Eczema (young people)

Georgia: And I try not to do it if I’m with my friends cos I know they’ll notice and I know they’ll be like, “Stop scratching. Stop it, stop it.” And sometimes people just telling you to stop can make you want to do it more. It, it’s one of those things though, isn’t it? You tell somebody not to do something and off they go and do it. And it almost starts off like a trigger reaction sometimes. So if I’ve got a scra-, like an itch on my leg, I’ll slowly make my, my way up my leg and up my body and then back down the other one. 

Himesh: You get like the younger groups that would like probably just say, would probably look at you and you know, whisper to their friends or I don’t know say ‘eee’ or something like that, I know that they don’t know what I’ve got but it kind of makes me feel like if they’re seeing it like that what are other people seeing, if that makes sense so I would force myself to cover up, force myself to put more moisturiser I guess just to make sure that my skin is better. And like but sometimes again like when people don’t understand when you put the creams they’ll say stuff like “oh he’s got cream on his face, shiny face” or whatnot you know what I mean, so yeh. But obviously those people don’t understand what I was going through.

Katie-Lauren: If one of my friends is like, “Oh, you've got eczema – I’ve got it too”. It’s nice to be like, it’s like something that we, us, we both know about and like you feel kind of, I don’t know, not special but included when there’s someone else with eczema and you can talk about it with them. You don’t feel so alone. And other people, other people don’t understand what’s going on, but in a way you kind of feel relieved that you've found someone else that knows what you’re going through. And it’s nice to be like, “Oh that didn't work for me, but have you tried this?” and it’s like, “Oh yeah, that works for me too”.

Aman: In university and stuff like that, yes, a lot more, because you’ve at a bit more of a fragile time I think. ‘Cos you, you move away from your parents and you don’t you have that, you don’t have that same support network that you would at home.  So, they’ve only talked about it the times where I’ve gone in at a flare up stage in the middle of exams thinking, oh god, you know, this is just the worst thing ever. And, yeah, having that kind of calming down moment where,  you know, they say it’s not really the end of the world, even if you fail your exams, what was more important is, is your own health. And so that kind of puts it in perspective and I wouldn't necessarily say that doctors speak or think about that as much as they could do.