Statistically one in four people suffer with mental health problems and this can be anything from depression, social anxiety, OCD and schizophrenia. Our mental health has to be taken care of in everyday life and sometimes it's impossible for us to take care of it, one day can build up to the next day and the next and before you know it, it becomes a major problem for us. In these times of need we need support from our families, friends and even our work places but sometimes this isn't always possible. Sometimes we feel alone, even though people are there for us, we just don't see it. At this point people may call others selfish for not thinking about others being there for us, but when your extremely low and are having mental health issues, its hard to think straight and even the smallest thing as going out to see a friend or even a family member becomes a chore or even scary for some who suffer with anxiety.
Me and my partner Luke suffer with both depression and anxiety, thankfully we aren't in a bad place anymore and feel like we can talk and write about our experiences.
So here is our story:
For many years me and Luke had suffered with anxiety and depression, when we got together in February 2017 everything in our lives went down hill. We as a couple wasn't the problem, it was other stuff that was going on in our lives that was, everything seemed to be going wrong even to the point of me being kicked out of my mothers house as we just was not getting on, Luke at the time had moved about an hour away as his parent had stopped renting there house so he was staying somewhere else. I ended up moving in with Luke which was great, but the only issue we had was now getting in to work, it started to cost us hundreds of pounds getting into work each month, which meant Luke lost all of his savings and we started to go into our overdrafts. So money issues triggered of our depression and anxiety again. I believe that anxiety and depression never really goes, sometimes we just learn to supress it, but its always there lurking over your shoulder waiting to pounce and it just depends on if your feeling strong enough to fight it.
This is where support being important comes in and especially from work. We worked in the same place at the time and unfortunately even with us telling them how we felt and asking for help with a transfer to a closer store, they refused to help saying we could not transfer. Due to how we felt at the time it became very hard to function in every day life and now we where losing moving very quickly each day. We forced our self's into finding a property closer and for a while everything became better again. Until work started treated very unfairly, other couples where allowed to be seen together during their working hours but all of a sudden we weren't. That's when the bulling came in from the managers at work, yes you read that right, the managers. So that's when work started making us feel low again and in crept the anxiety and depression, a lot of other stuff was going on in our lives and now work became a big issue for us. The doctors decided to sign us both of work due to the state it was putting us in. When we returned back to work all I got was grief and comments from my managers stating that they didn't think that you should be off work with depression, that we where faking it as we where both going through it and that if they knew I had depression before they hired me then they wouldn't of hired me. This is a major company that I am talking about. If I was to say which company this was, you wouldn't believe that they would treat their staff this way. As you can imagine this made me feel worse. So I started having more time off , being signed off that is, when I returned to work again. I did not receive a wellness meeting to see how I was, to see if I was ready to go back to work, instead I was thrown back in and given disciplinary meetings even though they knew how I was feeling and how much I was suffering. So time passed, hating work trying to not have any more time off as that would of been my job gone. Our lives outside of work became better then all of a sudden I fell pregnant with our beautiful daughter raven. We where soo happy that we was pregnant, even to the point where it distracted us from problems at work, until I had to be hospitalised with bad morning sickness. My senior manager didn't believe me, she even told me she wanted me to prove that I was pregnant, even though legally I didn't need to prove it, especially as it was before I was 12 weeks pregnant. That's when work started bullying me again, they did not even care that I was pregnant and everyone knows that stress isn't good, especially in the first 12 weeks.
That same senior manager then started to pick on my partner more and suspended him for going to the toilet, as we all know, its a human right to be able to go to the toilet. It sounds completely unbelievable that a senior manager would suspend someone over this but she did.
Because of the stress the senior manager put on my partner and me, I was signed off work as that was the best thing that I could do for my health and my unborn babies health. During this time, I started to feel better, work became the only issue now that me and Luke where having trouble with. We felt soo much better not being there, we then started to look forward to our little baby. I luckily, did not need to return back to work and was signed off all the way until the day I went into labour, So I started repairing and feeling great again. Luke however was still being treated badly by working and they where longing out his suspension, knowing that this was making his anxiety worse. It was coming down to a final meeting over email, that Luke was meant to be able to reply to. Instead out of nowhere he received a email saying he had been dismissed. We was going to go for a tribunal but it had been soo bad and they had mucked with his emotions that much that he decided to just let it be. This truthfully is the best thing that he could of done, being out of that place has helped him repair too. He is still suffering with social anxiety due to work and his experiences, but is now in a better place.
Me.. I'm still on maternity leave and will be for a year and then I will be staying at home with our little one or finding another job.
So there is our story, for us, money and work triggered our anxiety and depression off. But now we are doing great being away from that horrible work place. It's crazy to think how much one place can make you soo down. But now we have never been happier and we especially love our little family.
Advice for anyone out there going through the same sort of things, it gets better, it really does. For us we just needed to be taken away from the place that made us feel horrible. Us falling pregnant became our little silver lining for better things to come. Just remember you aren't alone, Mind is absolutely amazing for support and I know you might feel alone but your not, I promise. Just hang in there. We did and now we have so much to look forward to.
V xx
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