After ignoring an increasing number of panic attacks for over a year, Leicestershire writer Stewart Bint suffered a major mental health breakdown in 1997 which led to him being hospitalised for ten weeks, and sectioned for 28 days.
By Stewart Bint
Please don’t make the same mistake I did. I thought I could fight panic attacks myself. After all, they were all in my mind, weren’t they? Couldn’t hurt me.
During those early days of my condition, I felt as if I were in an ocean. Some days I was calm, serene, and floating. Other days I was panicking, anxious, and drowning.
Looking back, I can see they were all the classic symptoms of anxiety and panic attacks, but things were different in those days of more than quarter of a century ago. Poor mental health was the skeleton in the cupboard back then, particularly for men. Taboo. Unmentionable. So I brushed it under the carpet. Again, and again, and again, where it festered. Until the bulge grew into depression and full-blown psychosis, and burst through the weakened fabric of my mind, and I was seriously torn and damaged.
My counsellor originally admitted me to a Priory psychiatric clinic as a voluntary patient for stress and depression brought on by a year of neglecting constant anxiety and regular panic attacks.
Initially, things got worse, and I was duly sectioned for 28 days. But because of the severity of my condition and my increasingly bizarre behaviour I was also “specialed,” meaning a nurse was assigned to never be more than a few feet from me, around the clock.
To this day I have no memory of those first 14 days or so of being sectioned. When the fog did start to lift I demanded to be taken home immediately. The doctors had to explain again about me being sectioned and what it meant, as I could not remember having been told.
My family wondered if I’d ever leave hospital. But I managed to rebuild my life from those dark days, and today I’m a successful novelist and magazine columnist, and retired a couple of years ago from my role as global Public Relations specialist for one of the world’s leading hi-tech industrial software developers.
So, how did I come through it? How did a tiny spec of light gradually dispel the darkness?
Three aspects helped put it in the past. First: Acknowledging I had a problem, and seeking help. Second: Drawing up coping strategies. Third: There’s an old saying: “Give a person a fish and you feed them for a day. Teach a person how to fish and they feed themselves for life.” The same is true of constantly implementing these strategies until they become second nature.
Daily sessions were held with a senior psychiatrist, and gradually the anxiety and panic was held in check. I was developing the weapons to fight the anxiety, the depression, the psychosis, and overthrow the waves of bad, negative thoughts that had been invading my mind for so long.
Before my diagnosis I’d been an overly ambitious perfectionist, keen to please everyone and get everything absolutely spot on, and I’d become increasingly anxious that my work wasn’t going to be perfect.
But I started learning how to create effective coping strategies that actually changed my whole outlook on life. No longer did I wake up every morning and immediately curl up in a ball, cursing the fact that I was alive. I woke up looking forward to what the day would bring and taking another small, tottering step towards getting my life back.
During my treatment it was found I had repressed bad memories from my childhood. It was also discovered I had an inferiority complex. All that had combined subconsciously to bring on anxiety and powerful panic attacks. With all that out in the open, I was on the way to recovery. And once I was discharged, my coping strategy became all about casting off the things I no longer needed in my life, including corporate success and the stress that comes with it. I returned to my first love of writing, and became a novelist and have my own column in a local monthly magazine.
To me, coping strategies are highly personal, and you need one for every situation that can cause difficulty. For example, I realised that if I were to continue seeking perfection in my work and myself, I was destined to fail, and in all probability would face an even longer spell as a hospital in-patient. So my coping strategy for that was to accept compromise, both from myself and other people.
Whenever a deadline approaches I ask myself what is the worst that can happen if I don’t meet it? Occasionally I have needed to burn the midnight oil, but in the olden days it was a daily occurrence. Now when I miss deadlines no-one worries. Least of all me. No anxiety. No panic attacks.
In total, I was in the clinic for around ten weeks before being discharged into a care-in-the-community programme. Apart from one minor relapse, the coping strategies I learned during that time have been successful, and I’m grateful to have been able to rebuild my life with new, stronger, firmer foundations.
I’ll end as I began – please don’t make the same mistake I did. Seek professional help to overcome anxiety and panic attacks. Control them. Don’t let them control you.