UnTouchablePost-traumatic stress disorder
Post-traumatic stress disorder is a mental health condition caused by events that were very frightening, stressful or distressing — being in or witnessing an accident or an assault, abuse, a serious illness, war, or work that exposes someone to those things repeatedly. The main symptom is the event coming back: flashbacks, intrusive images, nightmares. People may also avoid reminders of it, have gaps in their memory, think badly of themselves, struggle in relationships, feel constantly on edge, sleep poorly, or have physical pain with no obvious cause. Symptoms can begin straight away, or many months or even years later. See a GP if you think you may have PTSD, or if treatment you are already having is not working. Treatments include trauma-focused cognitive behavioural therapy, EMDR, and antidepressants.
This is a plain summary, not medical advice, and it is not a substitute for talking to your GP or your clinical team. For NHS information about post-traumatic stress disorder, speak to your GP or call NHS 111.
People who have talked about it
2 stories, each one written in our own words from what the person said publicly themselves.
Tulisa
Tulisa was acquitted, and that was when the depression started
Content note — this story covers a subject some people would rather choose when to read.
Tulisa dates a major depression to the moment her public life came apart. She had spent her whole life working towards the position she was in — she says the thought of getting there was what had carried her through depression and anxiety as a child — and then, in what she describes as half a second, it was gone. She knew straight away that how she was seen had changed permanently. She uses the word tarnished. She was charged. She was acquitted. She says being acquitted is not much use when your life is already in tatters, and that she was grateful for the result and still could not shake what followed it. The processing only began afterwards, because while it was happening there was no room for it. She was then a key witness in a further case, and describes still being followed, still having attempts made to set her up, and living in a state of hypervigilance and fear for another year — three years altogether rather than one. That, she says, is when the depression, the anxiety and the PTSD properly set in. It is also when she made suicide attempts. This page is not going to describe them, and there is nothing here about how. What she chose to talk about is what happened next: a friend worked out that something was wrong, came to the house, found her and called an ambulance. She lived. She says she was angry to wake up, and afterwards did not want to know anything about it — she did not talk to that friend about what she had found until years later. She has since thanked, publicly, the person who stepped in. She has written a book about all of it, and says finishing it is the reason she is still here: that people go through long dark stretches convinced there is no light at the end, and she wants it read by someone in exactly that position. Nothing here is medical advice. If any of this is close to home, the numbers at the end of this page are free, and they are there in the middle of the night.
Patsy Kensit
Patsy Kensit on a PTSD diagnosis that finally explained the sadness
Content note — this story covers a subject some people would rather choose when to read.
Patsy Kensit was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder about three and a half years before this interview. She also lives with depression — something she finds hard to square with being, as she puts it, a very joyful person who is grateful for the life she has had. The sadness is there anyway. For years she assumed she knew where it came from. She put it down to relationships that had not worked out, and to not having built the family she wanted. What was put to her instead was that it went back much further — to her childhood. She was six when she was told her mother was going to die. By the time she was eleven or twelve she had been to the hospital perhaps a dozen times to say goodbye, and each time her mother came through it. She describes her mother as an extraordinary woman who stayed relentlessly positive through cancer, and who died when Patsy was in her early twenties, around her first son's first birthday. She says she misses her every day. At seven or eight she had a phrase she used to repeat — that she was having a bad thought. Her mother would tell her to cancel it and not to worry. She also remembers deciding, as a child, that if she worked and earned money she might be able to buy her mother's health back. What she says about the diagnosis itself is the part worth reading twice. It was a relief. She had wondered whether she was bipolar, or had ADHD, and finally having a name for it explained everything — that what she had carried was not about those relationships at all, but about things that happened when she was very small. Therapy over the years has helped, though she is not in it at the moment. She says she has been dealing with this all her life, and that it is good people can talk about it now without being written off as unable to work. Nothing here is medical advice. If you think you may have PTSD, or treatment you are having is not working, the NHS advice is to see your GP.
Photographs, in order: Tulisa by See Li (CC BY 2.0); Patsy Kensit by Damien Everett (CC BY 2.0).