As anyone who’s experienced it will tell you, mental illness is often characterised by almost impressively abundant amounts of self-loathing. You long to be like everybody else, long to worry about regular things and not be constantly monitoring your moods and feeling worthless. You tell yourself that you’re useless, boring, dysfunctional, and broken, and that no amount of self-reflection, therapy, or medication will make you better again. You ask yourself: Why would anybody love you?

It’s not so much the episodes themselves that fill me with doubt, but the aftermath – when I’m slightly more stable and have the time, headspace, and distance to look back and realise how ill I really was. And, at these points, I find it hard to believe that my partner would want to stay with me at all.

“If I’m so useless that I can’t even get out of bed,” I think to myself, “then why would anybody want to be with me? Why wouldn’t they want to be with someone normal?”