Participant Five: M

“The pictures represent what I suffer from showing before and after my recovery and what I do to recover. I have kids and a husband at home, they participate in my recovery when I am out of hospital. I have two children and they were affected when I went to hospital, they missed their mum, it affected all my family, when I was in my bed my boys sat beside me and comforted me a lot with my husband. My children, they are part of me, their encouragement keeps me together all the time, and my husband.”

“It is difficult to go out and do things on your own, you feel lonely, isolated and you don’t socialise with people. I suffer from psychosis depression but now I am much better. At home I do crochet and knitting everyday, it helps me to recover, most of the time when you do drawing, you do crocheting, you do sewing, you forget the other worries and focus on the physical moment. When you go out the hospital you don’t know who to connect with, you have no voice. When you come out of hospital you don’t know which service you want but [local mental health centre] will give you confidence to express yourself, to recover, to avoid arguments or things that have affected your life, it has helped me a lot. They create something good in you, tell you that it is not the end, that there is going to be recovery in the future. You can carry on moving and you can be a human being. You forgot your confidence, you forgot everything that you are about but when someone is telling you you are beautiful, you have something in you and they believe in you, it is little by little, I know what triggers to avoid, I know what affects me more.”

“I go out in the park to relax, I go for morning walks with my husband. With mental illness people might say you are aggressive and these kinds of things, but it’s not all the time, you are quiet, you are frightened, you are a vulnerable person.”

“Because I come from another country, and my background is from Africa, the culture is different in this country, different kind of growing up, different kind of situations, you lose your family, you lose so many things, but I keep moving on and mental illness does affect every nation so you have to keep moving on. There is a recovery time, always.”

“My mindfulness meditation helps me a lot, I meditate every day to calm myself down. I did mindfulness with my coffee because I was calm with myself and I was knowing myself.”