As part of Mental Health Awareness Week, Capsule spoke to Meg and Guy Mansell about Guy’s sudden experience with acute mental distress in June this year, after he experienced a sudden and severe panic attack that left them both terrified.
What followed was three months of hell, as the pair battled the financial and emotional cost of managing what happens when your mental health suddenly takes a hard stumble; how lonely, difficult and frustrating it can be, and what got them through the start of this ongoing mental health journey.
Sometimes a period of mental distress arrives slowly, insidiously; a rising tide that creeps up so quietly, you don’t realise you’re close to drowning. Other times, it arrives like a tsunami. For Meg and Guy Mansell, it was the latter.
At the beginning of June this year, Guy was aware that he was feeling off. “I was very spacey, not quite there – I kind of felt like I was on autopilot,” he says. For a week, he wondered if there was something medically wrong with him – running the gamut from being run down, to maybe a brain tumour.
He got some tests done, got his eyes checked, but nothing came up. A second trip to the GP saw him diagnosed with anxiety and prescribed an anti-anxiety medication. It wasn’t an out-of-the-blue diagnosis, Guy says, as he’s had anxious moments in the past. “I was just desperate to figure out what it was, so with this it was like: ‘oh, cool. It’s anxiety! Let’s fix it.’”
But Guy wasn’t warned about the vicious kick-off that some anti-anxiety meds can come with. Before you start feeling better, they can initially increase your symptoms of anxiety, dramatically, in a short amount of time.
Two weeks into June, Guy, Meg and their three-year-old toddler, Daisy, were having dinner on a Friday night when Guy felt the first stirrings of a severe panic attack coming on. Not wanting to panic Daisy, he excused himself to their bedroom and things got quickly worse.
“I had the most insane, terrifying, horrible panic attack, where I thought my brain was turning off,” he recalls. “I was stuck in this horrible loop of ‘nothing is real, nothing is real…’”
Meg could hear Guy screaming from their room, and when she went to check on him, he was clutching his head and screaming that his brain was broken. It was terrifying. They made multiple phone calls – to both their families, and to the anti-anxiety helpline – and eventually, they made it through the night. But the experience of his own brain turning on him was so traumatic for Guy, it seeded in him a deep panic: what if it happened again?
Guy Mansell: ‘Living On A Knife Edge’
Sitting at their cosy kitchen table for their chat with Capsule, Guy and Meg are still in survival mode from making it through the past three months. In a decade of knowing each other, it is – without a doubt, they say – the hardest thing they’ve gone through as a couple.
They are both wary of becoming the poster children for mental health because they are so deeply aware that they are only at the start of what is an ongoing journey. But they both see the value in sharing their story, of sharing the ‘messy middle’ of surviving the thunderclap of a sudden mental breakdown.
Both Meg and Guy describe the past three months as “living on a knife edge.” Like so many Kiwi families, their experience of acute mental distress cost them money they didn’t easily have and required resources that were very hard to access.
“Literally, my full-time job became being Guy’s mental health secretary,” Meg says. “It was like screaming into a void: ‘what do you mean, you’re just going to send us home?’ ‘What do you mean, it gets worse before it gets better?’ ‘What do you mean, you’re booked out until October?’”
After taking a week back home with his family to rest completely and let the medication settle into his system, Guy then realised it was the wrong medication. He was told that switching medications is a complicated process – weaning off one, and getting used to a new one, comes with a timeline of anywhere from “five days to six weeks.” When you’re staring down the barrel of a mental breakdown, that’s a massive window to have dangled in front of you, he says.
It felt like they were in “a guessing game,” Meg says, only with the highest stakes possible. She recalls one night when she was lying next to Daisy, holding her daughter’s hand as she went to sleep. “With the other hand, I was Googling, ‘Signs of suicide in your partner,” Meg says, tearing up. “There is this immense loneliness when you’re in it, like, ‘I don’t know what to do, why is nobody helping us?’”
The Frustration Of Finding Help
When it came to the helplines available, it was a mixed bag. Sometimes in moments of acute distress, they were put on hold – or had to leave a message and wait for a call back. “When your partner is having a panic attack, that 35-minute wait time can make all the difference,” Meg says. And even when they did get through to someone, it wasn’t always helpful.
“I could have smooched some of them through the phone, and strangled other ones,” Meg says. “There was one guy who, when I described what Guy was going through, the feelings of disassociation he was having, replied with, ‘Oh that’s very strange, I’ve never heard of that.’ And for someone who thinks they’re going crazy to hear that…” she shakes her head.
The pair were so aware of how lucky they were to have knowledge of numbers to call, to have some money to spend on therapy. But the only therapists available who didn’t have months-long waiting lists were still $500 an hour. “They were helpful, but all I was thinking was, ‘I’m here for an hour, I know how much this is costing me,’” Guy says. “I wanted to, at the end of the session, be told steps I could take that would help me get better. I know that’s not how mental health works! But a huge amount of my stress was how much therapy was costing me.”
And that was just the financial cost. The emotional cost of that three-month period was relentless, the pair say. Because mental health recovery isn’t a linear path; if anything, it’s like snakes and ladders. One good day, and then the ground falls out beneath you again without warning.
Meg’s public-facing job on The Edge Breakfast had to continue without disturbance, a job that requires her to be in an effervescent good mood, reactive and present to what’s going on around her, live on air for hours a day. But in her homelife, she didn’t know if she was coming home to a good day, or, as Guy puts it, “me crying on the kitchen floor again.”
At one point, Meg had to pull out of attending a family funeral because Guy was too anxious to be left at home, which they both described as the lowest point. “I felt like the biggest burden,” Guy says, and Meg says that when he told her that, it was one of the scariest warning signs, because “burden” is such a trigger word for suicidal thoughts in men.
“’Despair’ is probably the best word to describe that time,” Guy says. “I was desperate to get better, because I could see how much my anxiety was affecting Meg – she was so stressed, and her anxiety was feeding mine, and vice versa, with Daisy in the middle of it.”
Meg was in a state of constant panic. “My heart was always at 100 miles an hour, with me thinking, ‘I feel like my husband is about to slip through my fingers and nobody is listening to me.’”
But slowly, the tide started to turn. In the end, it was advice from their former midwife, and close friend, that helped Guy make some sort of peace with his panic attack. “She said, ‘Sometimes there is no reason,’” Guy says. In the same way that our physical body can shock us out of the blue, so can the mind.
It was simple enough to help Guy believe that it was a one-off period, rather than the start of a new life. It gave him some hope and, coupled with new medication that worked for him, there was breathing space back in their lives again.
A couple of weeks ago, the pair opened up about what they had been going through on their social media platforms. They were flooded with positive messages of support, and messages from people who had been through similar experiences in trying different medications. That’s all they wanted to do, with sharing their story – help other Kiwis feel less isolated.
“For people who are going through it, or whose partners are going through it, just that acknowledgement that it’s not just them,” Guy says. “What helped me when I was going through it was when people said to me, ‘I know exactly what you’re talking about,’ because in your own head, you think you’re going crazy. So, when I explained how I had felt, I wanted to do that for others – to help them feel less alone.”
“I am so grateful that Guy was open to medication,” Meg says. “I had many, many thousands of messages from people who had lost their partners, or their children, because they thought the medication wouldn’t work, so they didn’t try it. Or they went on it in the early weeks, and didn’t realise things get worse before they get better.”
Guy says he was hesitant at the idea of trying medication initially, because he was worried about being reliant on a pill for the rest of his life. “I thought, ‘Will I never be ‘me’ again? Will I never get to go back to the guy I was, pre-medication?’” But now, he’s so grateful he persevered. “In the end, I was like, ‘what’s the alternative? Fuck it, let’s try the medication,’” he says. “And thank god I did.”
Meg Mansell co-hosts The Edge Breakfast with Clint, Meg and Dan, weekdays from 6am and Guy Mansell hosts the Extremely Casual Gamers podcast, available on all major platforms.
Where To Get Help
- 1737, Need to talk? Free call or text 1737 any time for support from a trained counsellor
- Anxiety New Zealand – 0800 ANXIETY (0800 269 4389)
