I've lived with depression and anxiety for most of my life. Not the "feeling a bit down" kind that people talk about casually, or the "bit nervous before a presentation" kind. The kind that swallows you whole. The kind where brushing your teeth requires more energy than you can locate anywhere in your body. The kind where you wander around in a daze, standing in the middle of a room unable to remember why you're there, unable to feel anything except dread — while the rest of the world carries on around you as though everything is perfectly normal.

I'm writing this because I believe that when we talk openly about mental illness, we take away some of its power. And because I want you to know that the person behind this website isn't writing from a textbook. I'm writing from my heart, mind, and soul.

The Early Years

My mental health story began way back in 1978 when I was 10 years old...

I had what most would describe as a happy childhood. However, a couple of pivotal events that occurred just before puberty kicked in caused significant trauma that played out through my adolescent years and beyond. I kept these events to myself, but the buried trauma manifested as physical symptoms in my body — I began to experience chronic stomach pains (eventually diagnosed as IBS), and I was having repeated panic attacks. My body was speaking the language my mouth couldn't.

Adolescence: When Everything Accelerated

The panic attacks — they called them "hyperventilation fits" back then — began when I was twelve years old. The first one happened at school. Somebody gave me a paper bag to calm down my breathing. I was too embarrassed to tell my parents. When a friend's mother mentioned it to my mum in the street, I was mortified. The panic attacks continued throughout my teens and into my twenties, usually triggered by stress and anxiety. At sixteen, a classmate offered me a cigarette during an episode, saying it might calm my breathing. It did — or my mind told me it did. That's how a thirty-year smoking habit began.

Puberty hit me hard. My breasts developed far sooner and far larger than anyone else's, and the boys at school made sure I knew it. They'd try to undo my bra strap in class. They nicknamed me "Dolly" and shouted it in crowded corridors. They watched me play netball and shouted obscene things when I ran. I gave up all the sporting activities I had previously enjoyed and excelled at. I begged my mum for a breast reduction, repeatedly, for years. She wouldn't allow it. I eventually saved up and had one at fifty — and it was the best birthday present I ever gave myself.

I also developed a spider phobia after a genuinely traumatic incident — waking to find a spider crawling up my leg, the very one my dad had told me was "more scared of me than I was of it." A similar thing happened years later, again when I was in bed and vulnerable, this time on my face. To this day, I cannot open windows in case they come inside.

When I was sixteen, my family moved from Birmingham to the East End of London. Everything was different. I dropped my accent, reinvented myself, and — somewhere in all of that upheaval — realised I could use my sexuality to feel powerful. At the time, it felt like taking control. Looking back, it was the beginning of a pattern of self-destructive behaviour that would take years to understand.

At seventeen, my world imploded. My parents were fighting. My mum had a breakdown. My dad eventually moved out. During that period, I spent as little time at home as possible, staying at my boyfriend's bedsit, where I was introduced to weed and drank too much. Then I discovered my boyfriend (the love of my life) had cheated on me. I walked in on them. The emotional pain was unlike anything I'd experienced before.

The night before my eighteenth birthday — which was also the morning of my A Level English Literature exam — my mum went missing. I didn't sleep. I sat the exam in a state of shock and got an E, when I'd always achieved As and Bs. Both of my university offers were conditional. Neither was met.

Young Adulthood: Searching for Something

Between the ages of sixteen and twenty-four, my life was chaotic. Several traumatic events happened around this time, that I didn't tell anyone for years. I can’t go into those here, as some of them involved people whose privacy I obviously need to respect and protect.

Throughout my twenties, I suffered terribly with endometriosis - a painful gynaecological condition that resulted in three laparoscopic surgeries. I terminated two unplanned pregnancies I was ill prepared for, each one carrying its own weight of guilt and grief. I entered relationships with the wrong people and sabotaged the ones that might have been right. I couldn't understand why, once in a settled relationship, my sexual desire would completely shut down — a pattern that baffled and tormented me for years.

At twenty-five, I finally went to university. During my first year, I was in a relationship with a an older man I met whilst working at a pub to support myself through my studies. He was an alcoholic and was prone to violence on occasion. More trauma.

In 1996, I gave birth to my beautiful daughter — an emergency caesarean after a traumatic labour. Soon after, I found myself alone and homeless with a baby to care for. I stayed with my mum and stepdad in a tiny mobile home, sleeping on a sofa bed, until I found a flat.

I fell into a relationship with a kind man from work — too quickly, too vulnerably. He proposed. I accepted for the wrong reasons: security for my daughter, primarily. When I realised the mistake, I called it off.

Eventually, I went back to university, finished my degree, completed my teacher training, and embarked upon a series of stressful teaching jobs. In 2000, I met someone with whom I would remain in a relationship for 11 years - a record length of time for me. But in 2001, a smear test picked up early cervical cancer, and I was advised to have a total hysterectomy. I had always wanted two children, but it wasn’t to be.

After the hysterectomy, something shifted permanently. I became menopausal, quite literally, overnight. I started having migraines — something I had never suffered from before. The hot flushes were intolerable. I felt more physically ill and more fatigued than ever. I came to see sex as the source of nearly every painful thing that had happened to me — the family breakdown, the abuse I cannot discuss here, the shame, the surgeries, the terminations, the cancer... My libido simply evaporated, and I became, for all intents and purposes, asexual. It was as though my body had finally said: “enough.”

My response to all this was to bury myself in my work. I became obsessive about it. I was a workaholic, often working 16-18 hours a day, sleeping only 2-3 hours a night. I would go so far to say that I was addicted to work. And, of course, no addiction is sustainable in the long term.

What Goes Up Must Come Down

The years of obsessive work and the chronic stress that accompanied it inevitably led to physical and mental burnout. In 2009, I was diagnosed with ME/CFS. The chronic fatigue, pain, and cognitive fog that resulted from the burnout were devastating in their own right — but the depression that had been a recurring presence since adolescence also deepened significantly during this period. And it was the depression that truly frightened me. Not the sadness, but the emptiness.

I know what it feels like to lose the will to live. Not in a dramatic, cinematic way, but in a quiet, grinding way — where simply existing takes more effort than you can justify. Where getting out of bed feels like an act of defiance against a universe that seems fundamentally pointless. Where the only emotions available to you are fear, dread, guilt, shame, and an overwhelming desire to disappear.

I've experienced derealisation — episodes where the world becomes completely unreal, as though you're watching your life from behind glass. Everything goes flat. Your own voice sounds like it belongs to someone else. People speak to you and you can hear the words, but they don't land. It can be a terrifying experience.

Mine was/is often an existential depression — the kind that isn't caused by any specific event but by the crushing weight of life's apparent meaninglessness. The kind where you look at the world with painful clarity and think: What is any of this for? Where Tolstoy's words feel like they were written specifically about you: "It is possible to live only as long as life intoxicates us; once we are sober we cannot help seeing that it is all a delusion."

I collected quotes about meaninglessness the way other people collect holiday photos. I devoured philosophy, existentialism, anything that articulated the void I felt inside. It wasn't academic curiosity — it was a desperate search for someone, anyone, who understood and could in some way articulate what I was experiencing.

Finding a Way Through

I've been on antidepressants since 1999. They don't cure anything, but they raise the floor just enough to make other things possible. I've taken Prozac, Citalopram, Sertraline, and Mirtazapine for depression, and Propranolol for anxiety. Medication alone was never the answer — but without it, I'm not sure I could have accessed the things that were.

Immersing myself in the arts - music and drama, particularly - greatly helped me through my 30s, and for several years I became very involved in organising and facilitating youth projects that used the arts as a vehicle for coping with mental health issues. But my OCD tendencies led me to overindulge in this work at the expense of my own mental health, ironically. It became clear that I needed a different approach to my whole life.

The turning point, for me, was CBT. But it was a very long, drawn-out turning point rather than a sharp about-turn. And it certainly didn't happen overnight.

My journey with CBT began when I was referred to the NHS Depression & Anxiety Service (DAS) service in 2010, initially for anxiety management and panic attacks. I was sceptical. I'd been living with these problems for so long that I'd come to see them as part of who I was — not something that could be changed by filling in worksheets. I made up my mind that CBT wasn’t for me, and that it was futile to even try.

Then, in 2011 and 2014, I attended ME/CFS and Fibromyalgia support groups, both of which adopted a CBT-based approach and I found this helpful as the sessions gave me coping strategies for dealing with chronic pain and fatigue. I was finally able to see how pain, fatigue and depression overlapped. The peer support was also invaluable — being around people who actually understood, who didn't need me to explain why I couldn't just "pull myself together."

Once the support came to an end, I tried to persevere with the tools but it was difficult and I eventually fell back into old habits and unhealthy behavioural patterns. I forgot about the CBT. This meant that I was ill-prepared to cope with the distress caused by the death of someone close and other negative life events that occurred during 2018 — a set of events that sent me spiralling and culminated in a huge mental health crisis.

Once again, I was offered more extensive CBT sessions to help me through. This time I really tried to overcome my scepticism and stick with the principles. It was hard, genuinely hard, to sit with a therapist and pull apart the thinking patterns I'd relied on for decades. But I had an excellent CBT counsellor who was an advanced practitioner and this helped a lot. We explored the origins of my mental health problems more deeply this time, and I began to see how the CBT principles gave me something I'd never had before: a rational framework for understanding my own mind. The vicious cycles that kept me stuck — I could actually see them, mapped out on paper. The cognitive distortions that felt like reality — I learned to name them, challenge them, and slowly, painstakingly, they began to loosen their grip. It was working!

I still had/have difficult days. I still lived/live with chronic pain and fatigue. I still had/have periods where the old existential dread surfaces and the world feels pointless and flat. And just last year I returned to CBT therapy (this time with Talkworks) after I began to slip once again. After that most recent batch of therapy ended, I made a conscious decision that I would never be caught short again. I made a promise to myself that I would organise my CBT toolkit and start actually living and maintaining the principles it had taught me to the best of my ability.

I still don’t have a perfect life or flawless mental health. Nobody does. But I do have a solid set of practical tools which I have organised into a ‘toolbox’, so that I know exactly which tool I need to reach for at any given moment. This might be whenever I feel myself spiralling into a deep depression. Or whenever I feel unable to cope with a distressing situation outside of my control. Or whenever I feel like a total failure and that I have let people down. Or whenever I feel a panic attack beginning. Or whenever I experience terror at the thought of a spider entering my living space.

I now have language for what's happening to me. I have strategies that work — not perfectly, not every time, but often enough to make the difference between being consumed by my illness and being able to live alongside it.

Why I Built ChatCBT

I created ChatCBT because I know what it's like to be in that dark place and not have the words for what's happening to you. I know what it's like to feel that nobody understands, that nothing will help, that you're beyond reach.

You're not.

The resources on this site are the things I wish I'd had 40 years ago, 30 years ago, 20 years ago — clear, honest, evidence-based explanations of the techniques that have genuinely helped me, alongside interactive versions of the tools themselves. I have realised that I can put my past teaching experience to good use by communicating to others the valuable lessons I have learned. And I can also use my strong organisational skills to help others to organise their CBT tools into a personalised, actionable tool box that will be at their fingertips whenever they need it most.

I'm not a therapist. I'm someone who has lived with depression, anxiety, panic attacks, phobias, OCD, hypersensitivity, and (most likely) ADHD for most of my life, and who has found — through CBT, through medication, through the support of people who care, and through sheer bloody-minded refusal to give up — that things can get better.

Not perfect. Better. And better is enough.

Read more about my mission.