‘THE witch’ first started speaking evil thoughts into my mind when I was working in a hospital in Gambia, West Africa.

To everyone else she was a concerned-looking 50-something woman crouching over a feverish relative. My supernatural sensitivity said otherwise.

Utterly oblivious, I was suffering the horrifying symptoms of schizophrenia and was utterly convinced the hallucinations were real.

It was several weeks later, after returning to the UK, that reality slowly returned and I stopped hearing voices.

It took me years to gain the courage to tell anyone of my experiences and longer to write about them.

For this is the nature of mental illnesses. Few people want to talk about them. They feel shame for those who suffer them and – even in 2015 – those affected can be branded ‘mad’ or ‘weak’.

This Saturday, October 10, is World Mental Health Day and is a chance for us all to understand more about how mental health problems affect us.

One in four people reading this article will have experienced a mental health issue in the last year and nine out of ten will have experienced discrimination or stigma because of it.

Yet remarkably, most of us are still scared about mental health. Surveys show that a quarter of us say we wouldn’t want to live near or work with someone who has a ‘mental health problem’.

Celebrities Ruby Wax and Great British Bake Off’s Paul Hollywood talk openly about their problems (depression and obsessive compulsive disorder, respectively) but it is still a daily effort to forget the nonsense we have been taught.

For example, someone clinically depressed doesn’t just need to “cheer up”, post-traumatic stress disorder sufferers do not need to “pull themselves together”, self-harm doesn’t affect teenagers only, and those with eating disorders don’t respond well to being told to “eat more”.

This year’s World Mental Health Day has a focus on dignity., and if you do nothing else this year, Visit the Time to Change website (www.time-to-change.org.uk) to sign an online pledge, saying you want to end mental health stigma and discrimination.

For those affected, Wiltshire Mind are a fantastic local charity that offer free services and are expanding with more one-to-one counselling.

There will be tea and talk events, which offer refreshments, showcase artwork and encourage low-key discussion about mental health.

One thing of all of us can do is simple and costs nothing. Just talk.

l If you need help with a mental health issue, contact Wiltshire Mind at Spa Road, Melksham, SN12 7EA, call 01225 706532 or go to www.wiltshiremind.co.uk