So, in terms of kind of looking to the future. I mean, you mentioned this Masters in theatre?

Yeah. Well, Masters or any theatre school that will take me at all [laugh].

Yeah. So you’re feeling sort of confident about that, and about managing –

I think, I think I’m good enough and I think I’m sane enough. I just don’t know if I’m rich enough. Genuinely. I think the cheapest one I’ve found is like thirty one grand.

Right. Not per year, hopefully?

No, just total for a two year thing. But I’m – I do not have that many pennies. And I do not have a big fraction of that many pennies. So I need to find a job that pays more.

Yeah. But you don’t – It sounds like you don’t see the experiences that you’ve had as kind of holding you back in any way?

I think they’re a part of me. They’re always going to be there, and I’m always going to have the memories of them, and I’m always going to have the active effects of them at any one time. But Anthony Hopkins was schizophrenic. You know, Hannibal Lecter. He’s a good actor.

Do you see a time in the future where things will change?

When I have better days, I kind of do. I think – I don’t think it will go away completely. But I think – I think it’s possible to kind of get on with life to a certain extent, and still have symptoms. But I, I do find it really difficult to, to imagine that things are going to turn out okay. It’s just little things, like whatever happens there’s always going to be scars on my arms. All over, actually. So it’s quite difficult. I’m always thinking ‘oh, if I went for a job interview – okay, so maybe I’d wear long sleeves to the job interview and then at what stage are they going to see my arms and realise that’s happened. And it’s quite – thinking of life, always having to cover up. And always having like a gap – a year of my life that I wouldn’t quite be able to explain to anyone, on my CV. And there’s little things like that, that make it quite hard to look ahead.

And thinking back to say two years ago, what’s changed about you, as a person? And what’s stayed the same?

Think I’m a lot less passionate about things now. So like two years ago I was really like eager for stuff in the church, and I was involved in everything, and I was running these aid trips to France, to help refugees out there. And going out giving stuff to homeless people every other week, to – sort of constantly organising running things. Really busy. And now, that’s – it’s not even – It’s not so much tiredness, it’s just not really caring enough to do anything about anything, really. It’s just, yeah. Just a complete lack of motivation for getting on with stuff. I think I feel a lot less intelligent now than I used to. I was always like – I was always the smart one in my family, I was always the smart one in my friends, and that was quite a big thing I identified with, was being smart. And I think I’ve lost a lot of that. And it could be permanent. So, that’s quite a hard thing to come to terms with.

No, absolutely, absolutely. But, what I would say to those people is if you think that there’s not a recovery phase, at least of mental illness, then you haven’t experienced it properly.

Your experience of mental health hasn’t been on the severe end of it. Because unless you’ve been, I’ve had weeks where I’ve not even left my bed. I’ve literally just lost time in bed, because they cripple me, sometimes. If you haven’t experienced that, if you don’t think I need to recover from that then I’m afraid you’re wrong. Because if, if that was just a normal thing, then I would be doing it every day and it wouldn’st be a big deal. But when I’m, when I’m in those, when I was in that bed for two weeks, all I wanted to do was get a knife and put it through my throat. That’s all I wanted to do. There was nothing more in my head. I have bounced back from that. You have to bounce back from that. In order to be able to go out and do the challenges that you face every day, with a smile on your face, you have to be able to recover. But recovery comes in many many many different shapes. Recovery can be as little as, you went to the shop on your own today. How, how big that is depends on you. Don’t let anybody else, anybody else, not even your GP, not even your therapist tell you that your steps aren’t big, because every single step you make is fucking massive. It is gigantic.

It’s as big as you let it be. And you’ve gotta let it be big, ’cause otherwise those sad, those sad, horrible things will just beat you down all day every single day. I know from experience. You have to let some light in or the darkness just consumes you. There’s, there’s no other way around it. If you don’t, nobody else is gonna commend you for walking to the shop. No, your parents may say, well done for doing that. But nobody else can give you the power you can from going yes, I went to the shop today. All on my own and I didn’t just walk in and walk out; I actually did some shopping’s. Take that, blow it up, feed off of it. Use that as your oxygen, ’cause it is the biggest thing you could ever have in your recovery process is those wins. Tiny, massive, whatever a win is a bloody win in this situation. And you cannot always have ’em. But when you do, get it and hold onto it, because they are what matters. You’re not gonna get ’em a lot and when you do, hold onto ’em please, because there is nothing else you can do.

Because that’s one thing you’ve got to remind yourself with psychosis – as catastrophic it can be, as bad as it can be, you go ill and I would say within – you know – a week and a half of being sectioned, under like intensive care, you do feel better. And that’s what makes the management and treatment of psychosis quite interesting actually, because your real game plan is reducing the regularity of psychotic episodes. Because you know, it’s not ideal, getting psychotic. Because not only will you be in hospital potentially for four weeks, or even longer, you’re going to have the post-psychotic depression. You’re not going to be able to go back to work suddenly. For me, both times it’s been a hell of a long time, from being sectioned. Which is pretty much while you’re still in work. Or, or in study, whoever you are, whatever you do. You know, there is that – that length of time that it does take away. But you feel better from the psychotic symptoms pretty quick.

Is recovery a word that you use?

I do use the word recovery. I mean, there’s, yeah, there’s different things that I think apply to, to different parts of my recovery. I don’t think my emotions will ever be kind of standard. I think they’ll always change more quickly and that they’ll always be a bit more intense. But my reaction to those emotions, I think can recover. I mean, I’m a lot better than I was. I’m, at one point I couldn’t stay out of hospital for more than 12 hours. I’ve not been in hospital since October. So, in, in that respect things are moving forward. But also, from my understanding about most people that go to [the specialist personality disorder hospital], which is where I’m being referred to is that after they leave, they have a bit of support from services. But in the long term they don’t need services. They are able to manage most of the time on their own. Yes, they sometimes have crisis’s and need a bit of support, but generally they can manage. And, yeah, I think that’s what I hope for my future that I can continue to learn to deal with what I experience. I mean, I’ve kind of accepted that it may or may not go away, but that either way my life is worth living.

I can’st really see a time when I won’st have thoughts going round in my head. Probably there might be something where people have said, “I’sve had therapy,” or “I’sve had medication for it and it helps lessen them. And it helps do this.” But I’m always, with it being a mental thing as well, I’m always a bit reluctant as to whether it is still something that needs to be treated, or whether it is still something which most people have got. I think – I can’st really see myself not having the thoughts, but I think maybe I’m hopeful of kind of trying to look for some sort of counselling.

I haven’st really looked that much, yet. I know obviously about kind of local IAPT services, I know you can look online and try and find services through the NHS. And I know how difficult it is to get services for that. I’m not sure I would feel confident still going to the doctors and pursuing kind of therapy for it or anything, or medication. But maybe that’s something I should think about doing.

So, sort of confidence, that kind of thing?

Yeah. Yeah.

And is there anyone there to sort of support you, to get that back? Has anyone talked about building confidence?

My support worker does a bit. But I think at the moment I’m just so constantly having crises that it’s kind of just – I can’t remember what that phrase is, where the – always just blowing out fires, rather than just dealing with –

Fire-fighting.

Yeah. But they – Yeah, I don’t think there’s been much work to try and deal with things on a long term thing, it’s just getting me through like each week.

And do people talk about recovery with you?

I felt like at the start they did, and they kind of talked about how people can get completely better. And now they kind of just talk about like distress tolerance, and I’m kind of like, “I don’t want to tolerate this, I want to feel better.” And they talk about, you know, learning skills to deal with it. And, yeah. In fact there’s a, there’s a little poster up in my local like kind of branch of the CMHT, where it says ‘recovery is different things to everyone, and recovery isn’t necessarily absence of symptoms, but just learning how to deal with them. And to me, that’s kind of a bit – I don’t like that, because I think well these symptoms aren’t really something that you should just learn to deal with. Like I don’t want to kind of just settle for this being okay. Like I want to feel better.

In the short term, I think in the short term and to the medium term it destroyed me as a person. It, it took away everything I thought it was and put it in a blender and just made me just this, you know, I didn’t become this overnight. But, you know, it sort of the, the epitome of what was going on at the time. I was depressed. I was suicidal. I was hurting myself. I was hearing things. I was, you know, overweight. I felt I was ugly. That, that low point on my life where I felt all these really negative things. You know, I didn’t wanna be here any more. 14 years old and you wanna kill yourself is not really the best of situations to be in. So in the short term it sort of like brought about that collapse, you know, in the entire shaky foundations that was my life at the time just collapsed and fell into a pit of darkness. But, actually it made me, as a person and it made me who I am today. And it made me see the world very differently. It gave me a very unique perspective on the world, because when you go through that trauma at that young age, you become really really mature.

And you know you actually accept that everyone is on their own little journey. And everyone has their own demons to fight. And I don’t want anyone to go through what I went through. So I just developed this sort of empathic way of being. I developed this real, what I think, you know, care for others as a result of it. And it also helped me understand just more about people, people spend their lives trying to get, trying to understand you know, about mental health and about you know, what those experiences mean and how we connect to them. I think my episode really helped me gain a really deep understanding of people and how people work. I think some people asked me, if I could, would I change anything about my experiences and I say, no, because they make me who I am. They are part of me. I mean, even if you had a magic pill and you said, Andrew, if you take this pill right, all your mental illness will go away. You will never become mentally ill again I wouldn’t take it. Why wouldn’t I take it, because that’s part of me. It’s who I am. It, it’s everything I’ve known and that doesn’t mean I go around as some sort of you know, constantly ill, mentally ill person. It just means that I have a really strong identity of my mental health. You know, I’m very mentally healthy, because I have a mental health problem. And if I don’t look after my mental health, the consequences are really severe for me. I become incredibly unwell. And I become the—it’s life and death. I have to look after my mental health. I’ve got no choice. It’s what I have to do. Just like if your physical health was in danger and you had a physical health condition, you’d look after your physical health. Mental health is no different. So I wouldn’t take a pill, no.

See the video, the video I’m in, I would say was my recovery, because that January I would say was, it was just the whole shock of, I was a little bit sad that it happened. I was a little bit shocked. I felt a little bit guilty. I felt quite a lot of shame. But then, after that, because of the people and because of my own opinion of things was growing and because my whole, my own, my own inner strength of it came from it. So I, I grew to be quite a substantial person from this whole experience. So, there were, the recovery I would say was only at the most, a month. And from the rest of it, it was an experience, the whole thing was an experience for me. And there wasn’t a bad one or was it, was it good, it was simply something I had to go through, because it happened, it is what it is. Do you know what I mean?

And in terms of sort of looking forward to the future now, plans for the future, do you think that that experience of psychosis has had an impact or what about your plan, what are your plans now?

Yeah, definitely, because I even like, like I said, I, I was, I was already not leaning towards law regarding my education. So when this happened, I was like, oh okay [laughs] like I, obviously I wanted to assist which is why I made the video. So it kind of, it, it, it turned my attention towards mental health, most definitely, it definitely this experience, it changed me, without a doubt.

I had a lot of time when I was just in and out of hospital and like I was trying to take my GCSE’s at the same time and then it was just difficult. And then, but then I managed to get into college. It was a really good college. And I made a new friendship group and, you know, things started to improve. I started to get involved with like the extra curricular activities and that really helped me a lot. And it made me feel like I had some sort of purpose and then through that they went on to ask me, you know, ”Do you wanna speak at this event?” And I said, ”Might as well, yeah. And then I did that and then that gave me a lot of confidence to use like to share my experiences in a way that could help people understand. And so that kind of sparked off like a series of different volunteering, campaigning and that was really good. And now I’m at university studying mental health nursing. And I still hear voices pretty much almost constantly. I’m able to live with them a lot more.