What Are The Symptoms of a Mental Breakdown? The Day I Snapped (Mental Health Doc) | Only Human

[Music] you know how do you explain to your husband you're having these crazy thoughts that you can't go back to work i simply knew when i started addressing what was happening that i wasn't going to do it i wasn't going to be able to do it anymore i was going to have to stop and i was going to have to change something fairly dramatically it was like a wave came over me and i just lost control of myself and i just came and came in sat down and burst into tears you feel that you have no choice so you put on the acting face and you go in there as if everything's wonderful and underneath is just nothing but a very very runny wobbly jelly there was no reason for me to get up in the morning there was no value in what i was doing therefore dead seemed like a very good option stress is on the increase affecting over a fifth of the working population this is the story of five professionals who were pushed to the limit by the pressure of work you can imagine the demands of modern life nowadays people are expected to work at a much faster pace there are many many jobs that people are trained for but not allowed to do so people aren't fulfilling their full skill potentials if you like um social support at work and social support generally society is changing those kind of things are breaking down all of these lead to people actually suffering more stress and eventually starts moving on to more illness [Music] in britain work is the third most common cause of stress after bereavement and financial worries employers lose nearly 7 million working days each year to stress related illnesses yet many people are unaware that their complaints are symptomatic of stress i wanted to be a social worker from the time i was 15. i chose my a levels on the basis of wanting to be a social worker being a basic grade social worker was enough i was expected to become an accountant a housekeeper a home care manager an assessor for people having to play so many different roles within a very short period of time having those roles changed without proper guidance without proper training is exhausting it's exhausting emotionally it's exhausting physically and at the end of the day you burn out i burned out after a particularly traumatic visit to the client's house i found my hands and my feet covered in x-men which i've not suffered from since i was 10 years old or something and when i say covered i mean i'm absolutely covered so i went to the doctors and explained what had happened and he said you're not going back and that was it and it was as simple as that linda was told to take time off but after six months bored and restless she was determined to go back to work i think she was hoping that she put the past few months behind her that she'd be able to return to work and obviously return to work be stable not be ill and she was upbeat she was bubbly effervescent um and i felt fingers crossed things should go well for her [Music] i'd led quite a sheltered life i'd gone to a nice school and to suddenly go from that having expected to go into farming or something like that to go into london where it was all sort of high fly and posh cars and whining and dining at night i mean it was it was a bit glamorous i suppose because you're used to earning quite a lot of money it's very hard to suddenly not have that money or to expect you won't have that that sort of money so it was it was um it was one of the sort of jobs where you could never leave it until it decided to leave you i think [Music] from above you're getting performed perform perform targets targets targets and i think you've got to be a very special kind of person to cope with that and i don't think most of us can i remember when i first joined the company you know we used to go out for an hour and a half lunches and meet clients and have a great time and towards the end we actually had sort of no lunch at all we've got sandwiches in and just worked all the way through if you read any articles from anywhere everybody thinks your optimum efficiency for sort of six hours maybe eight so when you're working 12 or 14 there's a huge tail off your efficiency from being okay doesn't just sort of gently go down it goes so you're making more mistakes you're making more mistakes because you're more tired you're then worried about making more mistakes than there you are and it just sort of catches up on itself and gets faster and faster and you know long hours do not work decisions up in london are instantaneous and on the one push of a calculator if you've got a decimal point in the wrong place you've probably done a deal and lost it could be 200 000 pounds i mean huge money just on one press of one button and and that again cannot be good for you i mean it's it's everything is just it just everything is tension everything is stress and speed it was all i could do to make myself get out of bed to face what i knew was inevitably going to happen that day and yet it is the instinct it's something again you come back to it it's something you've done for 23 years you feel that you have no choice so you put on the acting face and you go in there as if everything's wonderful and underneath is just nothing but a very very runny wobbly jelly [Music] but you don't realize the cumulative effect is having in the body and in the mind probably is more important [Applause] you used to get home at night and go to sleep and you do wake up absolutely dripping wet with sweat and fear and when you're in the job it was just constant sort of a great lump in the sort of top of the chest there which you would just sort of i suppose you got used to it you actually got it was there but if you did sit and think it was certainly there like a huge great lump in the middle it's very difficult to cope with it was the relationship i think with with the pupils that made the job that you had these young people and you could influence them you could inspire them in your subject [Music] it was the juggling of you know so many different balls so many different responsibilities so many new initiatives um in schools and a school that is successful wants to keep improving and that i felt increased the pressure on all staff and senior staff so on top of all your daily responsibilities there would be new things to look at new things to implement i have wonderful parents but they're they're quite academic they're very successful dad's been a successful head teacher you know for i don't know 30 years my mother is um is a mental health commissioner she's been a jp she's you know done work at cambridge university so it's a very high powered very clever um and i couldn't believe that these people could love somebody who wasn't successful therefore i had to be successful i had to be you know i had to be really good at what i did the first blip i think my doctor would call it depression initially happened that the may after i'd started the new job in january and i think that was almost sheer exhaustion of all that change and of trying to get up to full speed when i i didn't know the people i was working with i was i didn't know the systems in this new school and yet i expected myself to perform brilliantly from the word go eleanor had pushed herself too hard she was prescribed antidepressants and sought long-term counseling not recognizing the severity of her situation she was back at work within a week i didn't think anything was different except there was this scary idea that this could happen but it you know it was only like a little blip and continued then in my job working hard taking on more responsibility and so on in many ways when i think back about it now the lifestyle was great um it was very boozy which suited me down to the ground i knew you know hundreds of people from the various departments that i've worked in and so the local bars around that area if i walked into any of them i'd know enough people to go and have a beer with [Music] the culture of of um the office in the company that i worked for was people were there pretty well from dawn till dusk if not before and after um and you're sat there you know in front of a bank of five computer screens relaying you news and information and share prices from all over the world you are sat in a chair with your feet up on the desk and the telephone hanging off your shoulder for 12 hours a day the principal stresses involved in that type of work is the feeling of being permanently evaluated and the sort of competitive edge and if you suddenly found that you were sort of falling behind in one way or another you know that's quite an unpleasant feeling if everyone else around you is doing better in terms of the amount of business that they're generating or the amount of money that they're making or whatever it be it was stressful i mean many people are well suited to it and and they perhaps enjoy the stress or they just don't get stressed but i i found being permanently analyzed and permanently feeling that i had to succeed at what i was doing and i had to try and be better than the next person or as good as the next person very difficult [Music] i felt a physical pain in my chest a lot of the time that awful sinking feeling you have when you realize you know you get in your car and you you're driving off on holiday and you realize you've left the stove on that sort of god you know what have i done and you have to whatever you know those types of things that's how i felt a lot of the time um you know butterflies in your stomach and and i definitely felt often quite uncomfortable in my chest in fact i went to um have a couple of medicals and they sort of warned me about that my liver wasn't working as well as it should probably because i was just boozing too much um i don't think i was boozing because i wanted to get away from stress but it was a part of the lifestyle that you go out and have a few beers and so i definitely felt that my health was suffering it was suffering it's on paper i mean it was it was a real thing my family noticed it and i think my friends noticed it too i certainly wasn't happy with what i was doing and and it showed or it began to show more and more i certainly wasn't healthy and i think if i had continued you know it would have probably got worse my biggest love is being out in the fresh air i've always been a dairy farmer i don't know that i would want to be an arable farmer on a with all the tractor work and such on dairy farms there's quite a lot of variety you never think it's going to be you and i never thought it was going to be me i i didn't think i got any big problems we were financially stable i got a good marriage my family were fine i got the best staff i could ever hope for on the place i got friends every i thought everything was fine i did i did anyway stress caught lynn completely unawares he ran his award-winning dairy herd supported by his wife and two children lin's long hours and dedication were to bring about his downfall farming is a 24-hour day thing his day began at four o'clock and it finished about nine in the evening usually obviously he came in for coffee and came in for lunch but it was relentless [Laughter] he was very stressed and didn't have time to go walking and all the things we'd started to do he was making excuses not to do because farm work came first again jill used to say she said i was getting too fussy if i had an idea it had to be done there and then even if it was halfway through a meal things like this but i don't as i say i don't know whether anyone else noticed anything about me often people pinpoint a nervous breakdown to one particular event as a clinician when i look at people you find that they've brought loads and loads of problems with them that have been building up to that point and what they're saying is the particular event is one particular precipitating event that everyone latches on to often that is the thing that pushes them just a little bit over the edge but it's like the straw that breaks the camel's back it's rare that that one event that has caused everything elena struggled on at her new school for two years but the burden of her workload finally became too much i don't know why it happened that day i don't think there was anything significant about what happened the day that i my engine broke down you know it i think it was just the fact that i had this time completely run out of steam it was a friday and i can't remember anything particular about the morning i probably did some teaching but i remember i was quite worried about a meeting in the afternoon we had a working committee on learning styles and i remember saying to my colleague i feel this is the straw that's going to break the camel's back that it was for me i felt involvement in this additional committee was just one thing too much i was with the head and myself and a number of other staff and i just remember thinking to myself i'm not coping with this i'm just i'm not coping um with this situation at all and at one stage i asked to be to be excused and went to the loo and cried and i didn't know what was happening [Music] i can't remember the journey home i used to remember the feeling of relief at leaving work and it wasn't just oh that's another day over i can go home to whatever but it was like it was like this armor had been there and you were having to hold this armor up all day and then you could be you you could you could get in the car and you could be you don't ask me why i couldn't be me in my work um and just that relief but yes and and coming home and you know how do you explain to your husband you're having these crazy thoughts that you can't go back to work you know you're just such a wreck um you're so collapsed inside it is it's a feeling of collapse it's that you've no more strength you can't do it anymore [Music] like eleanor simon tried to conceal the stress he was feeling for years but he too was delaying the inevitable i was very snappy very short-tempered my children who i love dearly i'm sure must have hated me at times because i sort of didn't want to do anything with them didn't want to go out i just wanted to sit and chill out so that all starts to add the stress all the way through and it just becomes a cumulative effect until somebody's got to give and there's a dirty great bang and it all goes wrong [Applause] i think the day that it all finally went wrong and all the sort of pigeons came home to roost as it were was when i went up in the train i got on the train i wasn't feeling good when i got up in the morning i was feeling very stressed about a couple of situations that i knew i had ongoing from the day before and i sort of was sort of clammy and a bit gray and sweating and unpleasant so i got halfway to work i blacked out on the train i got off the train to come home so i thought this just isn't right um and british rail blessed their cotton socks were absolutely stunning which was amazing they don't often get praised but i got back on the train at clapton junction come home i said to the chat next to me look i don't feel particularly good you know i'm not going to do anything horrible like throw up all over you but i'm not feeling right [Music] i did black out and when i came to there's a guard sitting next to me and um they'd actually called nine minutes it was waiting at saturn station to sort of whip whip me off the train and i got tested and they thought i'd had a heart attack and it was just stress it was just a i think they caught it or they call it executive burnout or something the hospital in sutton because i was very twitchy anyway the hospital in sutton was just like a it was just a scary place to be so i signed myself out of that and they got very upset when i signed myself out of there got a taxi home rang my wife and said i'm coming home because it's all gone horribly wrong blah blah she'd obviously completely flipped her lid because she thought i was signing out of hospital and i was having a heart attack and all this sort of thing so i got back here at which point the family doctor was standing in the kitchen as i walked through the door behind me i just was sort of confronted by my family doctor who then gave me the lecture of a lifetime how dare i sign myself out of hospital how dare i come back and it's like all these things i think when things go wrong there's only one place you want to be and that's home [Music] for lynn the farmer home and work were inseparable and the pressures became inescapable it happened in october which is quite a busy time of the year i'd gone to another farm to pick up some bags of feed and i intended to pick up 10 bags of feed [Music] when i got back here i found i'd only got eight and that seemed to um tip me over the edge he said i can't even count 10 or something silly and i said well everybody makes mistakes like you would say but he's always thought everything's his fault if it goes wrong which of course it isn't [Music] and he just sat down over there and he said i just can't cope any longer and burst into tears and um i said something like um you know don't worry and he said oh i've been feeling like this for ages it was like a wave came over me and i just lost control of myself and i just came it came in sat down and burst into tears i really didn't know what to do and we talked about him going to the doctor and he said no i'll be right in a minute he went straight upstairs to bed and was and did sleep actually straight away for ages but i had i had got him to say he'd go to the doctor because i thought i couldn't phone without his permission then anyway and so i did phone and so i was quite tearful on the phone to the receptionist and she was brilliant and said oh don't worry you know we'll fit him in and everything i then actually went and cried all over him as well which wasn't very nice but at least shows it showed i wasn't myself after eight weeks back in her job with long days of meetings and home visits linda was feeling pressurized again because i had had time off sick i was subject to very close personal supervision so although i had you know tens of years of experience under my belt whatever i was doing was being very closely scrutinized i had tried to sort out a situation within the hospital say that a gentleman would be able to leave and in fact go to a nursing home that gentleman should have left the hospital before i went on holiday when i returned from my holiday he was still in the hospital because of bureaucratic difficulties within the two systems between the social services and health authority at that point i knew i couldn't do this anymore that really was it enough was enough if i couldn't get somebody out of the hospital who'd been in there for months at a cost of seven eight hundred pounds a week for the sake of less than 100 pounds week worth of plastic tubing then i couldn't do anything i couldn't i really did feel as i couldn't achieve anything that that was absolutely it depression is a spectrum ranging from the mild depression which is almost like severe stress all the way up to such a severe illness that people stop eating they stop talking they virtually stop thinking and suicide is often one of the ultimate ends of depression about five to ten percent of people with severe recurrent depression will kill themselves my memory serves me right i had a row with my kids um had around with my partner and generally felt that there was no reason for me to get up in the morning there was no value in what i was doing therefore dead seemed like a very good option so dead was what i aimed for i had a large quantity of paracetamol and a bottle branding and after everybody had gone to bed i made myself a bed up in the lounge and then drank the brandy and ate the paracetamol and woke up a day later in the local hospital full of tubes and bits and pieces and was very very cross [Music] what i really wanted to be was in my nice little black hole when i wasn't in my nice little black hole i was in a hospital room so i was furious absolutely furious when you when you arrive at that sort of point in your life i mean it's not talking you want it's action you want it to stop and dead is the only real way that you can stop because what you're stopping is the experiences it's life you don't want to talk about it you know i've done the counseling bit and all the rest of it you don't want to keep repeating it no point so it's dead dead is it you know that the the sunday night feeling that people get where you know tomorrow's monday i noticed that something alarm bells started ringing for me when i noticed that actually earlier in the weekend perhaps after a year of doing the last job that i had um saturday i would be starting oh god sunday and then it's monday again and really by the end um by the last year that i was there i i had a sort of feeling of joy on a friday night that the week was over and almost instantly still the same evening almost in the same breath thinking oh god two days and i'm back here again and you i mean that's quite serious i mean when you really think about that you can't carry on doing doing that job you just can't it doesn't make sense ironically it was as i was starting to earn more money bonuses became quite exciting and and what have you that was when i really triggered in my mind that i had to get out and lots of people laugh at me about that because it seems kind of weird as you start to earn good money but i knew that as soon as i got used to that good salary and good bonus then you're on your career track and you can't escape or it becomes harder and harder and harder to escape with his health deteriorating and under a lot of stress it was time to get out or face a possible snap an opportunity arose when our company was bought by another company so i spoke to my boss and asked him what he thought was going to happen and he said to be honest i don't think many of us will survive this and i you know went like this and i thought great you know this is what i've always wanted i'll get voluntary redundancy i get redundancy i can you know leave and get paid to leave and then start with whatever else i feel like starting with [Music] the next day i came in and there was a big sign saying everybody from this department should go to the personnel department and i thought you know this is great this is it this is it and i went to my desk to take my coat off and there were some new business cards with my name on at my desk and my heart again just sank and i thought oh my god i'm i'm still here i'm still here and i just couldn't almost couldn't face it so i went upstairs and to the personal department and there was greeted by somebody who who said i'm afraid you know you're going to if you made redundancy you have to leave now and uh you know go through the exit interview and what have you and i was just grinning from year to year it was one of the best days of my life um it was really wonderful the worst days he sat just there in the chair staring at the carpet with his hands on his knees i think that was the worst time you know he wasn't doing anything or saying anything and i couldn't say anything that could possibly help i just felt useless and my self ex esteem was had gone um yeah useless a failure that's how i felt dreadful word it's not we don't mention it now i was really frightened as days went on because i didn't know how bad it was going to be and especially as he began to go a bit downhill to start with i did have a psychiatric nurse come around and that that did work very very well because somehow you can talk sometimes talk to someone you don't know better than people you know i did keep a diary after january or so so as i could um see how i was progressing but i think the the couple of months before that i i hadn't got much recollection off at all i said to jill what a pity i didn't keep an account of the journey back but who wants to read about carpet staring and worry beads karen the community nurse came in the afternoon says i'm doing nicely i'm going to give one more visit then says we'll see how i go i told her that i felt that i now hadn't got quite so much to talk about and that i felt that in itself was a good sign and she agreed lin's recovery has been slow with many setbacks but with the help of counselling and medication he is overcoming his depression race race [Music] after linda's suicide attempt out of immediate danger she was admitted to a local psychiatric hospital that was a useful space it was a useful time because it gave me time to not be with people they actually allowed me to be on my own until i was ready to start meeting with other people after 10 weeks linda was discharged and sent home on medication i think the whole experience i think has been really very damaging for the children um they've both been quite traumatized by it knowing that what your mother is saying in terms of behavior is i'm leaving you is incredibly difficult to deal with emotionally and although it was two years ago now and they they both are i think suspicious is probably a good word you know when i come home will she actually be there if she's not there why isn't she there if she is there is she going to be sprawled out somewhere having taken another massive overdose because she wants to die they don't know it's destabilized a great part of their life i think for linda the effects of stress were so severe that the family was unable to cope she and her partner eventually separated simon's way of dealing with such emotional turmoil was to blanket from his mind to be honest the immediate time after all this had happened i can't remember that clearly i think the brain just shuts down it doesn't want you to think about it afterwards all i know is everything was horrendous i mean the doctor tried to get me into all sorts of psychologists and psychiatrists and whatever and i mean i haven't got a lot of time for them to be honest certainly for me they didn't do the right things you know the antidepressants went on for a long long time and i never really know where they helped um i just was too scared to come off them in case they were helping so i stayed on those i think it was about two or three years which is a long time scaling the dose down after scaling it up and moving from one to another [Music] i think they said i should have six months off and you know i went to my boss and said i've got to have six months off which there was just you know forget it you know you can have a couple of weeks if you need it but that's it so that's more stress don't try and move it at all simon was only allowed three weeks off before he was forced back to work without time to recover he failed to cope and was eventually dismissed this is a job you've done for 23 years you can't just stop doing it it doesn't become it's not possible you can't think it's possible and it's not until somebody makes you do it by saying bye bye simon that you have to do it and i must admit the day it actually happened although i knew it was coming the day before you sort of building up to it it's all still horrible with the day they've actually said okay that's it you you're out of here you actually feel sort of the weight i'm sure i gained about three inches in height i sort of went sam sam but i had to for me pretend that everything was great and it wasn't great by any stretch of the imagination and it caused stress on every part of my personal life to such a degree that in the end my wife and i are separated i feel great guilt towards both my wife and particularly my children who at that time in my life they were about sort of 14 and 12. and that's a very important time for them and they obviously saw a dad who was totally unstable up and down like a yo-yo and bad temper some minutes not here a lot of the time and that's a guilt that you just got to live with sadly you can't do anything about it you can try to make it up to them and i've tried two cents but it's how big the scar is in them i don't know how they'll cope with it i don't know they seem to be coping with it very well and it's something i will always regret i suppose guilt regret the same sort of thing that you can't turn the clock back and do it again five days after eleanor's breakdown she was already looking for a new challenge to occupy her time i almost felt that if i if i stayed on the sick that i i wouldn't get up again there was that real fear and it was probably fear of this feeling of fear of failure again i had failed but i wasn't going to stay there we have quite a large house so i started talking to alan about you know could we do something like bed and breakfast and he was quite supposed to start with elena's pattern was when she felt uncomfortable feelings like being vulnerable being scared being scared that she was actually going to fail her way of being was just to launch herself into work and work so hard that you didn't have to feel anything so all she was doing really from my point of view was repeating her old pattern to start with i found it very very stressful i mean the first two guests i had were very very difficult it's been part of the learning process for me just to you know to learn to accept that this is not the hilton and it's not five star it's our home and it's it's an interesting experience when bookings were up elena was really high when bookings were down then it was the end of the world for her and she'd come and she'd talk about her business and what she was doing and so i was able to say to her well i wonder do you realize how strongly you're allying yourself with your business is there another way of stepping back and developing a life of your own so that you're not only defined by your work justin 2 has found a new line of work swapping the desk and computer for a workbench a grinder and a new life as a builder i've always had a thing about property i've always had a thing about doing things with my hands which is the one thing other than punching numbers into a calculator or into a keyboard on a computer uh the one thing you don't do in banking and also i have a small element of creativity i like to think anyway and it's nice to be able to employ that a bit in in my work as time went on and i was bumming and ironing and thinking about what i would be best suited to opportunities came up for me to do odds and lots of work for friends and it really just started from there and as soon as i got into it then when i met david my business partner who has been in this business for much longer than i have he was able to point me in the right direction a bit and it's it's a very different lifestyle but it suits me very well the one thing which you know inevitably you suffer from when you make a decision like like the one i made is money i mean that's that's everybody's principal concern i think probably is money you know where's the next mortgage payment going to come from well luckily for me i got paid to leave so i got a certain amount of money which has provided a cushion for me to move into a much lower scale of pay the first job that i did when i decided working for myself the tiny amount of money um i did a little bit of work for a friend of mine but that felt more real than any money that i'd ever earned before this is real money it was cash or it wasn't it was a check but you know i'd actually physically earned it i hadn't sat at a desk had a good month or a bad month or whatever and just received a you know a salary page taken to my account you know i'd had to physically work for it and that was great as you get older and you start to have children then there are implications about whether you can afford to raise them and whether you can afford to educate them in the way that you would hope to do and those are obviously big financial issues and those are concerns that i do have now but i'm confident that i'll conquer them one way or another and i want six children so i've got to do something pretty well about 10 years before i actually left the job i started the charity that i now run which is wildlife aid and i was sort of that was my relaxation i'd come home in the evenings and work with the charity till sort of one o'clock in the morning or do rescues and work all weekends but i needed the adrenaline to keep going so that's why i did that but as soon as i left work then i just took on this full time well those badges i come home to my roots now this is what i always wanted to do i dreamt about it and i'm doing it and every morning i get up and i actually quite look forward to it and even when the phone rings at two o'clock in the morning and somebody says i've run over a badge or something although it's a horrible thing to do i know i can do something about it i know i can make something better and i love doing it wildlife is a double whammy for me because i love animals and i think they're probably animals pets or whatever the best anti-stress machine you'll ever get in the world um i don't know how many people's lives they say but i should think millions upon millions having taken so long and earned big money and sort of done everything i wanted to do had better lifestyle than most i can now put something back the most disgusting badger in surrey don't bite daddy because it'll really if i get fed up with it here i can wander around the guard and i can i can go and do anything i want and that's the difference when you're being controlled by other people and you have no choice in what you do that's where the stress becomes unmanageable here if i don't like it in a way it might be an ego but it's mine so i can get up walk away and come back in caution last time feel a hell of a lot better what lots of nosh in there dad [Music] six months on lynn is still on medication but he is making a marked recovery with jill's help he couldn't have gone on like he was getting faster and faster more and more fussy more and more worried i couldn't see how he kept saying he was going to step back from the farm etcetera in three years and i couldn't see how that was going to happen the way he was going we do say now actually that it has done him a favor because it stopped him and he's starting again slowly jill's been fantastic i mean i'm bound to say that aren't i but she really has the first thing i noticed and this sounds as though he's a house husband but i promise you he's not i i'd been out and i came in and he was just doing the washing up and it was wonderful and i didn't realize how long he hadn't done anything like that for and i remember a really warm feeling thinking wow you know he's actually doing that because he just sat here while i got the milk got the papers got the logs lit the fire which isn't lynn you know it's just not [Music] eight months after his collapse lynn and jill are in the process of moving to the local village retirement has come three years early they have a new house and a new start he's talked about when we move he'll stop taking his tablets which the doctor wants him to do but he hasn't felt ready to do but you know just the last few days he said i think i will so it's all really positive stuff yeah [Music] the moment we've got so many places to go to and so much time to make up and be a little bit irresponsible perhaps you know come home late at night um now it's gonna be great it's gonna be great fun um we've got we've never sort of lived in a village or anything there's several societies and such we think that we can probably get into and just get a different life turn off the old one there's going to be the next chapter yeah linda has reluctantly come to accept that she will never go back to work but it has left a large hole in her life there was a huge multiplicity of roles in my life three years ago mom there isn't now it's very very very different and a housewife that's it [Music] i've never been just a housewife ever ever before days are very much about getting up going to the shop getting me newspaper doing the crossword fiddling around in the garden playing with the animals sorting them out making sure they're fed and watered there's food in the cupboard for the kids what's it really deciding to die i suppose it's the last taboo to be broken once you've done it and have lived you know that you can always do it again so not doing it it's probably more out of respect for the people around you and because one has a burning desire to be alive [Music] justin has completely transformed his life he is his own boss and his career as a builder is going well every angle of it is different it used to be ice very sedentary lifestyle this was more out here um and i you know i sat at a desk for 10 or 12 hours a day looked at computer screens and and uh you know got up to have lunch and sat back down again and now i sit down to have lunch and i stand up for the rest of the day and at the end of the day i feel you know physically exhausted but it's a great feeling i mean that's a lovely feeling i would be lying if i was to say to you that i now have a stress-free lifestyle i don't but i have a good lifestyle and i really really enjoy what i do now in complete contrast to before i i look forward on friday night to monday i want to get back to work again in a way i have two days now whereas before my day was work and then sleep now i have work and then i have you know the rest of the day which might mean you know down in the pub or whatever um and then sleep but there's a whole different segment in my life which almost didn't exist before i've definitely made the right decision you know i think there are opportunities in the world which enable you to be more in control of your self and and how you run things and how you do things and that's what i've achieved so i'm very pleased [Music] i saw an advert in the parish magazine which said professional office singer takes dedicated students and i thought well dare i i hadn't sung since i was at school um i thought well you know i pray god absolutely lousy voice but i'll i'll work at it and i want i really wanted to do it uh i was i it seemed a way of being able to express these emotions and i was feeling a lot of emotions [Music] oh [Music] eleanor in her old phase would have ended wanted to sing at covent garden i mean she wouldn't have stopped her anything settled for anything less but she must have a wonderful singing teacher who again enabled her to find her voice didn't judge it and i've never heard elena sing i don't know how she's at what her voice is like and i it doesn't really matter it's her voice [Music] [Music] oh [Music] come on this way my husband still says you know i wish we could have a foreign holiday more often but that's become far less important for me it's as if you can live every day rather than waiting for the holidays or waiting for the weekend hey come heel with the support of friends family counselor doctor not necessarily drugs you know i think everybody can find a way through [Music] our god [Music] oh [Music] you

Channel: Only Human

Views: 359,480

Keywords: Only Human, emotional resilience, mental breakdown symptoms, mental health awareness, mental health education, mental health insights, mental health perspective, mental health stigma, mental health support, mental health therapy, mental health treatment, mental wellness advocacy, mental wellness journey, mental wellness strategies, mental wellness support, mental wellness techniques, psychological crisis signs, stress management, stress management tips, work-life balance

Id: hZVyuGb81MM

Length: 49min 52sec (2992 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 17 2022