Ultimately, it’s about acceptance. Mental health issues can affect all of us.

Helena Young shares her story of experiencing high anxiety and burnout and touches on the tools and techniques that helped her get through it.

Helena Young has been a pharmacist for 15 years and works in the Education and Training sector at the Centre for Pharmacy Postgraduate Education (CPPE). In this podcast, she shares with us her experience of anxiety, and tips for others going through something similar.

In the first year that I was qualified, I was working in community pharmacy, and I had this episode of really high anxiety, to the point it was affecting me every day.

Prefer to read this blog? You can find a transcript of the audio below.

Hi, my name’s Helena and I’m a pharmacist who’s been qualified for about 15 years now, and I currently work in the education and training sector for CPPE.

In the first year that I qualified as a pharmacist, I was working in community pharmacy and I had this episode of really high anxiety to the point that it was affecting me every day. And this seemed to be triggered by two incidents that happened close together, so a little bump in my car, it was something quite minor and then a netball related injury, but for some reason these two things happening close together totally knocked my mental health off balance. And reflecting back, I think part of this was this sudden lack of exercise [which] has always been my stress relief, and this loss of a close social network, so my netball team. But also at that time I was in my first job after qualifying. I was living in a shared house with people I didn’t know that well, so I’d lost that social network that I’d had at university or even that I’d had in my pre-registration year. So I think the combination of those things really affected my mental health.

So, I was having this spiralling anxiety and I went to see my GP.

I was signed off work for a period of time and I was lucky enough to have a really supportive regional manager. I went speak to them and they were understanding and supported me to have the time off that I needed.

I also had a CBT referral, so that’s cognitive behavioural therapy, and this gave me the tools and techniques to help me manage that anxiety at that time. And I’ve used these tools and techniques time and time again to help me throughout my career. Also more recently during the pandemic when I was going through really high stress and what I now recognise to probably be burnout, I self referred to my local IAPT team. So that’s Improving Access to Psychological Therapies team, and I’ve got to say the technology has improved vastly since I first accessed CBT for support.

And this time around I was able to use an app, an online support to an individual in that IAPT team. So that was really helpful in terms of accessing the support as and when I needed it online. So when I look back and reflect on what helped me during those times, and I think the key first thing was just asking for help and it can be the hardest first step. For me, this was asking help through my GP. It was asking for help from my mum. I actually chose to move home temporarily so that I had that extra level of support, while my anxiety was particularly affecting my daily life. And the key thing at work was to find somebody that I could speak to. In my situation I was comfortable to go straight and talk to my regional manager, but if for you going to a line manager feels too big, too difficult, I would just advise finding somebody to have that first conversation with. Whether that’s a trusted colleague, it could be going back to your pre-reg tutor if you’re fairly newly qualified, for example, but things just seem to get a lot easier for me once I’d had that fierce conversation. As I’ve mentioned, CBT certainly helped and later I accessed counselling and talking therapies and this was when I started to understand what I was going through more and that was actually going through a period of low mood as well as high anxiety. And I think having somebody who’s neutral to your situation, even if this isn’t a counsellor. I also spoke to HR within my organisation and they signposted me on to other resources and other sources of support that I could have that I wasn’t actually aware of when I first started going through this anxiety.

It's okay to ask for help and support to get you back on track.

Building your own coping mechanisms and investment in self-care is also something that’s really key to managing your own mental health.

So working out what works for you. I know I need regular exercise and I need community around me to encourage me to do that exercise. So I will go to a Zumba class every week rather than going to the gym on my own, because going to that class means I get to know people there and there are people around me with that shared interest. I know as much as I love working as part of a team, I also need to schedule time out. So I need quiet reflective time and to maybe read for example, on my own as well.

And then ultimately, it’s just about acceptance. Mental health issues can affect all of us. So acceptance that you’re not alone in what you’re going through, you’re not weak or somehow incapable of being a pharmacist. Certainly those kind of thoughts went through my head when I first had this episode.

So, it’s okay to ask for help and support to get you back on track, and getting that support can just be that first step to getting your mental health back on track and maintaining that balance.

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