A Wirral man thought he was "a waste of space" before being diagnosed with a lifelong condition missed since childhood.
Looking back, 23-year-old Josh thought, "there's obviously something different about me" and wondered why no one spotted his condition sooner. He was struggling to focus and stay awake in lectures, his life felt unstable and inconsistent, and his moods switched from "great" one day to "terrible" the next, forcing him to resit second year of university. He said: "I couldn't keep up. I couldn't look after myself. I wasn't really eating. I didn't actually stay awake in a lecture until my third year of uni."
He couldn't "remember the last time [he] was happy", but cognitive behavioural therapy, setting a routine and improving his sleeping and eating habits didn't help. Instead, Josh fell into a "vicious cycle" of anxiety around not meeting his expectations, making his focus even worse. Josh said: "People would say, 'Oh, have you done the work for this seminar?', and I'd say, 'Ooh, what am I like, I haven't done it, ha ha ha', just laughing it off when really, on the inside, I was like, 'Stupid boy, I can't believe you forgot to do that. That's so annoying, you're such an idiot, you're such a waste of space'."
