What's Normal Anyway? Celebrities' Own Stories of Mental Illness (26 page)

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When I was seriously ill, what I found didn't happen to me was the idea – that's now rather fashionable as a therapeutic notion – that if you simply get people out into the countryside or amongst greenery then it helps make them better. And the statistics are impressive, including ones that are really quite extraordinary. Like if you put a landscape painting on the ward wall of people who've had surgery, their wounds heal faster than if there isn't one. It seems extraordinary but the experiment's been done and peer reviewed. That didn't happen with me. Exactly the opposite happened, in that I found it completely counterproductive to try to go out into the natural world, because the one bit of my feeling that I did remember – even if a lot had gone a bit blank – was that out there had really turned me on. To take walks and see things and to feel completely unmoved by them was shocking to me, so I stayed away from that. I know it does work with other people, perhaps at a slightly lower level of illness than I had, so I'm not damning that, I'm just saying that didn't work for me.

It may be going off too far sideways for me to say what I think about this trend of nature therapy, which I wholly approve of, but only if it is done with great honesty. I think that the idea that nature makes you happy – big capital N, capital H – is ridiculous, insulting to nature, belittling of you. We can sit here today – fabulous day, everything looks good – and I know for a fact there's catastrophe out there at the moment. That this extraordinary weather system has killed millions of migrating swallows and other birds. It seems to me that nature can be an enormous enhancer of emotional intelligence, if you get people to grasp the whole truth about it. Because then it becomes a play in a way. It's something happening with which you are connected, but you can also view it slightly objectively. And the truth is that there are a hell of a lot of bad things that are happening out there – some of which are our fault and some of which are inherent to being alive – but that life comes through. And that was the ‘nature cure' that was in there: sometimes simply glimpsing, at closer quarters than I ever had before, the ingenuity of life in surviving.

I think, having been to a dark place myself, I saw the dark things that were happening in nature more closely, more sympathetically. But that also opened me up – as this changeable East Anglian landscape did itself – to seeing the ways in which it would not give in. That wonderful line that Jeff Goldblum says in
Jurassic Park
when the dinosaurs manage to live, despite attempts to stop them breeding: ‘Life will find a way.' And I thought: ‘Yeah, life does find a way.' And that was something that I grasped very soon up here, and it was a powerful therapeutic thing for me. And it was not just a personal revelation, but changed my professional life as well, because it hardened a theme in my writing, that I'd always just played with before, that we treat nature too much as a pet. We want to be mother and father, we believe it can't possibly survive without our intensive care, whereas in fact it's much tougher, more resilient, more ingenious, more devious than that. I now see, and am moved by, and can argue the case for, how things get through, and to celebrate that ‘poetry of survival', as John Fowles once called it.

I take risks now, at least within my own sphere of confidence, that I never would have before. And I'm a much bolder person, I'm much friendlier, I was always timid of strangers and unfamiliar situations before but I'm just the opposite now. Getting better hugely built my strength and confidence – not just restored them, because they were probably a bit shaky before – but actually built a whole new steeliness inside myself which had not been there before. And, as I said, that spread into a much more thought-through philosophy about how I would write about my subject, in which that was reflected.

So I think I would say to other sufferers that one person got through: I did. Anybody can; almost anybody. People do get better. But I don't think you can ever get better just by other people making you better. I think at some point there has to be that personal moment of revelation, which I had moving up here when I saw somehow that the world was more resilient than I thought and I was lifted by that. And that was the nucleus of getting well. If you can reach that with other people's help that's fine but I think there is a point where you do have to make a commitment yourself. You can't simply rely on things like having drugs: you have to want to, you have to make that decision yourself. So I would say you can get better but you need to want to at some point.

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I'm off-message about depression because I think we regard it too negatively, if it's possible to say that. The automatic assumption that it is an appalling thing to happen to someone – all the dark imagery and the way people talk about ‘fighting depression' – that it would be better if it didn't happen, that it comes in some way from beyond oneself. I got very interested as I was recovering and writing my memoir
Nature Cure
, in the occurrence of depression in the natural world. What one would call depressive forms. Because whatever its complexities, and whatever its specific causes, depression manifests itself in human beings inside a form which is widespread in the natural world in many living things. The idea that – let's just stick with humans for the moment – that we react to trouble, to strife, to stress, with the two things we always talk about – flight or fight – is a huge simplification. Throughout the evolution of life there's been a third way between those two, which is retreat. If fight or flight prove impossible, difficult, incomprehensible, then you retreat into yourself. Playing possum is one. Large numbers of creatures go into conditions of protective unconsciousness when they're endangered. Their nervous systems, if one was to measure their activity, would very closely resemble those of human depressives: the parasympathetic takes over.

Oliver Sacks is one of the few neurologists who's written about this wonderfully, in his book on migraines, which he classes as one of those forms of what an earlier psychologist called ‘vegetative retreat'. That is: if you can't beat them, curl up in a ball and wait 'till it's gone away. Now this works if you're a hedgehog and the badger does go away. But when the badger is perhaps metaphorical and doesn't go away then that's when we're in trouble. But I do think that that lesson, that one's nervous system is not behaving in some unearthly way when these weird things happen to you, but it is an entirely natural response, is useful. It's a response to a situation that is intolerable but for which you can think of no easy way out – like fighting or flighting – and so you just stick.

So to begin with that and to say: okay, when you've gone into this state you've actually done something rather sensible and what you need to do now is to listen to that and see that it is a signal. That there is some particle of your life, or existence, or environment, that you need to get away from or change. Just as it would be if you were an animal that had gone into temporary shock, waiting for . . . again, showing psychosomatic symptoms . . . I hadn't thought of that before, it's a piece of theatre for the other creatures watching it. And what the process of therapy, or adaptation, then becomes is understanding what it was that, at that moment, caused you to believe that you were unable to do anything about it.

I had some weird, sensory strangenesses during my illness. Auditory hallucinations – no, not hallucinations because I knew they were not real – just auditory phenomena, which, for some reason, my ears had conjured up. And it was quite odd because each ear had its own particular thing. A bass, who could have come from the Russian Orthodox Church, was singing very deeply in one ear and a sort of country band playing light music was playing in the other. Fortunately, they very rarely both did it together! It was an amusing thing, in retrospect. I quite quickly – I wouldn't go so far as to say saw the funny side of it all – but got to realise that what these anxiety/depression periods are doing to you, is a kind of comedy. It is a disruption of the normal order of your life, which I think is intended for you to – as a really good comedy by Shakespeare would – rethink some of the things that are going on.

Subsequent to having vaguely written something along these lines in
Nature Cure
, I met a Buddhist psychotherapist. I have no particular feelings about Buddhism one way or another: I think it has a lot of very good points about acceptance, but I don't like its nihilism and lack of affection for the physical world. But its attitude to depression, I found, is pretty much that you accept the illness as something entirely natural that's happened to you because you've got, or have been put, in a position where you can see no other way out. So the therapy is to, as it were, embrace the depression, not try to fight it, and to work out what the way out is. Which, I suppose, is what all the therapies are, but it just starts from that different position of not regarding the depression as an enemy but as a potential teacher. And I think I've come to regard my illness as that: that having recovered from it I learnt an enormous amount about myself.

I don't think that I really grasped the notion of taking full responsibility for my emotional life until I'd been ill. I think that being ill was the climax of a long build-up of a failure to take responsibility, which in the end forced me to make that decision to take responsibility. So it had a function, it wasn't a random demonic bolt from the blue. And those failures to take responsibility are linked to that failure to have picked up a positive image of family life, evidenced by the fact of my remaining single for most of my life. I had enormous numbers of relationships but ran away from all of them. I was a classic commitment phobic. And probably really rather nasty in that I think I was quite an attractive guy – I had a number of very glamorous girlfriends – and I entered into relationships with an initial willingness, which in any honest other person would have raised the expectations that things would go further. But as soon as the possibility of a commitment, of living with somebody arose, I panicked and ran away.

I suppose the nest that I'd built for myself in the family home was one place I did feel secure, even though that sounds to contradict what I've said about family security. I was still tied to my home, not so much to my mother's apron strings – because she was getting ill in this process – but I had some secure emotional roots in, as it were, another person's existence, or another group of people's existence, which was my family's home, rather than something which I'd built myself. And a failure to actually generate it for myself, if I am to be tempted into giving an explanation, was because I'd failed to absorb evidence of it being a viable course for me. So I do not regret one second of having been ill because it made me change my life. It made me get out of that enveloped home in which I was locked – which was kind of unconsciousness in itself – and get out and build a life of my own. To fledge, as I put it at the beginning of
Nature Cure
.

Nature Cure
is not a self-help book, it's a memoir, it's what happened to me. But I do think that the worst possible way of starting one's journey back is with the assumption that you are dealing with something diabolic. I don't mean that literally – diabolic: to do with the devil – but that illness is a merciless enemy that has to be fought off, rather than reflected on. If instead one could say: okay, this is happening, it's a part of my life, let's begin by being calm about it. A Buddhist would say thank you for depression. Because it may be about to, as it did for me, prise open something that is wrong with your life and turn it into something new. If you're lucky; you have to be lucky for that. I know very well that it often goes the opposite way. But it seems to me that's not a bad way to start. Of course, everybody has to work out their own solution, with the people close to them and with their clinicians. But that would be my philosophy to underpin any therapeutic approach.

So that leaves me in the position of . . . what? Of not wishing depression on anyone as kind of an essential part of your education – you know, you can't be a proper human being unless you've had a good session of it – but at least saying that if it does happen to you, don't regard it as the enemy. Don't regard the experience as necessarily being one of unmitigated disaster, but perhaps begin the long journey back by saying: okay, this has happened to me for a reason which may actually be of help to me as a human being in the end, rather than just wiping out several years of my life. And that's easier said from a position of having got better, I know, I say that with absolute humility. But for me that's been true.

The thing that shocked me – that really deeply disappointed me – was when people said to me: ‘You're so brave to admit all this in
Nature Cure
.' It had never crossed my mind that it had anything to do with bravery. Maybe that's the result of being a writer: that it's in the nature of things to want to explore them and discuss them publicly, so maybe I'm a special case. But I truthfully had never thought what other people obviously had thought: that there would be consequences of confessing this in public. There weren't. On the contrary, it was just the opposite, and the idea of the stigma against mental illness – which I know full well exists – is mysterious to me because it's not something I've ever experienced.

I shall always be a little shaky emotionally but the bad days – the bad weeks sometimes – that I have, are never too serious. I always bounce back. I know that it is in my nature to express things that are going wrong in my life physically in some ways. Nothing particularly seriously – I get the full run of chronic ailments that most of us get – but, and again I hope this is consistent, I tend to regard those as: this is me, this is how I work, it's not an illness. I mean, much of the time I wish it wasn't there, but I tend to say: ‘Okay, it's a bit like having one leg longer than the other, it's a nuisance but it's who I am.' So that's, again, a slightly Buddhist reconciliation with the facts of one's frailty, that instead of constantly saying: ‘Oh my God, I wish I felt better' to say: ‘I've got a bit of a morning headache, I'm feeling a bit worried today, okay, get on with it, or get over it. It's not the end of the world. It's just the continuity of you.'