What's Normal Anyway? Celebrities' Own Stories of Mental Illness (10 page)

‘What have you done?'

‘Oh, I fell down the stairs.'

‘Oh, that's a pity.'

But if you see somebody you used to think was fit and well and now they're walking down the street and they look exactly the same, but they say that they've been off work five months with depression, there's a part of you – I find I do it myself sometimes – that thinks: ‘You can't be off five months.' And you wouldn't think that if their hair had fallen out. People often just want to put mental health in a corner and not talk about it too much. And it's extraordinary because there's not a single person in the country who doesn't know somebody who's got a mental health problem, not one. Even if they're in the absolute: ‘Pull yourself together, it's all in the mind, psychosomatic, blah', they all know somebody.

I do think things are changing, but I just think they're changing very, very slowly. I think a lot of this is about attitude so, for example, yes there's got to be research into mental illness – and that has to happen at an academic level, third sector – but there also has to be cultural change. I mean, if you look at the gay rights agenda, the way that developed, it wasn't just about laws, the cultural shift was actually really important. So I think
Time to Change
, the current campaign to challenge stigma around mental health, is good, I think the charities are pretty good on this stuff, I think that the whole arts world is very important on this, and I think it's great that they had that debate in parliament (although if you think about it, four MPs spoke out, well that's such a minority). I just think, in a sense, we have to normalise it. And the thing is, it
does
come: I've been going on about cancer – well we used to call cancer the ‘Big C', we didn't like to say ‘cancer'. So I think along the way, I do think this debate is changing.

And I think, looking back, that's partly why the London 2012 Paralympics was so fantastic, because – even though it involved athletes with physical disabilities – it offered us a new way that we could think about people with mental illness too. A lot of people for many years thought: ‘That person is disabled, therefore they can't do anything', and then they see night after night after night, day after day after day, what these paralympians can do. So if we could look at it as: ‘What can mentally ill people offer, what talents do they have?' As opposed to: ‘They're mentally ill, they have none.' So I actually hope that the Paralympics changed attitudes in relation to mental health as well as physical health. Because I think what my whole argument in this area is about is trying to get parity.

So I'd say to employers: ‘Respect it for what it is.' I think they should see it no differently to any other disclosure that's on a CV. As part of the
Time to Change
campaign we do this thing called
Dine to Change
in which Sue Baker and I have gone out and done dinners with employers about this issue. We did a really good one in Yorkshire with these real hard-headed northern businessmen, and in the end we were kind of trying to get them to admit that if they saw two broadly identical applicants and one said they'd had a mental health history and the other didn't, that would swing it, and they sort of did. And we said: ‘Look, you don't look like a bunch of positive discriminators, but maybe once in a while go the other way and see if you regret it.' And it's amazing how many of them thought: ‘Yeah, yeah.' And I think if they don't they'll lose out, as sometimes edgy people can be more creative, they can be harder working. So I would say: don't allow it to define the totality of your assessment.

Take when Tony Blair asked me to work for him. We were in France and I basically sat down and, from a proper kind of news perspective, told him all the things in my life that could become a problem if I was really put under the microscope. And a lot of it he knew – he knew I'd had a breakdown – but he didn't really know how bad it had been, so I told him the whole story. I told him about the voices and the music – and I could see him do one of his: ‘Hmmm, okay' – and I told him about the paranoia, all the stuff that went through my head. Basically just saying that I did crack under pressure, that's the truth, and who's to say it wouldn't happen again? And he said this thing – which
Time to Change
used in one of their first posters – he said: ‘I'm not bothered if you're not bothered.' And I said: ‘What if I'm bothered?' And he said: ‘I'm still not bothered.'

There's not one person on the planet who doesn't get physically ill from time to time, even the fittest people in the world might get a cold, might get flu, might have backache, or toothache, or earache, or cancer: they might have any number of diseases of the body. So given that the brain is the most complicated, sophisticated part of the body, why do we labour under this illusion that mental health is different? I suppose what I'm saying is that if you're mentally ill – whether it's a product of your birth, or a product of your background, a product of the way your life develops – you should see it, and treat it, as no different from physical illness. Some days we have good physical health, some days we have bad physical health. Some days we have good mental health, some days we have bad mental health. We're all no different. And if you approach it like that, you do what you do when you're physically ill: you try to find expert help, you get family support, you think about it, you do the things you're meant to do. And I think if we were all open about mental illness then we would all, not instantly, but over time, benefit. And along the way – because of stigma, because of taboo, because of discrimination – that may mean that, for some people, there may be adverse affects to being open. But over time we will all of us get to a much better place.

‘I just became so anxious about everything. I was a walking jelly. Some anxiety is copeable with, it's containable – you know, slightly raised heartbeat, breathing, slight nausea, slight over-reaction to loud noises – but in my thirties it wasn't like that, it was that times a million.'

S
tephanie Cole was born in Warwickshire in 1941 and started her training as an actor at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School at the age of sixteen. Since her stage debut at seventeen, she has had a hugely successful and varied career as a stage, television, radio, and film actor. On the stage she has appeared in West End productions of
Noises Off
,
Steel Magnolias
,
Quartet
, and
A Passionate Woman
. As a television actor she is perhaps best known for her roles in
Tenko
,
Open All Hours
,
Soldiering On
,
Waiting for God
,
Doc Martin
, and
Housewife, 49
. She now stars in
Coronation Street
, where she plays Sylvia Goodwin, for which she won Best Comedy Performance in the 2012 Soap Awards. Stephanie has suffered episodes of anxiety, panic attacks, agoraphobia, and depression at various stages throughout her life and is a patron of the mental health charity Rethink. In 2005 she received an OBE for her services to drama, the elderly and mental health charities. Stephanie has a daughter, Emma, and lives in a village outside Bath, where the interview for this chapter took place.

***

You must have had such a long trip to come and see me. Have some coffee before we start and these biscuits are rather good. Are you happy talking at the kitchen table? I'll put the answer machine on so we don't get disturbed.

Now, anxiety's an interesting word. It's interesting that we've chosen to use that word – ‘anxiety' – because it's quite a small word actually. It implies, if someone's anxious, that it's a little bit of a worry. For me, that's what it implies: one step on from worry. You're worried about something and then you're anxious about something. And to be anxious sometimes is normal, God forbid we should lose our flight or fight instinct because that's what keeps us alive. It's when you're anxious over those things you don't have to be anxious about – that's when it's not normal. Or to be anxious to a degree that the circumstances do not call for. It's when our brain uses it when honestly there is nothing to be worried about, when it cranks up the dial on everything. To be anxious about something is copeable with, but this is much, much more, it's a much bigger thing. It is anxiety writ large.

I didn't, of course, know what its name was when it started, because I was just a child then. I just knew that it was very uncomfortable and frightening. I remember a couple of times, when I was going to school on the bus, actually being overwhelmed by what I now know is panic. I remember fainting at a bus stop; in fact, it was not a faint, it was a panic attack. It then came to a point when my parents were asked to go somewhere in the early evening, where children were welcome, so we set out in the car and I was overwhelmed by this terrible, terrible panic that I just couldn't cope. I started to cry and said I couldn't go and I had to go home, so they turned around and we went back home. But of course, at the time – we're talking the late '40s, early '50s – if a child behaved in an odd way it was usually put down to a sort of naughtiness. Then I happened to overhear a neighbour who said to my mother: ‘Oh, she's probably got it off the radio or television', so it was put down to my . . . my acting tendencies. That what I was actually doing was trying something out, you know, that it was sort of play acting. Well it wasn't, it wasn't. And then it went away. Why, I don't know. How, I don't know.

It wasn't until years later, when I started to have panic attacks after my daughter Emma was born in my early thirties, that I actually recognised what it was. I was very, very depressed after she was born, and that quickly developed into appalling anxiety and panic attacks, which started very suddenly, when she was three or four months old, I would guess. Looking back, it started as post-natal depression but nobody diagnosed that. You know, I completely adored my daughter, I just fell totally in love with her the minute she was born, but I was feeling just absolutely overwhelmed. I was completely convinced I couldn't cope, that I should never have done this. It was also partly due to the fact that my first husband, though a sweet man, was completely incapable of taking any responsibility. So therefore everything devolved to me; this tiny thing's welfare devolved completely to me. And although I had a lot of friends in London, where we were living, most of them had not yet become mothers so I didn't have that sort of back-up. And my mum, who we normally turn to, was down in the West Country.

Anyway, what happened very, very quickly, I realise now, was that I just became so anxious about everything. I was a walking jelly. Some anxiety is copeable with, it's containable – you know, slightly raised heartbeat, breathing, slight nausea, slight over-reaction to loud noises – but in my thirties it wasn't like that, it was that times a million. I think that panic attacks vary from person to person a little bit, but basically mine always started with an increased heartbeat – the heart would race, I would have palpitations – and I would have an uneven heartbeat which, of course, is a very odd feeling. Then a breath-lessness, which leads to a lot of upper breath sort of panting as it were. Then eventually, because you haven't got enough oxygen, because you're breathing wrongly, your fingers start to tingle. I used to breathe into a paper bag, an old trick that works because it rebalances your oxygen levels, so it gets rid of the tingling and the breathlessness. Did I think I was going to die? When the panic attacks were bad yes, because there was this danger that you would pass out, which is frightening.

They would come on suddenly. I can remember, my husband and I were planning a holiday and we were on Regent Street, going to the travel agent to book it. And suddenly I had this – the palpitations, the breathlessness – and it was so bad that he got a taxi and we went straight up to our hospital, which was the Royal Free, and they did all the tests and, of course, they could find nothing wrong. But because the attacks were very frightening the natural reaction was: ‘I'm not going to put myself in this situation where it happens again.' And that's why your horizons get narrower and narrower. If you say: ‘Okay, I can't walk down Regent Street again planning a holiday, because that might happen again', you don't do that. But then, let's say, you go to the cinema and it happens again in the cinema, so then you think: ‘Well if I'm going to go to the cinema and that's going to happen, then I can't do that.'

And that's what happened to me, gradually, gradually. So consequently your boundaries and possibilities – what you feel you can cope with – become fewer and fewer. It took about six months for me to get as bad as not being able to go shopping. Shopping was the most terrible ordeal. I would manage to get to the end of the road with my daughter in her buggy and then I would have to turn around and come home. Eventually, anything that's away from the home is a no-no. You know, you can't go out to see friends or anything, the flat was the only safe place for me. What triggered the attacks was absolutely classic: anything that was away from home, because at home I was safe.