I don’t know if this will be of interest, hopefully for people in the same circumstances it will be.

The history of this is a little personal but I feel it needs to be said.

In 2005 I had a breakdown, I had a MBNA credit card with £7000 credit limit when I went on a spending spree and in the interim I applied and got another MBNA card with £6500 limit.

During the time of my illness I ran both cards up to the max and I was struggling to make the min payments as I also had several other cards at the time.

got these cards by simply applying for balance transfers they were throwing them at me.

Needless to say I defaulted on the two MBNA cards.

I wrote to them explaining my situation that I was now on medication and to offer a smaller amount of monthly repayments.

I made the lesser payments each month and each month they marked it as a late payment default and the balance continued to rise.

Eventually I stopped paying, a couple of letters and emails from them stating I was in default.

It then went to MBNA debt office, these people were quite aggressive in their emails demanding payment in full and threatening debt collectors.

I then wrote to them asking for the charges they kept adding to the account for late payments, I wasn’t late I just didn’t pay the minimum, I also blamed them for putting me in this position, they kept increasing the credit limit so I kept spending and in my condition I had no idea what I was doing.

Now on medication, I wrote a strong letter complaining they were the reason I was in debt and they should give me the discount on the advance charges as well as the extra interest cost, I had no reply.

Two months later I received a letter from MBNA saying they had written off my debt of over 13k and closed the account.

On checking my credit report it shows as closed balance 0

this came as a shock as I had a Tesco card with a large debt on who wouldn’t talk to me regarding my illness and instantly passed it to Frederickson’s.

I hope this might help others who suffer mental illness and not to let the credit card co bully them.