Why Impossible Mental Health?

Welcome to the Impossible Mental Health blog!

If you’ve spent any time looking through the site already, you’ll know a little bit about me. My name’s Deborah Nelson and I’m a Cognitive Behavioural Therapist and a Specialist Nurse Practitioner in Forensic Mental Healthcare and I have 20 years of experience in mental healthcare.

But that doesn’t tell you much about how I got to be here, offering this life-changing therapy and why I’m such a passionate advocate for mental health.

It doesn’t tell you that I have survived post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression. It doesn’t tell you that two of my three beautiful children have Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) or about the struggles we’ve had to access appropriate support. It doesn’t tell you about the people I have encountered in my personal and professional life that have fuelled my drive to help people and to blast through society’s myths around mental health.

I reckon my first blog post is the perfect opportunity to take you behind the titles and the qualifications, right to the heart of why I believe that CBT can allow anyone to enjoy good mental health - no matter what they have been through; no matter how broken they feel.

I have been on a journey in my life that not only led me to my vocation but also gave me personal experience of mental health and our public services that has ignited a fire in my belly to not just ‘work in mental health’ but to shake up the way things are done. Call me an idealist, but I have always dreamed big when it comes to my passions!

I guess it started, as so many things do, at home. My parents volunteered for St John Ambulance and by the time I was ten years old, so did I. We attended events at places like Muckamore Abbey Hospital and Knockbracken Healthcare Park, so from a young age I had experience of engaging comfortably with people who lived with learning disabilities and/or mental illness.

One day on my way home from school I popped in to use a public toilet and found a woman who had taken an overdose. My first aid training kicked in - I helped the woman and got her an ambulance. This chance encounter with a person in crisis lit the first spark of interest in me to help people who were struggling to cope with life.

My family was nurturing and supportive, but my father was a super-organised businessman, so I grew up in a house where self-confidence and a clear plan of action were the norm. I was brought up to be my own person and know my own mind - which is why it was disconcerting to reach A-Level age and have next to no idea what I wanted to do with my life.

Apart from, that is, this deep-seated feeling that I needed and wanted to help people, and so I settled on occupational therapy. Finally, I had a plan! I would go to university in England, become an OT, come back to Northern Ireland after a year or two and work here happily ever after. It was the first of many well-laid life plans that would go slightly off-track - I met my husband (we’ve been happily married for 19 years, so no regrets!) so the plan soon changed to staying in Northern Ireland. I studied nursing, starting off in adult nursing but successfully petitioned to side-step into mental health nursing, as I’d realised - at last! - that this was what I really wanted to do.

I was struggling a little with the fact I was working mostly in care of the elderly when I had discovered a real passion for forensic mental health, but I worked hard anyway. About a year before I was due to graduate, I discovered I was pregnant with my first child.

I had been in a painful and uncomfortable labour for several hours when an epidural was suggested - I had concerns due to my low blood pressure (an epidural lowers blood pressure) but in desperation to bring my baby safely into the world I agreed. Our worst fears came true when I momentarily stopped breathing.

When I came round, my baby still wasn’t here and after several more hours of labour, I was brought to theatre for an emergency C-section. Unfortunately, the epidural didn’t work properly and I could feel everything - I won’t even try to describe that pain.

Despite the horrors of his birth, my baby boy was finally here and in my typical practical way, I got myself up and dressed the next day - even taking out my own drip! I was ready to get on with being a mum… but he wouldn’t breastfeed. I spent seven long days in hospital feeling pretty hounded - if it wasn’t midwives urging me to feed my son (even throwing out my visitors!), I had well-meaning new mums popping in to chat, encouraged to support the ‘wee girl whose wee boy wouldn’t feed’.

It was tortuous, but the nightmare didn’t end when I finally got home. I struggled to bond with my baby in those first few months and maybe even years, having been through what I now know to be a traumatic birth, compounded by his feeding problems and my postnatal experience on the ward.

For nine months I relived those events in my mind every single day and my sleep was filled with awful dreams. I had returned to my studies and to nursing shifts on top of that, racking up over 60 hours of work a week.

As you can imagine, I hit rock bottom.

My GP diagnosed post-natal depression and prescribed medication but although I agreed to that, I knew it wasn’t the final answer and that I needed to talk about what had happened to me in the hospital. It made me wonder how many women were being diagnosed with postnatal depression who might be living with PTSD? I was referred for CBT, but never actually received it.

Another lightbulb moment in my life where I could clearly see a gap in what was happening with mental healthcare. We need to prepare mothers for the reality of birth rather than rose-tinted birth plans, and we need to provide appropriate care if birth is traumatic.

I was forced to work through it on my own, applying my education and effectively bringing myself through a ‘DIY’ CBT programme. If I had attended a proper course of CBT I estimate it would have taken me about eight weeks to reduce my distress. In practice, it took me about two years.

I graduated and got my first job in mental health nursing in 2002, and in 2003 I started my degree in forensic mental health, something I’d become increasingly fascinated with. I worked in care of the elderly for a short while before accepting a move to psychiatric intensive care. I worked here until 2004 until I got a job in Knockbracken’s new medium secure ward, where I worked until 2007.

Then I got a job with the new Home Treatment team, which was really exciting. This new initiative was giving people their lives back rather than keeping them in hospital for months at a time. I worked with people living with depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and a range of other conditions. We helped them recover and learn to cope with life at home, rather than treating them and then returning them to an environment where old problems and triggers remained.

It was such a rewarding job and often you could see an improvement in people within weeks. My interest in CBT had continued to grow and in 2008 I started to push those doors in earnest to see if the Trust would support me to train to be a therapist. They let me try a module but then decided I would have to wait until the rest of my team had an opportunity to study before I could continue. Very frustrating.

Another grand plan out the window, so I formulated another - I would pursue it on my own! I got accepted to the course at Queen’s University… and then had to let it go as I was unable to secure a caseload at work. I was starting to feel like a failure; like every carefully laid plan I made was doomed. I became pregnant with my third child around this time and let my CBT dream go again for the time being.

I did some CBT studies in the meantime, but around two years ago, after keeping it on the ‘back burner’, I found myself unable to sleep. My head was whirling with ideas for my own therapy practice. Who could I help? How would I set it all up? How could I fund it so that people in need could access this kind of help? Although I loved my job, I had a burning desire to just do the care - not tick a box or fulfil a quota; so whatever I offered would be for the person and not for a system, an organisation or a statistic.

I started the course at Queen’s in 2017 and that brings us pretty much up to today. My determination to bring to life the kind person-centred, transformative CBT therapy service I knew was possible has driven my path over the past two years. Whilst completing my university training to become a qualified therapist, I also worked with a design agency and completed a branding process to develop the vision in my mind and create Impossible Mental Health.

I’m currently researching CBT for parents and kids living with ASD because, as I mentioned at the beginning of the post, I’m mum to three children, two of whom have ASD - and we’ve all been affected by the lack of appropriate support.

ASD makes life more complex for everyone, there is no escaping that fact. It’s pretty good when we have routines in place and clear processes but there can is a continuous need to pre-empt your child’s thought processes, break things down for them to understand, deal with sensory processing issues and of course, look after the needs of our child who does not have ASD.

We were very lucky to be able to access psychology for one of our kids, but they were unable to engage and although our therapist did their best, they didn’t have the creativity and flexibility I believe you need in order to work effectively with someone with ASD.

That brings me to the key principle at the heart of Impossible Mental Health: forget what you think you know - everyone is different. The therapy I deliver is true, accredited CBT - but it’s not a cookie-cutter programme; my approach to each individual is as unique as they are, regardless of what issues they bring to me for help.

My mission is to cut through old and tired approaches to mental health, which is why I’ve placed mythbusting front and centre, and where the idea for the name came from. Good mental health is possible.

I envision becoming a charity or social enterprise in the future, as there are clear links between poverty and poor mental health. I feel passionate about this having volunteered at our local food bank, and I look forward to being part of the solution to that problem.

Nonprofits and charities are always born out of a need of someone needing to know something and then wanting to share it with others. I am no different in that this venture has been born out of the fact that I want everyone to know that there is a possibility of life, of hope, of wellness.

I am here to be that hope for people - a possibility that life could be different.

Phone Deborah on
075 3941 3244

We offer a complimentary telephone call to establish whether CBT is the most appropriate treatment for you or if we can signpost you to alternatives.

Alternatively, get in touch using our contact form and Deborah will reply as soon as possible.