stressful meeting and the dissociation afterwards. There’s the guilt and shame that depression weighs you down with and therapy sessions where you have to cut yourself open to show them where it hurts. Most of the time you feel completely overwhelmed and no matter how hard you try and push the difficult emotions away they always catch up with you.

I know talking to someone in recovery can feel like a minefield and I would much prefer someone to say the wrong thing from a good place than not talk to me at all. We all need to hold a lot of grace for each other. But rather than comment on outward appearances we can acknowledge another person’s pain, allowing them to be however they are in that moment. You can celebrate the steps forward they’ve made on the journey whilst understanding that there’s a long way still to go on already weary legs. It’s possible to validate someone’s experience whilst holding out hope to them. It’s important they know it’s okay if they’re not yet okay, they’re not doing anything wrong, recovery takes time.

I don’t know what mental illness looks like. I don’t know how it’s supposed to sound to those around me. However I do know what it feels like, I’ve lived with it for decades. I may not be sporting a plastic cone but both myself and Poppy the cat have been through the wars, her battles are just more obvious than mine.

I Wish Mental Illness Was Like a Broken Leg

Over the last decade there’s been a lot of progress in reducing the stigma and shame around mental illness. We can now talk about things openly that previously would be shrouded in secrecy. There’s been an emphasis on treating mental illness the same way as physical illnesses. In difficult moments on my own mental health journey I have had many a friend seek to validate and reassure me by comparing mental illness to a broken leg. The parallel there to remind me that I would not be berating myself for, and invalidating my experience of, a broken bone.

In a lot of ways it’s a helpful analogy. The brain is a part of the body and it gets sick just like any other. It seeks to remove the stigma of seeking help as who wouldn’t go to the hospital if their leg was broken? It’s a comparison that helps to separate the person from the illness, you wouldn’t consider yourself to be broken just because a bone was. There’s also the implication that this is something valid and outside of your control.

However, no matter how much I wish mental illness was like having a broken leg there are so many ways it isn’t. Firstly they are illnesses that are often completely invisible, there is no plaster cast to remind those around you that you can’t go for a run. People expect you to function normally because they can’t see any reason why you shouldn’t. Any accommodations have to be advocated for, requiring you to explain your illness which can feel impossible. I cannot just hold up an image of an X-ray or plaster cast and have people instantly understand what it means.

The thing I find most challenging about mental illness is that it’s so difficult to disentangle it from your sense of self. Your thoughts, dreams, sense of identity, hopes and fears all exist in your mind in the same place your illness has invaded. How do you know which thoughts are healthy and which aren’t? How do you reconcile whether you or the illness should be held responsible for the bad decisions you’re making? How do you escape the constant and pervasive sense of guilt? When you’re in physical pain you can take pain killers, with emotional pain there aren’t remedies that straightforward. There are no crutches that can help you navigate the world with a malfunctioning brain.

There’s also still a massive disparity between how mental and physical illnesses are treated. You wouldn’t be turned away from hospital for a broken leg but you are easily and routinely turned away from support services when it is your mind that is in agony. Waiting lists can be so long that even if you are awarded a coveted place on one you are sent away to live with the pain for months or years. You wouldn’t remove the plaster cast from someone whose bone hadn’t healed and say tough luck your time’s up, you’ll just have to live with it now. But treatments for mental illness are often a fixed number of sessions and then you’re discharged whether you are ready or not.

No matter how much we talk of investment in mental health it will never attract the funding of illnesses like cancer or heart disease. There is little investment in research or finding new treatments. Despite antidepressants being brought in during the 1950s we still don’t properly understand how or even if they work. I don’t know what the long term implications of my medications could be.

More than anything I wish I had a timescale for getting better like you would for a fracture. I don’t know how long it will be before I feel myself again. Therapy requires you to dig deep and can unearth emotions that make you feel worse in the short term. I don’t know when I’ll be ‘better’ or even what ‘better’ would look like. No one is going to commit to a prognosis. I long for the day that the cast comes off and my mind is free again.

Find Him on the Floor

Mental illness can sneak up on you. Your reality can shift by a degree at a time until your vision is completely distorted. What feels true to you one day might not the next. Sometimes only one part of your thinking is affected, hidden from view. You can have this specific area of irrationality invisible from the outside. Being ‘high functioning’ can make it harder to see what’s going on as each day you push through a little more, unaware that the pebble you started off carrying has become a boulder. You can be so good at convincing the outside world that you’re okay that you fool yourself.

I thought I had a good handle on the state of my mental health. For me it felt simple, I gained weight then panicked, dieting turned into restrictive behaviour and an eating disorder relapse. Simple cause and effect. All I needed to do was get my diet and relationship with food under control and I’d be fine. There was nothing messy or complicated lurking in the background that we’d need to unearth. This should be straightforward this time.

But what is probably obvious to anyone apart from me is that there is nothing simple about my mental health right now. Looking back I can see I’ve been struggling all year. The redundancy season at work took a heavy toll, the effort to cope with the extraordinary amount of stress impacted my mental health. Depression and Anxiety were constant companions which the relief of keeping my job didn’t dissipate entirely. If I hadn’t already been mentally unwell I may have made different choices when it came to losing weight. Emotions and circumstances had orientated me in the wrong direction and the weight gain just gave me a push.

The roots of my struggles go back decades, attempts have been made to solve them over the years but with limited success. When you’ve had chronic mental illness and tried multiple therapies it can be very difficult to access the support you need. Mental health services in the UK are so stretched that they can’t treat you as an individual. Instead you are a collection of diagnoses at best being funnelled onto a predetermined pathway, at worst denied help at all. There is not time to examine your individual needs or the path that got you to this point, your treatment is determined by whatever group therapy is running at the time or which self help web service they subscribe to.

Getting inadequate care is not only frustrating and disheartening but it can also make you lose hope in the possibility of recovery. You feel like a failure when a type of therapy doesn’t help, you accuse yourself of not trying hard enough. Surely if it works for other people it should work for you? You feel like a doll thrown on the discard pile, too broken to be fixed. I didn’t realise how much this had impacted me until my private psychologist presented me with a plan for how we’ll be working together. I found myself emotional that there was not just a plan tailored to me but one that sounds like it might actually help. I could feel a flicker of hope.

Many dark days had preceded this glimmer, rock bottom when it came was both a painful and profound experience. It was a Sunday morning about a month or so into going to a new church. I had been playing the game of how long I could go without eating which had only broken the night before. I was weak and exhausted but I forced myself out the house and to the church service. The next ninety minutes passed with my dignity largely in tact and limited stomach rumbling. I went through to the hall afterwards where they served tea and coffee. I’d been chatting to various people when I started to feel dizzy in the middle of a conversation. I expected it to pass like it had before. But instead it worsened and I fainted, coming to again in what was probably only a couple of seconds later.

I revisit this moment in my memory sometimes but not for the reasons you might think. I came to, in the arms of a kind friend who had caught me, to the words “you’re okay, I’ve got you”. In that moment I was scared and confused whilst also being held and safe. In the hours that followed I realised that those words she spoke were the same that God was saying to me, that the incident was a metaphor for His love. It was a season where I had struggled to see or experience God. I had looked for Him in all the usual places, in my bible and prayers, in church services and conversations. But I found Him on the floor. He was there in my shame and embarrassment, arms out to catch me, whispering “you’re okay, I’ve got you”.

I think that’s often where we find God, in the dust of our failures and consequences, in the messiness of our pain and confusion, our doubts and our hurt. He kneels next to us in the dirt. I have learnt time and time again not to mistake God’s silence for His absence, that not speaking does not mean He’s not listening. There is so much I don’t understand about God and life but I have felt Him catch me. I have heard His whisper.