It seemed to come out of nowhere. One moment I felt normal, the next I felt the ground drop from beneath my feet. I was doing a modelling job for Asos at the time and there was building work at the shoot. I honestly thought the floor was falling in, and assumed it must be connected. 

“We need to get out,” I urged the team. 

“We didn’t feel anything, Rosie,” they replied, to my confusion. 

It was 2018, I was 22 years old, and my mental health had not affected my career until then. But the feeling of vertigo kept recurring, each time producing the disconcerting sensation of a sudden loss of stability and balance. I kept calling the doctor and visiting A&E, complaining about this strange dizziness, and was diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder. But it was clear this alone was not the answer.

I suppose the alarm bells began ringing in earnest for my friends and family when I started believing I was the reincarnation of a sibling who had died. Nobody considered bipolar as an explanation. No one rang my agent and reported what I was saying. They all just wondered what on earth was going on, as well they might.

The culmination of all this was an episode of full-blown psychosis, triggered by the break-up of my relationship. I was at London Stansted Airport, about to fly out and join my family on holiday when I set off an alarm by jumping through the baggage drop-off, thinking I was in a dream. None of my senses were right. I felt I was running around in my own head, and it was scary. When I saw people running towards me, I was flooded with relief. “Wow,” I thought, “I’m getting real help at last.”

My memories of what happened next are hazy. I was admitted to hospital in west London where, a few days later, I was finally diagnosed with bipolar disorder: a mental health condition that triggers extreme mood swings, in which you yo-yo between depression and mania. The highs and lows can last for days or even weeks.

I tried out different antidepressants, while my confidence grew lower and lower. The drugs seemed to make me feel worse not better, and I began to experience massive lows where I felt suicidal. But then each week I would also have a huge high and believe I was cured. Despite these red flags, no one around me questioned whether there was anything else going on.

I had been working as a model since my teens. My career brought many ups and downs, excitement and rejection. Looking back now, I can see how little this helped my mental state. 

I had spent a year working in New York, earning good money and having a hyper-manic time. I was also spending every penny I earned and finding myself full of energy at 1am. I ran half-marathons when I wasn’t working, to try and burn it off.

It wasn’t a healthy lifestyle, being so young and so exposed to the vicissitudes of modelling, but I’d somehow managed to keep the show on the road, mental health-wise.

But by 2018, things were falling apart. I broke up with my boyfriend, stopped socialising and felt constantly panicked. Meanwhile, my excessive energy remained. I was sleeping for two hours a night. In the middle of modelling jobs I would suffer panic attacks and have to call my mother and ask her to collect me. Sometimes I burst into crying fits over lunch and had to have my make-up redone. Modelling involves a lot of waiting around, meaning a lot of time in your own head, which again was not good for me.

Bipolar depression seems to run in families, but although some of my relatives had experienced mental health problems, no one had ever been diagnosed with bipolar before. It wasn’t on our radar. 

Shortly before my psychosis, one locum GP had asked during an appointment that my mother attended with me: “Have you ever thought about bipolar?”

But my mother replied: “Don’t call my daughter crazy,” and walked out.

I, too, thought it sounded so improbable I didn’t even bother to Google it. Post-diagnosis, once I was well enough to research my condition online, I still struggled to find examples of young women discussing living with it. 

My opinion of myself slipped lower still. The only famous bipolar woman I could think of who was young and had a cool job was the CIA agent Carrie Mathison from the US television series Homeland – and she was a fictional creation.

But reading up on my condition and discussing it came much later. For a while, after being admitted to hospital, I was in no fit state to do this. I didn’t even know who my parents were at that stage. I thought I could speak in tongues. I thought I was Susan Boyle [from Britain’s Got Talent]. 

After being discharged after around three months in hospital, I went to stay with my parents, where I spent one of the toughest periods of my life. The low that followed my manic high was physically the hardest thing I had ever been through. At first I was too exhausted to even move. 

The local health intervention team set me a predicted recovery time of three years. It sounds long, but it took me about a year after my discharge to even have enough energy to exercise again. 

I started trying to do modelling jobs, but felt so depressed I kept having to leave and go home. The medication I was on caused me to gain a lot of weight, which I was under pressure to lose. With my opinion of myself at rock bottom, modelling didn’t feel like an appropriate vocation any more.

It took me about two years before I felt able to speak openly about my diagnosis. I had slipped back into modelling by then, but for a different agency, and I was also making films and campaigning on mental health. 

I was taking lithium and an antipsychotic medication, so although I wasn’t hyper manic or depressed, I still didn’t feel like myself. 

With the support of my doctor, I eventually cut down to just one antipsychotic medication – quetiapine (which can help prevent mania and depression by affecting brain chemicals such as dopamine and serotonin) and worked out how to manage my condition via lifestyle changes: exercising regularly, eating and sleeping well and avoiding too much alcohol and caffeine. At first it felt like a compromise, but now it just feels normal.

I have made a conscious decision not to shy away from my diagnosis. In making my new Channel 4 film about it, I searched for women with bipolar to contribute, and although plenty would talk to me, they would only do so anonymously. This saddened me, and highlighted just how much shame and stigma remains attached to the condition – even now, when we are so much better generally at discussing mental health.

But talk about it we must. 

According to Bipolar UK, the charity for which I am an ambassador, one in 50 people in this country has the condition. It is one of the UK’s most common long-term conditions. Yet it still takes on average nine-and-a-half years to receive a correct diagnosis. 

Just think how many years that means are spent in confusion and distress, taking the wrong medications and trying to work out why we feel different. People living with a diagnosis of bipolar in the UK are 20 times more likely to take their own life. If more people knew the symptoms, it would save so many lives.

Once I had been diagnosed, it made a lot of sense to my friends. I had always struggled to sit still, and I found concentrating at school very difficult. By 15 I was struggling with depression yet also experiencing highs and excessive energy. For a long time my moods had swung between extremes and I had always been hyper-sensitive. 

Now that I know why I am how I am, I have learned to adjust and can make it through the lows knowing they will pass, and that when they do I will enjoy a fresh wave of gratitude for my health. I’m also not afraid to enjoy aspects of the highs.

I began dating again, telling people on the first date that I was bipolar. Last year I met my current boyfriend. He accepts me for who I am. And, after all these years, so do I.

As told to Rosa Silverman

Modelling, Mania and Me, a short film by Rosie Viva, is on Channel 4’s Documentaries YouTube channel now.