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Toni

Toni is a 20-year-old from Leicester, who is currently unable to work due to a compulsive disorder. She talks us through the ups and down of this devastating illness.
Entry: 3

Toni has found it difficult trying to explain to friends and family just how the OCD is affecting her.

From my own experience, I firmly believe that the problem with mental illness is just that. It's mental. On the outside, I look perfectly healthy. Fancy haircut, fashionable clothes, religiously cared-for skin, expensive shoes. No one would know I'm actually incredibly ill, because I look fine.

With mental illness, you have to describe everything. You have to say how you're feeling, because people can't tell, and you have to describe what is happening inside your head. Even then, my friends and family have struggled to fathom why my life has been turned upside down by an illness they can't see.

When you break your leg, everyone knows how to act around you. They can see the problem; the great hulking plaster cast, the crutches - and therefore they can deal with it. People in supermarkets don't bang in to you because of your cast. People are, in short, aware. The problem with mental health is that people aren't aware. Despite the amount of times I have told my family and friends they must not, under any circumstances, mention cancer or death in my presence, it still happens. They forget, because there isn't something physical to remind them.

"Suddenly, people realised what was happening to me was serious."

At first, I found these comments hard to deal with. I couldn't understand how people could be so insensitive as to start talking to me about a friend of theirs who has cancer. Unfortunately, cancer is one of my triggers and it can send me in to a panic attack. After knowing the situation, people couldn't apologise enough, but by then the damage had been done.

Different people in my life have reacted to my condition in different ways. Some have been sympathetic, but I can tell they're really thinking why can't she just snap out of it?" Others have immediately understood, but the only people who fall in to this category are other people who have experienced mental health problems for themselves. The worst people are those that have avoided me and ended friendships. They only seem to acknowledge the 'mental illness' part of how I describe what is wrong with me, and for some reason this brings up images of some crazy woman who's about to attack.

I think what really made people sit up and take notice was what happened last December. I was four months into my illness and was struggling on an ineffective drug combination. At that point, I wasn't even seeing a psychiatrist. I woke up on that morning two days after Christmas exhausted and knew from that moment that I couldn't carry on life as normal and was in serious need of psychiatric help. Up until then, I'd been studying and working seven days a week. A week after my mental breakdown on December 27th, I'd dropped out of college and quit work on my doctor's advice.

Suddenly people realised what was happening to me was serious. In my family, it's almost a mortal sin if you're not coping with life. Not being able to cope is usually treated with much disdain, but in my case, it made my parents realise the full extent of my problems. As I no longer live with them, they didn't experience my illness day-to-day and therefore weren't aware of how dominating it was. The breakdown made them see how ill I actually was.


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