Personal journey
As she marks a decade of writing, speaking and campaigning around mental health, Bryony Gordon shares the lessons she’s learned about the subject, and herself, along the way
Sitting opposite Prince Harry in January last year, I couldn’t quite believe how far I’d come. Here I was, in the Californian family home of royalty, with someone who wanted to talk to me because of my experience with mental health, rather than in spite of it. Even after 10 years of writing about the subject, I still find it surreal to be approached by high-profile people, invited to events or even given awards for something I spent so many years trying to hide.
I never set out to become a mental health activist. In fact, I first wrote about my own experience out of desperation. Ten years ago, conversations around the subject were rarely discussed in public. But I knew there must be other people who felt like I did, so I wrote about my experience in my Telegraph column. Thousands reached out in response.
My own mental health journey began when I was 12. Although I wasn’t aware what it was at the time, I had a condition known as Pure O, a form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which involves distressing, intrusive thoughts as well as repetitive behaviours. People often use OCD as a colloquial term for tidiness, but that’s never how my symptoms have presented. I thought I was going to die, or that I had done something truly terrible and forgotten about it. I was washing my hands obsessively and repeating specific phrases. By the time I was 18, the stress was causing my hair to fall out. I developed bulimia. Then, as I entered my 20s, using alcohol and drugs became my coping mechanisms.
Part of the problem with mental illnesses is that they thrive by lying to you. They tell you that you don’t have a problem, or that you’re alone and no one’s going to understand what you’re going through. It’s only by breaking through those lies that you can move towards recovery. I hid what was really happening and, from the outside,
I seemed fine, with a happy life and a successful career. But the truth was very different. I struggled with depression and was drinking heavily. The only way I was able to take what I was going through seriously was to put it out to the world. In some ways, that felt easier than sitting those close to me down and telling them what was really going on.
The response from that first article showed me just how many people were in the same boat, and I saw how much these conversations were needed.
I started writing regularly about my mental health and the more I wrote, the more I learned about myself.
I eventually went sober in 2017 as a direct consequence of talking about my mental
