I had psychosis at 15 - now I'm a mental health nurse so I can help others like me

When Ayla Jones was 15 she believed someone was drilling through the walls of her home at night to come and murder her.

This was the version of reality she lived after early mental health issues mushroomed into full-blown psychosis.

Now, 10 years on, after years of missed school and hospital stays, she has earned a degree in mental health nursing and has a cast-iron determination to make a difference to young people suffering as she once did.

Ayla, from Sandfields, Port Talbot, was a happy, only child. She loved primary school and had a close relationship with her parents.

"I had friends and things. I always did well academically," she remembers.

Warning - this article contains details of mental health issues and eating disorders

But in her last year of primary school, tragedy struck her family when her brother Alfie was stillborn and the young Ayla wrongly thought it was her fault.

"I've never been able to deal with change so I think the concept of being the only child and then having a sibling, I found that quite hard," she said.

"I think that's what made me think, like because I didn't want a sibling at the start, maybe that's why [it happened]."

A second brother, now a teenager, was born two years later who Ayla loves "so much".

But the trauma of Alfie's birth stayed with her and the move up to Sandfields Comprehensive School coincided with a decline in her mental health.

"That's when I started making myself sick," she explains bluntly.

"I've always not been confident and hated the way I look. When all that trauma happened and the change [of school], it's like I turned to controlling my food, what went in my body and what went out, as a way of coping.

"I tried to diet and things and then I'd binge and then feel guilty about eating, and 'I don't deserve to eat, and I'm fat and disgusting'.

"So then I made myself sick and it was just a vicious cycle then."

After her parents found out, her GP referred her to the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (Camhs), where Ayla was diagnosed with bulimia, anxiety and depression.

She had counselling but it wasn't helping and she was eventually prescribed a low-dose anti-depressant.

"When I went to comp, I was in top sets," she said.

"When I started struggling mentally, all of that just went out of the window. It was hard for my mother to get me to go to school. I was really isolated."

Then psychosis struck.

"I had paranoia, delusions. I had my first full-on episode when I was 15."

Ayla thought someone she knew was going to kill her and they were "working with the devil".

She would hear drilling in the night and believed the person was building a secret passageway into the house.

She became hypomanic and had depression and anxiety.

"When I was going to school, I'd be doing my hair and makeup at like three o'clock in the morning, put music on, like literally had no concept of time."

Her medical team sent her to the community intensive treatment team, which provides high levels of support, including daily visits.

Ayla wouldn't believe doctors or her parents when they told her she was unwell and thought they were all part of the plot to kill her.

Afraid that Ayla posed a risk to herself, she was sectioned under the Mental Health Act and treated at a Camhs in-patient unit.

She was eventually diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type, put on stronger anti-psychotic drugs and spent the next few years going in and out of hospital and trialling drugs in an effort to find something effective.

But this came with significant side effects.

"Drooling. It slowed my speech. Tired all the time. Was made to feel a bit out of it."

On her 17th birthday, which she spent in hospital, a doctor told her parents he wanted to try a much stronger drug, clozapine - which can have severe side effects including seizures and trouble controlling body movements - as a last-chance option.

It helped but her body responded so badly she had to come off it and she was back on the drugs which made her very sleepy.

"I just couldn't function," she recalled.

She had been too unwell for school for years and knew she was missing out on the normal life of a teenager when she saw other people her age going out with their friends.

"I'd never even been on a bus on my own."

She left school with no GCSEs, but part of her treatment from the early intervention in psychosis team were weekly visits from a community nurse.

This was to prove pivotal.

"The support I had was really changing and helped me get back into the community. The Down to Earth project would take a group of us and we'd do woodwork and out into the forest, so it was building up skills to help socially."

At 18, she transferred to adult services but at that point, she said: "I was literally just existing. I wasn't living."

The doctor trialled mood stabilisers and, for the first time in years Ayla started feeling things and gradually come off the anti-psychotic drugs.

This stability gave her confidence to apply to Afan College and get the education she had missed.

"In college, that's when my life changed. I made friends then. I got a best friend. I was going on buses and things on my own and doing things that I'd seen other people my age do."

When it came to planning for her future, Ayla knew exactly what she wanted.

"I knew I wanted to go into nursing and help people with mental health and help people go through what I went through. I had that passion to hopefully make a difference."

She completed a BTEC in health and social care, followed by the Access to Higher Education diploma.

She accompanied a friend on a trip to an event in London where Jonny Benjamin, founder of youth mental health charity Beyond, was giving a talk.

"He had the same diagnosis that I was diagnosed with and that was the first time I had ever met anyone who was actually doing the things that he wanted to, and making a difference.

"My lecturer was like: 'You have to go and talk to him'."

She did and later became a member of the charity's youth board and contributed an essay to The Book of Hope: 101 Voices on Overcoming Adversity alongside people such as Joe Wicks, Dame Kelly Holmes and Rylan Clark-Neal.

Ayla was accepted at Swansea University and, in September 2021 moved to live in halls, but after a number of weeks realised it wasn't working.

"I couldn't cope and ended up deferring for a year. It was just too much, too soon. But I had that awareness to know."

She returned in 2022 and, with weekly support from her wellbeing mentor Pamela Johnson, graduated with a degree in mental health nursing.

Now she wants to use her experiences to help others.

"So many young people are struggling with their mental health. I'd love to see proper support in schools in an inclusive way.

"I don't think school is built for people who don't fit in the mainstream category, which is just wrong."

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