So I have decided to do a fairly in depth history of my experiences in the world of depression and anxiety. It will be done over a number of parts or episodes if you will.

Hopefully it may help others deal with their own issues or it will just let others gain a better understanding of it all.

So with out much further ado, here it is for your reading pleasure. Enjoy!

My name is Joe, I am a 27 year old ‘artist’ (The Anxious Artist) and I have suffered with clinical depression and anxiety for over 10 years now. I first started feeling down/ill at the age of 15 but I was not clinically diagnosed with depression and anxiety until the age of 17. This was because I would hide it at all costs from family and friends as why should I be unhappy, I had a great life.

I believe this had influenced my GCSE results and by this point my A level studies had been hugely affected after being an above average student. Instead of attending classes I would simply walk off the school bus and head out into some near by fields and walk alone for the school day with my ipod. In fact it was a Sony MP3 player, looked kind of like a pebble, I didn’t want to conform man!!

So after eventually being caught out by my mother, achieving terrible grades at A level and thinking I was doomed, never able to amount to anything I started on some counselling (which I hated) and Citalopram with the dosage slowly being increased over a few months.

After a short time on medication for the first time, I was starting to feel a lot better, and as it is widely known exercise is also a great tool for over coming depression, so I went of to college to study sports coaching and got my self fit and played a lot of football. Now feeling a lot more confident and achieving high grades at college I applied to Southampton Solent University to study Applied Sports Science, and during the last year of college and the start of uni I was slowly coming off of the medication.

However, by the start of year two at university the dark cloud was forming again, and I was not sleeping, eating poorly, gaining weight, tninking about suicide and missing lectures and hand ins. By the time the university had realised that I was ill and not just getting the balance of work and a social life wrong it was too late. I dropped out, barely saying goodbye to some great friends as I felt I couldn’t explain the situation to them…….

End of part 1

Any questions? Just leave a comment and I will do my best to respond.