Well let me first introduce myself. My name is Ben, and I have been suffering from anxiety for the past 4 years. After dealing with it for a while I decided to make a piece for DA. They say the best pieces on DA are those inspired from the heart, and it’s easily my best piece of art I have ever done. Since then, and seeing the amount of comments and notes I have received I decided that openness from me may be able to raise awareness about a mental health condition that often gets neglected compares to others.

Now first I am not preaching that this is the most important mental health issue, it is one of many that people who have not truly encountered find hard to understand. I have found it can be the butt of many jokes from friends, and how ever light hearted these comments are it can really knock someones confidence to hear that from a close or personal friend.



So, what is anxiety? Anxiety can affect people in many forms. Fear of public places, the fear of failure, and problems like claustrophobia all hold close ties to anxiety. Anxiety can provide many mental and physical problems to its sufferers, and everyone suffering will feel it differently and to different degrees of severity. Many people confuse anxiety with stress, and while anxiety can be part of a larger stress disorder anxiety is often misdiagnosed as stress it can often develop into something more serious. While it’s simple to say 'all you need to do is distress and clam down' it’s often not as simple as that. Anxiety is often caused by a freak encounter in life, or a situation that makes the sufferer uncomfortable rather than a prolonged period of stress, and this can sometimes make it harder to diagnose and treat.

Treatment is my main concern, that treatment for sufferers is too general, and that the constant delays of getting treated can make the disorder harder to shift. The health service will say that anxiety is hard to identify, however if you know what to look for, let’s say from a specific specialists point of view, then the symptoms between patients can be all too familiar and repetitive. I will talk about treatments etc later in this article.

Before I talk frankly about the condition and how it has affected me and can affect others if you want to find out more about the causes and symptoms of anxiety, and simply search for your local Anxiety clinic webpage, or search general pages about anxiety. A good one for UK residents is Anxiety UK, a charity specifically targeting treating sufferers and the causes of the disorder. Please check their website here if you are interested: [link] (If you aren’t a UK resident the site still has allot of informative information about the disorder that is there to help and inform)



So, me. I am nearly 21 now, a University student at Northampton in the UK, and a sufferer of anxiety for 4 years now. I have to say that it has taken me a long time to pluck up the courage to write this, and it did take me a long time to talk to friends about the condition as many people don’t understand that anxiety can be a major problem for sufferers’ in general everyday life. It was hard enough opening up about these things to therapists, let alone the world on DeviantArt and the internet!!

The first moment I felt uneasy was on a coach when I was travelling from Birmingham to Cornwall to see my grandparents. It’s the first real time I had travelled a reasonably long way without anyone else around me, and to be truthful I was nervous. My first symptoms I noticed was feeling sick and needing the loo constantly and consistently. Both can be very common symptoms, but their severity can change between sufferers. A week later after this I had to get on the coach home, one of the worst experiences I can remember. Being stuck on a coach without a break for hours, no toilet on the coach, and a coach full of people due to the cancellation of other buses. I can safely say it wasn’t an experience I would ever want to uptake again, and not one I would wish on anyone.

Now some sufferers say that the anxiety grew and grew over time, and mine did the same. I felt slightly strange for the next month or two, but it began again about a month after a started my final year at sixth form (equivalent to college). I simply could not pluck up the courage to go to my lessons, or even go into school. If I did get in I felt awful, and couldn’t sit in a lesson for more than half an hour without rushing to the loo. Let me tell you, you don’t half get some funny looks and comments from fellow students and teachers, and all of this didn’t help.

Over the next few months I missed more and more school, and found it increasingly hard to even go outside and leave my house. I refused to go out with friends, missed family gatherings among other things, and unfortunately this made it even harder to go outside in the long run. (My advice at this point would be to go out before the anxiety gets worse and worse. Trying to ignore the symptoms and hoping they will pass will in fact make the condition worsen).

I talked to my parents about it after the first 2 weeks of me making excuses not to go to school, and I was taken to the doctors. I was told I could have an anxiety disorder of some sort, and was given pills to help me relax, and to help stop the physical symptoms of the disorder stopping me going out. However this didn’t help really at all for me although others have said it did help for them.

I was denied a place on the specific 'anxiety disorder' course at our hospital due to low available places, and the fact that my symptoms were 'not severe enough to warrant a place being given'. At this point I could not go out, and on a good day I could get to school, but only make it through a few lectures a day, if that.

M advice then was to see a councillor. The first I saw I was a wreck, sat in there for one session leaving twice in 45 minutes to go to the toilet and just to get out of the room. I didn’t have the confidence to go back, and felt the session inadequate for what was actually concerning me. A month or two later I got onto another therapy course, again not with a specialist. I saw out the full course, going pretty much every week, and while the councillor (I forget his name, very nice man) was working for a charity, and not a specialist in stopping my physical symptoms he did start to build my confidence up.

After getting severely poor grades in my final exams compared to what I expected to get my course with the therapist stopped a few months later. At this point I was still taking the pills that had been constantly prescribed by the doctors. Then I got a stroke of luck. My local doctors was running a unique and relatively new idea to help those suffering with anxiety in informative group therapy sessions.

So, I got into the specific group anxiety course to help control and suppress the mental and physical attributes of the disorder. Now, this is where I finally felt something was being done. Instead of being given pills or being shipped off to unqualified 'experts' I was in a group, all of whom suffered from different forms of anxiety. This was hard to comprehend; I think for all of us on the course it was hard to be frank in front of a group of people about a disorder that you are embarrassed about. Let me remind you that this started over a year and a half after the time I was first identified by a doctor as having an anxiety disorder.

After the first few confidence building weeks the course identified why anxiety can take hold, how it can affect you, and theways of combating its effects (through exercises and techniques that can help relax you and help retrain your train in a way, for instance breathing exercises, or distraction theory, where you distract yourself with something to take your mind away from the anxiety). There is now allot of information online about this sort of thing, and I know many sites online have them (like the Anxiety UK one I think). This is sort of thing that I want to raise awareness about, that anxiety is treatable, and that health services and experts need to provide this kind of service to sufferers as soon as possible.

My final interesting point to me is many people find substitutes to feeling anxious, reading, listening to music, talking; all of these are there to take your mind off of the anxiety and onto other things. I have used all of these, talking especially worked for me. For example, if you are with someone and feeling like you have an anxiety attack coming then talk to the people you are with. The idea is for you to concentrate on something other than your anxieties. While the talking can be hard to maintain methods like this can be very effective.

My method of distraction later turned to smoking, and firstly I do not condone smoking, or wish any of you to start thinking it’s a magic cure - it most definitely is not. However it’s all about giving the mind something else to think about, and moving your thoughts from the anxious thoughts onto other things works very well. So the best advice I can give is to find something that you find takes your mind off things, and use it whenever you feel anxious or scared.

I still suffer from the physical effects when I go outside, and it’s been four years since I first encountered anxiety. It can be hard to go out without feeling ill, but with methods outlined to me on the group therapy course confronting your fears works well. My fears were going outside, and needing the loo all the time. My way of confronting these was first going out more, making time to actually go out and register how ill I felt each time I went out. Also, to address needing the loo I used the delaying method, to delay going to the loo as much as I could each time it affected me. This delaying method has helped me a lot, and it can be used with other physical symptoms too.

So physically I still am not 100% at all. However mentally I feel a lot better, not perfect again but better. From my experiences it can be a hard and long road to feel better again, but to those suffering from the disorder I can only say that help is out there, and it does help you. Instead of feeling forced into a routine you don’t want to be in get out there and address your fears. It may not be easy, but unfortunately it’s a very good way of getting past your fears.

Build up your confidence, talk to people, write something, put something on DA like I did, and do anything you can think of to build up your confidence as this is the first stage of reaching your goal of being like your old self.

In summary I can only advise on what I have discovered through my experiences, and the courses and information I have used to try and help cure my problems. But don’t just read this, get out there and find the information, research any doctors or therapists in your area, and go nd quiz your doctor about your concerns. One of my main regrets is that I never pushed to get the issue sorted at the beginning, and I just followed what the doctor was saying to me. If I had known what I know now I wouldn’t have sat back and been given sub standard advice and care without seriously asking questions of why there was nothing more they could do for me.

For me the biggest thing is how much I want to thank my friends, in real life, but also those online and on DA. If you have read this you will know who you are, because if you knew I had anxiety it means I have opened up to you or that you have helped me in some way. Things like this make me quite emotional as it means a lot that people do care and there’s nothing better than morale support from those around you. Am welling up a bit here so I shall move on!



To those reading who are simply reading to be informed about anxiety I thank you for reading, and I hope this has filled in a few holes in your understanding of the disorder. To those suffering any symptoms I hope that this story helps you to make a decision on what to do, and if nothing else helps you to confront those fears that you have, I can’t praise that method enough.

I think thats enough writing now, i think i could go on and on, so if you have any questions or queries please feel free to comment or send a note too me. Am always open to answering questions whatever they may be.




I recently joined a group on DA which is dedicated to raising awareness and providing info on all mental disorders, it has interesting and informative pieces on there so please check it out: [link]

I have also included a few pieces including mine that are raising awareness, or show anxiety in art form. Everyones perception of what anxiety is different for every person, so I have chosen various pieces that I feel identify the core issues. Thank you for reading, and I hope this has helped slightly to raise awareness about this mental disorder. Thanks again.

A few pieces that have made me think about anxiety, and that I feel provide different viewpoints on the disorder!