PLEASE NOTE: this article contains discussion of disordered eating.
By Sam McMurdock
Amid a mental health crisis in Northern Ireland, Ireland’s Big Issue spoke with Niamh Brownlee, who chronicled her experiences in a psychiatric unit in Struggling to Breathe.
During 2020’s first lockdown, Niamh Brownlee, from Carryduff, County Down, found the journal she penned in 2015 in a psychiatric hospital – and sought a publisher.
Brownlee was a 24-year-old primary school teacher when she was admitted to a mental health unit. She had struggled with her mental health since she was seven, but bulimia and acute depression surfaced while she was studying for her A-Levels. She spent the next six years restricting her calorific intake, then binging and purging – sometimes up to 30 times per day.
Brownlee excelled at university and found employment shortly after graduating, but even within the classroom, she could not escape her cognitive distortions.
This article first appeared in Ireland's Big Issue, a magazine sold on the streets of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland by people who have limited other ways of earning an income.