How are you really? Bryony Gordon answers your mental health questions

For a long period of my life, perhaps the first 35 years of it, nobody would ask me for advice. How could they? I had no solutions to anything, only problems. I was an alcoholic and a drug addict in denial, a human whose most enduring relationship was with a Marlboro Gold. 

I careered from one self-made disaster to another, and the only thing I was expert in was self-sabotage. I could have got a PhD in that, so adept was I at destroying opportunities that were kindly extended to me. If you couldn’t find me in the pub, then I’d most likely be in the toilets at work, crying over something stupid I had done in the pub the night before. My life was so chaotic that my friends formed a joke group on Facebook, entitled ‘Blame it On Bryony’. They assembled there with their anecdotes about stupid things I had done on crazy nights out. It was all very funny, until of course it wasn’t. 

So yes, nobody in their right mind would ask me for advice. But as I have got older, I have realised something: usually, people in their right minds don’t need advice. They’ve got things under control. It’s people in their wrong minds who need love, support, a gentle suggestion for how to put their lives back on track. I know from personal experience that my own life started to improve when that happened to me – when people who had also spent a long time in their ‘wrong minds’ reached out and showed me that it was possible to live another way. They took me to 12 step meetings, told me about therapists and organisations that might be able to help, offered a shoulder to cry on and shone some metaphorical light into the dark when I could not see any reasons to go on. 

Because of these people, who were brave enough to show me how they had dealt with their own problems, I am now coming up to seven years clean and sober. I have a stable family life, a happy, healthy 10-year-old daughter and a loving husband. I founded the peer support group Mental Health Mates, which is now in over 150 towns and cities around the country. I have written several bestselling books about my experiences with mental illness, and spoken to hundreds, if not thousands, of people who have experienced these things too. I have won awards for my campaigning, and last month I was given the President’s Medal by the Royal College of Psychiatrists for my contribution to changing the perception of mental health in the media. 

I still have moments of darkness, but I see them as messages from my brain to remind me that I have gone a little off track, not signs that I am a fundamental failure. And as a result of that, people ask me for advice all the time now. My Telegraph inbox and my Instagram DMs are awash with people wanting to know how to get sober, how to help their husband or child get sober, how to navigate their way through mental health services or get some relief from depression and anxiety. Every week, people approach me on the street to tell me that by talking about all the times I have been in my ‘wrong mind’ I have helped them to get back into their right minds. It is more than I ever could have dreamt of as an 11-year-old first suffering terribly from obsessive compulsive disorder. 

So it is in this spirit that today, I am launching myself into the world officially as an agony aunt. A person that anyone in their wrong mind can ask for advice. I do this because of my history with addiction, eating disorders, depression and OCD, not in spite of it. The skills I have learnt ‘battling’ these conditions have served me remarkably well, and given me a sort of superhuman strength that means I can now do things like run marathons, take part in triathlons, get up in the morning and not immediately want to go back to sleep. Being honest about my mental health in the Telegraph for past 10 years has been so wonderfully helpful to my wellbeing that it would be selfish not to share some of the gifts it has given me – most importantly the opportunity to immerse myself in a healing mental health community that has given me umpteen solutions for my umpteen problems. 

Please fill in the form below and know that nothing you ask will be judged (it can also be completely anonymous if you want, as I know how hard sharing this stuff can be at first). Please feel free to expose to the light any shame you are feeling, where hopefully it will begin to die. I’ve been there, and got the T-shirt – there is absolutely nothing anyone can say that will shock me. Each week, I will do my best to answer your problems, calling in expert help when needs be. And together, we can share the rich fount of knowledge that you can only get by being in your wrong mind.