I kept all my fears bottled up, and it will come as no surprise to hear that one day the bottle burst. I couldn’t stop crying and felt as though I couldn’t live another day like this. Work or leaving the house felt impossible. I sobbed when I visited my GP the next day and was told I needed a referral to a psychiatrist. I was lucky enough to have private medical insurance, and within a week I saw a psychiatrist at a mental health hospital.

I told the psychiatrist that it had been a difficult couple of years before these symptoms started: my mother had died the previous year, I’d left a difficult job and now faced a restructuring at my new employer. The psychiatrist explained that I was experiencing a form of anxiety.

This confused me as I had overcome acute anxiety as a young adult. I knew how to deal with a panic attack and understood the fight-or-flight response. These weren’t panic attacks. My body felt numb, disconnected and separate.

The psychiatrist explained that anxiety wasn’t only about fight or flight. There was a third response – freeze. Like a rabbit in the headlights, too frozen in fear to run away. And when levels of anxiety get too high, the brain disconnects so that it can do what it needs to survive. It goes into autopilot mode. I found this hard to accept. It was like anxiety had tricked me, and now I was stuck in its web again.

“I looked in the mirror and didn’t feel real – this is what it’s like to live with depersonalisation”