From today, Monday is now Doodle Day. For the next 6 weeks, we’ll be publishing one of The Doodle Chronicles’ creations. For the first in our series, Molly, who is behind the doodles, tells us more about herself and explains how The Doodle Chronicles began:

I’m a 21-year-old postgraduate student, recently diagnosed with severe clinical depression and generalized anxiety disorder. Although the diagnosis is new, my mental health issues are very long-standing, dating back to when I was 15 or 16, but which unfortunately went undiagnosed. Misguided doctors told me to ‘just stop thinking negatively’ and that I couldn’t possibly be depressed because I managed to force a polite laugh at a joke. Luckily, my university has excellent psychological services, so I am finally getting the help that I need.

I have been in a very dark place recently, feeling very alone and struggling to reach out for support from loved ones. I realized that mental illness, something that is already misunderstood and stigmatized, can be completely impossible to explain and sometimes even harder to come to terms with yourself. One evening, when I was struggling just to get through each hour, I started to doodle and so ‘Life in a Box’ was born.

I found it gave me a certain level of solace, helping me to clarify my own feelings and turning destructive energy into something much more productive. I drew more and more until finally my brain was quiet enough to go back to some kind of normality. Every day since, during my darkest times, I have turned to doodling. If you’re struggling with mental illness, I really can’t recommend it more; it’s not a cure or a solution to your problems, but it is a great way to come to terms with and accept your own thoughts and feelings.

Although this started off as a very personal project, I decided to share it with my family and friends on my private Facebook page, hoping that they might understand me a little better. The response was overwhelmingly positive, with people telling me that they had gained a new insight into what it meant to have a mental illness. People suffering from depression or anxiety themselves also told me how much they identified with my doodles and how it made such a difference to feeling alone and being completely misunderstood. I’m no artist, but it seems like sometimes a simple doodle can help where words alone cannot. I received such a lot of encouragement that I decided to set up ‘The Doodle Chronicles’ on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr; it was a big step to share my doodles and a bit of my story, but it is worth it even if just one person could be helped.