Video: Some days are better than others: How has mental illness affected your life? (Part 2 A)

In the last part of the video series “Some days are better than others”, 8 brave researchers talked about their mental health journeys. In Part 2 of this series, they open up about what living with mental illness is like and how this affects their personal and work lives. As you listen to their day-to-day experiences and struggles, you’ll start to see that mental illness, its symptoms and effects might not always be visible. It’s a helpful reminder to constantly lead with kindness and empathy in our interactions, because we can never truly know what someone else is struggling with beneath the surface.

While sharing how living with anxiety affects her life, one of the researchers said, “In academia, there's always this expectation where you really need to work all the time and be productive all the time. And so with anxiety, sometimes it was hard to breathe. Sometimes it's like a beehive in my head where I was just kind of buzzing all over the place and I couldn’t focus on one thing.”