The recent Time to Talk Day – the UK’s biggest mental health conversation – featured Mark Tiller, who was 35 when he was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes.
According to Abbott’s global Above the Bias initiative, 77% of people with diabetes feel their mental health has been negatively impacted by living with the condition.
Tiller’s diagnosis came in 1996, while he was working as a computer programmer in Melbourne, Australia, after his wife at the time noticed he was drinking a lot of water. After visiting his GP, Mark was kept in hospital for three days and was told he would be reliant on insulin for the rest of his life, and that his condition would progressively worsen. He says, “When I was first diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, it felt like a punch in the gut. It completely overwhelmed me, and I was scared and confused until I came to terms with it.”
Tiller’s self-confidence plummeted as he learned to navigate the condition, and he experienced diabetes distress. Diabetes distress is when people feel overwhelmed by the relentlessness of diabetes, leading to feelings of isolation, frustration and anger at the demands of managing it. He recalls, “I was increasingly struggling to be motivated to check my blood sugar and control it, so at some points I was only checking once a day. As a result, my diabetes got worse, and it started to affect my eyesight. This really got me down, and in 2014/15 I had several rounds of laser eye surgery.”
After living with the condition for 23 years, he took voluntary redundancy and decided to put his health first and make some positive changes, by self-funding a FreeStyle Libre 2 system in 2019. Tiller explains, “My diabetes was so much easier to manage with technology, plus I was able to easily track the effect of the food I was eating on my sugar levels. By February 2020, my HbA1c result was only 49 mmol/mol! This was the best result I had had in at least 10 years and motivated me to make further changes.”
He has since become a FreeStyle Libre Ambassador for Abbott and speaks regularly at professional events and conferences on the need to drive further access to diabetes technology for people with Type 2 diabetes.
www.freestyle.abbott.co.uk
https://bit.ly/Abbott_FSL3_2026
