What's Normal Anyway? Celebrities' Own Stories of Mental Illness (4 page)

Which type of bipolar disorder did they diagnose? They didn't do it, I did it. And this is quite an important specific point. You know, I haven't just accepted this all the time, I've read quite a bit. With the bipolar thing it was reading a book called
Bipolar Disorder – The Ultimate Guide
, written by two ladies, Sarah Owen and Amanda Saunders, and it's really good, with case histories and people explaining things. And the revolutionary moment for me was when somebody was explaining and they said: ‘I was continuing with my work, and I was working very well, and I felt my work was getting better and better, and then I found myself getting irritable with other people and getting resentful of the fact that they couldn't keep up with me. And I'd get argumentative and dictatorial and say: “What's the matter with you? I can do this, why can't you do it?”' And my mind kept going: ‘Tick, tick, tick', and I thought: ‘Fuck, that is me, that really is me.'

Because when I look back to the autumn of the previous year – in context, I was working on
Autumnwatch
at the time – I was getting increasingly annoyed with people at work. It was a period where I did have rows with several people and the reason was always that I couldn't see why they couldn't keep up, or they didn't understand, or they weren't doing their job properly. And to my mind I was justified as well: ‘You're doing a fucking awful job, aren't you?' And it got to the point one day when, for whatever reason, I had an art easel, and I didn't throw it at anybody but I did hurl it on the floor and said: ‘You're not even bloody trying are you?' And when I read that statement in the book, I tell you, it just fitted me exactly. I was thinking: ‘Look, that's perfectly classic bipolar', but I'd never thought of that as bipolar. I can't remember what sort it is – whether it's A, B or nearly C, or whatever – but it's not the top one, whatever that is. Bipolar I? That's right, bipolar I is: ‘Whoa, you're in trouble!' Is it II the lower one? Yeah, it well comes within that. So, to summarise that: it needn't be crazy behaviour, in my case it was over-confidence, over-cocky, that sort of thing.

And then I started thinking: ‘Go back through your life.' And something else that another producer had said came back to me:

‘You do frighten people a bit in the office.' (Not the sitcom. With Ricky Gervais.)

He said: ‘You do frighten them sometimes.'

And I said: ‘What?!'

And he said: ‘Yes.'

And I said: ‘How?'

And he said: ‘Well, you're just very abrasive and they feel that they can't do their job properly or they haven't done their job properly.'

And I said: ‘I hear what you're saying and I know what you mean, because what happens is, in my head, I get so absorbed in what we're doing in the show that I just want everybody to be there and get it done and I'm sure it comes over the wrong way sometimes.'

Then, thinking back even further, I remembered – God knows when, '70s or '80s or something like that – somebody else saying a similar thing. I was told: ‘There are actually a few people who don't want to work with you, because you're too abrasive, demanding.' And I remember one or two other occasions from years ago. So the whole thing has made me look back as much as I can on my life and think: ‘When I had a burst of something, could that have been of a bipolar nature?' And it's made me think: ‘Hmm, well, maybe I did have this reputation and maybe that's why.' Because I had a manic edge which made people uncomfortable or something. But I never believed it, I thought I was easy. It's terrible, it's terrible. That's one of the things that's genuinely surprised me in my life, when I was told that people were scared of me. I thought: ‘What?! It can't be.' I thought I was my charming self, but there you go.

But one of the things that's now become clear – that's relevant – is how varied something can be: that you can have a harsh version or not as harsh a version. And it's true of other things: if you've got a physical ailment sometimes you have a bad attack and sometimes it's not such a bad attack, and so on and so forth. There are variations and that's one of the things that perhaps needs to be recognised more by the medical profession in general. You know: ‘I am prone to melancholy' is not the same as: ‘I'm having a complete fucking breakdown.' And being manic is like that. It doesn't have to be the extremes of behaviour that I witnessed with the guy I knew up the road. If somebody had explained to me ten years ago that there is a disorder where you're very confident and then you're miserable, I might then have put the two together and thought: ‘Okay, yes, I'll accept that.'

When I now describe bipolar to people who don't know about it – I do this at my granddaughter's school – I say:

‘With bipolar, one minute you're really happy and doing lots of things and have lots of energy, and then on the other side you feel totally miserable and it's dreadful.'

And then you get onto the difficult bit. You say:

‘Now, sometimes, you can be very unhappy, and you may be suicidal' – and let's face it, it's a cause of a lot of suicides – ‘and on the other hand when you're up and happy and energetic, you might do some very good things as well as some very stupid things.'

And if you want a bit of a consolation, most people who have bipolar, when they're on the manic side, they don't look at it as manic, they look at it as creative and energetic. You know, there is a good side to that, there actually is, because at least you're happy then. You might be about to do something really stupid but you're happy. And, let's be honest, it's not a boring illness. It's not: ‘Oh well, you've broken your leg, put a splint on it.' It's horribly fascinating really, let's face it.

***

Anyway, go on with your questions if you want or I'll just burble on. Actually, there's one thing I really want to say. Shall I just get it out the way? This concerns lithium. (Everybody thinks batteries first: you take batteries, they keep you going, recharge you.) Over the years I'd built up a picture that it was this drug that you really shouldn't risk, that it was the last resort, you really shouldn't take it – ‘Oh God!' – you know? Why, particularly, nobody said, but it was: ‘No, no, no, no.' I also knew this guy who was bipolar who refused to be on lithium. And I'm thinking: ‘Well, he's had a lifetime refusing to take it, so there must be a reason for that.' So you get fed these things from other people and I had this image that was really bad. But then, funnily enough, things seemed to turn around, coincidentally almost, because I mentioned it to my ex-wife, who I get on very well with. So I was telling her about this, and she said:

‘Oh yeah, a friend of mine's been on lithium most of his life.'

And I said: ‘Really? Any problems?'

And she said: ‘No, he's got other problems, but not with that.'

And this happened with two or three people and it was:

‘Oh, are they? But I thought it was really dangerous or something.'

So Laura and I both, I think, said to the doctor: ‘Why aren't you trying lithium?' Because we'd come to the same conclusion having talked to a few people. But it was sort of dismissed a bit: ‘Oh, no, no, no, there's better things than that now, you shouldn't take that, it's very old-fashioned.' You get this sort of thing. But anyway, the point is, I thought: ‘Sod it, I'm going to try this.' And I'm not kidding, just a week or so after I'd taken an overdose, I start me lithium and within a week or ten days I'm really beginning to notice a difference. After two weeks . . . this is ridiculous . . . I'm really getting better. My kids were ringing up one another and saying: ‘He's back!' And it was just before Christmas, which was even better, and I've been on it since and I . . . I don't understand what all the fuss is about.

But then you go and see your doctor again and you say: ‘Look, I've taken lithium and I'm so much better, I can't tell you.' And it's: ‘Ah well, yeah, well, it does work for some people' – that's what they always say – ‘but not for everyone, it doesn't work for everyone, you're very lucky.' Yeah, okay, good. So if anybody asks me all I can say is: ‘Look, yes, I'm probably lucky in that it seemed to work for me.' It hasn't worn off, it hasn't gone up and down or anything like that. Side effects? Very few. I think early on there were a couple of side effect things which were pretty bloody standard ones: more diarrhoea than you'd like for a day or two, and then a bit of a dry throat, one or two like that. And I could say that sexually it doesn't do a lot for you but, having said that, that might not be the lithium anyway, because I've been on antidepressants so long. I still take those too. I take everything at the moment.

I mean, it's an interesting journey in a way, when you start comparing with other people, you know, because I don't mind taking pills, but it's amazing how many people do. And I just find that kind of, a bit sort of . . . a bit daft in some ways. It just doesn't make sense to me to actually have a hang-up about taking pills, I don't know why people do. And coming off them too: why do so many people do that when they're working? I wouldn't risk coming off the lithium, I actually wouldn't risk it now. Although what I do suspect is that I'm still taking pills left over from the old regime – i.e. a couple of antidepressants – which are doing nothing. On the other hand they might be, so why risk it? I've got four blood pressure pills, so . . .

***

I can honestly say I feel absolutely fine now, I don't feel anything but fine. The biggest legacy is reminders of things, I find. I'll be walking down the street in a certain place and it'll be near where I used to go for therapy and I'll just go: ‘Ah shit. Christ.' I mean it's not terribly upsetting but it triggers off a resentment where you go: ‘Ah, two bloody years or, in the case of therapy, six bloody years traipsing backwards and forwards.' You know, add all that up, money-wise as well. I do feel resentful of the misdiagnosis. Yeah, I do, I do. I'm afraid I find myself resenting the fact that it buggered up about three or four years, that I lost a long period of time really. I can see nine-tenths of the time that it's the same old reasons – that people don't have long enough with you so don't have time to explore things properly perhaps, and it is complicated – but there are some things that GPs could do better.

A couple of years ago when I had got through all this, and I was certainly
compos mentis
, I did about three open days at some conference for GPs about mental health and how they can improve in their treatment of it. (Quite a bit is the answer.) So you've got a room full of a couple of hundred GPs and I sort of went through the whole story. A lot of it was really fresh in my mind and I really wanted to make these points, you know? One of the main points, from a GP's point of view, was to try to involve anybody else in the family. Because obviously, a very simple rule is: if you've got bipolar, on some days you're going to feel happy, you feel up, you feel confident. Are you going to go to the doctor then? No, of course not, you think you're fine. They only ever see you when you're miserable. But your wife or your children, or somebody else – a work mate – are more likely probably to think: ‘You think you're really up there but I'm telling you, you're acting strange actually.' So I said: ‘Try and take more notice, or even invite any notice, from parents or whatever.' Because they're going to see a lot more of it than the GP, who'll only ever see you miserable – ‘Oh, you're depressed' – or see you saying there's nothing wrong.

And another, simply enough, was: ‘I plead with you, if one of your patients comes to you and says they are clinically depressed, then ask about the other side of things. Just consider bipolar.' Because it's complicated, you know? If you suffer from depression it's awful but it's a bit more straightforward in a weird sort of way. But something that came out when we did those talks was that quite a few of the GPs said: ‘I couldn't get the other people in my practice to come along today and, believe you me, there are plenty of GPs' – and this is them talking – ‘who pretend it doesn't exist.' It's a very alarming statement. One said: ‘Yeah, I'm afraid there's quite a few who just do the: “Oh yeah, sure, take this dear.”' Which is a horrible idea. In attitude terms it's obviously unforgivable if a GP doesn't give full credence to mental health matters. Dreadful.

As for a message to other sufferers, the first thing you have to say, and everybody does say it fortunately, but get it through and make it real, is: ‘You are not alone and it
will
make you feel better to talk to other people who have had other problems.' Obviously I'm very aware of this process of people being embarrassed or whatever, or not wanting other people to know . . . what was the phrase you used? The stigma of it and that sort of thing. But I think the stigma is far more in the mind of the sufferer than in other people's minds and if you can realise that then you won't feel as bad as you did about it. Because of that statistic – one in four – chances are you're going to get sympathy, in just the same way as if you've broken a leg or something like that. I think people are sympathetic about it because, let's face it, they know what it's like, or they know somebody else. So I think that it's just like . . . yes, an internal stigma . . . you don't want to be like this, you don't want to be in that situation, so it's you who doesn't want to know about it really.

This question of stigma is interesting in a way, because it's a question that should be put to people who don't have the problem, asking
them
: ‘What would you think about somebody you know who, in this case, has bipolar?' Because there are various reactions available aren't there? One would be: ‘Er, who hasn't? Very fashionable these days.' And let's face it, there is some danger of that, there is a little bit of danger of that. I talked to somebody the other day at one of these mental health groups and said: ‘Are you sure there isn't a bit of a danger here of always having celebrity sufferers?' And I know it's to get the publicity and all that sort of thing but I wouldn't blame a punter – a normal member of the public who's got these problems and then hears Ruby, or Stephen, or me, or one or two others – for saying: ‘Oh for fuck sake, show business isn't it?' I really wouldn't blame them at all for saying: ‘Well it's easy for you mate, you're a bleeding millionaire.' You know: ‘That's him, not me.'