Hello my name is Anna and I am 23! I have struggled significantly with my mental health since I was 16. I started off attending college in Wisconsin in 2019. The first year while I was there, I was on the triathlon team and in nursing school. Unfortunately when COVID hit in 2020, we had a lot of family health issues and I was the primary caregiver for my mom who at the time got very sick. I have had OCD my whole life, so with the stress of my mom being sick and COVID, I started declining pretty rapidly.
Anyway, when I was a sophomore year in college, I started having symptoms of what we thought was depression. I became very suicidal and had to attend a Partial Hospitalization Program close to my school. By this time I was not able to keep up with school work, so I had to medically withdraw from classes. Once I came home, I ended up in and out of hospitals and residential treatment facilities for two years, and then I started school again at a college much closer to where we live. Ever since that I have had a total of 9 hospitalizations, two residential stays (one where I lived there for 4 months), and thousands of hours in outpatient therapy. Now I have a Service Dog who helps me get through the struggles of day to day life. You can follow along with my posts to learn more about Service Dogs, the impact of Chronic Illness on people's lives, invisible disabilities, and mental health awareness!
Instagram: service_pup_piper