Coping with "mental health imposter syndrome"

Help is available, and you don’t deserve to struggle alone. If you have somebody you trust (be it a friend or family member, a counsellor etc.) it can help to talk things through with them. Having somebody just listen can really help validate your feelings – and they are valid.

If you're worried about opening up to somebody, there are ways to make talking easier; for example, you could leave a note or a message instead of a full-on conversation, or talk things through anonymously with someone using one of the helplines listed at the bottom of this page. I’ve used a helpline service myself, and having somewhere I could talk to anonymously about my problems without being judged really helped me.

It helped me to write down somewhere how I was feeling and what I was thinking about. You could keep a diary or a journal, or a simple mood tracker where you record how you’re feeling on a scale of 1-10, or using colours – maybe red, green and amber like on a traffic light.

Tracking how you’ve been doing in this way will help you visualise the bigger picture. Sometimes, without a journal or mood tracker to look back on, we don’t get a sense of how long things have been going on for, or which issues are the persistent ones. Having something like this can be a helpful reminder when you reach out for support.

There is a lot of information available about mental health on the internet. It can be really beneficial to educate yourself, to help you understand what you’re going through – but you should be careful to only get your information from sources you can trust.

There are a lot of misconceptions about mental health, such as that it’s “attention-seeking” or that you can just “man up” or “suck it up”. Misconceptions like these were really damaging to me and my recovery. If you can, you should try to balance the misconceptions with facts from good sources of information, like medical professionals. If seeing a lot of mental health content online is making you feel worse, take a break and practise some self-care.

Other people, even if they struggle with their mental health too, can have a totally different experience to you – that doesn’t mean yours is any less valid. Social media can often be a “highlight reel” of other people’s lives – people tend to withdraw when they’re at their low points, but show-off and celebrate their highs. It’s impossible to make a fair comparison with other people.

The best person you can compare yourself against is you – how are you doing now compared to X amount of time ago? It’s so empowering to look back on your life and see where you’ve gotten better! If you can look back through a journal or a mood tracker and see that things have gotten worse though, it isn’t all bad news. You’ve made a monumental first step in getting support – knowing when you need it. That’s half the battle, and the only way is up.