Candice Carty-Williams

Candice Carty-Williams

Dear NHS,

Physically, I am very hardy. I’m not one of those people Natasha Bedingfield sings of in her UK top 15 hit ‘I Bruise Easily’. I’ve never broken a bone and apparently I have a good enough number of white blood cells that if and when I get ill, I recover fairly quickly. Where I am not hardy, though, is my brain. I am one of those fragile but resilient people who found it easier to take pain in, bury it and keep on pushing. This caught up with me a few years ago, though, when I was twenty-three.

Following the loss of my best friend, my world started to spin off its axis. Panic attacks came and depression followed soon after. For roughly two years, I was stuck in my bedroom in a deep pit of despair, overwhelming past memories coming at me left, right and centre. It was debilitating and I was afraid. This all came neatly packaged in the form of a phobia. This phobia is where I directed all of my energy. I spent months researching this phobia, I spent months feeding it and accepting that it had ruined not just my life at present but my life to come. But, on one sunny day, I decided that it didn’t have to always be like this. I was too weary and too beaten down by everything, but a glimmer of hope in the form of the sunshine through my window told me that I should try to sort out things in my head. I geared myself up, went to the doctor’s down the road (a five-minute walk that felt like a five-year one) and I told them that, in my research, I’d seen that cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) might help me.

The doctor listened and referred me on. I had an assessment (painful), told the person on the phone about my phobia in great detail (especially painful) and was told that the waiting list for CBT meant that I’d be seen in ‘around six weeks to two months’ (the worst pain). A few days later, I called them back. I told them, with no detail spared, that I couldn’t go on like this and that I certainly couldn’t wait two months. There was a lot of crying (I think on both sides) and the next week, I made my way to the Maudsley Hospital’s Centre for Anxiety Disorders and Trauma in Camberwell. I’ll always remember my bus journey there. I felt terrified, but I felt hopeful.

Over the next few weeks, I worked with my therapist to sort my phobia out. To place where it had come from, to understand it fully and to undo the ways it had embedded and twisted itself in my brain. It was the toughest, most testing, most exhausting three months of my life. The middle was particularly hard. For one session, a friend had to do the journey with me just to make sure that I went. At the end, though I wasn’t miraculously healed (that isn’t how phobias work, you see), I was able to use the tools I’d learned to change my life as it was and move forward.

Years on, the phobia can still rear its very ugly and especially unwelcome head, but I force myself to put into place all that I worked on six years ago. I was, and still am, so grateful for what the NHS gave me. Not just the hope, not just the learning, but it gave my life back to me and it made me both weaker and stronger. Weaker in that I learned to accept that I didn’t always have to be strong, and stronger for knowing that there’s strength in vulnerability.

And for that, I thank you.

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