Chemist Toria Stafford's untreated mental illness starts to overwhelm both her science and her personal life.
Toria Stafford just finished her PhD at the School of Chemistry at the University of Manchester. Her research looks at lanthanides, uranium and other radioactive actinide elements by emission spectroscopy to further understand processes and fingerprint species relevant to the nuclear fuel cycle. She has a passion for science communication, public engagement and women in STEM advocacy, jumping at the chance to take part in events throughout the UK. Outside the lab, Toria enjoys reading sci-fi/fantasy books, watching musicals and eating chocolate.
This story originally aired on August 3, 2018 in an episode titled “Me vs. My Brain: Stories about losing your self.”
Story Transcript
I have always loved science, even when it wasn’t one of the cool subjects at school, I loved it. So when I chose to do science at secondary school and on to do chemistry at university, it was only really ever the only thing I was going to do. I actually even met my boyfriend at a University Open Day. He was the tall, dark, handsome one that you could tell lifted weights at the back from the same tall group as me. Very lucky.
Although we ended up at separate universities, we stayed together. And when I started university I thought life couldn’t get any better.
At the end of my first year, I was diagnosed with several food allergies. I was given this huge list of things that I shouldn’t be eating and things that I have to now avoid. Although the science had always been there and I'd avoided eating nuts for quite a while, something about it being medically diagnosed flipped a switch in my head. In a very short space of time, I drastically changed in me.
I saw contamination, or what I thought was contamination, everywhere. I thought that anything that I hadn’t personally cleaned and scrubbed was contaminated and dirty. So in response to all of these thoughts going through my head, I started obsessively washing things.
It started with my hands. I had to use a particular soap that somehow in my head I had approved for use. Then I used to have to wash my hands in a particular sink at university using this particular soap. And then how many times I had to wash my hands increased. Three, five, seven, double figures, twelve, fifteen. It got to the point where my hands were dry, cracked and bleeding from the excessive washing.
But it didn’t stop there. I used to come home at the end of every day, take a shower, and I would scrub my skin until it was raw and stinging because I felt dirty, although there was nothing on me.
And I would always wear something with long sleeves so that I could use those sleeves to handle anything that I was scared of. At this point, that was pretty much everything. Do you know how difficult it is to flip through a lab book through your sleeves? That’s what I was doing every time I had to handle it outside of the lab.
At the time all of this was going on and going through my head, I remember there was a video going around on social media and it was of this woman who was trying to open a bathroom door without using the hands that she just washed. She was using elbows, knees, feet. It was pretty funny to watch, but all I could think of when I was watching this video was, “That’s me, except with everything, not just the bathroom door handle.”
And all of my friends were laughing at this woman. I spent countless nights lying awake thinking, “But they're laughing at her. What if they discover my secret? What if they discover all of this thing that’s going on in my head that I don't even understand? What if they turned around and had the same kind of thoughts about me? What if they started laughing at me?” That terrified me.
These thoughts continued and it got to the point where my mood was suffering. Everything was suffering. So after a lot of coaxing by my partner, I finally went to the doctor about six months after my allergy diagnosis, and I just completely broke down in his office. I needed help. I couldn’t do this anymore. I couldn’t cope with any of it. It was too much.
The diagnosis? Severe anxiety, depression, and obsessive-compulsive disorder or OCD. The worst bit about the whole situation, I was too scared to accept medication to help with my condition, or conditions. At this point I didn’t even have paracetamol or ibuprofen because I was scared about taking them as well.
So when the scientist in me, although at this point it was very, very buried, kind of thought the medication would be an option before I'd seen the doctor, I did what any scientist would do and I spent a while researching it. But that was my mistake because it became just another obsession.
I would spend hours and hours and hours going over the same things over and over again, trying to persuade myself that it would all be fine. You wouldn’t get all of these side effects. It will do you good. So although I came across all of these benefits that I could have from taking them, I saw all of the negatives and that’s all I focused on. Just the negatives.
And when I told Conrad about this he begged and pleaded with me to accept the medication. But I was so scared just the mere thought of medication made me feel sick and dizzy.
But I did accept some help. I started counseling and also cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT. Starting counseling is one of the hardest things I have ever, ever had to do. We talked about some surface issues but we never got to the root of the problem, because one of the things about counseling is there's only a limited number of sessions that you can have. So not long after finishing, my mood started declining and I was basically back to square one. I had no idea what was going on or where this had all come from. But I got to have a good cry.
The waiting time for CBT, because it’s so in demand, I had to wait over a year before I could start. By this time, my obsessions and my compulsions were an all -time high and my mood had reached an all-time low.
When I moved into the student house the summer before and I started my CBT, I scrubbed the entire house top to bottom. It took about a week before I was happy to set foot in there and start moving my things across. And even then I wasn’t happy with a lot of it and I would… I had particular places for things. I don't know why they had to go in that place, they just had to. There was no other way about it. I wasn’t happy if they weren’t in their place.
And even after all of this I imposed a strict set of rules for anyone entering my bedroom which was my haven, the only place I felt safe. Any shoes or socks that had touched the carpet or anything outside, not allowed in the bedroom. Nothing from outside is allowed to touch the bed. Everything had its particular place and I would actually lose sleep if I knew something was out of place.
My partner Conrad, when he came over, had a little square on the floor where he was allowed to put his bag. And he had a separate set of towels just for him because I couldn’t know where he put the towels down in the bathroom and that might be the wrong place, so they were dirty and contaminated.
Every time after he left, I would scrub the floor where he had left his bag. I would change all of the bed sheets and I would rearrange the whole room to exactly how it was before he came. I'd basically remove every trace of him not because I didn’t want him there, not because I didn’t love him, but just because that’s what my compulsions told me I had to do to be content. As content as you can be in that situation.
In my CBT I started making progress. We set small weekly goals, which is fine. But when I say small I really mean small. One of my biggest obsessions was food labels because of where my kind of problems came from. I would read things over and over again and sometimes I'd even read it, a food label, like a hundred times and I still wouldn’t be happy eating the food.
I even had my own set of plates and cutlery and things like that back home that I would use when I went to stay with my mom because, I don't know why. I just had to. I just had to have that. I wasn’t happy using the cutlery and stuff I'd used for years.
I got a call one night around midnight from one of my sisters in floods of tears. I knew instantly what it was about. My mom had lost her own battle with her demons and passed away. She was the perfect example of someone who was so in denial about the problems that she had that by the time she realized, it was too late.
I didn’t handle this very well at all. I pushed everything that I was feeling deep down inside me. I didn’t confront my feelings, I didn’t grieve properly, I just said I need to be there for my sisters. No other way about it. You can’t show your emotion.
So that’s what I did. I got on with everything, I went back to uni and, apart from an email that I sent to one of my tutors so that it could go on to my university records, I didn’t say anything. I didn’t mention it to my friends. Nothing.
I got on with revising for my exams and that Easter I took my exams and it was the best exam season I had my entire undergraduate degree.
That summer I was doing a research placement at the university and I was living on my own because nobody else was around during summer. That’s when everything hit me and I went on this huge downward spiral, only much worse than the times before.
It got so bad and I was so wrapped up in my own head that after a few months I had pushed Conrad away. I begged him on the phone to stay, trying to convince him that I could change. That I could be there for him. That I could be a girlfriend, not a burden like I had been. But he didn’t believe me because he had heard it all before.
During the months that I had been, or years at this point, that I had been suffering he was my lifeline. He was the only person who knew the full extent of everything that was going on and one of the only people I had told. And now he was gone. And the only person to blame was me. I pushed him away.
I was numb. I didn’t know what to do. My flat mate at the time went home for a week and that week I didn’t get out of bed. I didn’t shower. I just lay in bed staring at the ceiling, thinking everything through, replaying the years and years in my head thinking what I could have done better, what I could have done differently.
I maybe ate some dry cereal out the box once a day if I was lucky, maybe a glass of water every now and again. And I didn’t even make it to the Christmas meal with the research group I was doing my master’s project with because I couldn’t drag myself out of bed physically or mentally. I was in a completely different state of mind that I couldn’t see a way out of and didn’t see a reason to drag myself out of this.
When term started again, I resumed my CBT. I made small progress very, very slowly, but I did. But as with the counseling, there's only a limited number of sessions that you can have so they stopped. But there was one thing that kept me going and kept me progressing and that’s Conrad.
A few months after our breakup, we actually realized that both of us were better together than we were apart. We spent a long time talking everything through and we decided to give it another go.
We both made it to graduation at the end of that academic year. We both got PhDs at the same university so we could be a lot closer. And we ended up moving in together and everything like that.
Since then I have made slow and steady progress. It has not been easy. I’m not going to lie. But I have made progress and that’s something that I am proud of.
At the end of last year, I had another dark moment. But this time after a few weeks of being in a dark place, I decided that I was going to own this. I was going to take this chance to be better than when I'd gone this low before. I saw it as a turning point.
I went back to the doctor. I broke down again, scared the medical student that was in the room. But I went, “Give me everything you've got.”
I went to counseling again. I haven't signed up to CBT but the biggest step was I started medication. It was terrifying. All those side effects that I was scared that I was going to get, I got. It’s not fun. Worth it, but not fun. And I’m getting there.
For me, recovery has meant owning my fear. I still handle my lab book with sleeves outside of the lab, which when you're writing a thesis is not ideal. I still make sure and double-check and triple-check that the front door is locked. And I still occasionally will have things that will completely set off my obsessions and compulsions.
But that’s okay. It’s a part of me. It doesn’t have to own me and be all-consuming. I can still be me and live with these conditions. I've even come to find some positives in it. The front door will always be locked, and the windows. And I work in a lab with radioactive material so my contamination control is pretty outstanding, if I do say so.
I’m Toria. I suffer with my mental health but I am still a scientist in spite of it all. Thank you.