When I was a young adult, I nearly died during a three year period where I was unknowingly suffering from a severe mental illness.
Thankfully, during an eight week stay in psychiatric hospital I was finally properly diagnosed. What followed was a long journey of recovery.
Looking back, I realise what would have helped my recovery was more insight from someone with lived experience of what I was going through.
When I think about the different factors that contributed to my recovery and ongoing wellbeing, the advice I’ve received from doctors is but part of a much greater whole. This is not to discount the central importance of medical professionals in treating those suffering from mental illness. It’s simply an acknowledgement that there is so much more that goes into a successful recovery than the clinical.
As someone with lived experience of both a mood disorder (bipolar disorder) and an anxiety disorder (obsessive compulsive disorder), I have found that living with conditions like these damages one’s confidence, making life very difficult. My previous work as a patient advocate in the New South Wales hospital system and as a volunteer presenter for the Black Dog Institute’s high school program bears this out.
My motivation for creating this website is to provide a lived experience angle for those who need help with knowing how to come to terms and live confidently with a mental illness.
I am not a clinician, my expertise lies in my lived experience and the insights I have gained through more than two decades that have involved a major breakdown involving hospitalisation, a long recovery process, and learning how to maintain my mental health as someone who now works full time and has a wife and three children.
I use my own life experience as a field study in life after a major mental breakdown and I hope it can be a useful resource for anyone whose experience bears some resemblance to what I have been through.
If that is you, I pray this website helps speed up your recovery and save you a good deal of unnecessary time and stress.
I am also a fan of poetry and you will find videos on this website of me reciting poems that inspire and speak to me and I hope they do the same for you.
Will Turner 