Hannah Murray

And I think I was probably quite heavily sedated at various points, but my memories are quite fragmented around that time.

One day, and I don't know why, there was a voice in my head, which I thought was Steve's voice, which told me, it's fine, you can take the pills, it's safe to take the pills.

And so I started taking them.

And so gradually, once I started taking quite a powerful antipsychotic, did start to regain some connection to reality.

But it took a long time, yeah, to fully come back.

Yeah, for sure.

When I was coming to terms with it later, when I was kind of much more back in my sense of reality...

it felt like I had sort of failed at being an adult, failed at being independent, failed at, I guess it felt like the mental health equivalent of going bankrupt or something, if that makes sense.

Like this idea that you had sort of gone the furthest you could go to the biggest extreme and you had been told, you know, you don't, you're not functional, that we have to take extreme measures because you are so not functional.

And that was really...

really difficult to come to terms with that I had gotten to that place and now I have so much more compassion for myself having gone through that and for and I think I'm really I said at the beginning I don't like the word gratitude but I am I am grateful for that experience because I think

I think of myself at 25, 26, and I was so obsessed with my career.

I was so obsessed with my body and going to the gym and how I looked in the mirror and who wanted to fuck me or didn't want to fuck me and whether I was smoking five cigarettes a day or ten cigarettes a day.

You know, it was like I felt like all my...

uh obsessions were quite trivial and superficial really in my mid-20s and then this thing happened that completely ripped me open completely brought me to my knees and brought me into contact with other people who were having their lives ripped open and being brought to their knees and I just I feel like I'm a much more empathetic person because of it and a much more

more real person because of it.

And I also found like, it was interesting when people came to visit me because my parents visited me, a lot of my friends, a lot of friends came to visit me in hospital and I could see their fear when they arrived usually.

And then I could see them over the course of their visit

sort of relax and realize that other patients are just people.

They would sometimes have conversations with the other patients.