What's Normal Anyway? Celebrities' Own Stories of Mental Illness (3 page)

So when the consultant said: ‘So how are you doing now then?'

And I said: ‘I feel really good actually.' And I did, I felt really good at that point.

And she said: ‘Not
too
good, I hope?'

And I said: ‘Erm . . . oh, bipolar you mean? No, I'm not too good. Manic is not . . . like that.'

And I instanced this friend of mine and said: ‘I know what happens to people, they jump off buildings and think they can fly and that sort of thing.' So they have this image of being real crazy.

And I said: ‘I'm not that. I am not that.'

So therefore, during the next ten years, I had expunged the idea of manic depression because I had a certain idea of it and – aside from this woman – nobody else had taken it at all seriously either.

Aside from the jargon, the therapy, the pills, the next thing that becomes a part of your life is the question: ‘Are you going to need to go into a hospital at some point or another?' Which I did. I went to the Priory first – the North London Priory – and everything about the two or three hours that I spent there was awful, from the minute I drove through the gates and along the path, through the bloody great gardens. You know, it looks like a stately home or something and it immediately reminded me of where my mother had been – instantly – which didn't help. And then it just gave me the creeps. I was registered or something and left in this room, this big room, and Laura stayed with me, and it was: ‘Somebody will be back soon.' And I really freaked out. I was cowering in a corner, saying: ‘Please, please don't leave me here, don't leave me here,' and she was saying: ‘We've got to do this.'

Nobody turned up for about two hours and when they did they said:

‘Oh, there's a phone call for you.'

And I said: ‘But nobody knows I'm here.'

And they said: ‘Oh, it's a newspaper.'

And I said: ‘You've got to be bloody joking, I've only been here a couple of hours and somebody in this place has leaked that fact to the papers.'

You know, unbelievable. It happens, but I did think that was a bit quick. So I just couldn't . . . there was no way . . . I had to get out of that place. So I ended up in another hospital in town. (It's a private one too, but that's another issue, I'll come back to that.) And to cut a long story short I had to go in there about three times during a ten-year period.

***

Then there was the therapy – both in and out of hospital – which, among other things, set me off knowing what shrinks did. And, like I said before, it's such classic stuff: that you lacked mother love, that you lacked attention, motherly attention and support, and the person who was supposed to be looking after you ran away. You could . . . it's like a comedy sketch of what the basic things are that are going to bring you down, and that's a classic one obviously. The possibility of a genetic thing was interesting because that didn't get mentioned much, the therapist immediately homed in on the deprivation of mother love. I mean . . . I don't know whether it's true or not true, whether it's valid or not valid, whether it's the reason or just one reason, I haven't a clue. But he's going to go through every aspect of that.

It's a whole other subject this therapy stuff. And you don't have to be in a private hospital to get the therapy but I've seen these things going on in them. It borders on the comic, it borders on the grotesquely amusing, I'm afraid. I don't wanna say it doesn't work but they stick the word therapy on anything, you know:

‘So, are you going to art therapy today?'

‘Yes.'

‘Are you going to dance therapy later?'

‘Yes.'

‘Have you got social therapy?'

‘What's that?'

‘Well, it's playing dominoes actually.'

‘Right.'

‘We're going to do gardening therapy!'

‘We're going to do birdwatching therapy!'

‘We're going to be doing sitting-and-watching-David-Attenborough-therapy!'

‘Something-else therapy . . . blah-blah therapy.'

They're all given a name. What's the fashionable one at the moment? Oh God, that self-orientated thing, erm, it is awareness? Mindfulness, that's the one. You're supposed to go to that therapy. Also music therapy, that was a good one, a lot of people seemed to like that. Which is basically about the same as at a mother-and-toddler club, basically the same as at infant school. They leave a pile of percussion instruments – I could have lent them some – and there's usually a teacher who pretends to play the piano, but can't really, and everyone's meant to go like that and sort of make a noise and let it all out and that sort of thing. And the same when you do your art therapy, you paint something and then somebody will interpret it: ‘Mmm, yeah, this is you gloomy, a big cloud, oh dear, it's tough isn't it?' ‘No, it's actually raining.' I'm loath to knock them because I know a lot of people seem to like them but, as you've gathered, I just got more and more cynical about those sort of things and I didn't find them any use whatsoever. Aside from, occasionally, the naughty use of finding a couple of kindred souls, giggling most of the way through.

And, of course, looming over them all is cognitive behavioural therapy. Well, I don't know, I've been to quite a few of those and I can honestly say, I'm afraid for me – and I don't want to knock it – that I don't know what it's about, I really don't. I wish I didn't feel like this, it's one of the reasons I've been a bit cautious of talking about things, but every time somebody stands up there and does a pie chart and starts writing things on it I . . . I just
cannot
get with it at all. If you were to believe the papers – particularly the
Daily Mail
– there will be somebody there saying: ‘CBT saved my life', or whatever, so I've got to accept that it does. But I also . . . I also can't help thinking: ‘Well, yes, but it's very cheap for the NHS or whoever too.' It's a pretty basic thing, particularly if it's group therapy. But then again, to some people the group is important, I've seen it work. You know, I've been to so many of these sessions at the hospitals, there's always somebody nagging you. And you go along and sometimes it's just like a good chat with a bunch of people and if you get the right group it can be very interesting.

I don't know . . . the trouble is you always feel you shouldn't criticise something if you can't come up with something better and I can see that. But I think if you're of a certain mind and have a certain take – and you have a facetious sort of streak as I tend to do – then you've had it once you start giggling and you're given the nuts to hold or something like that. You think:

‘Oh God almighty, I can't do this!'

And it's: ‘How interesting, what are you feeling now?'

We had an American lady as well, which seemed strangely appropriate:

‘What do you feel now?'

‘Um, I'm a bit bored really.'

‘Interesting, interesting.' That was her catch phrase.

There were two other guys at the back and we were like naughty pupils:

‘Oh, that's interesting, interesting.'

Oh God. You know, I just want to write something there, I think there's a sitcom or something in it.

***

How did it affect my work? Luckily, during that stage – because this coincides mainly with my wildlife career – it didn't affect me very much professionally, because I was very fortunate that one of the producers I worked for was very sensitive about the problem. I think she had probably had problems herself at some point or certainly knew people who had. And I remember her very well. A couple of things. One, when we had finished the series we were working on she sent me a card, because she knew I wasn't in very good shape, saying: ‘Don't worry about it, the job is still here, if we have to delay the next series it doesn't matter, it's okay.'

And another one was, I was supposed to go to Kenya and do some Christmas special and I could feel myself getting really edgy about it. And, again, she stepped in and said: ‘Do you really wanna go?'

And I said: ‘Ahh, I dunno.'

And she said: ‘Look, I don't think you should because you'll be stuck out there and you won't have proper medical attention immediately. It hasn't really been sorted out properly and it doesn't matter.'

And a lot of people will say: ‘Go ahead and test yourself!' But I can honestly say – and this is general advice in life – if you don't really wanna do it, just don't do it, and you'll be amazed at how much better you'll feel. You know: ‘I don't have to go and do that! Great!' Anyway, so there was that degree of sympathy, which was so important at the time. God yes, it was a relief. But I can see exactly why there are jobs where people think: ‘I mustn't let them know, I mustn't let them know.' It just depends on the attitudes of who you're working for and, in this particular case, at that particular time, I had sympathy from that one producer.

There was only one time when I ever really broke down in public, which was when I was supposed to give a talk to these people who worked on oil rigs . . . that's the only time I really had to stop, you know? But if we're looking for the brighter side of things, it showed that you only have to be in a room with half a dozen people and you find that at least a couple of them will have had this sort of experience, because the organiser of the event said:

‘Do you have problems with depression?'

‘Yeah.'

And he said: ‘I thought so, I recognised that instantly. Don't worry about it, it's okay, it doesn't matter. It's only a bunch of people who probably don't know what you're talking about anyway!'

And that was partially true because, although I'd been on television all year, I had a room full of people working on the oil rigs all year! And I said: ‘Has anybody seen
Springwatch
? . . . No?' Oh, Christ.

The irony, I suppose, of my journey – for want of a better, less pretentious, word – is that what has got me into trouble is not depression. It wasn't the depressive side, it was the manic side. Although I didn't know it was a manic side then, I didn't know I had a manic side. And that, I think, is not a very good comment on some of the people who were supposed to have been treating me or noticing that. The word bipolar – manic depressive – had not been applied to me or suggested to me, either by anybody else or myself, for years and years, since that NHS consultant I saw very early on. And, like I said, I dismissed it because of the exaggerated image of manic depression, which sounds like you're a total lost cause.

But leading up to 2009 I was behaving in a way which was more extreme. It wasn't outrageous frankly, but it was more extreme, looking back. It was all very, very work related. In the manic phase it was all to do with me having a perhaps inflated – you see I won't even accept it now:
perhaps
– inflated sense of knowing best, constantly saying: ‘You don't understand.' You know, I basically lost it with a couple of producer/ directors, where I said: ‘For Christ sake, can't you concentrate, can't you see that this is meant to be like this?' Or: ‘Will you please follow
my
script not yours.' And without going into gory details or non-gory details there were reasons behind all this. I wouldn't say that any of it was completely illogical, although there are probably people who would refute that and say it was illogical and I wasn't justified in saying I knew better. Was it divorced from reality? That's a good way of putting it. No, it wasn't divorced from reality and I don't remember anything that completely was, although people have told me that I said things or made statements which I can't really remember. But no, no, it definitely wasn't cardboard and dead bodies, it was kind of truth-game type stuff, you know? I was going to go in and tell you exactly what I thought of you and what's going on.

Then at the start of 2009, I got very, very depressed again, spending days in bed sleeping or staring at the walls. And the last four years have been the biggest drama one way or t'other: I ended up hospitalised for a fair chunk of time, I took overdoses twice, which is not a very bright thing to do, and tried to smuggle a blade of some sort into the hospital. All that kind of thing. At first I went back to the private hospital but, for a start, I really couldn't afford to be there, in a financial sense. It just wracked up half my bloody pension that I could have given to my kids. Also, as time went on, Laura was saying: ‘Honestly, I know you don't think you were kind of over the top in that period last year, but I think you were, and can we talk about the bipolar situation?' But the consultant, the private consultant, seemed to sort of ignore it: ‘No, let's just try a little bit more of this and a little bit more of that.' And Laura was getting totally frustrated: ‘We can't go on like this, it's going to bankrupt us, you're not getting any better.'

And she, Laura, was very much building up a general antipathy towards the hospital. Possibly over the top, but I can see what she meant. Laura felt so strongly about it that I found myself going with her and getting this feeling, if you're really being critical, that at the private hospital they were keeping you there as long as possible to get as much money as they could out of you. Yep. Laura definitely feels that; she actually wrote to the consultant. And naturally got a rebuke, a rebuttal, but on the other hand it wasn't a terribly sympathetic one, it wasn't: ‘I can understand you feeling like this, but . . .'. It was: ‘Of course I wouldn't, anyway I must go, I've got another patient.' So, to cut a reasonably long story short, Laura eventually virtually refused to have anything more to do with the private hospital and I'm glad she did.

Anyway, after the second of the overdoses I got whisked off by the Camden emergency team . . . I've forgotten what they're called . . . the crisis centre, that's right. I was taken off, still totally groggy and everything, and plonked in the crisis house, which is fortunately not too far away. And it's all NHS stuff and they were wonderful, it's a really great facility. And while in there – I was in there about ten days, maybe nearly two weeks – one of the doctors who came in said: ‘You're quite clearly bipolar.' I honestly think it was almost as simple as them saying: ‘You've had ten years where you've been having depressions and it hasn't got any better' – and probably myself and Laura saying there was this period which, looking at it more critically, could be defined as having a manic episode – ‘so let's assume that it is bipolar.'