Whilst meeting my personal tutor today, he brought up a very interesting question - what is news? Is there a clear definition? Of course, as new Journalism students, we gave the general answers one would expect; news was communication of information to feed curiosity. My tutor agreed that that was a very good answer. However, he said, there was a very good definition by British Journalist Harold Evans (editor to the Sunday Times who uncovered the Thalidomide scandal) who simply said that news could be defined in three words:

I found this quite powerful. The reason we read news is because everything in the news affects us as people, whether directly or not. For example, we are interested in the events of Hurricane Harvey and Irma because it is affecting a group of people extremely badly, even though it has no direct affect on us. In the same way, someone would be interested in a news story about developments in cancer research because the illness has affected someone in their family, therefore having a direct impact on them. We consume all this media because it is about us. 

In this modern social age of over-sharing, we all want to know what everyone is doing all the time. The fact that the media will always target people by being about people only feeds all this curiosity that we all have - this keeps the media thriving, feeding curious appetites for information all over the world. News is suddenly running our lives - our thoughts, our opinions, our actions - and we can't get enough. News is us as a world population, and our consumption of it gives it the power to become us. News is people.

I haven't posted in a long time, almost a year in fact. A lot has happened in that time, I finished my A Levels and am now at University. But I've had a horrible few months because of mental health, so I'm going to talk about it quickly and get it all out in the open. Mental health isn't talked about enough and the stigma needs to end.

I actually wrote about this back in 2015 in a post titled 'A Little Self-Help' which you can find here. At the time I wrote that, I was unaware that I had anxiety and did not fully understand what I was going through. I hope in this post to reflect on that and tell you about how I have progressed since then.

In my post I mentioned that I was feeling unhappy and was unsure how to make myself happy again. What I didn't realise is that I had stress-induced anxiety. Unfortunately, nobody had helped me to understand this problem and just put it down as exam stress and nerves, which I believed at the time. It wasn't until I went to see a doctor about another medical problem I was experiencing that I was actually formally diagnosed with this anxiety, as she believed that it was the root cause of my other medical issue. That's when I finally began to understand my issues throughout Year 11 - the panic attacks made sense, the unhappiness made sense. However, as I believed it was just a temporary thing that I experienced in my exam time I didn't reach out for help anywhere. That was probably the worst decision I could have made. the best time to learn how to deal with an issue is to tackle it head-on when the problem has begun, but because signs of mental illness aren't covered at schools and considered a 'taboo' subject people never realise they have a problem until it is too late. This is then followed by a gradual build up to where you would then need heavy psychiatric help. which is what I ended up getting.

I started Year 12 with some feelings of anxiety and mostly bottled them up until I could have a 'dedicated cry time' once a week. It was still affecting me, but not as badly as before. I took up Reflexology, which was quite helpful, and I also tried practising Mindfulness, which works until you get out of practice! I got out of practice at the beginning of Year 13 when suddenly all of my worries about exams and University suddenly rushed forwards. I was too busy for exercises, at least that's what I told myself, and suddenly all my hard work into stopping my problems collapsed.

In the Spring term, the anxiety started to get worse as coursework deadlines drew closer. The English department screwed up my coursework and then I had to push my history coursework back because of it. On top of this I was trying to study for my exams in summer. Any time I felt anxious I pushed it away, pretending that it didn't exist. Again, not my best decision. At that point I should have definitely thought about reaching out to someone, but it never crossed my mind as something important. I had coursework and exams to focus on and everyone seemed much further ahead than I did in my studies.

Summer term was my downfall. The day before I was supposed to go back to school, I broke down. For the next two weeks I only went to lessons for two days and stayed at home a lot because I couldn't face school. I suddenly realised that I needed help. A lot of it. I registered with the NHS Talking Therapies and within a week I had had a review on the phone with one of their specialists and was signed up to a program called Silvercloud in the Space from Panic course. That program was amazing. I was able to work through all of these exercises to help tackle anxiety and panic attacks at my own pace and every two weeks I did a survey about how I was feeling and had a phone conversation with a dedicated therapist. This was amazing. I can definitely handle myself a lot better now. I ended up being released from the program early because of how well I was doing. My exams were made a lot easier by this and I have access to that program for another year until I am completely signed off. I wish I knew about the service sooner so that I could separate and compartmentalise my worries and thoughts about my anxiety. A lot more people should sign up for this as it is free and there isn't a very long waiting list. If people knew about it in the early days of their illness as I believe it would have helped save a lot of people a lot of torment.

Anxiety isn't pretty. No mental illness is, and the worst part is that you always feel lost and alone whilst you are suffering -  I know I did. If we talk about mental illness more then everyone will feel less alone whilst tackling these problems.

Having a mental illness doesn't make you less of a person. In fact I believe it makes you stronger than anyone else because of the torment your mind goes through. Just remember to get help.