I’m not qualified to give medical advise and recommend you speak, at the very least, to your GP if you have concerns or questions about available treatments for your mental health issues. I will, however, recommend you (and everyone else!) practice regular self-care.

I’ve spent more than 25 years dealing with mental health issues, but I also ended up wasting a lot of that time to struggling and barely keeping my head above water because I was unable (and occasionally unwilling) to access appropriate mental health care and a strong support network.

Over the years I’ve lost (a lot) of friends, a marriage and numerous employment opportunities because of mental illness. Some of it to the stigma attached to having a mental illness (or more), some of it to my own inability to deal with my mental health at the time.

After painstakingly building my life back up since becoming a parent and finding out how much of a difference good mental health care can make I didn’t want to sit on the sidelines and watch other people lose time they don’t have to with struggling, when they can, with some help and compassion, lead fulfilling lives with just as many opportunities as everyone else.

Trichotillomania is an impulse control disorder. Basically it’s an urge that results in you pulling out your hair (and can include all forms of hair on the body). My tendency is to pull out my head hair (which is an improvement over my earlier years which also involved trichophagia a.k.a. hair eating) and eyebrows. For me it’s usually in response to feeling stressed, anxious, frustrated or from wrestling suppressed anger. These days I keep my hair dyed bright, unnatural colours as a form of aversion therapy because I can see the dye on my fingers if I start pulling (it’s slowly working).

Fibromyalgia is a medical condition that involves chronic widespread pain and a heightened pain response to pressure. Other symptoms include extreme tiredness, memory problems and sleep issues. The cause is unknown, treatment is difficult and even though it is neither degenerative nor fatal, the chronic pain is pervasive and persistent.

Basically: social media or sanity. I cut back heavily on social media because it was becoming an interference in my day-to-day life. Yes, this makes it hard to get the word out about the books as an author – I breached the ‘cardinal rule’ of authors needing to create a platform before publishing. However, on the other hand I’m less distracted by ‘shiny things’ I see online.

However, if you really want to see me occasionally in my natural environment, I still sneak onto Pinterest and I used to post on Tumblr solely for providing original, creative prompts for fiction writers. Sometimes I lurk on Reddit looking at cat pictures, too.

I also respond to emails. Actually, I prefer them!

At the moment the social media accounts for Offbeat Brains are still in development.