“Are you an anxious individual?” The moment my GP asked that question, my heart sank. How many of us have been written off as ‘anxious’ in the hope of a more substantive diagnosis? For over a year, I’d been dealing with odd health symptoms like sporadic hair loss, excessive body hair growth, dark patches of skin, extreme mood swings and dizziness. Sitting in that surgery chair, I felt numb.

Anxiety disorders are obviously very real and often debilitating, but every time a medical professional has suggested it to me, it’s felt like a brush-off. It’s all in her head, she’s making this up for attention. Having done my research, I knew that my physical and mental symptoms were part of a bigger problem, and connecting the dots, I was fairly sure that I had PCOS (polycystic ovarian syndrome). And yet… no one listened to me.

Things came to a head when I lost consciousness while travelling for work. I’d been filming on location and returned to my hotel, only to black out for no apparent reason. It was just one more thing left unexplained, but I pushed to be assessed and was found to be healthy and ‘normal’.

“I thought I had an anxiety disorder – it turned out that I had a key symptom of PCOS”