Right
So just sit and...and we kind of...
Okay
Oh wonderful, thank you
Very serious.
Turn to the camera please.
Ok
Terrific, lovely.
Ok brilliant.
I think the thing I find most stressful, as a GP, and most difficult to deal with from a mental health point of view, is pressure on my time.
Everybody who comes in from 8:30 till 11:00 that morning, you will see. Whether it's 20, 30, 40, 50 people.
The working environment is quite highly paced and it can get quite hectic and a bit overwhelming at times.
My job is now 24/7. When you're running a practice you're looking after everybody.
You're looking after the patients, you're looking after the GPs, you're looking after the staff - absolutely everybody.
When I'm sat in front of a patient, I want to be focused on them. I want to listen to them, I want to help them,
but I'm conscious that I've got 80 scans and 100 blood results, and complaint letters to respond to and boxes to tick.
I started to feel very overwhelmed at work - I think it was kicked off, initially, by just so many changes.
So many regulations that we had to meet.
Where I get stressed, is if we haven't got enough patient slots. So, we've got far more patients that are wanting to come in.
So many reports we had to write
and then I'm trying to, have to, sort of, squeeze them in, juggle them...
Outside institutions that we dealt with...
I went through quite a severe period of depression.
So I'll get very anxious. I'll start to panic that I can't cope and I'm going to make mistakes.
I was waking up in the night, also working very long hours.
I had to double check, triple check everything I did.
Right, so, sorry, what was the second question?
Was it hard to....?
Yes, okay.
It affected my concentration. I felt like I was at risk of making mistakes.
And it all began to feel too much for me.
I couldn't stop crying, and I just thought, I can't do this, I'm not strong enough to do this. And I felt that I'd failed.
It's strange working in healthcare because we...we deal with patients with work stress, mental health problems, burn out all the time
but we're still rubbish at talking about it and we're still rubbish at saying 'actually, I've gone beyond stress and now my health is suffering.'
I think it's easier to say something like - 'I'm burnt out'
I don't think I thought I wasn't coping, actually. I think I thought I was busy.
I'm here 14 hours a day. I'm physically exhausted. It feels better to them than actually saying 'this is affecting my mental health'
There is also that fear that if you talk about mental health problems, that that's somehow going to get into your...your health records or....
...and your professional record as well.
You don't want to appear weak or that you might not be able to cope.
You, sort of, want to give that air of 'I'm in charge, and I know what I'm doing'
The first thing I was encouraged to do was talk to my GP. And that should always be, for any of us, the first step.
I'd been chatting to a patient and after they'd gone, my colleague was, sort of, interested in how I knew so much about what I was talking about.
And it....we just, sort of, had a chat about what I deal with and my mental health. And it just seemed it was a really nice gentle conversation
that just seemed perfectly normal to have, at that moment in time.
As soon as you start talking about it, and I started writing about it, suddenly I was getting friends coming up to me
and strangers emailing me and saying: oh God, this describes me; this describes how I feel, or how I was feeling.
I talk to some patients about my own mental health, when it's in relation to them, a lot of people who suffer with anxiety will come to the counter.
It's so important to be looking after yourself because that's the only way that we're going to do the best for our patients.
We can't give out something that we haven't got there to start with.