Dr Hannah Belcher on her autism diagnosis, using art as a way to express herself, and more...

We caught up with Dr Hannah Belcher, a post-doctoral researcher at King's College London, and one of the speakers at our recent mental health conference. Here, she writes about getting an autism diagnosis, her mental health journey, and learning to express herself through art...

My mental health has always been something of an enigma to me, and something I have tried to get to the bottom of for as long as I can remember. Throughout my childhood I experienced severe phobias, anxiety, and selective mutism. Every word I spoke felt like I was revealing another layer of my bare flesh. No one knew why, and no one really tried to find out why. As long as I was doing well at school and appeared to have friends, as far as everyone around me was concerned, I was doing fine.

Eventually this came to a head when I was 14 and I dropped out of school completely. There followed a decade of deep depression, self-harm, suicidal thoughts, panic attacks and agoraphobia. This was occasionally interspersed with periods of a more hyper mood, where I’d take on multiple projects, gamble, spend money, and suddenly have a desire to leave the house more than usual and socialise.

We all know that looking after our mental health is important, but sometimes it can feel almost impossible. Being autistic can make this harder. 

I bounced in and out of mental health services, with no one really understanding what I was going through. I was given pill after pill and was frequently under the Crisis and Home Treatment Team. I was accused by therapists and doctors of making it up and of being avoidant and ‘difficult’, all because I couldn’t properly communicate my feelings and thoughts.

Eventually, I was referred for art therapy and it completely changed my life...

Being able to do something creative and distracting while talking to someone opened up a whole new way of communicating for me. My art therapist first identified that I might be autistic, and getting my diagnosis helped explain many of the mental health difficulties I had faced. Just this knowledge alone meant I felt more confident to leave the house again and more aware of the sources of my anxiety.

For example, I had been avoiding shops and queues for years, but now I understood it was the sensory sensitivities I faced that made these environments so difficult for me. Similarly, I realised how low my self-esteem was from constantly feeling the need to mask my true self, in case others judged me negatively.