Journey of Recovery with Bipolar

Today starts #EDAW2017 Eating Disorders Awareness Week! This is a week to help raise awareness and reduce stigma surrounding eating disorders. It is estimated that nearly 720,000 people suffer with some form of eating disorder in the UK; It's a shocking but a very real fact. Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any psychiatric disorders, which makes it more essential that it's caught early and proper medical attention is given. As a young tenager girl, I was consumed with negative body images and had little self confidence. I struggled with a poor relationship with food and my health suffered. Like many young women and men, I didn't receive the right help and my eating disorder continued into adulthood. Although I am now in control and have a much healthier relationship with food and exercise, I constantly have to monitor my urges and negative body image. In my blog today, I write about all the things I wish I could have told my teenager self. Oh how...

I've very nervous to announce my first poem - oh depression. While being detained under the mental health act in hospital, I wrote about my struggles with bipolar. I've tried this time to express myself through poetical wording. Being able to write my thoughts down on a paper has been very therapeutic. I hope that by sharing this poem, people can gain insight into the struggles of someone with depression. Hope you enjoy! Oh depression depression, what am I going to do with you? Your stealing my life, ruining my career and destroying who I am inside. Oh depression depression, what am I going to do with you? I feel so much, I hurt so much and I don't know what to do with the pain. Oh depression depression,what am I going to with you? I'm sectioned in hospital, locked up inside,and watching my life disappear. I've got fight this war inside my head and battle fearlessly onwards. Try each day to strive for recovery, I know it's a difficult task But I ha...

How rowing improved my mental health.  I have been struggling with depression  for the past two years, but in March 2016 my condition became critical. I started displaying elevated mood with thought disorder. As the days went by, I was sleeping less but still had buckets of energy; I was consumed by creating my own businesses and was planning on investing large sums of money into them. With no insight that I was becoming poorly, my manic episode went untreated, and I very quickly became acutely ill. I started presenting with psychotic symptoms; I was hallucinating and had delusions of grandeur. I dyed my hair bright colours and wore odd clothing. I believed I had 'inner mermaid powers' and that I could levitate! I also thought I was seeing butterflies which represented good and evil spirits. Eventually my behaviour became so erratic that I was taken into A and E as it was feared that I was becoming a danger to myself. I was sectioned there under the Mental Heal...

There are many elements which have helped my recovery. Mindfulness has been at the centre of my recovery therapy. It is a useful tool in finding inner peace. I have shared a mindfulness exercise which can be practiced individually or within a group. Mindfulness tree exercise: Find a comfortable postion to sit in, where you can feel relaxed but alert. With your piece of paper and pen start to draw a tree. Enter into this exercise with no prior judgements of your drawing abilities or any preconceptions of what a tree should look like. Just allow yourself to freely draw whatever your interpretation of a tree may be. As you hold your pencil, take a few moments to focus on the feeling of your pencil between your fingers. This is something we do almost every day– but very rarely do we pay attention to how it actually feels to hold a pen in our hands. Deliberately pay attention to each element of tree as you draw it.  The winding roots that achor the tree into the earth. ...