For the record: my 2017 nervous breakdown
By Hattie Butterworth
Seven years ago at this time I was beginning to experience the start of my first nervous breakdown. I was working as a Steward at the BBC Proms and within the space of two weeks, I was unable to function anymore. Everything I had clung to in my life to had vanished, replaced by what felt like a sinking hole of panic and emotional pain. The experience of my life breaking into small fragments.
What a ‘nervous/mental breakdown’ is can be hard to define, and I’m sure it’s different for everyone. What I know is that the first time I experienced it, I knew it to be a breaking down of my entire self. The word ‘breakdown’ felt so accurate to describe the feeling in my brain of nothing holding itself together. Even on reflection, it’s impossible to come close to knowing how to describe it.
‘Saying you’re having a “breakdown” will always be part of our dialect. Sadly, many people will use it without really knowing its true definition.’
I would experience attacks of doom, an intense feeling of it ‘all being over’ and complete terror being let loose in my head. I would feel it brewing throughout the day and as the Prom finished up at around 10pm, the wave would crash down on me, leaving me helpless and crying on the floor of the disabled toilet in the Albert Hall. ‘I don’t know what’s happening',’ I would cry on the phone to my parents. ‘I’m falling apart, my brain is so scary.’
I can’t remember what else I said, but I spent each night clinging onto Pinterest quotes and YouTube videos about breakdowns and anxiety. Then waking up, groggy with fear and unsure whether I could survive another day. There was one day in early September I felt my brain completely couldn’t go on. I got the train up to Scotland, clinging to meaning and light in anything to stop the waves of dark thoughts, and stayed with my parents for a month without my phone.
The panic/existential/suicidal thought attacks continued at night in Scotland as I tried to claw my life and identity together. The end of my first year, I was still a teenager at just 19 years old, but afraid this was where my life would surely end. ‘You’re not here,’ my mum would say. ‘I know’ I’d reply, my body shaking with shame.
I could do nothing other than make cups of tea and try desperately to feel grateful for them. Sometimes I’d have two minutes where the pain wouldn’t be so bad, and I’d write about it. How relief felt and how even now, in my deepest pain, there were still waves.
I read a book called Self-Help For Your Nerves by Claire Weekes, written in 1962. I got it from the community library in Bettyhill. My dad told me that it had helped his mum in a difficult time with her ‘nerves’ so I took it out and read it cover-to-cover in an afternoon. It was the only thing I was able to focus on. Dr Claire was honest about the experience of a nervous breakdown and how it might make you feel. She got me, she knew where I was. Depression, anxiety, OCD, trauma, suicidal ideation and overwhelm all wrapped up in one with no clear cause.
We aren’t supposed to use the term ‘mental breakdown’ anymore, but the term ‘modern mental health crisis’ seems to have replaced it. It’s not a diagnosis, but a description of an experience. One thing most descriptions of ‘mental breakdown’ agree on is that it stops you from functioning - stops life in its tracks. I have never felt so utterly tackled to the ground by something mental than I did in late summer 2017. Piecing myself back together took the best part of six months, until another mental health episode followed.
This second experience the following February wasn’t a breakdown in the same way. In obsessive thought spirals of early 2018 I was still able to function, albeit on a lower level, and every day wasn’t surrounded by that traumatic mental pain of the summer before.
Coming out of the darkness was like learning to speak again, but without knowing how to communicate it to my friends and colleagues at college. I wanted to be like everyone else and was embarrassed at how little I had been able to practice over the summer. I wanted the cello to take over, as it often had in the past, and mask all the pain. But the shock and incessant hell of mental illness made that impossible and relapse inevitable.
Saying you’re having a ‘breakdown’ when describing a minor inconvenience might always be part of our dialect. Many people will use the phrase without really knowing its true definition. And many of us use it comically, though we know the horror of the reality of that word, and how miraculous it feels to have survived its wrath. I’m alive, 7 years later. It feels like a big anniversary to mark.