My story so far
I’ve had to “out” myself as mentally ill to a number of different colleagues in the past and I’ve found it never gets easier. I’d always been awkward and nervous, a worrier, a perfectionist. I was diagnosed with generalised anxiety in my second year at university; I was diagnosed with depression just after I graduated, and only six weeks from the start of my PGCE. I was put on anti-depressants and terrible at committing to attending counselling. I first had that "mental health" conversation during my PGCE and I was terrified. What if they felt I’d lied? What if they felt I was looking for sympathy? What if they said I shouldn't be a teacher? My course leader, my mentor and my placement coordinator were wonderfully supportive. What is strange is that in a classroom I perform, I become a pantomime character of myself and just act my way through it: most of my anxiety comes from interacting with the people who really can judge me, that is other adults.
I took my first job in a school I’d trained in with an amazing Head of Department; Kate had known me through my training and had been my mentor for a while, she’d worked in teaching for over twenty years so when she warned me I knew I had to listen.
“Look, we’re supportive. We’ll help you out and protect you. But outside of the department they’ll use your mental health as a way to get rid of you.”
And I watched it happen. I watched an experienced colleague be signed off, then hit by lesson observation, book scrutinies, drop ins from the Head even when there was no way the Head was just walking past (my colleague taught in a prefab hut on the edge of the school site).
I was luckily on a temporary contract which made me leaving the toxic situation a little easier. Kate helped me through the application but my anxiety kept getting in the way. Do I tick the “disabled – including mental health conditions” box on application forms? Do I not? To leave it blank was to lie. To fill it in felt like sticking a target on me saying “Hey, this lady here? She shouldn’t be hired”. And every time I was rejected for a job, every time I wasn’t asked to interview I convinced myself that it was because I had been honest and declared that I was the one in four adults who struggled with a mental health condition. After six interviews and goodness knows how many applications, and even more abandoned forms, I secured a job. I knew I was leaving the school and the situation filled me with dread – what if I was jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire?
When I got to my new school I was hesitant to open up. At times I think it is the ‘accusatory’ language used when mental health was brought up. I had to inform my NQT coordinator that I couldn’t be recorded teaching because the whole process would send me into an anxiety riddled spiral; instead of a “That’s terrible” or a “Would you like us to observe you another way?” the statement was “Have you declared this on your fitness to teach?” Strangely, yes, yes I had. Because my anxiety didn’t want me to add ‘liar’, to reasons I struggle to like myself.
And I can understand a school’s hesitation because everyone’s mental health is so personal and unique, it can be triggered by any small thing that to a healthy person might seem nonsense. One of my friends has suffered from the joke-that-wasn’t-a-joke-because-it-was-told-at-the-worst-time – strangely on a bad day I don’t appreciate being told I’m a failure for not
having the right number of photocopies. My anxiety is driven by a desire to be perfect, to prove I’m good enough and to not give anyone a reason to see me as less than perfect. And that’s hard in a job where you are so accountable for things that are beyond your control.
My life would be so much easier, and my mental health in a much stronger position, if I could accept that I was being judged on my performance alone – but in reality I’m being judged on an imperfect sum of my performance plus a child’s performance. I’m working every hour I can to prove I’m good enough and to do right by the kids so they don’t look back and wish they’d done more, or that I’d done more, or that I’d cared more and that I’ve tried my hardest when those difficult conversations happen after results day. But there’s only so much beating your mental health can take when the revision materials you’ve worked so hard on to help kids to succeed are openly refused by students, especially when they are the same students that your superiors want to know why you’re predicting them beneath their target grade. And there’s only so many times you can be asked “Well, what are you going to do?” when a kid is only in 45% of your lessons. And there’s only so many times you can give the same piece of feedback before you start to question your life choices.
One of the biggest challenges I face while teaching is having the resilience to bounce back, because once I’m rattled, I’m rattled completely. It takes one comment, one badly phrased email and my anxiety can bubble over. I received an email from the school nurse one day including the phrase “can I respectfully request” which sent me into a meltdown for about six hours because obviously I had offended her, and undermined her position, and I was never going to be able to walk into the medical room again and how was I going to socialise with the pastoral team because the school nurse went out with them… until she explained that she’d been panicking over saying it and was worried she’d sounded mean. When I questioned how I’d ended up on the monitoring and evaluation schedule four times in four working days I was told “We’ll come in as and when we need to”, which may be true, but did absolutely nothing to help my mental health. Cue a full blown wobble. Because I clearly was failing, I was letting people down, I was a cause for concern, I wasn’t good enough, I should quit before I get pushed, why am I a cause for concern, what have I done, which class is underperforming, who has suggested I’m not coping, this is because of X, of Y, of Z… And it continued.
A leaflet was left in my pigeon hole for the Education Support Partnership. It wasn’t just left in mine as some sort of scarlet letter, but every member of staff was given one which made me wonder why. How had we gotten to a situation where the thing that senior management felt the need to do was provide us with blanket information on how to access counselling? We need to start challenging the rhetoric of teaching. We need to move from the glorifying those who work themselves for hours and from the teacher blaming. We also need to stop this culture of the witch hunt, that a lot of people with diagnosed mental health conditions feel, that they’ve been open and honest and it’s become a reason to justify picking them to pieces.
How do I cope and what works for me?
Honestly, I somehow do. But I’m not sure how.
Sleep well: If you aren’t sleeping go to the GP – I was prescribed sleeping pills for a while, not that they worked, but even looking at my sleeping habits was enough to start to change things. I was guilty of using my phone before bed, that’s a huge no no, especially when I was just quickly checking a work email.
Work life Balance: Find your work life balance. I know for me work does not happen after 8.30pm on a school night and my bedside light is off by 10pm – for me that’s manageable and practical. Find your release. I do a dance class and every Friday night for two hours I dance, with a group of absolutely lovely women. I knit a lot. I read – I try not to read school work, instead I try to read stuff that doesn’t feel like it’s pseudo-work. There is much to be said about self-care for everyone, let alone teachers.
Take a Break: Take the time you need. Don’t power through until you burn out. Take a mental health day. I had to, and it saved me. I got sent home after crying at three different members of staff before 8am. I was broken, I couldn’t stand up straight, I’d deliberately worn a lot of make up to try to prevent me from crying. I went home and slept. Then cried. Then rung my mum. Then cried. Then slept. Then cried. Then got angry that my brain had done this to me. And I was back in school the next day. If I’d pushed on, if I’d broken in front of a classroom of kids I’d probably still not be back.
