Sedona's Story

Sedona was a patient at St Andrew’s Healthcare for two-and-a-half years and before her admission she had been in multiple different hospitals.

She had struggled with her mental health since the age of 15 and was diagnosed with anorexia nervosa and borderline personality disorder.

Sedona said: "My risk level was very high and I was self-harming a lot. I was attempting suicide and before I came to St Andrew's, I was ending up in intensive care units on the operating table pretty regularly. The extreme risk of my suicide attempts meant that the longer that went on for, the closer I was going to be to death. All those people that were treating me in the hospital following these incidents, were pretty sure it was going to result in death as well.”

It was not until she was admitted to a personality disorder specific ward at St Andrew’s in 2021 that she felt that her mental health started to improve.

She said: “For me, being on a ward that was specialised to treat my complex mental health condition, meant I could get purely targeted treatment and I received therapies that are proven to help with the disorder. I felt like I was being treated like a human again, and there was that tiny bit of hope that kind of popped up.

“There was such a structured approach from a multidisciplinary team that was able to give not only me, but the other patients as well, a very clear structured pathway in order to get back into the real world. St Andrew's was different to other hospitals I had been in, because there were so many extra occupational activities available.

During her inpatient stay Sedona was given access to music lessons, where she learnt to play the cello, she took her A Levels and even passed her lifeguard qualification.

She said that having staff believe in her “finally felt that someone was giving me a way out as long as I committed to my recovery”.

Sedona was discharged from St Andrew’s in 2023, and was moved into a supported accommodation. There she managed to stay well and has now started studying bio-medicine at Bath University.

She said: "I genuinely never believed that I would get to this stage in my life, and I think a lot of the professionals who worked with me didn't expect me to get this far either. For a long time, everyone – including myself and my family - were convinced my behaviour was going to end in death. Certainly at the time, I didn’t want to live and I didn’t think I had a future.

“But now I am building my own life for myself. I'm living by myself. I'm going to university. I'm doing all these things

that I never thought I'd be able to do. Hope is what got me through those last few years in hospital, because all the staff around me were so hopeful. It’s only because the people around me gave me hope, that I started having it too. St Andrew’s changed my life.

“The staff at St Andrew’s were incredibly supportive towards me which is why I jumped at the chance to be involved in the For Hope In Every Life appeal – because they taught me – my life is worth living. And I’m so grateful for that because now I’m at university, I have a boyfriend and I have a future. I can absolutely say that if it wasn’t for this hospital, I would not be here.”