Marion:

My name is Marion Janner. It's difficult to know where to start. In this context, I suppose, I'm a patient. I have a severe mental illness, something particularly vicious, called Borderline Personality Disorder which is characterised by a compulsion to self-destruct.

It has got the very ugly name of "Borderline Personality Disorder" and it's both ugly and confusing because it sounds like it is marginal but it's not; it's very full on. It is a disorder of the personality because it really messes with our emotional regulation and our ability to stay calm. All those posters and t-shirts one now gets encouraging us to "Keep Calm" – that's the last thing we're able to do. We experience relatively small blips as being genuinely catastrophic; at that moment it feels like the end of the world. All that is in my head, and in many other people's heads with the condition, is the absolute need to self-destruct.

The heroic, skilful and compassionate work that mental health inpatient staff do - day in, day out – gets overlooked but I'm acutely aware, both from my own experience of being an inpatient and also through star wards, that ward staff do the most phenomenal work. They're very engaged with patients, very creative, imaginative and very committed. My own condition is one that would appear to everyone else that I overreact to everything, that I'm making big dramas out of things and so on. All I can say is: I genuinely can't help it, that's how my illness manifests itself. I'm incredibly appreciative of staff for being totally non-judgemental about the things I do to myself and how I respond when I'm in crisis. I've had really phenomenal care.