When I was younger I used to think I was on the right path before my first diagnosis of Depression. I have always been quite a positive person - so I've been told. I'm fierce and active in resolving and finding solutions for my problems, I am enthusiastic in my struggle and recovery with mental illnesses. I wasn't much of a complainer.

As a Christian, I have made the mistake of using the wrong kind of prayer for certain issues I have. From using a prayer of deliverance when I should have just asked God for something simple as peace and calmness over me when I was in the midst/road to of feeling suicidal. Either way, I think for me it's important to pray whenever I am having a problem.

If you asked me three years ago what sort of guy I was attracted to, I would tell you someone with high intelligence, had a heart for people and was overall 'stable'. If you asked me now who I would choose, I would not hesitate and confidently say someone who loves Christ as much as I do. Before becoming a Christian (I used to be a Buddhist), I didn't plan/asked/expected to be raped by my first love.

I clearly remember when you told me to quit changing things. To quit making extensions on assignments that were 'simple' just because I couldn't keep up with the class and preparation work of the assignment. I may have forgotten what the other things you said, but I haven't forgotten about how you made me feel. I felt my last two years of high school was a living hell.

Photo by Erin Smith

I told in a recent interview with SBS (Vietnamese) that I didn't set out to be a mental health blogger. I never set out to be excluded from Nursing in University. If anything, I set out to become a registered nurse and help as many people as I can professionally. When I was excluded from nursing, I mentioned in the interview that it was my most traumatic experience in my life back then

Hold her when she is crying, when words no longer work. Acknowledge the fact you cannot fix anything at the time, but you are there to support her. You can only do so much. Tell her of all the good qualities she has such as, she is kind. She is beautiful, and wonderful as she is. Understand and mention that you are always on this journey with her, and that God always protects her and loves her for who she is. Be active in her progress in her recovery, and cheer her on for every good step of the way.

There is still a lot of stigma around mental illnesses. Although it's getting better, we still face these challenges - for example, with everyday conversation - how easy it is to say "Good" to the typical question we see every day when meeting someone new, "How are you?", when deep down in ourselves we are not actually ok and actually need someone to listen to us.

Know that no matter how much emotional and mental pain you are in, someone out there is thinking about you. They accept you for who you are, they don't care how you wore your makeup that day, what you thought you said that might have sounded 'stupid' or 'bad'. You are accepted for who you are as a beautiful, human being.

I remember in 2007, I was a very insecure girl, not confident and always had issues with my own body. I compared my own image to other girls. I believed and told myself I had the 'worst' body in high school, no matter how much I would eat, my body seemed to never gain weight.

Been wanting to post this one for a long time now, but the title idea just been sitting in my notes app for ages. Although I'm feeling really vulnerable, weak in the mind, body and soul recently, I want to try and use my own energies to making thoughtful, and genuine mental health content from now on, even it means sometimes posting every few months. My blog will always still be here for you all to access, no matter how much I feel I am struggling financially to maintain it anymore. It's a service I want to donate my time and money to.

I was recently hospitalised down in the psychiatric ward. Again. This isn't a secret guide or anything like that if you're purely interested in how "getting out" of the Psychiatric Ward, it's just my experience and each case and person is different from each other. I just want to give a few points on how I made it out of the psychiatric ward without taking no medications at all.

We all know that the modelling industry is all very superficial. We all know that models wear a lot of makeup, get their hair done to near-perfect and their look gets transformed when they are doing a photoshoot, particularly. But do we know the impacts of being a model have on our mental health? We flip through magazines, scroll through those beautiful, "perfect"-bodied women on their Instagrams endlessly (oh well I'm guilty for it at least) and don't realise that we're unconsciously making our self-esteem on ourselves worse?

I accepted the past and know that there was no turning back (I don't live by regrets) in telling the GP seven or eight years ago that I've been feeling "suicidal", have a loss of appetite and my sleeping pattern has been getting worse and worse. I simply diagnosed myself with "Depression" during that time when I was nineteen years old. I had been failing my University subjects for nursing, that the next year or so, I was finally excluded from the program and school.

Make her feel beautiful every day you see her. Tell her that she's beautiful. Don't judge her for the cycles and seasons she goes through. Believe that part of her recovery is you being there with her through the storm. Understand and listen to her feelings and emotions. Don't be quick to judge her and tell her to snap out of it. Don't tell her to change her way of thinking.

"Where are you from?" - someone asks me for the first time in our first meeting. I stutter for a bit at the answer, trying to quickly process in my head whether to say if I'm Australian or Vietnamese.

Holding the aluminium sheets of medications I was about to open, I take a moment; just the slightest moment to really try to think this is what I really wanted to do: to end my life. To end it all with overdosing on medications.

Life isn't easy. We all know that. We have to work hard towards our goals and if we have any at the time. It sometimes phases me that for someone like me who have all these problems that it can sometimes be easier to die and end it all. Yes, I have attempted suicide before. I first hit myself with a rock against my head when I was 14. Didn't pass out or anything. It hurt, and it stopped me there. And I'm glad it did. I have so much to live for now.

I feel I haven't written and been keeping up to date with my mental health blogposts/videos lately. So I'm trying my best tonight to squeeze out a story for you guys. I want to say that my experiences in the psychiatric/mental health ward was definitely different to everyone else's. Everyone goes through different experiences each day and respond to it differently. There were some ways I regret of doing/thinking while I was down in the ward:

Understanding someone with a mental illness/es is a hard one. It takes a lifetime for someone to understand someone else's condition I would say. You don't just meet someone and the person with the condition tells you about their struggles and you say you understand what they're going through. Unless you've been in similar situations such as hospital admissions and similar diagnoses but even that there's not full understanding in my opinion.

Friends, this post is to help you understand me better maybe, and perhaps help you recognise when I'm in an episode. It is also for me to document a bit of what's happened in the last couple of days as a reflection as well as it being therapeutic for me. In the above video, I mentioned that I have been diagnosed with depression, schizophrenia and bipolar.