She continued to excel at Cambridge University, where she graduated with a degree in law.
Jess’s first job was at Sky News and by the time she had turned 25, she was a fully-fledged news presenter in Moscow.
Whatever the assignment, in whichever time zone, Jess’s brain worked with the precision of a Swiss watch. At no point was there any inkling that the internal mechanism of her mind might go into meltdown. She presented ITV Channel Television’s flagship 6 pm news programme as soon as she started work for the broadcaster in Jersey in 2008, and soon became a household name.
Then one day in November 2013, without warning, Jess’s brain malfunctioned.
‘I had suffered quite a bad injury playing netball which caused muscles in my pelvis and back to go into spasm,’ Jess (35) explains. ‘I was in a lot of pain at night and I became anxious about not sleeping. There was a pattern of catastrophic thinking which led to me becoming a total insomniac. I thought if I can’t sleep, I won’t do my job well, which could lead to me losing my job and my partner leaving me. I felt I was going insane and I thought about crashing my car just to get some help – for doctors to give me something to quell the anxiety.
‘I never actually entertained the thought of suicide, I thought “wow, that’s too much”, but the notion of it entered my head. It was the most terrifying experience I’ve ever had.
‘For 32 years my brain had served me so well and suddenly I felt it had really let me down.’
Jess says she went to see her doctor, who told her she was suffering from depression – but she begged to differ.
‘My brother had clinical depression in the past and the symptoms he described were not the same. ‘Instinctively I felt I was suffering with intense anxiety. I would go through a rollercoaster of being really anxious and then really low. The really low part was caused by the fact that I couldn’t see an end to the anxiety.
‘It was constant primal fear and it felt like I had an elephant sitting on my chest 24/7 – I couldn’t breathe properly.’
The doctor gave her antidepressant tablets and sleeping tablets.
‘He tried to give me the antidepressant Prozac. I remember chucking it in the bin, I was worried about the affect it might have on my brain chemistry.
‘The sleeping tablets would knock me out for an hour, but then I’d be up and my heart would be hammering, and I’d be sweating and shaking. The fact that the sleeping tablets didn’t work made me even more anxious.’
Jess says her natural response was to try to think through what was happening – ‘but this was something I couldn’t think my way out of. The more you try and think your way out of anxiety and depression, the worse it gets.
‘And if you’ve spent your whole life never having encountered any such issues before, it is really scary. I was catatonic.’
She broached the subject with her work colleagues soon after her anxiety issues came to the fore. ‘I was quite open with work because I felt like I couldn’t mask it. I didn’t realise that on the surface I appeared fine and that if I hadn’t said anything, they wouldn’t have known what I was going through.
A prisoner of her own pernicious thoughts, Jess’s anxiety would not go away, even with the kind words imparted by her friends and colleagues.
‘With anxiety, things are always worse in your head than they are in reality. There were people saying “don’t worry, you’ve got anxiety, it’ll pass” but it didn’t help – I was trapped in my own head.’
Jess decided to seek the help of a different doctor in December of that year, who suggested meditation.
‘I thought it was a lot of hippie mumbo-jumbo, but I was willing to try anything apart from anti-depressant pills, so I went to a few sessions run by Julie Cushen, who is a mindfulness meditation specialist.’
Jess also read The Sleep Book by Dr Guy Meadows, a sleep physiologist with a PhD from Imperial College London. In tandem with the meditation sessions, it proved a turning point.
‘The book was amazing, it explained the mindfulness approach to sleeping and the science behind it. It reinforced the fact that for me, mindfulness meditation was the right approach to take.
‘That was great because when I first went to the mindfulness meditation sessions, I saw them as a tool to get rid of the feelings I had, but when I read this book I learned that mindfulness is not about getting rid of your feelings, it is about accepting them and seeing them in a different light.
‘It took months and months of practice to get used to the mindfulness techniques and I didn’t start to feel properly better until May of that year.’
Mindfulness is the psychological process of paying attention to the present moment – to thoughts and feelings – without placing too much importance on them. It teaches people to focus on the immediate moment, rather than letting their brains run riot. Mindfulness has science on its side too. Expansive population-based research indicates that the practice of mindfulness is strongly linked to improved mental wellbeing.
‘The concept of mindfulness is just to let things be. All your mind is doing when you’ve got anxiety is thinking about how bad things could be in the future, how bad things have been in the past and fortune-telling worst-case scenarios.
‘If you are anxious, you just say to yourself, “I’m feeling like this but that’s okay, I’m not going to die”.
Jess, who first went public about the experience she had with anxiety last month in a blog for ITV Channel, says the psychological strategies she learned taught her to put distance between herself and her mind, when necessary.
‘I used to believe everything my brain was telling me. I have learned to detach myself a little from the part of my brain which I had become so attached to – the thinking, reasoning, judging part.
‘By doing that, it helps you to take pernicious thoughts less seriously and in turn, it sends more signals to your body telling you there is nothing to be worried about. It’s a bit like the clouds and the sky. Some thoughts will be dark and gloomy, others light and fluffy. If you make sure you don’t cling to them too much, they will move on eventually, and you will see rays of light.
‘Those rays of light for me included baking and horse-riding – because when you are in control of a wild animal you don’t have the head space to think about anything else.’
Jess, who regularly exercises racehorses for trainer Christa Gilbert in her leisure time, says other activities that helped her were singing in a choir, going jogging and taking her two spaniels – Bella and Maisie – for long walks along the north coast, and in the countryside.
‘Those activities helped me focus on the here and now.’
Although Jess cannot pinpoint exactly what caused her anxiety, she believes a number of events in her life may have acted as triggers.
‘My mum was diagnosed with cancer a few years before, in 2010. She got better, but I didn’t deal with that very well at the time and suppressed it.
‘So part of it might have been a lot of unprocessed emotion – and if you can’t process your vulnerable emotions and talk about them to others, then you’re not very strong at all.’
The anxiety did eventually pass and Jess, whose parents Fred and Dina still live in her native Berkshire, has been enjoying her life once more. She married her long-term partner Adam (39) – who runs his own business in Jersey – in August last year and she continues to be one of the Channel Islands’ most cherished TV news presenters.
‘In my twenties I was fiercely ambitious and very single-minded, and my career achievements made me happy. I’ve changed quite a lot in my thirties and I’ve realised that work is not all there is to life.
‘Adam is naturally a very mindful, chilled-out person. He doesn’t judge me and he was super amazing when I was suffering from anxiety. I get very emotional just talking about it – Adam was incredible.’
The Mental Health Foundation estimates that one in four people will experience a mental health problem every year, and this is widely believed to be a conservative estimate.
‘I think this figure of one in four is way below the mark,’ insists Jess, who says she decided to write her blog about mental health to reassure people going through what she went through, and as a message to society ‘that there’s no shame in experiencing mental ill health’.
She adds: ‘I don’t want to become a poster girl for mental illness. I’ve had this one bad experience and I’ve learned a lot, and that’s why I wrote my article.
‘I also wrote it because I feel there’s been a big shift in the mental health debate and this year, ITV has committed to covering more stories about mental health – including in its soap storylines. I suppose that I’m a big protagonist for that.’
Several friends, Jess reveals, shared with her their own stories about experiencing challenging mental states.
‘The response from Islanders has been wonderful, it was a little bit overwhelming to be honest.
‘So many people shared their experiences and many people said I was brave to have opened up about it publicly, but it made me think: why should you have to be “brave” to talk about it?’
There remains, says Jess, a stigma enshrouding the subject of mental health.
‘I think there is a stigma in the western world. If you had asked me four years ago if I thought I would be susceptible to a mental health problem, I would have laughed and said, “Me? You’re joking, I’m one of the strongest people out there”.
‘At that time I had never experienced it and I didn’t understand, for instance, why some people were depressed.
‘I labelled people with good mental health in one camp and people with bad mental health in another camp.
‘I’ve learned that every single one of us on this planet has mental health and we will go through times where our mental health is tested. For me, it is as common as the common cold.
‘I want people to know that mental ill health can happen to anybody at any age, and there is real strength in showing vulnerability and talking about it.’
Jess would like the subject of mental health to become a mainstream topic of public debate. ‘It’s time for us as a society to talk about it. In Jersey, I’d love to see people tackle the subject of mental health by creating an organised movement, where people take to the streets in unison to talk about – and if necessary, shout about – the issues.
‘That would bring the true scale of what people are going through right to the surface. At the moment I think governments across the western world are able to put the issue of mental ill health on the backburner.’
When Jess’s anxiety took hold of her brain in 2013, she was told she would have to wait three months for an initial assessment just to evaluate her psychological wellbeing. She says it would have been a further three months to receive therapy.
Jess wonders whether mental health issues should be dealt with by the medical profession more quickly.
‘It would have been a three-month wait before they just assessed my psychological wellbeing. If somebody breaks their leg, would doctors allow them to be walking around on that leg for three months before an assessment?’
Earlier this month, a new mental health initiative was launched in Jersey. The Jersey Recovery College – which is part-funded by the States’ Mental Health Strategy – is already trialling mental health courses to give people the tools to lead their own mental health recovery.
‘There are some great things happening in Jersey and the recovery college that has been set up is an excellent move.
‘To get more people to talk about it and to find more ways to lift pressure off people a bit, all helps.
‘Ultimately, you can’t expect to stay fit and healthy if you eat junk food and don’t exercise, and the brain is the same. You need to keep exercising it. For me that means meditation and mindfulness exercises. For others it’s cognitive behavioural therapy and for some, it’s medication. It depends on the individual.’
She adds: ‘To anyone experiencing mental ill health, my advice is it’ll be all right in the end and if it is not all right, it’s not the end.’
You can follow Jess on Twitter: @jessdunsdon, and on Facebook: Jess Dunsdon ITV.
You can also watch Jess presenting the ITV Channel TV news, weekdays at 6 pm and 11 pm.
