Introducing: Adenike Adebiyi

Growing up, I heard much about the importance of our mental life. At home, at church and at school, I learnt the mind was valuable for everything from spirituality and ethics to education and intelligence. So much about the life of the mind, rarely ever about the health of the mind, both of which are crucially interdependent. It wasn’t until I experienced depression and anxiety myself at university, that I realised how terribly undervalued mental health was, both personally and socially.

Fast forward a few years later, I’m in my third week at the Money and Mental Health Policy Institute as an External Affairs intern, and I couldn’t imagine a more apt organisation to begin my professional career with!

Interrupting my university studies to pursue recovery was one of the most difficult and yet necessary decisions I’ve had to make in my life. At the beginning of my year out, I struggled to secure a full-time job because of depression, but not being able to find work made me even more depressed. And when I eventually secured work, I was so overdrawn financially and emotionally at one point that I had to call in sick. I was “too ill to work, too broke not to” (to borrow the name of a recent Money and Mental Health report).

Looking back, I couldn’t have overcome depression without the support of my church, friends and family. But I also have my university to thank for signposting me to helpful tools and resources, from cognitive behavioural therapy, to group workshops on ‘challenging unhelpful thinking habits’. Even exam season was made less daunting when I attended morning ‘calm your brain and have a croissant’ sessions for some yummy mindfulness! I also had a go at using MUSE headphones with mindfulness meditations on the Headspace app. In light of the recent wave of headlines on the harmful effects of technology and social media, it’s refreshing to see how it can be used for good.

The more sessions and workshops on mental health I attended, the more I came to actually believe the well intended “you’re not alone” cliche often quoted during times when the opposite feels true. The most profound of these realisations came when I saw university teaching staff attending some of those workshops, too. It was then that I saw that mental health problems are more common than our social silence about them in the past might suggest. I’ve also since had people open up to me about their mental health and related financial struggles, so it’s not a ‘they/them’ issue, it’s an ‘us/all’ issue.