Coping

Hello, I'm Aled, welcome to the show.

This evening I want to talk about

your mental wellbeing, as a teenager.

We're all going through something as we grow up

and we all cope with it in different ways.

Give me a call to share your problems and let me know

how you coped with it,

and I can guarantee that whatever issues you've been through,

you'll be helping a lot of people

who may be listening to this right now.

Ok let's go to the phone lines now,

-and on line one, hello, what's your name?

-Hi, my name's Lizzie.

Hello Lizzie, what's your story then?

Erm, I was just calling in

erm, to talk about how I've had anorexia.

Do you know why it started or why you felt the need

to control your food?

I was about 13 when I started suffering.

I'd just broken my leg

and I'd gradually put on quite a bit of weight

and then when I went back to school I kind of,

I encountered quite a lot of bullying.

And it meant that I didn't really have many friends

and I felt really isolated.

Erm, and so I moved schools but then I still didn't really fit in.

I couldn't control friends

and I couldn't control what they said about me

or what they thought about me

and controlling what I was eating

was a thing that could replace having friends,

and it also gave me a way to feel like I was achieving things

and like I had value, and it made me special.

It was my best friend and I believed everything it said.

Did you go to great lengths to try and avoid food?

Because presumably people around you would start noticing that you weren't eating.

Looking back on it I'm kind of surprised at how creative I was

in the various things I could do to avoid eating.

If you were sitting at a dinner table there was ways that I could

somehow get the food to the dog

or hide it in various items of clothing.

As soon as you'd eaten it there was just this horrible feeling of guilt

and anger at yourself,

I just used to become really panicky of, how can I rectify what I've done?

How can I change it,

how can I make sure I don't eat anything else that day, to counteract it?

Or do however much exercise I felt I needed to do.

There were times when I really wanted to eat

and I'd see a piece of chocolate cake and actually I thought,

I would really like that, but then it's, like,

"Lizzie, don't be so stupid, why would you think you deserve that?"

If there's a physical illness, you can start healing it,

but no-one can get inside your head and take the voice away

or hear what's going on, to fix it.

A lot of the media like to jump on size zero models

or the pressures on people to try and look skinny.

But it wasn't really about losing weight and being skinny for you, was it?

I don't think I ever really saw myself as skinny.

I don't know whether that's because if I'd have let myself seen it

then I would have thought, "I have to change."

I became really secretive, really manipulative, really aggressive

and angry and controlling, and looking back on it

there are things that I did that I'm still horrified that I did.

Like holding scissors to my dad's stomach over a chocolate biscuit,

I don't think I've ever seen my dad so scared, I would never do that,

but it, it just completely changed me as a person.

So how bad did things get?

Erm, yeah, I hadn't eaten for quite a few days and I just

had this excruciating agony

erm, like in my stomach, I needed to go straight to the hospital.

I was put on permanent bed rest, so I wasn't even allowed to get out of the bed because, cos my heart

was in such a weak condition that if I moved

it would put too much strain on it and I could die.

I think however close death can feel, you still feel invincible,

I would end up water loading which became quite a big thing for me.

Erm, where I would just drink so much before I was weighed,

so that it was all made up with water.

Things went from bad to worse from then

and I ended up in a long stay in-patient hospital.

I had to be supervised when I ate and after I ate.

I had my windows screwed shut and my plug blocked in my sink

so that I couldn't throw up and not let anyone see

and I had to be watched 24 hours a day.

There are ways that I could secretively exercise in my room.

If I wasn't being watched

I would just be doing star jumps continually through the day.

I would do absolutely anything

to try and burn off energy.

But I couldn't stop what was going on inside my head.

If you were able to go through having doctors and nurses

being so forceful with you, and you still not quite hearing it

inside you, what did it take for you to start to...

How do you turn yourself around from that?

I think it was the risk of infertility that really got me.

I hadn't had a period in about four years and I realised

just how real that was, that actually I could be putting so much at risk.

Being able to have children is such a huge thing

that I just didn't want to lose that.

So I ended up going into a psychiatric in-patient unit

for about six or seven months,

which I think gave me a lot of therapy

which was very helpful in that it got me eating again

and got me in the habit of eating, and the routine.

Recovery isn't, you know,

just really, really happy,

it's actually horrible and you've just got to keep your end goal

in sight and just keep pushing yourself and realise

it's not gonna be happy for a while, like,

because you're still challenging yourself but at the end of the day,

what you're working towards is, you know, is gonna be a lot better.

Now I feel really sad about how it's changed our family life,

of what it could have been, the years we lost, and what it's like now.

But then I see the positives of what happened, like the fact that

I've had that life experience and it means that I can help other people.

Well, Lizzie thank you so much for your call today,

I've certainly learnt a lot from what your story was

and I'm sure that there's a lot of people listening to this

who might be going through the same thing that have a better understanding

of what you went through

or what maybe they should do to get to a better place, so thank you very much for the call, Lizzie.

That's OK, thanks, bye.

I believe we've got someone calling through now,

-let's go to line one, hello, what's your name?

-Hello, my name's Joe.

Hello, Joe, what's on your mind?

I'm calling up to talk about OCD.

Describe OCD.

Er, well OCD is, is when you have obsessive thoughts,

and they lead to compulsive behaviour,

and they make you do things and those things start to disorder your life,

that's what OCD is.

It was like a bully.

whatever OCD told me to do, I had to do it in that way.

So how did it start, what kind of things did you start doing?

When I was about 8, 9 years old,

we were given very frightening drugs talks at school

and I remember going home and being terrified of solvents.

I had these worries about

the solvents in paint or on vanish on the tables

so I had to then wash my hands lots.

It become a big problem.

If I touched anything which I thought could have something

poisonous, or could in some way could contaminate me.

I'd have to immediately go and wash my hands.

So paint a picture for us of what...

of what you went through when you went through one of these things.

Er, well I remember being given a sort of origami thing

from another student and they'd drawn on it.

I was afraid that some of the ink would get to my fingers,

obviously in the lesson I couldn't go and wash my hands,

and I just became so incredibly anxious about the fact

that I'd touched this thing,

I completely shut down and couldn't function.

Where there any other symptoms that started from this?

At the age of 11 or 12 there was quite a big shift

into different types of

obsessive thoughts and behaviour.

I had a sort of religious background

so I think that I was very worried about,

er, offending God and I'd try not to have the thought,

er, that I wanted a family member to die

unless I tapped an object five times

and if you try not to think sort of sinful thoughts or thoughts about

people you care about then those thoughts intrusively come in.

Fears of poisoning and the tapping,

it was like two waves.

So Joe, you're saying if you had a bad thought

then you tapping something would, what, stop that?

Yeah, for example when I left the classroom

I'd have to tap every surface on the desk in a specific sequence.

Which for a lot of the time the sequence was five then seven then five then ten.

Then seven then five. So I'd strum like that for five and then,

then five, six, seven, five, five, ten, five, five, six, seven, five.

It worked out that I'd have to tap the desk 440 times

before I left the classroom.

If I wasn't sure about exactly how well I'd tapped it

I'd have to start the ritual again.

So the 440 for one desk is very much a minimum count.

But I was doing it all the time.

This was like more than a full time job for me, and even in my dreams.

So, in my dreams I'd have OCD.

-Em...

-What do your family say about what you're going through?

It was very difficult for them cos I wouldn't engage with it at all.

And the only thing worse than having OCD was the idea

of telling people about these things.

If they asked me why I did it I'd just deny that I did it at all

and just wouldn't have a go,

I'd just refuse to have a conversation about it.

The most important thing was always do the sequence properly

that was more important than upsetting my parents.

So did you, presumably you saw someone about it.

How did that come about and who was it you saw?

Doing all those rituals right was at the cost of having friendships

and doing things that I wanted to do.

I compromised so much that I realised that

I had to do something about it and I agreed to go to therapy.

Treatment was a lot of work

but it's so worth it and I'm so glad that I underwent those treatments.

When I was first diagnosed, that was just such a revelation for me

cos I assumed that it was just me going mad

and then there I was the only one that was like this.

Knowing that, that this was a common illness gave me hope.

Do you remember any moments that might suggest you were

getting through it and there might be light at the end of the tunnel?

One of the challenges was to throw rubbish away

without doing the tapping rituals on the rubbish.

I'd have to completely go against my fears and I remember throwing

some bottles away into the recycling bin...

..and I didn't tap it and in the past I would have taken

the bottle out and made sure I'd done the ritual properly.

Even though I still had a long way to go I think then I realised things were gonna get better.

Wow, so how are you now then?

Is this something that you can be cured of or is it something you've got to manage?

I don't think the word cure is appropriate,

but the point is that OCD used to have control over me,

and now I have control over the OCD,

and it never stops me from doing the things that I want to do.

So I think if you mean cure in that sense,

yeah, I have control over my OCD.

It doesn't stop me doing what I want to do.

So, Joe, thank you very much for your call, hopefully a lot of people

who are listening and can identify with what you're saying,

will know what to do and, er,

and hopefully helped a lot of people, thanks a lot.

Thanks a lot, great to speak to you.

And you, bye.

I'm being told we have a caller on line eight, so line eight,

hello, what's your name?

-Hello my name's Zoe.

-Hello, Zoe, what's on your mind today?

Erm, I'm just phoning in to talk about my experiences with self harm.

Er, I started when I was eight.

In what way did you self harm?

The first time I ever did it I'd had a really bad day at school

and I came home and had a huge argument with my parents.

Erm, and I shut myself in my room

and to try and stop myself from crying I bit myself

and it made me feel better.

So it started from there really.

And it was only a couple of times a month to start off with

and it was just when things got really, really bad,

that I'd punch stuff or I'd bite myself or pull my hair out

and that probably lasted for about

five or six years, ish.

Erm, and it got worse and worse,

like, it became more frequent and I'd bite myself harder.

I knew that it can't be normal for someone

to injure themselves to make themselves feel better,

the whole logic of it just doesn't make sense, and in the long run

it didn't make me feel better, but at the time it did,

and so that was all I was interested in.

Once I learnt that it helped me, it made me feel better

it started to take the place of other things that would have made me feel better

because it helped more.

What things would make you drive to self harming?

I went through a lot of bullying at school,

so that was a big issue,

things at home weren't great

so that didn't help,

we'd just argue all the time and we were always winding each other up,

and not a good relationship really.

You know, you don't understand, like, emotions at all when you're younger,

and when you've got them all inside you

and you haven't got anyone to talk to or any way of releasing them

it was my way of,

getting it all out and,

there were times when I wanted,

I really wanted someone to turn around and be, like, "Are you OK?"

And then other times I was just like, I don't want anyone to ask,

because it would be like opening a can of worms.

And once you've opened it you can't put them back.

I didn't tell anyone until it was quite...

well, quite recently really,

I used to spend a lot of time sat in my bedroom

and just sit and listen to my radio constantly.

I'd sit on the floor in the shower with the water on,

it's amazing how relaxing that is.

It like, it was really good.

Where there any other ways that you self harmed?

As I got older it became, er, cutting and burning,

in the past say three or four years it became razor blades and stuff,

it was really bad.

And then after that if I tried biting myself it didn't make a difference.

The worse it got the more I'd have to do

to make a difference.

When I started cutting myself I'd use whatever I could find at the time.

I remember once when

I was out walking and I used a piece of barbed wire fence

to self harm and that was

probably really, really stupid

and I, looking back on it now I'm like, "Did I really do that?!"

I remember one night,

I'd spent seven hours self harming, like, just constant,

like all night and the only reason I stopped is cos I ran out of space.

Erm, I went into an A&E quite a few times.

99% of the time,

the doctors and nurses don't want anything to do with you.

Really? How come?

It's like because you've done it to yourself,

you don't deserve their treatment or their help,

but there was one nurse who I remember, I always remember her.

She came over and it was about 5 o'clock in the morning

and she came over and offered me a cup of tea and toast.

And just that made me feel better than any other nurse I've ever met,

like, that little bit of compassion

and treating me the same as everyone else.

I was like, I'm not quite so abnormal.

-Is that how you felt people treated you, differently?

-Yeah.

After doing self harming and going through that process

-not once did you tell your parents?

-No.

That's a hell of a secret to keep for all that time.

It's awkward cos we didn't talk about how I was feeling

or what was going on

or anything, it was like swept under the carpet.

So when did things start getting better for you?

Last December really was I guess the big time I remember things changing.

My partner he said that if I carried on he wouldn't be able

to still be there.

And, like, I adore him,

and the fear of losing him far outweighed any positive

I was gonna get from self harming.

I started getting in touch with Harmless, and they're a charity

which are designed to help people who self harm.

Like, things are so different now.

Having someone there that I can talk to about it,

and I know they're not gonna judge me or tell me that I shouldn't do it

but they're gonna talk to me about why I want to do it

and help me find ways to deal with what's going on

that doesn't resort to hurting myself.

The longer I go without doing it,

the less frequent I feel like I want to.

I'd say, well, 99% of the time I'm happy.

I mean life's not ever gonna be perfect

and that's the thing you've got to know,

that life will never be perfect.

Well, Zoe, I think you've been so brave talking to me today,

-thank you so much for calling in.

-You're welcome.

-Thank you for your call.

-Thank you very much.

Thanks, Zoe, bye bye.

I believe we have someone on the line now. Hello, what's your name?

Hello, my name's Sony.

Hello, Sony, what you calling in with?

I'm calling in cos I have erm, depression and other problems

so I wanted to talk about it.

Do you know why you were depressed?

I was born in a really nice, well off family, and my parents

I didn't spend much time with them,

my dad was in the army and he went around the world

to like, you know,

like fighting and stuff and erm, my mum worked in a bank.

I was the like one of...

You know, the best child they had, like when it came to studies and stuff,

they had really high expectations,

like especially when it came to exams.

Like I would have to get A's or A stars

and if I missed like by one mark

my mum would be, like, you know, really angry.

They expected a lot from you.

Yeah. I go to one school, and my mum's just like,

"Ooh, there's a new school out there, it's really good."

So she moved my school.

The school I'm at at the moment is probably like my sixth one.

Cos, we kept on moving around.

That probably stopped you being able to form friendships.

Yeah, you know It takes a long time when you're shy, to make friends,

and erm, you kind of almost get to the point

like, you know, where you kind of know someone

and then my mum would just move me away to some other school.

My parents, they only found I had depression when I was 17

and erm, they only found out because erm, I tried to...

Like, you know, I had a suicide attempt.

My mum wasn't there and my dad, he left us like a year ago

and erm, me and my brother don't get on well.

We had this argument like every single time

and I felt like I can't take this any more

and I felt like this is the best thing to do for me.

So I just had this like really stupid idea in my mind

and erm, I decided to do it.

I just got some pills and stuff,

I went back home and erm,

like, you know, started like taking all the pills.

I realised then like I'd did a really big mistake,

and by the time I realised it

I had already taken fifty pills

and I remember walking down to the bus station

to take myself to the hospital and the bus was delayed by two hours

so I had to walk back home

and I almost realised that I was about to faint

so I just called an ambulance

and I was barely able to speak.

I remember them basically trying to save to me

and it was really painful, mentally and physically.

My doctors came down and they wanted to talk to me,

like, why I did it and stuff,

and I just didn't really say much cos I just wanted to keep it to myself.

It sounds like everything was against you.

Yeah.

I couldn't connect to anyone properly in my life.

Then you have depression, you just can't really pull yourself up,

you just really wanna give up

cos it's not an easy thing to go through.

So you seem to be in a much better place now than you were then,

-what was the biggest turning point for you?

-I joined a group.

I had like friends who had the same kind of issues.

Mental illness and stuff.

They made me feel better because I felt I'm not the only person

going through this, it was just like a turning point for me.

I felt, for the first time in my life,

I felt like I was being appreciated for what I did.

When I joined the group, you know, it takes time,

and I did have incidents in the middle,

so, it, it was quite a rough time.

The last one I ever tried was just like probably a month or two ago

but it wasn't really that bad,

I just run off from home cos I was really depressed,

and I got a knife and just ran away.

I ran like a mile just barefoot.

I just went up to the cathedral, just sat there for a while and just have a thought and...

Something just popped in my mind.

I felt like if I do this then it'd be such a stupid thing to do.

I'm not quite there but I'm trying.

Sony, thank you so much for calling in.

There's a lot of people who will be listening to this,

feeling the kind of feelings that you had

and hearing that there is light at the end of the tunnel

and you can come through it.

It's really important so thank you very much for your call.

You're welcome.

I believe we have someone on the phone line now,

-so, hello what's your name?

-My name's Joe.

Hello, Joe, what's your story?

I called up to talk about the isolation I felt when I was

bullied at school, and, er, cyber bullied as well.

-Why were you bullied?

-I came out at school as being bisexual.

That's probably not something

that the guys in your class were prepared for were they?

No, they didn't really expect it and didn't quite understand it either.

And, how exactly did you come out?

I'd gone through a period before I came out of being confused

and thinking maybe it was just

a phase and I'd grow out of it,

and it kind of clicked one night in my head on a school trip

that I was bisexual and there was no way of getting round that.

I came out to a few close friends and then when we got back I came out

on Facebook just by ticking the 'interested in' boxes.

And how did they initially start bullying?

First of all it was shouting across the school

and getting abuse thrown at me.

It started online at about the same time.

Where you being bullied at all before you came out?

No, not at all.

It must have been horrible to suddenly overnight almost suddenly

have people shouting nasty stuff at you in, in the classroom.

I felt very alone, very closed up.

I spent a lot of time just sitting in my room not talking to anyone

because I felt what the bullies were saying was true

and I was, you know, a crime against nature, I was disgusting.

I came back from school and went online and then it was

there as well, so there was no safe point almost.

For those people who are listening

and finding it difficult to imagine what it was like,

take us through what it was like to get those kind of messages

and the effect it had on you.

The messages kept building up and building up,

there was lots of them.

There was a lot of anger and pain inside of me,

I wanted to take it out on myself

because I thought it was the right thing to do

and there was a compass sitting on my desk

so, I picked it up, I picked up the compass and I cut my arms.

Take us through why it means that seeing anonymous messages

about bullying results in you wanting to hurt yourself.

I was at such a low point it felt right to take it out on myself.

I felt incredibly down and very, very, very lonely

and I absolutely hated myself for what I was

and I wished I was straight.

It was, it was an awful, it was an awful period of my life.

Did you take that to your parents during that time?

I didn't for a long time, it was just one night,

it had been one of the regular days at school with the bullying there

and online, and I came down to have dinner

and had forgotten to put on a jumper.

I was sitting at the dinner table with a T-shirt on

and my mum and dad spotted

these scratches on my arms from where I'd been harming with a compass

and my mum asked me what they were.

First of all I said, "It's probably best you don't know",

and then so she asked again,

"I really want you to tell me."

And I broke down at the dinner table

and told them that I'd been self harming

because I was bisexual and I was being bullied at school.

Your mum, was she shocked?

Was she horrified that her little son

had done something like this?

Or was she quite delicate about it?

My parents were amazingly supportive,

my mum gave me the confidence that I needed

to e-mail one of the teachers that I trusted to get it all sorted.

Now it's over I feel so much better,

but obviously the people who aren't so lucky,

there was a guy who I was following on Twitter

,who after he came out as gay to his mum,

he received so much abuse from his mum and bullying in general,

he committed suicide.

-So you were following someone who committed suicide?

-Yeah.

His last Tweet was "I'm so tired of all of this, I'm going in a few minutes, just wanted to say goodbye."

and, er, he drowned himself.

After that happened I knew that I didn't want to end up

as bad as that.

So I suppose you have quite a message for the people who

are listening to this, cos there are two different stories that end

very differently and I suppose you've come out much more positive,

so what's the difference?

I think the difference is that I took a lot of action against it

and if you don't talk to anyone about it

then it's not gonna get any better and only when you start talking

can you start taking action against things.

Joe, thank you so much for calling in with your story,

I'm sure there will be lots of people listening to this

who might be going through exactly the same thing as you

that will feel very encouraged about talking about it

-and maybe in some way standing up to the bullies themselves.

-Thank you.

-Thanks a lot, bye bye.

-Bye.

Thank you so much to everyone who's called in today.

This evening's show was about hearing young people's experiences

and seeing how they've coped.

When you're going through things talking about it seems to be the hardest thing to do,

yet everyone we've spoken to today

agreed if they'd had the chance to go back

and do something differently,

talking more is one of the things they would have done.

Thanks a lot for listening,

bye bye.

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