How true friendship breaks down the stigma of mental illness

October 10, 2019

Thursday 10th October is World Mental Health Day, a day to help raise awareness and encourage open conversation. This year's theme is suicide prevention. Rachael Newman was aged just six when she had her first suicidal thought. In her book Learning to Breathe she shares her journey into and out of the darkness of depression. In this extract from the book we learn how friendship can help break down the stigma of mental illness.

Learning to breathe If my first year at university had given me a taste of what life could look like, my second year was a time to grieve for a life un-lived. Feeling unimaginably guilty about what I’d subjected my family and body to, I began to find it hard to look at the cross again, unable to comprehend how I could be saved when I felt like such a mess. Tears fell freely and I started having more panic attacks. I would appear at Luke or Kelly’s door, eyes vacant, struggling for breath. Luke describes it as if I were in screensaver mode. At those moments I had no personality, just fear. The only way he could be present with me was to treat me as normal until I came round, as Kelly brought the faintest ghost of a smile to my blank face.

During one particularly awful panic attack, I bumped into one of my lecturers. As he led me, blinded by panic and tears, towards his office, we arrived at the office of Anna, my ethics tutor. Deciding that perhaps she would be better placed to help me in that moment, he steered me into her office, whispered to her and left.
Anna guided me to the chair in front of her desk and took her seat.
‘Do you want to tell me about it?’
I burst into tears and cried for a long time. She came to crouch beside me, handing me tissues at regular intervals.
From then on, Anna and I met regularly. We prayed together, lamented together, raged together. We sat in silence and together ‘We learnt to listen to the silences and to stand in solidarity with the silence of suffering in and through our friendships.’ I was allowed to be fully myself; there was no separation between dealing with Rachael and dealing with my mental illness.

Anna and my friends simply allowed me to be, and taught me that was more than enough.
They formed the circle of care that Simon had talked about so often. Between Luke and Kelly, Anna, my mum and Simon himself, I felt I could face my illness in a way that I hadn’t been able to as a teenager – but I didn’t know how to begin to approach God with the pain. I felt guilty for letting him down and being a burden to my friends. The circle of care came together to hold me when I was at my weakest and enabled me to come before God in a way I couldn’t do alone.

The friendship I received was like that we see in the story of the paralysed man who was lowered through the roof to Jesus in Mark 2. These men were so desperate to bring their friend into contact with the healing power and presence of Jesus that in the heat of the Capernaum day they dug through someone’s roof to beat the crowds and sit at Jesus’ feet. It was an astonishing act of friendship; not least because I doubt the owner of the house was particularly enamoured with them in the aftermath. And while we probably won’t have to dig through ceilings for our friends, by its very nature true friendship breaks down stigma.

Rachael was aged just six when she had her first suicidal thought. Over the next decade, life would become increasingly fraught with depression and self-harm, and her outlook only bleaker. Before her eighteenth birthday, Rachael would twice try to take her own life.

And yet amidst this darkness, a flicker of faith lived on.

This is Rachael’s story of her journey into, and out of, the darkness of depression.

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