Anyone who knows me will know just how much I hate running, but I've decided don the trainers to run the London Marathon. The motivation for my self-inflicted pain come from me wanting to run for MQ - a fantastic charity which you can read about below.

 Many people may not know this but I have primarily cognitive obsessive-compulsive disorder and a generalised anxiety disorder. This has driven me lose connections with myself, the people around me, and led to feeling so afraid that I contemplated taking my own life on more than one occasion. Things looked pretty dark until I started to talk about what I was feeling, and began trying to understand why I had developed OCD and anxiety in the first place (you can read more about my story here).

After some amazing counselling and through the support of those around me, I feel better today than I have in all of the past five years. Without this help, I don't know where I would be. But so much more needs to be done to bring parity between our physical and mental wellbeing. Prevention is much more effective than reaction, but for this to happen, we need to understand exactly why one in four of us fall into ill mental health.

That's why I believe more research and funding is needed to understand our mental health better. If we are ever going to truly understand why we're undergoing a mental health epidemic, we need more research into causes, treatments, and ultimately, prevention.

My aim is to raise money to help aid the pioneering research that MQ are conducting, right now, in getting to gripes with the causes of ill mental health. Any money you can give to this cause is hugely appreciate, but to put things into context:

£1,000 could pay for:

• 2 years of patient/public involvement events like Dr Teresa Tavassoli’s project for autism. Patient and public involvement is essential to ensure that research is being carried out with the input of those who are directly impacted by its outcomes, so Dr Tavassoli is spending money to follow 70 autistic children at age 4, 5 and 6, and measuring their responses to sensory stimuli. Some more information can be found here. 

£2,500 could pay for:

• A full patient pilot study, like Dr Claire Gillan’s project, creating an internet-based tool which could predict how effective antidepressants will be for different individuals. 80% of GP's see treating mental illness as 'trial and error' and 50% of treatments are ineffective. Dr Gillan’s could enable health services to radically reduce the amount spent on ineffective treatments. Here’s some more information. 
• One full year’s lab equipment for projects like Johannes Graff’s project, which aims to understand PTSD. Dr Graff is exploring the potential of exposure therapy, one of the most effective treatments for the 2 million people a year affected by PTSD.  Here’s some more information on the project, which is now showing promising results.