Today’s blog features Angela who is a blogger from Scotland. Angela tells us about her struggles with Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder which she suffers from during her monthly cycle.

I was diagnosed in 2014 with Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder which is linked to my monthly cycle.

The condition causes both physical and psychological symptoms that affect daily life. Doctors say it is rare, but I don’t believe that is the case.

Before my diagnosis I was told it was just “normal anxiety” and the relationship with my husband almost fell apart, I missed out on days out with my children during 2014 as I was too scared to leave the house.

I hardly saw my friends, but at the same time, I was lucky that everyone was there for me.

I haven’t worked since 2013 but, I hope to get back to work soon. I am currently studying for a health and social care degree at Open University, and I also write my own blog.

I have submitted a petition to the Scottish Parliament asking them for better access to psychological services across Scotland, and the outcome of the inquiries has been used to form Scotland’s new mental health strategy.

To find out more about Angela’s campaign check out her story in the Cumbernauld News.

Physical Symptoms
bloating
abdominal pain
headaches
backache
muscle and joint pain
breast pain
trouble sleeping
feeling sick

Psychological Symptoms
the feeling of being hopeless
anxiousness
irritability
oversleeping or not sleeping at all
lack of interest in favourite activities
no motivation
no energy
problems concentrating or focusing
feeling overwhelmed
a severe manifestation of physical symptoms (as above)
Suicidal thoughts

If you suffer from Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder or you recognise some of the above symptoms in yourself go and check out Angela’s Mental Health Blog, comment below or join in the discussions on our social media pages.
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This is from a BPD Solution seeker

I was relieved to be diagnosed with BPD after years of pain and suffering.

Hi I haven’t written anything like this before so was a bit nervous about it and got myself into a panic thinking I need to sound intelligent and how I need to word my story then I thought f@@k it !!!

Don’t try to be anything just share my experience then I can’t go wrong, so I am starting to write this as it comes and let whatever come out as. There won’t be any fancy words or quotes just whatever is from me.

So here goes … My name is Kim. I’m a 36-year-old female, and I have been diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder.

I have suffered from my mental health as far back as I can remember. My early memories of childhood still to this day pain me, not understanding the emotions I was feeling, not understanding this world I feel I have been placed in by mistake.

Feeling completely lost, alone, and stuck.

I can remember being of primary school age, sitting on a swing in the park for hours just staring up at the sky and feeling complete confusion.

Wondering who I am?

Wondering about this world around me and feeling like I don’t belong. While the other kids of my age are all playing together, playing games, laughing and smiling and I’m just thinking, I can’t do that. I can’t do this. I just want to leave.

Please take me away from here.

I thought I was the only person in this world to feel the things I felt. Everyone else seemed to appear normal.

When I say normal, I mean interacting with each other, doing normal things, being children.

Not being messed up in the way I was.

I spent my childhood in the darkness in a world I didn’t understand.

Why was I here?

What was so wrong with me? I just didn’t know.

I’m not sure if it is trauma that caused my BPD.

I do know I have a brother who is seven years younger than me and he is a balanced human being who lives a balanced life. (he’s the golden boy of the family.

He doesn’t suffer in pain.

My mum used to say, how come your brother turned out ok?

I don’t have an answer for that.

Maybe because of the age difference or maybe he didn’t see the things I saw as a child as he was younger?

The violence within my family home I know damaged me and many more traumatic experiences to follow.

By the age of 13, I was completely out of control and ended up in a children’s home because my mum just couldn’t cope with it.

She didn’t understand what was wrong with me and neither did I.

I was lashing out by that time and causing many problems my mum had tried many things, but in the end, the last resort was the children’s home, and that finally came.

For years after that, I hated my mum and blamed her for everything.

I started a long battle with drug addiction because

I couldn’t bare this world, so I used one substance after another to take away the pain I felt inside.

I felt unloved. I felt unwanted. I felt like a bad person.

I hated myself, and I hated the world around me.

I believed I was a monster. Some nights I would pull my hair so hard bits would come out, and I’d scream into my pillow just to try to get rid of the hurt.

I didn’t trust people either.

I was always on edge and paranoid and still can be like that today.

I would come up with a million and one scenarios in my head to what people were up to or what they were going to try to do to me.

Sometimes might I just add I was right and things I thought would happen would happen?

I had to protect myself. Protect myself from everyone so no one could hurt me.

I used drugs that made me high one minute the next I was on drugs that took me right out of it.

Which I craved more and more because at first they removed all the pain but it never lasted eventually the pain would always return.

I went from blaming my mum for the way I was to blaming the drugs to blaming any partners I was with at the time. I had two kids along the way.

Jeez, I couldn’t even look after myself.

What the hell was I thinking?

What was wrong with me?

Even though I always put the blame elsewhere, there was a part of me inside that knew deep within that there was something else wrong with me. I just didn’t know what.

I spent my life up until ten years ago on and off drugs to the point there were no more drugs to try.

Every drug I had used till it didn’t work anymore.

I had no choice but to come off them.

I had gone from one broken relationship to another.

Now I was on my own.

I was homeless at the time.

My kids were removed from me, and they had to stay with other family members until I got clean.

After a long battle, I got clean.

I thought right let’s get myself together.

Got off the drugs, Got my kids back, got a job, etc.

I wanted to try and rebuild my life again but how could I rebuild it when I didn’t have any solid ground in the first place?

I didn’t know that so yeah I got off the drugs and the drink which was another avenue I exhausted.

In the time spent in the fellowship, I worked on a 12 step programme which involves meditating and praying, having a sponsor, and helping others come off drugs.

If you follow this programme you are told you will live a life beyond your wildest dreams.

I was doing everything I was told.

I got clean, got my kids back, and got a flat and a job.

I was looking great and even purchased a car.

So wasn’t that all I needed to do?

I was still in pain the only difference this time I wasn’t on drugs. I had all the outside stuff which was the first time in my life I had that.

Everything from outside looked great, but I still felt this pain within.

Feeling like a child sitting in the park on the swing staring up at the sky. In all these years what had changed?

I was still confused. I still didn’t know who I was. In fact, I was even more confused because now I was pushing myself into the world.

Trying things I hadn’t done before.

And yes at times I experienced laughter and fun and can do on some days even now I find this confusing.

How can I feel happy one minute then the next minute feel so sad?

Then I think was I even feeling happy at all?

Was it real? I don’t know? It’s so confusing.

I went from feeling loads of confidence like feeling pretty funny and intelligent and able to having no confidence at all.

Feeling so ugly that I can’t Evan go out the door as if people look at me they will see my horrible monster face and see how stupid I am.

I actually thought at one point that I had bipolar as I can go from one extreme to another.

I go from laughing to crying tears running down my face.

I go from feeling completely secure and loved to insecure and unloved.

I can think my partner is the best thing in the world to the worst person I know. It’s crazy.

There no in between.

Please, someone, let me out of here!!!!

I made a decision over a year ago to leave the fellowship because something wasn’t right.

I was doing everything and still having suicidal thoughts and hallucinations at night.

Leaving the fellowship was hard because I was scared as I thought if I leave I will have nothing to fall back on.

By doing that it led to more pain which led me to my diagnosis.

I was cutting myself and taking overdoses.

What now?

In turmoil with my new relationship destroying that.

My partner says at times he feels like he’s in a relationship with a heavy emotional weight!!

I cut myself to stop the pain.

I try to kill myself because I can’t cope in this world.

I was reluctant to go to the doctors because I had been there before and they had prescribed anti-depressants which at that time didn’t help me, so I thought what’s the point, but my mum encouraged me to go back.

So I did, and I begged them to help me.

I told them I want to kill myself and I can’t cope with all these emotions.

This anxiety, the paranoia, and the insecurity.

The pain I am feeling and the pain I am causing others. Please make it stop I asked them.

They referred me right away into the mental health clinic where a crisis team started the process.

I don’t want to hurt my family by taking my life away but is it possible for me to be here in any way and not suffer?

After a couple of months of visiting the mental health team through the NHS, I was given a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder.

Right away I was right onto Google 24/7 reading everything about BPD.

For the first time in my life, some things started making a bit of sense.

Part of me felt relieved, and I couldn’t believe there were actually other people with BPD.

I then went on to stalk them all online!!

I was like are you like me hehe. People actually feel what I do? It was so strange.

I went through a period of feeling relieved one minute to feeling like right

I am a loony the next minute to thinking maybe they got it wrong they made a mistake, and there is no name for what I have.

Maybe I’m just f@@ked up!!! There no cure.

I was given a booklet by my key worker at the clinic about being diagnosed with BPD.

There was information in it about DBT which is dialectical behaviour therapy.

Dialectical therapy is proven through studies to be one of the most effective treatments for BPD.

I was also giving a CD to practice breathing techniques.

I attended my next appointment at the clinic and of course asked about the DPD treatment on which I got no response from my worker.

Feeling confused then I started feeling stupid.

Thinking maybe I read the booklet wrongly.

But I went home and reread it again and yeah there it was.

DBT therapy is available on the NHS for borderline personality disorder.

I have been trying to pursue this with the clinic, but eight months later I am still no further forward with getting any therapy.

I did get put on Sertraline medication 100g it has brought my anxiety down a bit.

But the suicide thoughts are still there, and I even took an overdose of my Sertraline to kill myself which only led to a horrible experience in the hospital.

I was unwell with the overdose but still alive!!!

Is there no escaping this world I thought?

I have a 24-hour number I can ring if I feel suicidal.

Sometimes it has helped depending on who answers the phone.

I once had a guy on the phone telling me can’t I just stick the TV on and how tired he was as it been a busy night with calls.

I didn’t have to phone back after a long time because I felt what’s the point in speaking to them.

I have been online and on the Linehan institution website.

As they are the ones who founded DBT but when it asks to put in my postcode, it just says no clinicians available where I live.

I have tried to access the treatment privately, but the costs are so much that I really would need to win the lottery to pay for it which I’m currently trying to do!!!

I do go online and get bits of DBT workbooks etc.

It’s kind of hard doing it yourself as my thinking can be distorted at times, so I really need to work it through with a professional.

I’ve stopped going to the clinic as they just want to keep upping my medication and adding other more.

I’m still having suicidal thoughts.

I still can’t cope in this world. There are times I enjoy things but the downtimes are killing me.

I don’t have any friendships outside my family as I don’t know how to.

On Mother’s Day, I booked a table for dinner for my mum, my partner, and his mum.

On the Friday I booked this, and on the Saturday morning, I was great.

Then came the Saturday night came and something changed within me.

My belly started turning, my emotions all started building up then exploding by the time Sunday came I couldn’t move.

I lay in bed for hours just lying there. Every time I have any meltdowns, this is what happens to me afterwards.

I can’t eat.

I can’t do anything but lie there just staring into space. Then the days to follow I’m filled with guilt and shame of letting my mum down.

At times I feel like I’m losing hope.

I know that if I don’t get therapy, I will take my life. If that day comes, I hope my family can try to understand that being here was too painful for me.

I want to access therapy I want to get better, but if not I can’t go on anymore like this.

This is not a life for anyone. I love my children.

My partner, my Mum, my Dad, and my brother, and I even have a beautiful seven-month-old granddaughter and my two dogs of course.

I’m so in love with them. I really don’t want to hurt them more.

When you battle mental illness, it becomes exhausting, and it affects everything and everyone around you.

DBT is proven to be the most effective treatment for BPD, and yet I can’t seem to access it?

Thanks for reading.

If you have any questions about Kim’s story, please comment below or join in the discussions on our social media pages.

My childhood best friend was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and he committed a brutal murder.

I remained in touch with him and spoke to him on a regular basis and visited him in the mental institution.

I was shocked to find out that for a long time I was the only one who spoke to him apart from his father.

I faced a lot of criticism for staying in touch.

People couldn’t understand why I wanted to talk to him after what he had done; I became ‘the one who is friends with a murderer’.

But he was my friend for so long I couldn’t not talk to him and find out why it came to the murder.

He had suffered in silence for most of his life.

And what I had dismissed as shyness and depression was in fact voices only he could hear.

I wrote a book about it ‘Solacium’.

I initially wrote the story down as a way of self-therapy to deal with the shock and insomnia I developed as a consequence, but I now feel I owe it to my friend to make his struggle known.

I hope my book not only provides a glimpse into the tortured mind of a paranoid schizophrenic but also manages to portray him from a different angle than the one chosen by the media at the time.

Not a crazed, bloodthirsty monster but a sensitive boy who was dealt the wrong cards and battled his whole life to find a place in a society that still stigmatises mental illness.

According to recent studies, a quarter of the population in the UK is likely to develop some form of mental health problem over the course of a year.

And with the NHS continuously cutting funding into the health support sector, I believe it is important to raise awareness and foster better understanding to ultimately provide better care to those who suffer.

Here’s the link to the book.

By Sarah

Please feel free to comment below, email some questions across, and join in the discussions on our social media pages.

I was surprised when I was diagnosed with Tuberous Sclerosis aged 13.

Back in 2014, I was only 13 and I was a high achiever in high school and on the 31st of January in a lesson I had a twitch randomly set off on my left cheek where my check literally was shaking up and down out of control for around 30 seconds.

My best friend at the time saw it happen and she looked mortified.

I knew I wasn’t imagining it then.

After it occurred I was sent out of the classroom to calm down along with my friend who seemed pretty traumatised.

I’d go round all the members of staff who were in charge of my wellbeing and they all said it must have been me being tired but I knew it wasn’t that because I wasn’t feeling tired at all until that occurred.

When I got home from school I told my mum and dad who didn’t believe my either and that drove me insane.

I coincidentally had a doctors appointment on that same day about something else and me and my dad went and I explained and my doctor was on my side at this point and said if anything of that sort happens again come back and to ask if the teacher in the lesson of when it all happened saw it.

Sadly she didn’t nor anyone else bar my friend.

Nothing happened again so I forgot about it and believed maybe they were right and I was just worn out by schoolwork.

Until 3 weeks later.

After 3 weeks another one of a similar sort happened while it was just me and my dad home and you could tell he was pretty mortified too.

This one was different to the previous ones where this time my mouth was jerking from a normal position into a position that people having strokes have their mouth drop down and I was making grunt noises yet I was still conscious and able to walk.

This one lasted around a minute and was a lot stronger than the previous.

After the second one I was having them every 3 days and everyone was becoming more aware and we then got the doctors involved after we caught a few on tape.

We had the doctors refer us to the epilepsy clinic because it turns out you can have a conscious seizure which we never knew.

We soon learnt that I had seizures and I needed an MRI scan I was slightly relieved to have a diagnosis that we can focus on preventing them.

After my MRI scan we discovered not just epilepsy but also 6 tumours and one was in quite a dangerous place.

My ventricle, this is when everything got serious and all my appointments and referrals were coming through sooner.

We were just lucky they weren’t cancerous.

No one had a clue what these were and I was referred to an even bigger hospital in a city and this is what scared my whole family the fact of not getting a diagnosis on tumours.

After months and months of appointments I was attending, I couldn’t be in school a lot and my grades and attendance were lowering which wasn’t like me at all.

We also discovered that I was having smaller seizures so often I could fit 90 into 1 day and that was so embarrassing and being a 13-year-old your main goal is to fit in and be like everybody else and I realised that’s not the case and I was distraught.

I was showing symptoms of depression and I never felt happy anymore so I was set up to meet with the school counsellor weekly and see if expressing my feelings would help, it didn’t.

I swapped to a new counsellor because the original one left me in anger and I had to skip another lesson to calm down from how much anger the counsellor was giving me.

But the new counsellor was amazing and more like a friend than a therapist. She got me through things.

Whilst things in the doctors were still happening I started being put on medication and seeing if they worked.

Unfortunately, it took 5 different types of medication to handle these seizures which were getting stronger and stronger. I’m now on 3 different medications to prevent all these.

I was still depressed and I couldn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel and I started having panic attacks that not many of my friends understood or really didn’t want to be a part of this mess I was so I started to lose friends which hurt me even worse.

The first person who gave up on my was really unexpected was my best friend for around 13 years, we’d known each other our whole lives.

He’d discovered his own friends and convinced them to not like me either. This didn’t help my depression at and I was just sinking lower and lower.

Still changing medication at this point I started one called Keppra which is known for something called Keppra rage which would lead the person the get angry and physical for no reason.

I got this and I went lower than rock bottom and all it did was make my seizures worse and they started to happen more in school.

This led me to lose more friends

Then back in 2015 which was an entire year later in February I had to go to London for a PET scan and we made a mini holiday out of it and I really enjoyed it and I actually got the right medication to stop my seizures and my tumours hadn’t grown at all but I did have tuberous sclerosis which 1 in around 6,000 people have in the UK which is crazy.

When I got back from London everything started to chill out and my mood was lifting it was great.

Have you or someone you know have Tuberous Sclerosis? Please share your stories with us.