“I’d have saved years if someone had asked”: Mental health services must ask about abuse

an article by Andrea Woodside published in the New Statesman

Some 38 per cent of women with a mental health problem have experienced domestic abuse.


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I have been accessing mental health services for pretty much my whole life. It wasn’t until two years ago, at 47 years old, that anyone asked me about my experiences of abuse. The question was life changing.

Before that, I had been living with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder for over 20 years. I’d been in and out of crisis care and made attempts on my own life. My whole adult life had been wrapped up in a tirade of poor mental health.

But in 2017, when a psychiatrist finally asked me about my experiences of abuse, everything suddenly become clear. It’s bizarre to think I had got to the age of 47 and no one had ever asked me about it before.

It was then that my diagnosis of bipolar disorder was changed: I was now told I was living with severe complex post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a result of the prolonged and traumatic sexual and emotional abuse I’d experienced. It all started to make sense.

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I really hope that you can access the whole article. I have a paid-for subscription to The Staggers but I seem to remember that you can access three articles each week (or something like that).

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