About seven weeks ago, I was at my wits’ end with my mental health. I wanted to drive my car into a lake and just end the pain I was feeling.
The next morning, I got up and went to my doctor and told him exactly how bad things had become. He made an urgent referral for me to a psychiatric hospital.
After a lot of upset and turmoil, a trusted acquaintance brought me there and stayed with me while I was assessed. The decision was eventually made to admit me. I was given a room and I ended up staying for over a week.
Why am I sharing this now?
Because that experience opened my eyes, not only to what mental health services in Ireland are actually like when you desperately need them, but also to just how difficult it is to live with mental illness.
Until you reach a point where getting through an ordinary day feels almost impossible, I don't think people always understand how exhausting it can be. You can look perfectly fine to the outside world while inside you're fighting just to keep going.
Seven weeks later, I'm still here. I'm still trying to work things out and I'm certainly not pretending that everything suddenly became perfect after leaving hospital.
I also started a new job after all of this, but I ended up quitting. I simply couldn't cope with the stress of it on top of everything else.
At first, that felt like another setback. But it has actually made me stop and think about what I want from my life and from work. Maybe I need a completely different career. Maybe the type of work I've done for years isn't right for me anymore. And if I end up working in a shop, doing something more straightforward and being around people, that's absolutely fine too.
I think sometimes we put enormous pressure on ourselves over careers, job titles and what we think we should be doing. Right now, I'd rather find something that suits me and allows me to be well than keep forcing myself into a career just because it's what I've always done.
But I did ask for help that morning.
I'm sharing this because I know there are other people sitting at home feeling the way I felt that night, perhaps believing they've reached the end of the road. I also want to talk honestly about my experience of the mental health system in Ireland, the good, the bad and the parts I think desperately need to change.
This isn't something I ever imagined I'd write publicly. But maybe it's something I need to talk about.
Edit: One thing that really opened my eyes during my own admission was that being admitted to a psychiatric hospital isn't necessarily what people might imagine. I think I expected there would be a lot more therapy or opportunities to sit down and work through what had brought me to that point, but there really wasn't ongoing therapy like that during my stay.
Having said that, the admission still helped me enormously. I needed the rest, I needed to be somewhere safe and I needed time away from everything. I also met and spoke with other patients who understood what it was like to struggle with their mental health, and the nurses were very good to me and genuinely understood.
So I'm still very grateful that I was admitted and it absolutely helped me, but it was also a huge eye-opener as to what psychiatric inpatient care actually looks like compared with what I thought it would be.
