As a child, I think I always struggled with anxiety and in later years as an older person, I had been treated for depression at times. But I think the one thing I now realise looking back was whenever I was treated for depression, I dont think I had an outlook in life that was of no hope or feeling very low, just probably exhausted.

I didn’t understand why this was happening to me. I felt like my body was betraying me, and it was attacking me all the time.  And it made me more nervous about leaving the house back then because I didn't know when to expect the next attack. I wanted to hide away.

My mother told me to go and pray hard for forgiveness; that the Lord was telling me to be better boy than I was.

The pandemic was a difficult time for me and it brought lots of feelings to the surface which I had been avoiding or trying not to pay attention to. Being locked down made the feelings a lot more intense and there was nowhere to go to escape from them. I was definitely depressed during that period and it lasted for some time. 

My first experience of anything relating to Mental Illness was when my partner at the time, the father of my children developed what I now know was psychosis, specifically schizophrenia. It was a word  which I didn’t understand, so I set out to educate myself.