How Becoming a Mental Health Nurse is Helping Me

Student mental health nurse Beka Louise explains how working with people with mental health problems helped her manage her own anxiety better.

If there is anything that being a student mental health nurse for the past three years has taught me it’s that mental health professionals are just not ready to talk about their own mental health. That doesn’t seem to make sense to me. So here is a little bit about me, my anxiety and how working with others has helped me manage this!

A lot of people don’t know about my anxiety, and I don’t know if that is because I have learned to cope better than I did or if it just never comes up in conversation.

Working with others who have anxiety has actually helped me to manage my own.

I’m a person who jumps to 'catastrophic thinking'; honestly I will always jump to the worst conclusion and I know it’s not the best thing to do in life. My boyfriend and family try to help and understand as much as possible but some days they just don’t get it - no matter how much I try and explain. I know it’s exhausting, believe me I have been there.

But working with people to help them find ways to manage these thoughts and understand their anxiety has helped me do this myself.

I’ve always been a person who has been open about mental health. I have people within my own family who have mental health issues themselves and I have never seen the shame in talking openly about this. I wouldn’t have become a mental health nurse if I did!

I don’t try to hide my anxiety and I am not ashamed of my anxiety, it rarely comes up in conversation but if it does I’ll openly admit I’ve struggled with it.

The bottom line is that working with people has really helped and I’m so proud of where I am today, especially when I think that I’ve conquered a highly stressful three-year degree! Believe me if I ever tell you that I understand what you’re going through, I actually do and I’m not just saying it.

Read more from Beka on her blog or follow her on Twitter @littleworldbeka!

*Image from Time to Change's 'Get the Picture' Campaign

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