What's Normal Anyway? Celebrities' Own Stories of Mental Illness Read online

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  After my breakdown I wasn’t drinking at all, and I was really enjoying that, and I really thought I’d cracked it. But I was incredibly depressed. And Fiona was finding it very difficult because she thought: ‘Right, he’s had the breakdown, he’s heeded the message, he’s sorted the drinking out, so why aren’t things better?’ And I think the truth – though I don’t know this – is that I’d always had some sort of depression and drinking made me feel better. Even though it made me feel worse. So the thing is, because I wasn’t drinking – I went for thirteen years without a drop – that was enough to keep me going. You see, giving up the drink was so kind of . . . it was such a purpose at the time, taking it day by day. I had this thing about Geoff Boycott, because he was one of my heroes as a kid, so every day I gave myself a run: it’s my first hundred, my first thousand, up to two thousand. And it’s like that kept me going. Also, because I had another obsession: work – first in journalism and then later in politics – what the drink had covered up before, the work now did. As long as I was motoring, as long as I was feeling I was doing the job properly, I felt I could deal with it.

  So I didn’t really confront the depression thing for a long time, even though it was always there, and still is. What does it feel like? I think the best description I’ve ever come up with to describe depression was: ‘It’s a bit like feeling dead and alive at the same time.’ And I think when it’s bad that’s how it feels. You’re conscious of . . . I can look at that wall and see there’s a very nice painting there, I can turn on the telly and I can see there’s a bunch of blokes playing football, but you’re completely disengaged from it because inside you feel a kind of internal, not death, but deadness. And for me – I can only speak for myself – I feel this combination of the mental and the physical. You know, you feel that to do really, really simple things that don’t require much energy, just require a phenomenal amount of energy. You tie your shoelaces up and you suddenly feel really tired. So I think that’s the closest I can get to the sense of my depression.

  My favourite line in my novel All in the Mind – which is about a psychiatrist and his patients – was the one: ‘It felt like he’d lived through a storm and not a blade of grass had moved.’ In other words, there was almost a pointlessness to the depression as well. When I feel really bad it’s like that sense of a cloud coming in: not getting out of bed, feeling pointless, no purpose, all of that. When I get that, it’s usually a really powerful feeling at the start, like hopelessness. I can’t push it off. I’ve almost given up trying to push it off now, because I’ve always failed. I’ve felt it coming in and it comes in and gets you, right?

  I think I’m right in saying that I didn’t actually take any medication for depression until . . . 2005? Because I was in the public eye after leaving journalism and working at Downing Street, I think there was probably a little part of me that thought: ‘If I see a shrink and end up on medication, will that get out? Will it be a problem?’ You know? And I’ve always had an aversion to medication anyway and I think a lot of people do. But it was Philip actually, Philip Gould – my friend who recently died of cancer – who finally said: ‘Look, you can’t do this on your own.’ And he put me in touch with somebody and I still see this guy, not regularly but when I feel a bit . . . you know. So I do this thing now where I give myself four days and if it’s not gone I think: ‘Right, I’d better go and see this guy and talk it over.’ And we have the same conversation again and again and again, and then after a while he’ll say: ‘Look, I think maybe you’d benefit from a bit of medication’, and I go: ‘Shit, really?’ So I’ll go on a course of medication, an antidepressant, and I’ve had all sorts and some of them have helped me. Now I sometimes say to myself: ‘Would I have lifted out of it anyway?’ It’s possible, who knows?

  The longest I’ve ever been on medication has been about seven months. I’m on them now, in fact. I was just going through a very kind of gloomy, energy-less, anxious period and the thing is, because you’ve been through it so often, you know when it’s reasonable and when it’s not. For example – I don’t know if you feel this? – but I find when I’m feeling kind of anxious about things, I’m conscious of the fact that I’m worrying about something I don’t need to worry about. But it becomes almost all-consuming, you really think it is important, but it’s not, and the more you tell yourself it’s not, the more you worry about it. So that’s the cycle. And I do think, I’ve often said to Fiona, that it’s almost, not literally menstrual, but there’s definitely a cycle to my depressions. They come around and there’s nothing I can do about it, you know, and it could last for days. It’s very rarely more than a few days at an intense level, but then it’ll be at a lower level. I’m conscious of it all the time though. Fiona thinks I internalise it way too much and think about it way too much, but I think I have to, I sort of accept it as part of who I am now.

  And I’m not good at hiding it, I’m really not, and the impact on my family life is pretty grim at times I think. Very hard for the kids. My daughter is in the: ‘Pull yourself together, what have you got to be depressed about?’ camp. And even though on one level that’s the worst thing you can say, on the other I quite like it, because it kind of means she doesn’t get it and I’m quite happy about that. My daughter is very, very up front, she sort of says: ‘What are we supposed to do when you’re like this?’ And I say: ‘Well, one, just generally understand, don’t play a blame game, it’s not your fault, it’s not my fault, it’s not your mum’s fault. Nobody’s to blame, it just is, and try not to let it ruin your own enjoyment of life.’ But it’s difficult, it’s very difficult.

  I think from my perspective, when I’m feeling very depressed, I want the people around me that I want around me. But although I want them with me, I want them over there. I think a lot of depressives get this, that when you’re depressed, the idea of, you know, a party or a dinner or a social engagement, is urrgh, horrible. Some of my worse moments have been in situations where you’re expected to be happy. I can remember once going with Fiona and friends to see Eric Clapton at the Albert Hall. And I said to Fiona during the day: ‘This is a really bad idea, I just shouldn’t go.’ And it was like: ‘But they’ll be disappointed . . . but they got us the tickets . . . but it’ll lift you out of yourself.’ And I knew that all that was nonsense, I knew the minute I got there I would be unbearable to be with.

  Because the other thing that I think I underestimate – Fiona says it, the kids say it, Tony Blair used to say it – is that I do emanate a kind of . . . what I feel. And I can’t help that. So I find that the best thing for me to do, when I know that it’s bad, is to try and lock out, and that’s why I’ll go out for four hours on the bike or go to bed. But even when I’m in bed, during the day, I know that the mood that I’m emanating from that room, where I’m on my own, is coming down here. I know that. And when I’m like that, Fiona’s strategy is: ‘That’s him, he’s doing it, I’ve got to carry on doing what I’m doing.’ But it’s very difficult for families and I don’t think there’s much support for families in terms of knowledge, which is often about stigma.

  However, although I still get very, very down, I’ve definitely found better strategies for dealing with it. There are all different kinds of techniques you can use – writing, recording dreams – there was a point when I was doing all that on a systematic basis and it did help. I think the other thing I would say is that physical exercise has become really important. I took a long time to get into that, but now I find it very important when I’m feeling depressed – even though it’s really hard – to get out on the bike, go for a run, go for a swim, do something. I’ve got these new wheels and yesterday I was going to go on the bike, but then by the end of the day I’m thinking: ‘I didn’t go out, I didn’t do anything’, so today I’ll try to do more. So that’s important, I find it really helps. And now I think I’ve found that the gaps are getting longer. I think.

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  When I’m on the speaking circui
t, I do this thing about rules of leadership and strategy and one of them is: ‘Get good out of bad.’ And I think partly that’s what I’m doing with all this. So although my breakdown was the worst day of my life on one level, it was also a defining moment. And defining moments, ultimately, if used well, can be good. I think I used it to sort myself out. This will sound crazy but I don’t actually think I could have done all the things I went on to do if it hadn’t happened. Because if it hadn’t happened I probably would have just carried on as I was: thinking I was invincible, thinking that I could drink what I wanted, thinking that I didn’t really have to think of other people and relationships. If actually, that night, I’d not gone on the piss, not had a row, but come home, had a decent sleep, got up feeling just a bit rough, I could have carried on like that for years. Lots of people do. But I think actually, in a way, the sort of bigness of it, the psychotic nature of it, made me realise: ‘Fuck, you’ve got to change your ways.’ And I’m by no means a kind of perfect person but I do think about those things a lot more than I used to; I think about my impact on other people much more than I did.

  And take my novel, All in the Mind. That came out of an impulse, thinking: ‘Well, if you’ve got all this shit going on, try and get something good out of it.’ And if you read it, in their own different ways, these different characters represent different bits of my own mental history in there the whole time. And I really enjoyed writing the book and I love it when I’m looking at my twitter feed – I get a real buzz – when people say they’ve just finished reading it and it’s such an insight into depression. Or when I get letters from people who are mentally ill saying, you know: ‘I read your book and I felt somebody else understands.’ That’s getting good out of bad for me, so I think that’s why I look back and think that what’s happened is one of the best things that’s ever happened to me.

  It is highly likely that a phrase similar to ‘Tony Blair’s right-hand man’ will appear close to the intro in the second sentence of any obituary of me, because that was defining in terms of my professional life. And I’ve done lots of other things since working for Tony: I’ve done my diaries, which will be seen as important historical documents; I’ve worked for different causes and companies and charities and organisations; I’ve been on the speaking circuit; done loads of telly, documentaries; now this cameo acting and blah, blah, blah, blah. But of all the things I’ve done, the thing that has meant the most to me has been the way that I’ve developed arguments and engaged in this debate about mental health. It’s all about this theme of trying to get good out of bad – so the bad was the breakdown, the bad was the impact that it had upon myself and other people – but what good can you get out of it?

  When people say: ‘I think it’s very brave and very courageous that you talk openly about it’, I say: ‘Well I feel that it benefits me and I’m really glad if other people feel that it benefits them, but I’ve always felt really good about being open about it.’ And actually it’s the one part of my life where the media have been really reasonable and fair and I have never experienced stigma, I’ve never felt it. But when I’m out and about talking about this and doing the whole Time to Change thing I will say to people: ‘Look, I totally understand why you don’t want to be open about it.’ Because when you say to me: ‘Where’s the stigma?’, for me the stigma comes in the workplace, it comes on job application forms, when somebody’s going through an applicant’s CV and they spot a six-month gap and they think: ‘Now what’s that about?’ So then they ask, and the person who’s interviewed is thinking: ‘Now am I going to be honest, and if I am honest am I going to put myself at risk?’

  And that is the stigma. It’s the fact that that person, if they’d had cancer, wouldn’t think twice about it: ‘I had cancer, I had to have it out, look at me now, it’s amazing.’ And it’s: ‘Great, fantastic.’ Now, if they said: ‘Actually, I was a drug addict, I don’t take drugs now and I haven’t taken them for ten years, but I was a drug addict’, or, you know: ‘Oh, I had a breakdown’, there are some employers where there won’t be a problem but there are plenty where there will be. And that’s why, in the workplace, if somebody wakes up and feels really depressed, they’ll phone up and say: ‘My daughter’s ill’ or: ‘I’ve got to take my mum to hospital.’

  The thing is, the way the public think about physical and mental health are worlds apart. We’ve discovered the language for physical ill-health. If somebody says: ‘My mother’s got cancer’, we all know what to say: ‘I’m really sorry about that. What’s the prognosis? What sort of treatment is she getting?’ If you see somebody walking down the street on crutches, you know what’s going on and we all know the language:

  ‘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.