“The call was no longer than three minutes,” Amy tells me. “One day, I just woke up alone in my flat and thought, ‘I can’t do this anymore – I need to speak to someone about this’.”Īfter calling her local GP to make enquiries about antidepressants, Amy says said she was “surprised” at the speed with which she was handed a prescription for citalopram. “I wasn’t working in the office, so I was spending a lot more time at home and was living alone at that point,” she said. Although she doesn’t believe that the first national lockdown was the catalyst for her to seek help, she admits that, similarly to thousands of others around the country, her life had changed. Dr Howsman tells The Independent that college members have reported an increase in the number of patients presenting with mental health concerns during the pandemic.Īmy, 27, had struggled with poor mental health since her teens, although it wasn’t until 2020 that she realised her existing support mechanisms were no longer working for her. “The Covid-19 pandemic and restrictions people have been living under will have been challenging for everyone, and for many, it will have undoubtedly affected their mental health and wellbeing in some way,” says Dr Gary Howsam, vice-chair for the Royal College of GPs.
It was like a business transaction that the doctor just wanted to get done Upon waking the next day, Siobhan realised something needed to change and called her doctor to make enquiries about medication for her mental health. After a positive experience herself with antidepressants, she encouraged Siobhan to contact her GP. When her sister came to visit for the first time since lockdown began, she found that Siobhan had stopped washing. Siobhan was able to access private counselling, but was unwilling to consider antidepressants, fearing she would be perceived as weak and that staff would lose confidence in her should they find out. The chief executive of a charity, she had been struggling with an estrangement from a close family member. I didn’t know what to do with myself,” she said. “I was functioning – work and everything was fine – but as soon as I got home, I couldn’t stop crying. It was in July 2020, shortly after the UK had emerged from the first national lockdown, that Siobhan* realised she was crying almost every day.
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