Outsourcing My Mental Health

After years of trying to manage her shape-shifting symptoms with the help of family, friends and specialised therapy sessions, Daniella Scott finally found lasting support – in the one place she’d never wanted to

Once again, I am lying in the foetal position under my bed. The left side of my face is pressed into the beige carpet, the smell of damp seeping into my lungs. My phone lies similarly prostrate beside me – a rambling, half-written e-mail to the Samaritans open on the screen – while around me Spotify’s ‘Feel Good Friday’ playlist blasts out.

I have been like this for the past three hours – unable even to move; my body compressed by an invisible weight. My hands are numb. My legs shake with weakness. As for my mind … it has emptied, blank apart from the tormenting fear that this nothingness is how it will remain forever.

Every now and then this happens: my life gets derailed by a tsunami of various mentalhealth problems: depression, OCD, anxiety – all of the baddies are in there. There is no single villain. And that’s what makes it so hard, for it is impossible to fight a foe who shape-shifts so relentlessly. And so I do the only thing I know: I submit to it. I let it knock me off my feet. Flatten me. Take everything I’ve got.

I forget now what set it off that afternoon, but I know it will have been something small, something insignificant. It always was. A cold shower, a rude bus driver, an overcast morning. No matter what, the result was always the same. I could be incapacitated for what felt like minutes but was in fact hours, occasionally days. Time disappears into the black hole that mental-health issues create: swallowing all logic, motivation and hope.