The two baking experts both posted incredibly personal pics on Instagram.
Former Great British Bake-Off contestants Kim-Joy and Lottie Bedlow both took the extremely brave step of publicly opening up about their mental health on social media yesterday.
Yesterday, theatre producer Lottie Bedlow, 32, who competed on the show last year, posted a picture of her hand holding a small white pill, accompanied by this caption: “Not my usual post and I’ve thought long and hard about whether it’s a good idea or not. But the fact I had to think about it, and the worry I felt about posting it, is the exact reason I think I need to.
This is 50mg of sertraline. I take one tablet every morning and have done for 4 years.”
Lottie went on to explain that she’d lived with various forms of anxiety for as long as she could remember, “ranging from the standard ‘generalized anxiety’ diagnosis to the more scary sounding ‘OCD tendencies with intrusive thoughts’.”
She added that she’d probably tried “every” form of therapy over the years, initially avoiding medication because of the stigma surrounding it. Lottie only began taking meds when she reached a “crisis point” — a place she’s eager to ensure as many others avoid as possible.
“I wish I hadn’t been so caught up in the stigma that I waited until I was really desperate to go on them,” she wrote. “That stigma will only go away if we are more honest about how many people rely on these drugs to function on a daily basis because there are A LOT OF US out there.
Lottie highlighted the fact that, as a society, we readily accept that certain conditions necessitate regular medication, like insulin for diabetics whose bodies can’t produce it properly. “For whatever reason, my brain doesn’t produce the right chemicals at the right time so I help it out with medication,” she wrote.
Lottie’s post was soon followed by one from 30-year-old Kim-Joy, who competed on Bake-Off in 2018. Her caption — which accompanied a similar-looking photo — read: “This picture is of the antidepressant I take every day — held in my anxiety-ridden bitten fingers.”
“I’ve been on various different antidepressants since I was a teenager, but it’s only since about a year ago that I started sharing with a few people about being on antidepressants. Even when friends would talk to me about they themselves taking it, I still wouldn’t share that I took it.”
Kim was realistic about the barriers she’d had to opening up, admitting: “I had a traumatic and chaotic childhood with close family having very severe mental illness, so I’ve always felt like I need to be the adult and that means I need to appear ‘strong’ so that I’m there for others, even when I feel scared. Also I’d compare my own issues to my family, plus others I worked with when I worked as mental health practitioner myself, and decide that my own issues are undeserving of any empathy because they aren’t as ‘bad’.”
Crucially, she emphasized that all our mental health is important and that there is no benchmark you have to surpass in order to be worthy of help. She also stressed that meds aren’t an easy fix, explaining “sertraline doesn’t help completely but it does take an ‘edge’ off.”
Both Kim and Lottie said they were returning straight to their festive baking after their vulnerable posts. Sounds like a pretty wonderful way to practice mental self-care to us.
