Why I am open about my mental health
I’ve shared quite a lot of my life on Just Average Jen over the years. I’ve talked about my weight, my physical health, difficult relationships, things I’ve struggled with and, perhaps most openly of all, my mental health.
Sometimes I wonder whether I share too much.
There are things I’ve written about that would probably horrify the version of me from twenty years ago. I’ve talked about taking antidepressants, having counselling and therapy, struggling with anxiety and depression and, more recently, some of the longer-lasting effects that difficult experiences have had on my mental health.
I don’t share everything. There are parts of my life that belong only to me and the people closest to me, and there are experiences I either don’t want to write about or don’t feel ready to write about. Being open doesn’t have to mean giving strangers on the internet unrestricted access to every corner of your life.
The things I do share, though, I share deliberately.
After more than ten years of writing online, I’ve realised that some of the posts that matter most aren’t necessarily the ones with the perfect recipe photograph or the clever SEO keyword. They’re often the ones where somebody messages me afterwards and says, “I thought it was just me.”
That’s probably the biggest reason I continue talking about my mental health.
I spent too long thinking I should just cope
For years, I thought struggling with your mental health was something you were supposed to manage quietly.
I don’t necessarily think anybody sat me down and told me that. It was simply the impression I had. Physical health problems were things you could discuss openly, while mental health seemed much more private.
If somebody had asthma and needed an inhaler, nobody thought twice about it. If somebody broke their leg, they weren’t expected to try harder to walk on it. Yet when it came to anxiety, depression or struggling to cope, there always seemed to be an unspoken expectation that you should somehow be able to think yourself better.
I’ve certainly been guilty of applying that standard to myself.
There have been times when I’ve struggled and still wondered whether I was making too much fuss or whether I should simply be stronger. Even when I knew intellectually that mental health problems were real, it was surprisingly easy to treat my own differently.
Talking about it has helped me challenge some of that. If I’m prepared to tell somebody else that there’s nothing shameful about taking antidepressants or having therapy, I have to try to extend the same understanding to myself. I’m still a work in progress on that one.
Therapy isn’t something I’m embarrassed about
I’ve had counselling and therapy at different points in my life and I’ve always been fairly open about it on Just Average Jen. That sometimes surprises people.
I think therapy is still portrayed in a very odd way. In films and television, somebody lies on a sofa while a therapist asks about their childhood, or therapy is something that happens when a person has reached an absolute crisis point.
My experience has been much more ordinary than that. Sometimes I’ve needed somewhere to talk through things I was struggling with. At other times I’ve needed help understanding why particular situations or memories affected me in the way they did.
Finding the right person mattered enormously. I’ve had therapy where I didn’t particularly click with the therapist and other experiences where I felt comfortable enough to talk about my mental health and say things I’d struggled to say out loud.
That’s why I don’t see therapy as something embarrassing or as evidence that I couldn’t cope with my own life. Sometimes another person can help you see patterns that are almost impossible to recognise when you’re standing in the middle of them.
NHS advice for finding talking therapies
Understanding my past changed how I understood myself
As I’ve got older, I’ve begun to understand that some things I once considered personality flaws were actually connected to things I’d experienced.
I’ve written elsewhere about my experiences of domestic abuse and about living with flashbacks and the longer-term effects of trauma. Those aren’t easy subjects to write about, particularly when they involve memories I’d much rather not have in the first place.
Understanding those connections has nevertheless helped me make considerably more sense of myself.
Over the years, I’ve had reactions that seemed completely disproportionate until I understood what was behind them. There have been times when my brain has reacted to something as though I was back in a situation that ended years ago, even though logically I knew I was safe.
Learning more about trauma didn’t instantly make those experiences disappear, but it helped remove some of the confusion and self-criticism surrounding them.
That’s another reason I talk about my mental health openly. If somebody else recognises themselves in something I’ve experienced, perhaps they’ll start asking kinder questions about themselves too.
Mental health has affected other parts of my life
Something else I’ve realised through writing Just Average Jen is how artificial it can be to separate mental health from everything else.
My relationship with food hasn’t existed independently of my emotions. Neither has my weight.
I’ve written about emotional eating, food noise and the times when losing weight became far too consuming. Looking back, I can see that sometimes I was trying to solve emotional problems by changing what I ate or what I weighed.
That doesn’t mean everything is caused by mental health, but for me there have certainly been connections.
The same applies to confidence, relationships, motivation and how I feel about myself. If I wrote about weight loss without ever acknowledging any of that, I’d be leaving out a huge part of my actual experience.
It’s one of the reasons JAJ has changed over the years. I started out talking much more simply about losing weight and healthy living, whereas now I’m interested in the complicated bits underneath it all too.
Life is rarely as straightforward as following a meal plan and going for a walk.
Being open online does make me feel vulnerable sometimes
I don’t want to give the impression that I’ve reached some wonderful level of confidence where I publish deeply personal things and never give them another thought. I absolutely do.
There have been articles I’ve hovered over before publishing because I know that once something is online, people can form opinions about it.
Friends can read it. Family can read it. People I haven’t spoken to for years can find it. Brands I’ve worked with can find it. Complete strangers can decide what they think of me based on a few thousand words about one time of my life.
That can feel uncomfortable. There’s also a strange vulnerability in knowing that somebody might use something you’ve shared honestly as a reason to judge you. The internet isn’t always particularly gentle.
Over time, though, I’ve become better at deciding whose opinions deserve space in my head.
If somebody thinks less of me because I’ve experienced depression, needed antidepressants, had therapy or struggled after difficult experiences, I’m not sure their approval would actually add very much to my life.
It has taken me a long time to get anywhere near being able to say that.
I also have boundaries around what I share
Being an open blogger doesn’t mean everything has to become content.
This is something I’ve become more conscious of as the years have gone by. Sometimes writing about an experience helps me process it and sometimes the healthiest thing I can do is keep it private.
I also try to think about other people involved. Something might be part of my story while simultaneously being part of somebody else’s, and I don’t automatically have the right to tell their side of it.
There are also things I might write about eventually but not while I’m still right in the middle of them.
For me, there’s a difference between writing honestly about something I’ve had time to understand and publishing every emotion I’m experiencing while it’s happening. That boundary moves, and I’m sure it will continue to change.
Why I think talking about mental health matters
The thing I hope comes from being open isn’t that people read my experiences and think I’ve got my mental health figured out. I definitely haven’t.
What I hope is that somebody who is struggling reads something I’ve written and feels slightly less strange, ashamed or alone.
One of the hardest things about mental health problems can be the belief that everybody else is coping brilliantly while you’re somehow failing at being a normal person. Social media probably hasn’t helped because we’re surrounded by carefully selected versions of other people’s lives.
I’ve had days when I’ve worked, written articles, answered emails and appeared perfectly normal to everyone around me while things inside my head felt anything but normal. You can’t always tell.
That’s why I think ordinary conversations about mental health are so valuable. Not only conversations about severe mental illness or crisis, but conversations about therapy appointments, medication, anxiety, bad days and the fact that sometimes our brains are simply hard work.
The more normal those conversations become, the less frightening it might feel to say, “Actually, I’m struggling.”
Being open doesn’t mean I have the answers
This is something I want to be particularly clear about because I’ve written online for a long time and have a Diploma of Higher Education in Psychology. Neither of those things makes me a mental health professional.
When I write about depression, anxiety, trauma or therapy, I’m sharing my experiences and the things I’ve learned along the way. Where I include medical information, I try to use reliable sources, but my experience can’t tell somebody else what treatment they need.
Sometimes the most useful thing another person’s story can do is help you recognise that something isn’t right and encourage you to talk to somebody who is qualified to help. I’ve certainly benefited from professional support myself.
I don’t want to pretend I’ve got everything sorted
I think this might be the part of blogging about my mental health that matters most to me. There’s a temptation when you write about something you’ve struggled with to package it neatly. You describe the difficult bit, explain what you learned and finish with the lesson that fixed everything.
Real life hasn’t worked like that for me. I’ve understood things in therapy and still struggled with them afterwards. I’ve made progress and then had something trigger feelings I thought I’d moved past. I’ve learned healthier ways of coping and occasionally fallen straight back into old ones.
Some things have become considerably easier. Others haven’t.
I don’t see that as a reason not to talk about them. If anything, I think it’s important because so many personal stories online end at the point where everything supposedly became wonderful.
Mine doesn’t. I’m still learning about myself, and my understanding of my mental health now is different from what it was five years ago. I’m sure the same will be true five years from now.
Why I’ll probably keep talking about it
After more than a decade of blogging, I’ve become much less interested in presenting a polished version of myself.
I’m a woman who has lost a lot of weight and regained some of it. I’ve struggled with food and with my mental health. I’ve had therapy. I’ve taken antidepressants. I’ve experienced things that affected me long after they were over, and there are still days when my brain makes life considerably harder than I’d like it to.
Those things are part of me, but none of them is the whole of me. Perhaps that’s ultimately why I’m comfortable writing about them.
I don’t think admitting that I’ve struggled takes anything away from everything else I’ve done. If anything, being able to look back and understand some of those struggles has helped me become much more accepting of the person I am now.
And if writing about my mental health helps one person realise that needing support doesn’t make them somehow less capable than everyone around them, then I’m quite happy for this part of my life to be visible.
There are plenty of things worth being embarrassed about. Looking after my mental health isn’t one of them.
