When do you know you need help?
With everything happening in the world today, how do you know if you need help? Even if you don’t think you do - can you be sure?
We often shrug off mental health issues for one reason or another, and we have all been guilty of it in some form. For me, I went for a good number of years shrugging off bad sleep patterns, low motivation and mood swings as just one of those things. So how can we find out if it’s time or necessary to get the help that is available?
Well the NHS provides a questionnaire that is a valuable tool to assess yourself and forms part of my ongoing toolkit now that I know about it. It’s anonymous and no data gets shared with the NHS from it, so you can answer it completely honestly without repercussion. What’s more it is built by mental health professionals and gives an high level assessment, provided you answer honestly, of where your mental health is.
The assessment will guide you on the next steps if they are needed, which would generally be speaking to a health care professional. What the assessment doesn’t do though is prepare you for the period between doing it and seeing a professional.
I decided to take the plunge so to speak, out of curiosity. I still believed that there was nothing wrong but people around me had mentioned a change in me a number of times, so I thought it would be worth a try. When I did the assessment it came back with a fairly high score and recommended making an appointment. It took me some time to process as I didn’t think I had a problem at all before doing it. I did make the appointment and had to wait a while before I could see my GP.
This is when I found myself doubting everything. Maybe I had exaggerated my answers, or misunderstood the questions. Was I going to be wasting NHS time? I nearly cancelled the appointment a few times, but thanks to speaking to friends and family openly about it, and knowing I had other people I knew that had got high scores too, I came to the conclusion that it was worth at least discussing with a professional even if it was just to find out I was fine.
Doing the assessment and sticking to the appointment was one of the best decisions I have made, as it provided me with professional help to understand my mental health and build my own toolkit to fight low mood. I still use it every now and again as a checkpoint to see how I am doing and find it a vital part of my own toolkit.
So if you are concerned or even if you are just curious, why not give it a try, it’s quick and painless:
https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/stress-anxiety-depression/mood-self-assessment/