Finishing my degree!

Once more I have left it was too long to write one of these things!

So it has been 6 months or so since I last posted. Since then I have come very far with my research project! I am now editing and finishing it off. It has been amazing experience, absolutely fascinating getting to interview people about their experiences of unemployment, and analyse what they say. I can honestly say it’s the most interesting piece of work I have done in my entire life and I will miss it now it’s almost over. I have also found it has given me an insight into why I have felt such a failure for half my life. We are pretty much set up to believe that we need to have our whole lives and careers planned out by the time we are 21 and if you don’t then you are a failure. If this is something constructed in society then surely it is up to us to challenge that and not feel bad about ourselves? My supervisor has been incredibly supportive, and I am happy to have made so many friends and met many new people during my year and a half studying at UEL. This experience will stay with me for the rest of my life.

Outside of university I have been a lot happier too. I definitely feel less anxious, and any stress I do feel is usually manageable. We finally moved into our very own flat a month ago. I can’t describe the relief of not being cramped into a horrible studio-like flat, and having the freedom to do the house up just how we want. It finally feels like we have a home. Work wise, my job is challenging but fun, and I feel happy that I am making a difference in people’s lives. I still have an underlying feeling of dread about the fact that I have no idea what I am going to do from September. I have made it through to the assessment centres of two graduate schemes, which were daunting but great experience. Although I received a rejection from the second, the first I have been put on the waiting list for, but I’m not going to get my hopes up too high. Overall I feel that things could be a lot worse and that I am still doing well even if I stay where I am. I will always get new chances to develop myself and learn new things. I feel taking things as the come is the best thing to do from now on. I’ve learnt so much from the colleagues and friends around me and the different routes they are taking through life.

The trip to Helsinki was pretty awesome. I have wanted to go since I was a teenager so it was great to finally see it. I think I managed to cripple myself walking around the city but it was beautiful. We went to visit the island of Suomenlinna, see all of the main city sights and I got to try elk, squeaky cheese and reindeer. The sea and lakes were frozen (this was March) which was a pretty cool sight to see. I would love to return to Finland, and see Lapland another time.

I am going on holiday in two weeks too, so I am super excited about that. I am just looking forward to spending time somewhere hot and relaxing with great food and drink! If only RyanAir didn’t charge £100 each for baggage! Oh and I also started taking driving lessons. My lessons have gone really well so far and I received a lot of praise after my last lesson as my confidence had improved a lot (and my ability to press gently on the brakes haha). I can’t wait til I am able to drive, wish I had taken lessons sooner!

So that is a quick update on my life and where things stand at the moment. I have decided to set myself some short term goals, because I feel that it helps to motivate!

1. Pass my driving test
2. Get a distinction for my thesis
3. Lose some of my body fat (~not necessarily the same as losing weight – I joined this Facebook fitness coaching group called Rebelfit, and have found it very helpful although I still need to put a lot of it into practice!
4. Get back into full-time work.

So there we go 🙂

So we are 2 months into 2017

It’s been ages since I have posted anything on my blog. Quite a lot has happened since the last time I wrote on here. I had another set of exams last months and got now got distinctions in all of my modules I have completed so far! Can’t believe it! So now all I have left is my dissertation, which seems to be coming along quite well so far. I just finished transcribing my interviews so need to start analyses soon. I re-registered for the module for the Summer semester so it is due in August now instead of April. This should give me enough time to complete it and also to relax now and then so I won’t be too stressed out. I have been doing my support worker job for six months now and am settling in. It is all challenging and new and can be stressful at times but overall I am happy to be making a difference to people’s lives. Mentally I have been quite exhausted, and keep getting headaches and chest pains. I went to the doctor about my anxiety but he just told me to self-refer to the IAPT services, which I have already done enough times, but I will give it a go anyway – if they ever get back to me. To be honest I never feel like anyone takes me seriously, because I am so high functioning when it comes to mental health so it looks like I am okay because I am able to work and appear cheerful a lot, but really it’s just hidden inside but I don’t feel like it’s really believed.

I still often feel like I am a failure and constantly worrying about the future and whether I will ever manage to get any sort of a career off the ground. I’d love to do a clinical doctorate or PhD but I am afraid my constant low self esteem and feelings that I won’t ever be good enough will stop me from getting anywhere close. I’ve been doing my thesis on unemployment and it has reminded me of what a struggle applying for jobs is. I feel like I am forever stuck at the bottom, desperate to be something more, but never quite managing it, over-educating myself and therefore feeling even more like an underachiever.  I often wish it didn’t matter to me and that I could be content with having a family one day and being able to live somewhere nice. I feel like I should be grateful but there is still part of me that feels like I could achieve more and be something, and that feeling eats away at me making me feel like a failure even though I know I should feel lucky. I know even going back to uni and studying something new was really brave and amazing of me to do, considering how I felt a year and a half ago. Each step has been ridiculously hard.

I have good news though as me and my boyfriend just bought a new built flat, so will be moving to Colindale in May or so, and we are also going to Helsinki for the weekend soon so things are looking good. Even though I feel down about myself now and then I know life isn’t too bad. It’s just hard to remember feeling happy when you are feeling down and that makes it tough at times.

Relationships and Mental Health

This week is this year’s Mental Health Awareness Week and the theme for the year is relationships. We are actually coming up to the end, but I had two exams this week so only just got round to writing a blog about it!  My last exam was yesterday so I am going to be relaxing for the next few days ^_^.

Anyway relationships are a pretty good theme in mental health because good and bad relationships can have such a big affect on your life and on mental wellbeing. Bad relationships can have a massive affect on your self esteem- and not just romantic ones, but platonic and family one’s too. I have struggled to make friends for nearly all of my life, I am shy and introverted and not very good at small talk, so I am not able to approach people easily. This has got better over the years, and nowadays a lot of people I meet would probably be surprised to know this, but when I was a teenager it was a big deal for me. When I was 13 I fell out with all of my friends and spent nearly all of my time alone, other than in science class where I made a couple of friends. I was a very lonely teenager and no doubt this had an affect on my self esteem and mental health. I always wanted to make new friends but I didn’t feel I was likeable or interesting or cool enough. Being able to talk to people about your problems is incredibly valuable too. Good friends can be amazing support and talking to people about your problems is a big weight off of your chest.

Of course bad romantic relationships can be damaging too. I spent three years on and off with a guy who made me feel like I was worth nothing, and that I was just there to be disposed of whenever he got bored of me. He made me feel like I was something to be ashamed of- someone to shag when he felt like it and then hide away like a secret. He used to just block me or ignore me for up to 8 months at a time and then come back and expect to be forgiven just like that – unfortunately I was young and naive and did so, well until he cheated on me, anyway. It was horrible and I was miserable. Most of my other relationships tended to feel one sided too, where I would put in a lot more effort than I would receive and feel like I was just a distraction until somebody else came alone. I became so convinced that I wasn’t worthy of anything better that I just went with it. Luckily I eventually found somebody who did like me as much as I like them, and made me feel beautiful and special. I still find it hard to trust people though and I’m worried that will take a long long time to get rid of.

Family relationships can also be damaging if things don’t go right, and a lot of people who suffer from mental health problems  has unhappy childhoods. I can’t speak about this much myself, but it shows how important it is to be surrounded by people who love and care for you, and vice versa.

So take the time this week to get in touch with the people who care about you in your life. It is so important that we maintain our friendships and keep an eye on our loved ones.  If your friendships are damaging to you, then make new friends. And don’t ever think you don’t deserved to be loved because everybody does.

A late happy Easter to everyone. And an update on 2016

It has been a while since I last posted on here which shows that my aim to post more blogs more has gone out of the window! Last I mentioned that I was about to start a Psychology Masters degree at UEL with a view to work in adult mental health in the future and a lot had happened since then.

My course has been very interesting so far. I had very little knowledge about psychology when I started and I have learnt a lot over the last three months. I have learnt about child development, personality, the ego and the ID, intelligence and the history of psychology. I have developed a love of social psychology which is all very new to me. I came into the subject with a passion and anger about the injustices I feel are happening to those with mental health problems and I still have that but I have also gained more of a love for psychology in general.

I am currently preparing for my first exams in five years, which of course is pretty terrifying especially with my history of anxiety but I have found that over all I am a lot happier. I have stopped having panic attacks for the most part and feel less anxious in general though I still get stressed at work. I am only working part time though so it isn’t as overbearing.

Outside of university I have been volunteering in a mental health drop in centre ran in South East London by a volunteer organisation and South London and Maudsley NHS trust. I love spending time talking to service users and getting to know them. Occasionally I hear stories of how people are suffering with the current cuts and benefit reforms and it makes me even more determined to do something to help people once my degree is over. All the people I meet are so lovely, interesting and intelligent people, and I hate to know how they are suffering from government policy and the stigma they face from the general public.

I have also been spending time looking after myself. I have been swimming and going for walks with my boyfriend and family. I have been reading as much as ever and visiting museums more often now that I have a bit more spare time. A bit. Between work, uni and volunteering I have still been majorly busy most of the time but it is in a good way. I am getting to know who I am myself and who I am going to become.

I hope everyone has enjoyed their Easter and the sunny weather!

We need to talk about Mental Health everyday, not just today!

Whenever we read anything in the media about mental health the first thing we are told is that 1 in 4 of us will experience a mental health problem this year. In reality it is likely to be even higher because a lot of people go undiagnosed or don’t even realise they have  a mental illness. This is clearly a large proportion of the population and yet mental health problems are still stigmatised in society. Sufferers are more likely to lose their jobs, have a lower quality of life, and even die at a younger age. In some ways the stigma is getting better, but at the same time the fact so many people admit to having something such as anxiety, depression and ADHD leads to others accusing them of trying to be special snowflakes, attention seekers or just people trying to find excuses for bad behaviour.   I have suffered from anxiety from a very young age and have been called an attention seeker many times throughout my life, admitted mostly by a string of horrible boyfriends, but it made me feel like an awful person. These sorts of attitudes make people even less likely to want to seek help for problems they are having. People like to point out that “everyone has anxiety these days!!” on Buzzfeed articles and Facebook posts. It seems that people are more annoyed about people talking about experiences than they are worried about the important things. What it is in our society that is making mental illness more prevalent? Why have we got to the point where people are so stressed out and under so much pressure that it is making them sick? Of course people are going to become depressed and anxious in this age of austerity, unemployment and rising rent prices.

source

A  point I would like to make about how we perceive mental health is about the types of disorders we tend to see discussed in the media. The focus is usually on the above conditions – depression and anxiety, with a bit of anorexia and OCD thrown in. When we think of more severe mental illness; psychoses, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and personality disorders, we tend to distance ourselves more from them. People get scared when they see people “acting crazy”, talking to themselves or saying and doing things that don’t seem “normal”. People often think people with more serious illnesses should be locked up when in reality they are perfectly capable of living amongst society, perhaps with a carer or even alone. Many are harmless and often lovely people. In fact people with Schizophrenia, for example,  are 14 times more likely to be the victim of violent crime than they are to commit it. People with mental health problems in general are more likely to be victims of violent crime than the general population, showing that the most vulnerable are more likely to be taken advantage of and hurt.  The majority are not dangerous, on the contrary they need to be protected if anything.

Another group of people we also need to consider when it comes to mental health are BME groups. Mental health issues are disproportionally high when it comes to black people, particularly amongst men. With a lot of mentally ill people ending up in police custody I imagine many end up in police cells instead of getting the help they really need. With poverty and unemployment being massive causes of mental health problems of course it is going to be higher amongst minority groups, who are the people most affected.  One of my therapists, who had an African background once told us that in her culture things like depression are seen as “White people’s problems that they get because they are spoilt” which suggests that people from BME backgrounds face more stigma as well. Nowadays groups are being set up to provide access to support for people from minority groups which is an excellent starting point towards helping people in different communities.

When we talk about mental illness we need to not only talk about anxiety and depression but also talk about severely mentally ill people, people from minority backgrounds, soldiers with PTSD and all of the groups who suffer from mental health problems. It seems to me there is too much emphasis on just stress, anxiety and depression, all of which are important, but we need to look out for everybody. Every sufferer needs to be treated in a different way to suit them, but with all of the NHS cuts I don’t see how this is possible. We need to spread awareness until people start taking proper action. In fact don’t just talk to people today – talk to them everyday. And keep on talking.

Scrapping Nursing Bursaries is a Terrible Thing

Recently the NHS has hit the headlines due to a nationwide shortage of nurses with 90% of hospitals being understaffed in 2015. This has long been a massive problem that has now got even worse. Nursing is a hard, stressful but rewarding job with long hours and low pay, and now they are under even more stress having to take on a bigger workload due to these shortages.  This is a problem not just for them, but for the patients who rely on their care.  It takes a remarkable type of person to be able to do such a demanding job yet it seems the current conservative government has very little appreciation for this. In fact despite the present statistics  they are currently putting into action a policy of taking away NHS bursaries from student nurses and midwives.

Of course all degrees benefit the student at the end of the day but in the case of nursing they are working very hard and doing a job that is crucial to society. It is a job that cannot be done just for money but also due to a desire to help others. Unlike surgeons and GPs they aren’t rewarded with big salaries at the end of their training. The average salary is just over £23,000. Yet we need nurses, without them a hospital cannot run.

Yet they do it out of passion and a desire to save lives and help people.  Cutting off funding for those unable to afford to study is a terrible thing. The NHS relies on these people. The country relies on them. In a climate where we have a massive shortage we do not want to be putting off potential nurses we want to be encouraging them. For a long time we have had to rely on nurses imported from abroad and now this is going to get worse. Of course this doesn’t stop people complaining about immigrants coming over and “stealing our jobs…”

A lot of people choose to become nurses later in life or after studying a degree in a different subject, in fact the average age of a student nurse is 29.  This means they may not be eligible for student loans and the like. How will they be able to afford to do so without bursaries? By cutting off this funding we will be putting off people who could be amazing nurses. With all the cuts that the NHS has suffered this seems to be another knock back both for the students and for the health service itself. It costs money to hire agency nurses from overseas. We shouldn’t have to rely on them, we should be encouraging people in this country to train and become nurses and the bursaries are an important part of that.

Happy new year!

2015 wasn’t a particularly good year for me. Nothing much happened and I was plagued with increased anxiety and depression for a lot of it. Needless to say I am glad to be rid of it and am looking forward to a new start in 2016.

Usually I wouldn’t bother to set myself new years resolutions and I aren’t really setting resolutions as such, however I have a few goals that I aim to achieve once I start my Masters degree on the 25th.

1) Actually do my uni assignments and studying early and don’t do them at the last minute. This is basically what I did for the whole of my undergraduate degree- and the rest of my school life. However this time I am going back to education through choice and not just because I feel I have to so hopefully I will feel a lot more motivated and happy to do work.

2) Start getting more active. Maybe at first by just doing a little more exercise or going swimming once a week. I loved it as a kid and I love doing it on holiday so why not start up again?

3) Write more blog posts. I enjoy writing and will have more time to do so once I give up full time work. I have a lot of strong opinions and would love to get a chance to voice them and share ideas with others.

4) Go back to doing CBT when I am feeling down. I found that it worked for me but honestly I never had the time to do any when working a 45+ hour week. I just haven’t had the time to put my health first which is sad really. I want to keep a notebook with positive thoughts and things people have said to me so I can perk myself up when I feel down.

5) Use my time at uni to volunteer or find work experience so I can find out exactly what I want to do and gain the experience and ability to achieve this in the future. It’s not going to be a quick or easy process but if I don’t try I won’t get anywhere.

6) Continue to read a lot, colour and regain the creativity I lost as I grew up. There are so many things I would love to be able to do and you aren’t ever too old to learn.

 

Anyway I hope everyone reading this has a great new year. Look after yourself and most importantly love yourself!

Book Review: Soviet Ghosts: An Empire In Decay

I received this book as a Christmas present and couldn’t wait to get started. In fact I read the whole thing on Christmas day!  It is a coffee table book by photographer Rebecca Litchfield, whose interest in deserted Soviet buildings began during a visit to Pripyat, the town left abandoned after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.  Her book is a record of the forgotten history of the Eastern Bloc countries, and as she mentions, there are very few places in the Western world that are just left to decay like this. Like many urban explorers, Rebecca risked arrest and injury in order to take these photographs, and even got detailed by the military in Russia for being somewhere she wasn’t supposed to be.

 

 Buzludzha Monument, Bulgaria

Litchfield’s photographs are absolutely stunning, showing a part of the world most of us won’t even get to see. She covers a wide range of countries that were formally part of the Soviet Union, including the Ukraine, Bulgaria, Slovakia, The Czech Republic and East Germany.  The sites too are wide ranging, from military installations to hospitals, schools and the gigantic monuments that seem to have been built so frequently in communist countries (and still are being built today in North Korea.) Many of the photographs are haunting, with hospitals and asylums being abandoned with all of their equipment still intact. Of course the most haunting of all are those in the chapter she dedicates to Chernobyl, where people were forced to abandon their homes and leave their belongings after the worst nuclear disaster the world has seen so far.

Litchfield accompanies the photographs with a short history of the soviet union, divided into different categories for every chapter. To be honest I would have preferred there to have been a short history at the beginning and more information about each of the sites photographed instead. I think the photographs tell the story of the fall of the USSR themselves. They show how easy it is for an empire to fall and the people to leave, but after humans are gone the stone still stands. Eventually that too is reclaimed by nature.

That is the only criticism I have and the book is worth every penny for the absolutely breathtaking pictures inside. It is a must have for anyone interested in soviet architecture or urban decay.

2016 is my chance for a new start

2015 has been one of the hardest years of my life. I have been suffering from anxiety and depression since my early teens and this year it finally boiled over to the point where I was spontaneously crying at work and feeling like a complete mess. A number of things contributed to this, including doing a very stressful job which I was already having doubts about doing and having no friends left close to me. All I had was my boyfriend to spend time with, who was amazing and patient with me but I felt very alone when I wasn’t with him. I also found out one of my ex boyfriends had died tragically young which shook me up a bit and led to me worrying about my own death and whether my loved ones would die.

Living with severe anxiety is horrible. Small things that don’t bother other people or that they are able to forget about after a while stick with you. Scenarios are played out over and over again in your head. Being constantly stressed and worried is mentally and physically exhausting and sometimes you feel like you just can’t go on like this. If I knew that a week at work would be tough, or was worried about stock being down I would go home and lie awake worrying about it. Sometimes I would freak out and have panic attacks. Everytime me and my boyfriend had small arguments I would assume he hated me and wanted to leave me. I felt worse and worse about myself and this made my already low self esteem even worse.

I decided to finally get help for the troubles I had been having and was referred onto CBT first on the phone and then in group sessions. During this time I began to try to think more positively about myself and came to the decision that I needed to make changes in my life if I really wasn’t happy. It was hard. Very hard but I decided to apply to university to study psychology so that one day I would be able to help other people in the same position as me. I am going back to university in January to do a postgraduate degree. I always wanted to do one eventually, but I needed to discover what I wanted to do first. It is terrifying giving up a full time job and going back to studying especilly when you are 26 and feel that you should already have control of your life, but I feel it will be worth it.

Even if I don’t make it, or do nothing with my degree at least I tried. They say you only regret what you didn’t do, so I am going for it. Hopefully it will help me feel better about myself and enable me to help others too. If not at least I will know that I gave it a shot and believed in myself for once.

The best way to fight extremism is not through Islamophobia

The one thing a lot of people seem to find hard to understand about terrorist attacks is the fact that they are committed in order to strike fear into the hearts of the people they target. In the case of the Paris terror attacks this target is the West and the sad thing is, they are achieving their aims. They want the people of Europe to hate and oppose Islam.  If you join the EDL or support people like Britain First you are doing exactly what ISIS want you to do, for they want war between Islam and the West.

It should not even need to be said that ISIS do not represent all Muslims, in fact they kill more of their own people than anyone else, and in fact hate the ones who do not follow their strand of the religion even more than they hate Western Capitalist countries. For example they hate Shiite Muslims, a different sect. They also really hate Iran. And the Taliban. In fact they even hate Al Quaida.  It may be from Cracked but read this article seriously! What they do want though is for Westerners to hate all Muslims, causing Muslims to hate them back and a good old war to start.

Certain aspects of the Media don’t want you to believe all of this however, The Sun, for example, recently published the scaremongering headline “1 in 5 British Muslims’ Sympathy for jihadis”. As well as receiving a record number of complaints the title doesn’t mention the results of another survey they published before – one that shows that more non-Muslims have sympathy for youngsters heading off to Syria than their fellow Muslims…

Let’s take a look at this graph taken from The I. The first survey was taken after the Charlie Hebdo shootings at the beginning of this year and both Muslims and non-Muslims were surveyed. The second was taken now, in November 2015.

So this shows sympathy with the young people who have fled to Syria has actually decreased since the Paris attacks and was always higher in non-Muslims anyway! Of course we cannot take “sympathy for young Muslims fleeing to Syria” to mean “support for terrorist attacks against the West.” The question is (deliberately?) vague and easily misinterpreted.  The most likely explanation is that people understand why these teenagers and young people are angry. I, for example, agree that the bombing of the Middle East by America and Europe is wrong, so I understand and therefore sympathise with these people. That doesn’t mean I agree with the murder of innocent citizens in the name of any cause.  I’m sure ISIS absolutely love the Sun’s headline though.

Recently it has been in the news that hate crimes targeting Muslims in Britain has increased. These verbal attacks are mainly made against young Muslim women wearing hijab. This of course, has a lot to do with the fact that this makes them easy to identify as Muslims, but also sadly I believe it is to do with the fact that women are an easy target. Let’s face it most people don’t really want to come face to face with a terrorist but a young girl shopping with her friends or a women with her children are hardly going to be a threat to you. It’s really quite cowardly.

Before you decide to go out and racially abuse the guy who owns the corner shop down the road or a young mother with a pram on the bus, just remember that is exactly what ISIS want you to do.