Hi Stephanie, I've been following this blog for a little while and I really like the texts and extracts you post (and you write really well, based on your new blog) - so thank you for that! I have a question that is quite personal, feel free to ignore it. Sorry to hear that you're dealing with a mental illness - I know that it can be terribly difficult to handle, especially in regards to other people. I was wondering if you'd been able to receive good support for it at Oxford? - Em.
Hi! So it really does depend on your nationality and severity of mental illness. There is a rather large university counselling service where you can get appointments with a psychiatrist for free, but I’ve found the NHS to be very, very slow, with a lot of guilt-tripping along the way about treatment – despite the fact that I’ve been treated intermittently for what I have since the age of 13, I still had a GP warn me that on medication I would gain weight. (This was said three times. As if it was literally the worst thing that could happen.) The psych referral I received also took 3 weeks, was scheduled for the exact time of my last exam, was cancelled because the doctor couldn’t show up, was cancelled again because the hospital thought it was me who hadn’t been able to show (???) and now I’m just fed up and out of the system bc I would rather let mental illness slowly ravage me than have the NHS do it instead.
But this is only my experience. And I come to it as a person who was first treated medically for mental illness against her will, and who has had some really, really bad experiences. If you’re already based in the UK it’s probably the same as anywhere else. I didn’t have much support back in the US; people don’t have it here in the UK; I have even less as an international student. I have friends whose continual, years-long battle with the UK health system has moved me to tears of anger, but similarly there are others that apparently have really good experiences. The fact that the good experiences of the latter are usually from sufferers of anxiety or unipolar depression – the more common and less stigmatised disorders than, say, more severe mood or personality disorders – is probably not coincidence.
