And one thing no-one ever told me when I went to college is that so many people come as mature students, so many people take a gap year, then another gap year. Nobody ever, ever said to me about that, no-one ever told me about these foundation years, no-one ever tells you at college, you know you don’t have to do science A’ levels to do engineering, you can go off do several gap years, come back and do a conversion year and then do it. It’s all sort of like, it’s acceptable to do a gap year, but it’s really pushed when you have to do something like voluntary or a year in industry, which is fine, but it’s very structured like you must do A’ levels, you must go onto university or you know have a place waiting for you at university really.

And I suppose most people do that, but I think looking at my college and what I’d been through a lot of people don’t. I think sometimes it’s good to take a couple of years out. I regret not doing a gap year. I’ve no idea what I’d have done with my gap year, but I think it would have been useful to work, save up some money for university, ‘cos if I’m here for six years money is obviously a big issue, maybe not travelled but maybe worked for an organisation where I could have travelled, but on, in retrospect I can use this year, this is, I call this foundation year my branching out year, where I can try all these new things, and I will probably will work everywhere else, and it’s, it gets me to see what I want, so in some ways it is a gap year, so to speak.

The one that the National University of Australia does is like a questionnaire type thing, and you can fill in the log, the other one’s sort of, [university name] one just explains to you sort of why these things happen, and it gives you sort of I can’t remember all the buzz words now, ‘cos there’s loads of these buzz words. But it’s like sort of, look, you know analyse what you thought, look at what could be wrong with it, look what could the alternative thoughts of it, how true is your original thought, that kind of a-four-step-process so to speak. , and it also explained stuff like the symptoms, which is what I suffered from, I suffered from non-specific chest pain, which is also called psychosomatic chest pain. Very common in people with anxiety, and there was a guy on there, who was doing like a voice over and he was speaking about that, and it suddenly clicked that this was all, this was caused by stress, not by, I went to see the doctor about it but he said, non-specific chest pain is caused mainly by stress.

And when you, it, it helped a lot actually and you just start to sort of realise that if you can control the stressful situation you start to feel a lot more better about it, and that when you’re feeling really bad it’s anxiety causing the problem, not yourself sort of. So by externalising yourself and blaming the anxiety you feel a lot better about it really.

We love our complementary therapies ‘cos they make us feel good, the whole placebo effect, but they’re a waste of money to be honest. There’s no such thing as alternative medicine, there’s either medicine that works or it doesn’t work. With mental health you know it’s really important we weed out the bad types of counselling which don’t have a proper effect, we only have so much money to spend on mental health, that’s a fact. We want to spend it on stuff that works really, not stuff that doesn’t work. And I think really we do need to start bringing in more science to the field of mental health.

I’ve always been a bit of a lightweight to be honest, I’ve never needed much to get tipsy, and I’ve just never, never enjoyed the taste of beer say and this is the most common drink that people drink in the UK. So that put me off, it’s only now that I started to like stuff. I mean I’ll only drink cider now if I drink anything, that’s the only one I like to be honest. And I just, especially studying medicine has put me off ‘cos I realise how much damage it can do. Although having said that medic students do drink a hell of a lot, so, they are, they obviously don’t listen to their own medicine, so to speak. And it’s just never been something I’ve been particularly wanting to do to be honest.