Written by Dior, a Biological Science NTU Student

Hi, I am Dior a Biological Science student and one of the male mental health champions at NTU. This blog is going to be focused on time to talk day and my experiences talking about my own mental health and what struggles I may have faced throughout my journey. First a little bit about what Time to Talk Day is. It is an event held every year here in the UK on the first Thursday of February and it’s focused solely on mental health and encouraging everyone to talk to someone about their mental health as a way of helping raise awareness around the topic. It can be to family, friends, co-workers to talk and listen to one another and help provide each other with a form of support even if it is just listening to their struggles allowing them to take some pressure from themselves.

Time to Talk Day is an important event that should be more well known as 1 in 4 people have struggled or are struggling with a form of mental health issue and may not want to share their problems with others as they may not know how to properly express those emotions, they may be scared how someone will react or may not want to feel like they are a burden on the ones they care about. Time for Talk Day is not a well-known event within the UK, and it is our goal as mental health champions and NTU’s goal to make this event well known and try to offer support to all the students for their time at the university.

I am one of these people who never spoke about my mental health due to not wanting to be a burden to others when they themselves may have issues I do not know about. However, that changed when an argument with my family in 2019/ 2020 revealed my struggles and how I felt like ending my life. That’s when I started receiving counselling as the school I had attended at the time heard about the issues I was facing. It was infrequent and I was never told when I would see the counsellor, I was always just pulled out of a random lesson on a Friday, it could have been weekly, every few weeks or even a couple of months before I’d see the counsellor again. With such infrequent sessions it made it difficult to really explain what was going on and get support. I changed schools in 2021, but the struggle to get support continued as although the counselling sessions were at various times of the day every week on the same day the issue was now the counsellor changed every few weeks due to them being students who were doing placements to try and gain experience for their course. Having to re-explain everything to each one meant I was not getting the true support I needed as I would re-tell them everything and by time they start to offer support they changed again.

Due to this I had to find my own way of supporting myself, I had lost interest in art and drawing due to a horrible teacher I had loosing the one thing that I found comfort in so I had to find something new, which is when I turned to music as it helped me stay distracted from any negative thoughts that I may have. After a while that stopped helping as much. But in 2017 I had met I group of people online as one of them streamed and we all played games and had fun until something happened between a few of us which caused the one person who streamed and brought us all together to stop all together. But we have all supported each other throughout the years and became a group of people who have never met from all over the world who cared for each other, and to this day 8 years from our first time ever meeting we are all still close and talk regularly and I know if I ever need someone to talk to some of them will be there for me even if they take awhile to respond.

It may be hard to talk about your mental health to others so some look for medical support from your doctors to get things like anti-depressants. For me personally they didn’t work as well as I had hoped, as I have been diagnosed with depression and was on anti-depressants, they never kicked in with their intended purpose but the side effects of the medication made it more of a struggle as the medication made me feel violently ill. I also never received support from my doctors or had a check-up which was meant to happen and they never continued my medication so I stopped taking them. My mental health may not have improved much over the years, and I may still struggle from time to time, but I try not to let it show so I can ensure that everyone else is ok.

You may not feel comfortable talking to someone in person about your mental health but there are others all over the world with the same issues or have had those issues that can offer support and listen to you. This is why Time to Talk Day is important as it may not seem it but just talking to someone if you think they may be struggling can have a significant impact on that person and you may never know.

For help, advice and resources whilst studying at NTU, take a look at the following for sources of support.
Support from NTU
Self-Care books in NTU’s libraries
Silvercloud: SilverCloud is our online system designed to help with a range of mental health issues.
Health and Wellbeing resources
NTSU Information and Advice service
Wellness in Mind: Advice and support for anyone in Nottingham experiencing issues with their mental wellbeing
Student Minds or Student Space
10 Keys to happiness
Mind
Papyrus
CALM