What's Normal Anyway? Celebrities' Own Stories of Mental Illness (23 page)

Training-wise I was just flat, everything was flat. And it was very difficult because in order to excel in sport you have to put in an extreme amount of effort. And when you don't even feel like getting up, putting that amount of effort into training is almost impossible. As an athlete other people expect so much of you, but there's also something unique about an athlete that makes them a good athlete and a successful athlete – it's in the way their mind works. We are very hard on ourselves as people. We don't often recognise how good we are, how successful we are, because the nature of what we do is always on to the next thing. So you have an achievement: ‘Yeah, that was nice, now what can I do next?' You have such high expectations of yourself but it's impossible for someone to achieve that all the time, forever. Somewhere along the way it's going to take a drop and that's very hard for an athlete to deal with. Because, you know, having a goal and not achieving it says to an athlete: you're not good enough, you've failed. And nobody likes to feel like a failure.

But I just didn't have the fight or the motivation in me at the time, because when I'm depressed I just feel kind of, urh, lifeless, all day. There's a lethargic feeling, sort of no get up and go, no umph. Everything, you know, at this low-level drone. It's like a dark cloud that follows you everywhere. Some days it lightens up and then there's a few rays of sun but you just never know when it's gonna hit. It can really catch you off-guard because one minute you're fine and then the next minute you think: ‘I couldn't care less', I'm just sort of a bit dead. And then I'll think: ‘I'm alright again', and then suddenly I'll be watching something that wouldn't normally make me cry and I'll be bawling my eyes out. It's kind of like having your period – you're a bit more moody, or cranky, or more tearful or whatever – but it could come at any moment and last for God knows how long.

It wouldn't surprise me if there was a genetic thing going on because my aunt was admitted to a mental institute, my cousin committed suicide in 1998 at age twenty, a very close family member just admitted to me that he was suicidal recently, that he only stuck around because he wanted to see how I was going to do at the Olympics. Another person closely related to me went through a really bad stage where she was feeling suicidal and was totally depressed. And with what we know about the brain and how it's made up – physiologically, biologically, how it's actually structured – if there's a fault in a certain area it causes various behavioural patterns to be more prominent in that person. I mean, I'm no scientist but if your biology means that you inherit this flaw in your brain in the way it works then, yeah, it would not surprise me if there were some hereditary component.

So one day I was telling my sports doctor that I wasn't, you know, feeling up to . . . life. In order to have been able to do the things I needed to do, I literally would have had to have somebody living with me who would just take care of me. Somebody who would prepare everything, like all the food, as I couldn't even be bothered to eat junk food, let alone making high-quality meals. And I know this was quite hard for people who knew me to understand because I'm the one that everybody goes to for advice. I've always been that person; I'm always everybody's big sister. So normally I get the brush-off when I'm asking for help because everybody thinks that I'm going to be able to figure it out myself, because in their perception I'm so strong. But surely that means that when I
do
ask for help you would jump to it even more so, because you would think: ‘Well, if she's asking for help then it must be serious.' But people would just say: ‘Oh, you'll be alright, you know what to do.' Well, I may know what to do, but I just can't do it, so someone better just be on the lookout.

So I was just chatting to my sports doctor and he recommended taking these antidepressants. And I refused at first, but he kept bugging me about it, so I did take them from him but I never took them – if you see what I mean – I just took them so that he would think I was taking them. You know, when you read something on the box that says you could commit suicide because of taking them, you don't want to take this thing lightly. You hear a lot of stories about people who have. And no one's monitoring you, they just give you these pills and it's: ‘Off you go, good luck!', which I don't really think is a good idea. And everyone else I talked to said: ‘Oh, don't do that.' You know: ‘Oh, my mother was a zombie when she did that, she was nothing like her normal self.' Or: ‘These devastate your body', and blah, blah, blah. This was from friends I knew who had known people on medication and also my mum, who didn't want me to because she's a natural health person, so she's studied a lot of these chemicals and is not a big fan.

But at that point, I couldn't do other things to help myself because I couldn't care less. For some people they might be able to trigger themselves to eat well or exercise, or there might be something that just allows them to snap themselves out of it, but I couldn't do it, not on my own. So although I think the natural way's the best way, there are times when you just can't, so after thinking about it for a long time, I eventually did end up taking the pills. I thought: ‘Let's try it.' So I started taking one type and after a while I went to my GP and I said: ‘These have helped me get a little bit better but it's kind of plateaued and I need to be a little bit more motivated to get out of bed.' You know, I had the motivation to put one leg out of bed, to not mind waking up, but I needed to be able to get out and do stuff, I wanted to do more. So I was put on another one and I was on that for about eight days. But during that time I'd spoken to my friend who was on antidepressants and she was like: ‘Oh, you should try these ones because they actually give you energy, almost to the point where you have to tell yourself to relax a bit.' So I went back to my GP and I said: ‘Well, my friend said to try these ones, what do you think?' And she was like: ‘Yeah, sure.' So now I've had my normal ones, switched to the other ones, and about eight days later she let me have the new ones.

I felt a bit odd when I started taking them and they said: ‘Oh that will just pass in time', but it wasn't just at first, this was ongoing. The problem was I didn't know what part was me and what part wasn't. I was still up and down emotionally and in training I'd feel dizzy and I would blink and feel like I was going to fall over. And every so often I'd get little injuries, or my training wasn't going well, or it would go well for a while and then it would plateau. And I'm like: ‘What IS this? Is that me? Is it because I'm getting old? Or is it the drugs?' It was a nightmare. And because they were having such an effect on just my running, I'm thinking: ‘Well, what else are they doing inside of me?' Because it's a chemical – do you know what I mean? These are very, very strong drugs, mind-altering drugs. And I didn't want to live like that, in some cloud of not knowing, so I knew I'd have to get out of that state eventually.

***

In the run-up to London 2012 we were training in South Africa in January and I think things had gone reasonably well there, but I knew that if we had any more problems injury-wise then it was gonna be a long shot. But to be honest by that point I'd lost my passion; it felt like something I had to do rather than something I wanted to do like in previous years. I wasn't doing it because I loved athletics or because I was passionate about it like in 2008. I cared because it was in London but that was the only reason I was doing it. But you can't tell anyone that stuff because you're supposed to want to be an Olympic champion. You can't say: ‘I don't really want to do this, I'm just going through the motions.'

And in a way, you don't even want to admit to yourself that that's what you're thinking. You tell yourself that you
do
care every day when in actual fact you feel different. And then you feel stupid because this is the London Olympics, this could change your life if you get it right. So why would you not at least try? But it was arduous. I really didn't care, I just wanted to get it over and done with – the sooner the Olympics came and went the better. I should have retired before, you know: ‘Done, boom, stick a fork in me', but because of London I kept going. But at that point it had become more other people's dream for me than mine. So that has its consequences and they don't fall on the people that encourage you to make the decisions, they fall back on you.

The day I took an overdose had been a good day. I'd had training, I'd started my session and it was going really well: I mean, like, I was on it. Then, just as we were about to get to the main part, I felt a weird pain in my leg so we called the session. And I was fine with that because the lead-up had been really good, so I wasn't bothered. Then I was driving home and I just started crying; I wasn't sad but I just started crying. That was infuriating to me and at that point I said: ‘Well, if I can't even have a good day and not cry, and I don't even know why I'm crying, then this is ridiculous. I've tried and I can't do it and I've had enough.' So I drove home and I took all the sleeping pills that I'd been prescribed when I had insomnia. I was just like: ‘God, I can't live like this. I can't live thinking I'm having a normal day and the next minute I'm crying. This is bizarre. I cannot function on a daily basis like this. I've had enough now, so goodbye . . . or hello!'

Then I texted my boyfriend, because I think a part of me wanted to let him know what I'd done, and I think as I was texting him I started to sort of fade out. I think he then, at that point, called my cousin who lives about 100 miles away from Bath and she called my mum before calling me. My mum said: ‘Fine, I'm on my way up there already, just keep her on the phone, call the ambulance.' My cousin said it was really bad for her because I wasn't talking well and she could hear me falling over and knocking things over and I couldn't get to the door. And she's like: ‘Oh my God, if I have to hear this it will haunt me for the rest of my life.' So she's just like trying to keep me on the phone.

Meanwhile, my mum was already on her way to Bath before I'd even taken the pills, cos she'd been trying to get hold of me and I just hadn't got round to calling or texting her back. In her sixth-sense motherly way she knew there was something wrong before, but in my opinion there wasn't, because I was fine, I was actually fine, so I was surprised that she thought there was a reason to come up. And it's funny because she said: ‘I knew there was something up', and I'm like: ‘Mum, there really wasn't anything up.' Although I know it doesn't look like it, as when she gets there I'm in hospital!

So I woke up in hospital. I don't know what treatment they gave me, I just know I had all these pads on me. Then, when the psychiatrist was due to come round, my mum was like: ‘There's a psychiatrist coming and they're probably going to want to section you.' And since I had an aunt who was admitted to the Maudesley Hospital in London and was so drugged up to her eyeballs that she didn't know her left from her right, I knew I didn't want people to section me and force me to take drugs. So I knew I needed to say what I needed to say, no matter what I felt, for everybody: for my son, for myself, for everybody. Because I knew that my mum could take care of me better than they could so I was not going to take the chance.

So I just totally blagged. I was just: ‘I'm fine, it was just a bit of a mistake, blah, blah, blah.' I was: ‘Yeah, it was a bad day.' I think I blamed it on the antidepressants, which I'm sure it was. I know it was connected to that because I wasn't that bad until then: all the emotional unpredictability was because of that. I'd had three different antidepressants in the space of a week and a half, and later, when I looked into it more, I found that you're not supposed to chop and change antidepressants just like that. Nah, not good, not good. So I just said: ‘Yeah, I'm sure it was because of that and I'll be fine.' And I didn't have any more sleeping pills to not be fine with anyway, because I'd taken them all! And they were more than happy to let me go home and I was happy about that.

***

Because I didn't retire until a year later, there was no way I could have come out at the time and said I was feeling suicidal, or had attempted suicide. No way, not in public, absolutely not, because you're showing weakness. It's not the reaction of the public I'm concerned about but my competitors: why would I want to give them that advantage? So you can't talk about it. Sometimes you're all using the same doctor and are on the same team, so can you trust them? It's a difficult beast to tackle because there are so many reasons why an athlete would not want to speak out while in the peak of their careers. So where does that leave the athlete? Dealing with it on their own.

So when I finally announced my retirement the following year I was in heaven. Everyone was like: ‘Oh, how are you feeling? It must be really hard watching the Olympics.' Er, negative! It has been great. A lot of depression comes from, I think, when you're not living your truth: you're not where you wanna be, doing a job you don't really wanna do, because you feel you need to do it for the money. Or carrying on doing athletics when you don't really want to because it's 2012 and who would quit before 2012? What sane person would do that? So it's like . . . it just shows that when you are finally living your truth, it's easier to move from day to day.

So when I was feeling good I called my GP and I said: ‘How do I wean off these antidepressants?' And she said: ‘You don't, you just get off them.' I think whatever it was, I was on the lowest dose possible, but I thought she would say start splitting them in half or something, but she said: ‘Oh, just get off them and if you have any problems give us a shout.' But I never had any problems. I feel proud of that because that was my goal: to not be on them. I never felt like it was a long-term option, because as long as you're putting chemicals inside your body, your body's not going to be in its natural, normal state that it's meant to be in. So to me, who wants to be as close to what I was born to be as possible, antidepressants are far from that. What with the side effects and differences in your personality, long-term there are too many downsides as far as I am concerned. They were just a crutch to get me to feel inspired to do the things I wanted to do, until I could take over and do them myself. It was about helping with the intrusion to the extent that I could help myself and I feel that I
am
helping myself now.