“When I got my initial diagnosis, it came on the tail end of a really challenging time in my life,” the social justice advocate and creator of The Black Girls’ Guide to Surviving Menopause tells Stylist.

“I was feeling extreme fatigue, melancholy and lost an extreme amount of weight in a short space of time, all while in the last stages of my menopausal journey. I really thought I was physically ill, because I was just fading away.”

After a doctor cleared her of any physical health problems, Burney-Scott was diagnosed with clinical depression. “It was like my body had been trying to tell me what was going on. I was doing a job that required a lot of mental work, so I put the stress and the constant brain fog down to that. But actually, it was my body trying to say: ‘This is more than just sadness’. So when I got the diagnosis, it was like a lightbulb went off.”

Mental health: this candid Instagram post explains why a depression diagnosis should be seen as a positive, not a negative