Mental Health Awareness/Acceptance Week

This week is Mental Health Awareness Week in the UK.

Poor mental health can affect anyone, and the world of residential leasehold is no exception. Mental health challenges confront leaseholders whose flats are affected by the building safety crisis; stress and anxiety bear down on property managers; deep-seated worry and low mood have stalked me for many years.

I am not the only barrister with an unwelcome shadow, and I hope that by describing my own experience of mental ill health, I will help reduce the stigma that still attaches to mental illness.

I know (now) that if I do not look after myself, my mental health will deteriorate.

Looking after myself includes taking daily medication – duloxetine – to regulate my noradrenaline levels. Those tablets would probably be described as anti-depressants. They came into my life in November 2012. In the decades before, various GPs had prescribed citalopram, a serotonin-based medicine. It didn’t work, and left me thinking that there must be something wrong with me because I didn’t even feel better when I took the medication that was available for my sort of problem.

Life was exhausting: it was like running two people from one body. While I was trying to connect with the public-facing, self-assured and articulate qualities of a barrister, I was also dealing with an anxious, stressed and scared person whose default response is “freeze” when faced with frightening situations.

By November 2012, I was at my wits’ end – or, more accurately, I thought that I was at my career’s end – I felt so low that I simply could not contemplate continuing to work as a barrister. It seemed to me that all of my negative beliefs about myself were true: I wasn’t clever enough for a career at the Bar; I was too soft; I had somehow snuck in under the radar and, worse, everyone else thought that about me too.

I decided to present myself one last time at the GPs’ surgery, managing, as I generally did, to hold myself together until I made it into the consulting room.

I am so glad that I went.

When duloxetine came into my life on the morning of 29 November 2012, it treated me to four or five hours of nausea, just to signal that it was in my system. But then, miraculously, it actually began to work. As the afternoon wore on, I began to feel not exactly cheerful, but as if I could face people and smile. I went out to a dinner that evening and could not believe how much more positive I felt.

Of course, once things had righted themselves, I would stop taking the tablets, and, sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly, I would slide away from the world until it seemed like it existed on the other side of a window – a bow window with wonky glass like the sort in Charles Dickens’s Old Curiosity Shoppe.

After thirty years of those symptoms however, I now recognise them for what they are – a sign that my noradrenaline needs adjusting – and treat them as a reminder that I need to return to the tablets. It’s not great: I’d much rather not have to try to remember to take them every day, and they do not completely relieve me of my susceptibility to stress and dark spells.

I stepped back from full time practice as a barrister in September 2020. I did so because I intended to write posts for my website and books about the law. That intention was and is genuine.

At the time however, I did not say – because I was ashamed to say it – that I also felt that I must step back for the sake of my mental health. I was ashamed because I had never, in my view, really been anxious/stressed/depressed or low enough to justify taking time to look after myself: to me that just seemed like self-indulgence.

Nearly two years have passed since I decided to step back. I thought that I’d be fine within a few months. It’s taken longer than that. Today I feel so much more human than I did when I was taken to hospital in 2019 with a panic attack that wouldn’t stop, but achieving good mental health will probably take the rest of my life. 

We’re all a work in progress.

Please. Be kind to yourself.

Ask for help if you need it. 

Useful links:

Mental Health Foundation

Samaritans

Mind

The Blurt Foundation

The Sad Ghost Club