"Debilitating inertia gripped me. I couldn’t respond to the simplest message so I didn’t open my emails."

"Their anxious texts grew more insistent by the day, yet they went unanswered as I sank progressively deeper into a morass of despair."

"All colour and emotion had leached out of my world and everything was grey and monotone."

"It’s not a feeling but an absence of feelings. You exist without purpose or direction. I couldn’t feel joy, excitement or anticipation – only heart-thudding anxiety propelled me out of bed in the morning. I didn’t actually contemplate suicide — but I didn’t want to live in the state of mind I was in either."

"I wanted to stay in bed all day, and it was only intense anxiety — a feeling like someone screaming in my face — that propelled me up in the morning"

"I barely functioned, stopped talking to my friends, went through the motions of living and working but achieved nothing at all."

J. Middleton