What's Normal Anyway? Celebrities' Own Stories of Mental Illness (12 page)

I realised through analysis that my coping mechanism as a child and, I have to say, even now – although I know I'm doing it now, so I have a handle on it – is to cut off. Quite simply to cut off, that's it: boom. So I have to be very careful. I remember when my mother died that was awful, but it was sort of in the natural order of things as she was in her mid-eighties. But when my second husband died comparatively young – he was sixty-eight, which is no age now, and we'd only been together about eight years – I had to be very careful not to just pop it in a box. To start with, the grief was so overwhelming that there was no way I could have popped it in a box, no way at all, thank God. But as I went through the stages, in a way I quite deliberately sometimes opened the wound, because I knew there was more muck to be got out. I would do it quietly on my own, I hasten to add.

And at that time, interestingly, what came back was a fear of leaving home. I did do it, and I didn't get panic attacks, but I remember once driving from here, just outside Bath, over to Suffolk, to friends. They had started this charity to do with the green movement and they did, and are still doing, the most wonderful work. And I'd said that I would do a speech for opening this particular thing and I remember getting in the car and I literally cried for four and a half hours to Suffolk. I cried and I screamed because I didn't want to leave home. And I knew this was ridiculous: I knew I had to do it, I knew it would be fine, and I knew I would be home. And indeed the moment I got there – I didn't tell them – and they were lovely and other things happened to take my mind off the whole thing, I was fine. I spent the night there, we had a lovely time, and I got in my car and I drove home and I was fine.

This is going to sound crazy but because I trained in the theatre – I went to the Vic School at sixteen and a half – one of the things you learn is: ‘You get there and you perform.' Now, actually I have to say that there's a part of me that thinks: ‘Bollocks to that, if I've broken my leg, sod the performance.' You know? But nevertheless, there is something in me that's been trained to think: ‘If you say you're going to do something then you do it.' No, don't let's call it professionalism because it's quite simply a programmed response, learned through having been an actor. You know, it doesn't matter what you feel like: you go, you get there. I know the ludicrous side of that, don't think I don't know, that under certain circumstances that is ludicrous. Nevertheless, unless it is
obviously
ludicrous, it is a programmed response that my body follows through. And it doesn't do me any harm – it is a useful response. Because, as a matter of fact, when I got to Suffolk I had a lovely time, I did what I said I was going to do, and I was glad I did it because what they're doing is lovely. And I came home and I felt much stronger for having done it.

***

Around that time I also suffered from depression, which hasn't happened to me very often, thank God, and I don't have the very, very bad sort. It's just been a couple of times in my life when I've simply said: ‘I can't cope.' I had a very difficult time around about the time of my menopause, when my mother was also very ill, as well as my first husband. And my daughter was coping with that and I should have been doing more to help her, but because my actual physical presence with my first husband made it worse, it was a very, very difficult time. I had it then probably for only about six months, and then I had it again about a year after my second husband Peter died, when I could feel myself actually going down the slippery slope of not coping, again then for only about six months. I'm lucky in that the first set of exercises I was given worked for me, then the talking technique worked for me, and everything I've learned from both of those has been immeasurably useful. So when I started to go into what I recognised as something that was abnormal – you know, it was not normal grief, it was something abnormal – I could do something about it. Although sometimes, of course, it takes someone outside who has to say to you: ‘Sorry, stop right here.' And I think the last time it happened it was my daughter who said: ‘Mum, I think you just need to go and get help.'

You know, we all have moments in our lives when we're sad, we're happy, we're depressed, we're joyful – all these things, they're transitory, they're part of being alive. So we'll say, in everyday life: ‘I'm a bit depressed today', and it will mean you're a little bit low, and everybody goes through that and it's part of being a human being. What we need to know is when we step out of that passing depression into something that is much worse, that is a real black dog. I prefer to call it that: a black dog. And it's terrifying and it's bleak and it's all-embracing, just as panic attacks are bleak and all-embracing. It is something that leaves you feeling that there is no future, that leaves you feeling unable to cope with the present. My experience? Wanting to sleep constantly, not wanting to get up in the morning, there being nothing to get up for. I mean, nothing tastes nice, nothing smells nice, nothing feels nice, nothing sounds nice. When I use the word ‘nice', nice is such a silly word, it doesn't mean much does it?

It is actually rather like stepping into a darkened room with nothing . . . there is nothing. I remember once at the BBC, I was doing a play, a radio play, and we had to do one of the scenes in a studio – I can't remember the name of it, it's called the something-room or the something-studio – where there is no reverberation at all. It is the most extraordinary experience because you get no echo and so everything is blanked and buffeted and it is extraordinary. When the engineers are working in that room, if there's a fault or whatever, they are only allowed to stay in for half an hour, because otherwise actually something in your brain would flip. It is complete sensory deprivation. And I think a completely black and bleak depression is actually like sensory deprivation, because you are deprived of those other feelings and you see no way out. There is no light and it is frightening. And nobody can do anything for you, nobody can help, and it's horrible.

But I've never descended into the absolute depths of depression, ever, so I can't honestly say that I know what that's like, although I can imagine. I don't think of what I have as a condition, I think of it as something that's occasionally part of my life. It's not something I would label myself with – I have a difficulty. I think if it's something you definitely have – if you are definitely bipolar – then that is a label, and actually that label helps you manage. But I wouldn't walk round with a label saying I have depressive attacks because really it's neither here nor there to anybody else. There's a difference, I know, because my brother Pete has schizophrenia, so I know the difference between having bouts of unpleasant depression and what is real. It's the difference between – okay, let's go physical for the moment – it's the difference between having a very, very nasty ankle sprain and having to have your leg amputated. As regards depression, I occasionally sprain my ankle but I am not an amputee. Does that make sense?

What's helped me most throughout all these experiences is finding the right thing at the right time. The exercises in my thirties, the later analysis, and the occasional use of an antidepressant to get me through the depression and rebalance the chemicals in my mind sufficiently. Citalopram was the first SSRI I tried and it worked for me and I haven't needed it since, oh, about six years ago. I had no problems coming off it, it was a mild withdrawal, a slow withdrawal, but no, absolutely fine. And I've always been very careful – believe it or not because I'm overweight – about what I eat, because I am aware that what I eat is going to have an effect on my brain as well as the rest of my body. Of course it is, because it's an organ. You know, if I put in too much alcohol the liver will go: ‘Burdurgh, burdurgh, burdurgh', and if you don't give the brain the right stuff it will go off on one. I mean I'm not obsessed, God no, I give myself treats. So occasionally I'll have a pudding and I love it – I mean what would life be? – but I don't have a vast pudding every day and I don't feel deprived in any way shape or form, because basically what I like happens to be fruit, vegetables, a bit of chicken, a bit of fish.

And exercise, yes, I've got a swimming pool in the garden so I swim and I love to walk. If I feel myself getting a bit down, then I just whizz off on a brisk walk and it's enough. I don't have to go to the gym for six hours, thank God, because I hate gyms, but I love swimming and I love walking. And so it means, for instance, that if I'm up in Manchester doing
Coronation Street
– which I love – if I wake up and I think: ‘Ummm', then I just get up and I pound those pavements. And sometimes I don't and I sit there and I gloom, and I just feel so ill when I gloom, because it makes you feel slightly sick doesn't it? And I think: ‘This won't do – get out!' I think I keep being saved by anger actually, interestingly, when I look at it. I mean sometimes if I'm in Manchester and I've got the day off – and I love Manchester, but I've been to all the museums and everything – and I'm sitting and reading and starting to feel blurgh, I'll think:

‘Oh for Christ sakes, just get out.'

The dialogue goes on:

‘I don't want to get up and go out, I'm perfectly happy here!'

‘Okay, but you're feeling rotten, why don't you just get out?'

‘Oh, for God's sake shut up!'

‘I'm not going to shut up until you get up and get out.'

‘Oh, alright, I will, but you'll see, I won't feel any better.'

And, of course, I come back and I feel much better. So that's the dialogue that goes on – usually internally, but sometimes out loud.

***

Have I ever experienced stigma? No, no, because I'm lucky I work in a profession where all sorts of oddities are tolerated. We're a very tolerant profession, because we spend our lives looking into other people's lives and putting ourselves into other people's shoes. So therefore it gives you a tolerance: not only does it breed a tolerance for others, but it breeds a tolerance with yourself actually. And so many people have suffered from some form of depression or anxiety, so they understand. And the sort of depression that I suffered from was within the bounds of normality – which is why I hesitate to call it anything other than just a very bad depression – but I think when we go into bipolar or schizophrenia or stuff like that, then we go into a completely different ballgame, because it can manifest itself as something rather strange. It's like with my brother Pete, if he were to go into another episode I'd know immediately what to look for: it's a slight twitchiness, a slight odd, perhaps, attitude towards something like food. You know, it's something that is very much not within the bounds of normality.

Schizophrenia is particularly stigmatised because, of course, everybody always thinks of those headlines – ‘Paranoid Schizophrenic' – they always think it's the mad axeman, and the incidence of that is minute. I mean, you know as well as I do that somebody who suffers from schizophrenia is more likely to harm themselves than anyone else, much more likely, and indeed they very often do. The very word schizophrenia has almost become rather like a Greek myth: it has all these legends and stories around it, which are nowhere near the truth, although they sprang from it originally. For people who don't know, schizophrenia often holds the idea of somebody being in two minds, which is crap. Interestingly, when my brother was finally diagnosed with schizophrenia in his late twenties – although it had manifested itself from about the age of seventeen but nobody knew what it was – it was a huge relief for the family, because we finally knew what the enemy was. But over the years it's been very difficult for him, for the family, very difficult for my mother particularly, who took the brunt of it really, because it was a rarity in that day. Luckily my mother was like me, she didn't give a fiddle or a toss about what other people thought.

But I've seen for myself just recently where I live, a young person who has the illness, who desperately needs help and there is none available, and I've seen how some of the people in this village have reacted. They've reacted in a barbaric way, as if the information that is available – that is in the newspapers and on the television and on the radio – has not touched them. They say absolutely appalling things and they have no conception of what it is like for the family, for the parents, for the person to whom it's happening. And what really worries me is that there is no willingness to listen to what is actually going on. I mean, our local vicar has been wonderful and preached a sermon about how people ought to get their noses out of their arses – he didn't actually say that! – but you know what I mean.

I do despair sometimes. No, I don't despair, because you're doing things like this, and more and more people are speaking out. So I don't despair, no, and it is much better than twenty years ago, it's like racism. But I cannot believe that in this country we still have people – unthinking people, stupid people, bigoted people – who will burst into tears at an unknown soldier's death in Afghanistan, and then actually turn round and talk such venom about this young boy who cannot help his illness. I mean, where are we in the empathy and tolerance and humanity stakes? I mean, where are we? I don't know. It does make me angry, I'm afraid. It does, it does. You just think: ‘What do we have to do, actually, for people to understand?'

So what would be the main message I want to get out to other people? Mental illness is not glamorous in any way, shape, or form, it really isn't. For people who are not sufferers, I'd say: ‘Just imagine. Just for a second step into someone else's shoes and imagine what it would be like if it were you.' You know, it's so comparatively easy to just take a moment and to think: ‘What must this feel like? Oh Jesus, how awful.' Because everybody, everybody, has had black moments in their lives, everybody has grief and unhappiness and sadness. So just imagine that, multiply it by however much you can multiply it by, and imagine it being never-ending, and that's what people go through. But in most cases it's a fairly useless message because a lot of people don't care enough. It's easier to dismiss somebody, it's easier to say: ‘Well, he's mad, isn't he?' And then you walk on: ‘It's not my problem.'