Every year, the first Thursday in February sees Time to Talk Day, run by Time to Change. The idea is to get people talking about mental health and share their experiences with the aim of ending the stigma that people face.

For the last two years, we at LDV have taken part in the event and our readers have produced some outstanding pieces. You can read them all here.

Two years ago, Eleanor Draycott wrote about her experience of living with BiPolar:

Many people don’t understand what being Bi-polar actually means, I guess this is why I’m putting this down on paper. The most basic knowledge the population has is that someone with this illness “suffers from” extreme highs and lows and this is certainly true. One day I can be the life and soul of the party, extremely talkative, wanting to go out and embrace the world with open arms. But the next I can be so down that getting out of bed seems like an insurmountable task. There has never been any pattern to my highs and lows, either can last for days, weeks or months. Before I was on the right combination of medication, in my manic stages I wouldn’t sleep for as long as they lasted. I was always out partying, dancing, drinking, behaving recklessly, spending money I didn’t have on ridiculous items I would never need if I lived to be one hundred. I would sit up for hours writing pages and pages of rambling thoughts in notebooks, that made no sense when I came down and my mind wasn’t racing, but which at the time of writing I was convinced contained the answer to world peace.

At my lowest I can lie in bed or on the sofa for days on end, no motivation to move, leave the house or even to eat, spending days sobbing into a cushion because I feel so sad it completely overwhelms me – like the bottom has fallen out of my world, but unable to give anybody, even myself, an explanation as to why. It’s impossible to describe the psychological pain I am in a these times. So intense that it is almost physical – like someone had plunged their hand into my chest and was crushing my heart with their bare fingers. This may sound overly dramatic to you, but that’s the closest I’ve ever got to verbalising how it feels.

Last year, Alex White wrote about the support she had from a teacher which made a big difference to her:

He told me that I was ordinary. There was nothing unusual about me. All I did was have stronger reactions than other people and even that wasn’t my fault. Yes I did need help to overcome those problems but everyone needs help at some point in their lives. I was no different. The only thing, he said, that had ever marked me out to him was that I was the only person who would still admit to being a Liberal Democrat.

After that he didn’t tiptoe around me. He didn’t treat me any different. He still cracked jokes and he still spent his entire time trying to engage our history class in completely irrelevant debate. To my last day he still treated me like he had before that talk. I wish I understood then how much that meant to me so I could thank him. With so many people when I say I have a mental illness they either think I’m some sort of psychopath or think that I need to be surrounded in bubble wrap and made failsafe. He did neither. He recognised that Alex White was more important than an illness and that one day Alex White would beat this illness entirely.

This year’s event is on 4th February. Normally, we’ve just asked people to write pieces in the couple of days before, but this year, I thought it might be a good idea to give you more time to think about it. If you want to take part, please send us a piece of around 500 words at some point in the next two and a half weeks.

You can find out more about Time to Talk Day on the Time to Change website.

* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings