“I’ve always suffered with anxiety but now I’m hearing voices, they’re always derogatory, always criticising me.”

Donna explained that she used to use Cannabis recreationally, but she stopped because she felt that it was what caused these voices. Mainstream medicine hadn’t helped her at all and she ended up in hospital with a breakdown.  Now recovered from that she was looking for a more natural way to heal.

 “I was scared out of my wits in hospital, it felt like the nurses were all against me”

“When I was sent home I was too scared to go out, it feels like I’m going to hyperventilate when I’m outside, anybody could do anything to me because it feels like they can read my mind”

“I’ve overdosed a few times, it’s like there’s nothing to live for”

“I need to get rid of this mental health malarky, get back to being a proper person”

Donna explained that she had a very narrow range of feeling OK – when I asked her to explain that she said that everything had to be exactly right or she felt worse.  Too warm made her feel ill, too cool made her feel ill.  Being on her own caused anxiety, being with too many people caused her anxiety – and so on; and she was well aware that the problem was with her.  She also had another problem:

“I felt very neglected as a child, that’s turned me into a very angry person”

In between all of this anger and anxiety Donna told me that as she no longer was able to hold down a job so she spent her time helping the homeless, she had so much empathy and such a strong desire to help those whom society looked down on.  Many of her days seem to consist of going out and helping and feeding people, which considering her own anxieties was amazing to me. She laughed and joked about her life, rarely dwelling on how low she got at times.

I prescribed a remedy called Mercury, it not only matched her actual symptoms and suicidal tendency but also:

• Her inner belief that things were her own fault pointed me to a mineral remedy
• There’s a lot of anger against other people in mercury, they can often feel that those who are actually helping are out to harm them
• It is also a remedy with an awful lot of aggravations, things have to be just so to keep them in their comfort zone
• They laugh and joke about life, often being very entertaining
• They are offended easily and have a very low tolerance to others

Two weeks later Donna called and reported the following while she was walking along to deliver some sandwiches for a friend she’d made on the streets:

“The voices have subsided, they are much more distant and I can block them out most of the time.  Also they are not as mean and crude.”

“My memory is still rubbish, it hasn’t helped that, I’d like you to sort that out now.”

Well, Donna hadn’t mentioned her bad memory, although that too is part of the Mercury picture, and I had to explain that we needed to wait a little longer before repeating the remedy, or looking for another one.  “Be patient” I encouraged, we will get there, but let’s go gently.

Donna laughed, “Being patient is not part of my DNA” she told me, “I just want to take another one – it’s like magic”

I saw Donna again a few weeks later, and she is doing remarkably well, even though she was taking much more of the remedy than I’d have recommended.  At the moment, we’ve agreed she will phone each time before repeating the remedy and I will try to curtail some of her enthusiasm for taking it on a regular basis!  That said, it is helping her so much.  In the past 3 months she has stopped all her medication (again, all done with her enthusiasm and impatience to move forward and against my recommendation to go slowly), she is feeling so much better and the voices are hardly bothering her although they’re not completely gone and she is now considering the change from relying on benefits to building her own business.

She has taken far more of the remedy than I’d have thought wise, and yet I can’t deny she’s doing brilliantly on it. So, again, a great learning curve for me and as homeopathy is such an individualised form of medicine I’m interested to see how much more Donna’s life will improve over the next few months as she continues to plunge forward a little recklessly but with huge enthusiasm.

If you are suffering from anxiety and would like help, please get in touch with me by phone or electronically for a chat.