There are lots of stories surrounding mental health and social media and I’m not exempt from this as this very thing happened to me, here is how Facebook helped to destroy my mental health.

Everyone that knows me thinks I suffer from paranoia and the fact that I can’t often predict bad things happening before they actually do doesn’t help either.

I want to tell the voices inside my head to shut up and leave me alone, but sadly, the voices won’t listen, and that’s when it all becomes too real.

I was once a fairly popular person who almost everyone who I associated with, would add me to their Facebook until something strange happened in 2007.

Almost everyone started to refuse my invites, delete me or even go as far as blocking me despite the fact I hadn’t personally done anything to those people.

The first thing that came into my head was how dare these people blank me! I had previously had this at school and never thought it would happen again and again!

Then I was upset because the people that were ignoring and blanking me where adding individuals who were nasty to me for no reason, yet they liked them! I was being betrayed, and they were all against me.

It did happen again when I was going through a tough time in 2013.

Even my own cousin deleted me and months later when I was sacked from my job at a Cornish digital agency because of my behaviour due to my mental health, ex-colleagues also deleted and blocked me.

It was the social media site Facebook that was part of the reason for me getting the sack.

In August 2013, I was fighting with just about everyone, and I was bored at work because the place had become so serious. My so-called close friend had also blocked me from her boyfriends Facebook account.

Many people had left the company, following redundancies and changes at the beginning of 2013.

New recruits had joined the company, and everything was different.

There was no longer much banter, teamwork or team meetings even the Friday monthly meetings where we used to get free lunch had stopped.

We all sat at our machines from 9 am to 5.30pm almost in silence.

I was put into a new group and in another office and I was separated from my old team and my content team.

I was still working on Argos with them, and I was asked to desk hop while working on Argos.

One of the other team members was off, so there was a spare desk in the Argos team room.

I needed some help with some research, finding websites for household goods, so I came back into my old room. I was going through Google and checking out the websites until I came to a site called “Rachel Reveals”.

Stupidly, I clicked on the site, and I couldn’t believe what I saw! The site had many explicit images on it, so I told my senior, who looked at the site and laughed it off.

At first, I was concerned because I couldn’t believe how easy it was to find these types of sites. So I asked her about putting this site on the ban list.

She made a bit of a joke out of this and asked me to send it to another colleague along with our SEO Exec who for some reason never liked me, he also never added me to Facebook when I requested him.

A month later, I was pulled out of the room by my manager who said he wanted a quick chat with me.

I was taken into a private room, and as soon as I noticed the HR manager there, I knew instantly that something was wrong.

They asked about the site Rachel Reveals, and I told them that this was a site I accidentally stumbled across while looking for household good opportunities and that I told my supervisor.

She then asked if I had shared the link and talked about it to which I couldn’t remember because weeks had passed and that site had been forgotten about. So why bring it up now?

They told me not to talk to anyone about this investigation, took my pass and office key and sent me home.

Later that night, I got into a mess and asked a member of staff if she could remember the number of people that received the link because I could lose my job over it.

A few days later I received a phone call from HR saying that lots of people were involved with this and that my suspension had been lifted.

I was so relieved until she told me that this wasn’t over because I had to attend a meeting with her, which was taped.

I never spoke to anyone the day I returned to work. I cried most of the day, and at the end of the day, my Account manager went along to the medical centre with me.

On the Monday morning at about 9.30am, I was asked again by my manager for a private chat, again when he opened the door, I found the HR manager yet again.

She told me that they were going to have to suspend me again due to the outcome of the meetings. Again, my pass and key were retaken.

A few days later, I was sent all the interviews from the meetings, and I found out that the member of staff who I had spoken to on Facebook had printed off our conversation and had given all of it to HR to save her own skin.

She could have just not mentioned it, and maybe I would still have had a job. I was signed off work by the doctor and was receiving CBT counselling.

In the meantime, I kept receiving letters inviting me to a disciplinary hearing.

In November 2013, the HR Manager wanted to meet me because I had been off sick for almost 3 months.

I had the meeting in a cafe, which is owned by one of my ex-friends friend and she came to support me at the meeting.

After the meeting, I wanted to get this over with as Christmas was approaching and I wanted to get better, and the only way I could try was if my future was sorted out.

I took the HR manager’s advice and went for private counselling which my medical insurance through the company covered.

I decided to go through with the disciplinary and fight for what I felt was my future and told them how I wanted to progress within the company and that I was trying to hide what I thought at the time was depression.

However, all of this was ignored, and I received an email just days before I thought that I was going back to work to say that I had been sacked for Gross Misconduct and that my contract was terminated with immediate effect and that my counselling would also be withdrawn.

I contacted the private counsellor to let her know, and she said that she would continue my sessions because my counselling had been authorised before the contract termination.

I was upset to think that a silly little conversation and social networking site such as Facebook has helped to destroy my mental health.

I later found that many people from the company and people who had known me for years had deleted and blocked me from the site and this wasn’t helping my mental health.

I was so paranoid and destroyed that I decided to come off Facebook as a result of this.

It wasn’t until the end of 2016 that I reluctantly returned to Facebook under my blogger name, and the only reason I returned was so I could upload my blog pages and communicate with bloggers, freelancers and companies for collaborations.

Has Facebook ever or an incident on Facebook ever helped destroy your mental health?

Let us know in the comments below or join in the discussions on our social media pages.

When joining Disabiltiy Cornwall I never imagined months later the Cornish Charity CEO would force be to resign.

It was October 2011, and I joined a Cornish Charity in a new temporary role as an Online Administrator, for three days a week.

The role was a new role, so the Cornish charity CEO wasn’t clear in what she expected me to do.

My duties included updating the website which is built by a man who lived in Newquay who they used as their Web Developer.

He used a CMS called Joomla, which I had never used before.

I also updated their social media channels, Facebook, and Twitter as well as participating in their offline magazine and populating their other side project which was an online list of Cornish places that are disabled friendly.

The CEO told me that I could choose my working days, so I choose Monday, Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

I was expected to also attend events such as online and social media events in London and Plymouth.

I had ideas such as fundraisers and concerts which were met by negative constant criticism and reminders from my CEO about not having enough funding to do anything.

Things started to go a little bit sour when a new lady started in Finance, and I was asked to change my working days because the new lady needed to use my desk, so I was asked to work on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays.

I felt a little bit out of place but continued to stay upbeat and positive and determined to turn this part-time job into a successful full-time role for the charity.

My CEO and her administrator had an idea; they wanted me to ask celebrities on Twitter to donate memorabilia and sell it off in an eBay auction to make money.

I was a little bit unsure about this idea because I thought it would look like we were begging.

I voiced my concerns to my CEO’s administrator, and we decided to go along with what we were told to do.

Over the next week or so someone had written a negative tweet about the charity always asking for money.

The CEO’s administrator told the CEO, and I was then pulled into the office.

Once in the office the CEO was really nasty to me and blamed me for the negative tweet which was written by her and her administrator, all I did was post it to the social media channels.

She also said that her team had known each other for years and that I didn’t fit in with them because they are all friends out of work as well as at work.

She then said she would be giving me a week before deciding on what to do with me!

I even joined the after-work Yoga sessions and ended up working with the CEO’s number two.

Her job was to get funding for projects and write the bids, and I was the one driving the tech side.

We wanted to build a mobile app, showing disabled-friendly places in Cornwall.

I had also started attending the ILM Level 3 management course which I was told to do on my day off and all the other staff were paid to do this.

The next week the CEO said that she and her staff were pleased with me and indicated that things were improving.

I was also mentoring a young lad who is deaf and helping him. Once when the website went down, I was talking to the young lad on the chat in my own time when I was finished work.

A month later I was about an hour away from finishing work when I noticed something sinister was happening.

The office door was locked, and I could see through the big glass window that the CEO called in her right-hand man who was in charge of the offline magazine and who for some reason never appeared to like me much.

About half an hour later she called in her administrator who I saw in tears and then I knew something was happening.

I was packing away about to leave for the week when out marched the CEO with an envelope in her hand.

She gave it to me and said I think I need to give you this?

I ran out of the building and to my car and shredded open the envelope, and there it was in black and white.

I was being invited to a disciplinary meeting because I was supposed to have been I had been caught sending emails to my father from my work account asking him what he thought of the work.

I wanted to make a good impression, and I was so keen to be the best that I was looking for advice.

The CEO had thought that my father was doing all my work when he wasn’t.

The letter also said that I didn’t do as I was told, but this was untrue because I did everything and more!

This made me so ill that I was signed off with stress for two weeks and when I told the CEO that I was off with work-related stress she said: “I’m very sorry to hear you are unwell but are you still coming to the meeting on Thursday?”

She even got her number two to ring me up and persuade me to hand in my notice.

But her number two said that “If you come back to work until we find someone else, you can continue with your ILM course, and you will get a reference and that the meeting will go ahead without me unless I hand in my notice within the next hour.”

I agreed to come back after two weeks if I could continue on the course.

Once I had handed my notice in, the CEO said that she didn’t want me back and that she would pay me up until the end of the month and that I can’t continue with the ILM course.

Unfortunately, employers are allowed to treat you how they want because if you haven’t been in a job for two years, they can get rid of you without reason!

I was shocked by how a Cornish Charity who is supposed to care about people with disabilities can decide to force someone who is suffering from mental health problems to hand in their notice!