Tom
I joined the police in 2014 at the age of 19. Things started to change in me. My sleep really started to deteriorate to the point I'd be waking up multiple times a night, struggling to fall asleep to begin with. And then the most prominent symptom for me was an inability to keep food down, particularly around exercise or heightened moments most of the time, and it continually got worse. Was quite nauseous, feel sick, throw up, thought there must be something going on inside my stomach.
So that led me to seek help by booking to go to a GP, and he told me, "Don't want you to lose your gains, mate" based off me going to the gym a bit at that point and gave me the anti-nausea tablets and said, "Come back in a couple of weeks if you're still struggling."
2017, sort of carried on doing what I was doing with these prescriptions. They didn't work. I used a few sleeping tablets here or there where I was struggling to sleep still, but then just sort of disconnected. As the person that was repeatedly giving me 150 milligrams of sertraline, I never had a conversation saying, "Mate, how are these actually going for you? What are they making you feel? Are they helping?" That conversation wasn't had with any of my GPs prior to when the script was renewed, and it wasn't had with the person dispensing them either.
And so I just took them, I just kept taking them. So I think some better understanding as well and a bit of education around what they were really doing to me, for me, or not, would've helped me probably sooner go, "Okay, maybe I don't need to be on these for the rest of my life, and maybe there's something else out there that's better for me." So there's probably an absence of any real interaction with a pharmacist that is probably the biggest concern in that space for me.
Every time I go and grab them, I could be feeling absolute lowest of lows, but give them a smile and ask them how they are. They'll ask me how I'm going, say, "Yeah, good, thank you. Have a good day." And that's the interaction. You go out and you're back to reality again. It's just that small interaction is just an exchange. It's a purchase, really. I've never seen it or had the experience where I felt like that could be someone I could engage with to actually find out more about what options are out there or, yeah.