What's Normal Anyway? Celebrities' Own Stories of Mental Illness (6 page)

Anyway, eventually it was too late – the school couldn't handle me – and after suspending me six times I was finally expelled when I was fourteen. My dad was disgusted with me, it felt like he just shouted and shouted, calling me all sorts of names, saying that I was useless and a waste of space. I got used to growing up just hearing the same words really. It felt like my mum was having to keep the peace and choose between having me or my dad in the house, so then I started saying I was studying in the library but really I was going to the park, where I ended up just hanging around with the wrong crowd and getting into worse and worse trouble really, taking drugs. Oh God, I tried everything – apart from trips and things like that – but ecstasy and cocaine and all that. But it didn't work out for me at all. Because I was so skinny – anorexic tiny, probably five-and-a-half, six stone – and then I was drinking on top of that and doing drugs, I collapsed loads of times and then I got epilepsy, which was really bad.

Then my parents chucked me out. Because my dad – who was respected in the community and had a seat on the council, they probably thought I would bring real shame on him and the family and whatever. So they basically told me to go away, they got rid of me. So I spent a lot of time in hostels after that. It was really scary because obviously I was privately educated, I was at one of the top boarding schools and I spent my weekends watching polo and stuff, and the next thing I knew I was in a hostel with a load of heroin addicts. And I'd brought it on myself but it was hard to survive . . . I had to use all my senses to survive in that environment and it was horrible. It was the lowest point of my life ever.

I just wanted to escape all of this, because my life at this time was so awful. So I changed my name: I went to the local lawyer's office and I changed my name by deed poll. I just wanted to get away from Sarah Howes, who was me, who had a bad life and was a complete loser. I just wanted to be someone else, I wanted to change my destiny. There wasn't any particular reason I changed my name to Alicia Douvall, I just liked the name Alicia and then I saw a bottle of champagne and I spelt the name wrong. And I don't think my parents cared as I don't think they wanted to know me. So I changed my name, then I got a job in the local hairdressers, and I left the hostel and moved into a flat with a boyfriend. And then I realised at that point that I was going to change my life around completely.

***

I'd been thinking about plastic surgery for a while, after I'd found this book where there was this woman who, I think, was sixty years old and she'd had loads of surgery and she looked amazing. There were before and after pictures and they were like chalk and cheese: they were this frumpy woman who turned into this beautiful woman. And I thought: ‘This is my answer to everything: the answer to happiness, to a successful life, to get loved.' So I started planning how I was going to get all this plastic surgery. I just wanted to be like Barbie. I suppose, looking back, it was that association in childhood of her being successful and beautiful and happy. I just wanted to be like her. So I lied about my age and I had my first surgery at 17, which was a boob job. I went to a surgeon who told me: ‘Yep, that's great, you can have it done', and how wonderful it was all going to be. So I started on that journey.

After my first boob job I got interested in glamour modelling. I was uneducated and unqualified – I had not one GCSE to my name – so it was the perfect kind of career for someone in my position. Also, it went totally against what my parents brought me up to be: conservative, clothes very covered up. You know, we never went on any European holidays so we never saw people sunbathing in their bikinis and things like that, so it was the opposite to how I'd been brought up. I went to a local photographer and he just cut me a break and did me some pictures for free and helped me send them off and then I got a top model agent and work started coming in.

I started doing Page 3 for the newspapers and I became the facts girl for
Playboy TV
. I used to get
£
1,000, or
£
2,000, and I got picked up in the car, had my hair and make-up done, and it was a huge thing. And I got down to the last three for the
Big Breakfast
, I was against Kelly Brook and she got it. I was dark haired when I auditioned but then I dyed my hair blonde. But I don't think it was just about my hair colour, I think it was about me not having confidence in myself – I didn't think that they'd ever want someone like me. I never had the upbringing of feeling I was capable of doing something like that. Glamour modelling was much more reachable.

I think to start with I had clear plans for what surgeries and procedures I was going to have: I was going to do everything to my face and then go down my body and do everything else. But being body dysmorphic – although I didn't realise it was called this at the time – I was almost blind so I had to rely on the surgeon telling me what I needed. And I knew that: I knew I was blind, I knew I couldn't see what was in the mirror. And after each operation or procedure I'd feel happy and then . . . sort of . . . I think the anxiety would come back. For instance, after the first boob job I was happy for about a year afterwards, but then I wanted my nose done and then I wanted my boobs done again. You'd have all these grand hopes and then it was never right. One minute you think it might be but then reality sets in and you think: ‘No, it's not quite right.' Because plastic surgery has its limitations, it's never going to be perfect. So you have mixed emotions and you either plan to revise it or go on to the next thing.

So I started having lots of plastic surgery. And, you know, because of the bruises and stuff from the surgery, and my insecurity about how I looked anyway, I would have been more than happy to just stay in and plan for my next surgery. More than happy. But I was in demand as a glamour model and I had to have the money for my next surgery, so I had to do the modelling, I had to do the TV and newspaper work. But I used to turn up for photo shoots all the time with black eyes and bruises and everything and in a way it was self-sabotaging my career. It was stressful but in my mind I thought: ‘It doesn't matter, I look like shit, but I'll have the next surgery and I'll look a lot better.' It was awful.

I didn't understand, being young, what I was doing with my life. And to me, my childhood was normal, I didn't understand that it had affected me, so obviously I was having plastic surgery and I didn't understand why I was having plastic surgery. And I got quite badly depressed around this time, so I started taking antidepressants, off and on, from the age of about eighteen, nineteen, and I think the tablets worked really well because they level out your serotonin levels. But I was on a high dosage and I remember being in an absolute cloud, so drugged up, I couldn't concentrate for more than twenty minutes. People used to think I was on drugs all the time but I was just on these tablets and, yeah, they numb you don't they, so you're neither here nor there. I couldn't think deeply, I couldn't . . . I didn't have much feeling, I was just a breathing shell.

I think I started to realise that I might have a problem with my body image – and having all the surgeries – in my early twenties, but I just carried on. But by my mid-twenties I knew that I had a serious problem. By then I'd had hundreds of procedures. In all I've had something like seventy operations under general anaesthetic, including sixteen boob jobs, six nose jobs, eleven operations on the skin around my eyes, a facelift, tummy tuck, a rib shortened, my toes shortened, implants in my bottom, implants in my face, my brows shaved. And then there have been all the non-surgical procedures, like Botox, fillers, laser treatments. It's all cost me over a million pounds. To pay for it I went without food or ate beans on toast, I didn't buy nice clothes, I dyed my own hair. Because I always had to make sure I had enough for surgery; I had absolutely nothing so I could have more surgery.

Surgery was what gave me hope, what gave me my happiness, what gave me function. It was my way of life and it was very hard to have another way of life. I liked having the surgery, I liked recovering, I liked the anticipation, I liked the struggle of it, I liked all of it, everything associated with it. If I didn't have surgery what did I have? It was the way I functioned: it was my oxygen. It was like someone who collects toys and stuff, I could bury myself away in my own world. I didn't have to have functional relationships, I didn't have to live my life like everyone else, and I had a reason: because I was always injured. It became my life and the more things that happened that were bad for me – if I was in a relationship and they were nasty to me or abused me – I just thought: ‘I don't really care, I just want to have surgery next week.'

So, you know, surgery was my comfort. Just like an anorexic with food, surgery was my comfort, and it used to work. That's the thing: it worked. I think it was a mixture of addiction, obsession. Like an alcoholic or drug addict, I self-medicated with plastic surgery because it was . . . you know, because I'm a thinker. At the end of the day alcohol wouldn't have worked for me because it's ultimately a depressant and it makes you look like shit so it was never logical to drink or to take drugs but this seemed like a logical decision. But it wasn't a nice thing to be known for. Nobody wants to wake up in the morning and become the world's most worked-on woman. And no one wants to be famous for having plastic surgery, that was never what I wanted to be. I aspired to being Barbie and Marilyn Monroe, I never aspired to be a freak.

***

I was probably officially diagnosed as being body dysmorphic in my late twenties after I'd been referred to a psychiatrist. But I just thought they were lying. I thought mental illness didn't exist and it was an exaggeration. I didn't agree with it; I was still having surgery so I didn't want to agree with it. And I was angry because there was no kind of solution. So I said: ‘I'm not mentally ill and I don't want to be mentally ill, I don't want to have something wrong with me.' I felt that one day I was going to get it right, that I'd just gone down the wrong road and I'd been unlucky and met the wrong surgeons and everything else. I didn't think that actually it was my problem, it was my fault, and that I was wasting my time and money. That's a tough pill to swallow and it took a while.

To me, being body dysmorphic is like being imprisoned by your own mind because you're locked into the most powerful thing in the world, which is your own self. And you know, there's no answer, there's no escape from it. Being body dysmorphic is like . . . I don't know, I can't think of anything worse. I'm sure people would argue and say there are lots of things worse, but I can't think of anything, because it takes you over. It's very hard to have a normal life in any shape or form: you can't have a proper relationship, you can't believe anyone who says you're beautiful or good-looking, you can't walk down the street or be in crowded places because you think everyone's going to be looking, and pointing, and laughing at you. You're just never happy with yourself.

And you're trapped in this whole world where you're locked into having plastic surgery after plastic surgery and nothing can get you out of it: there's no tablet and no operation. You're blind, completely blind to what you look like, and you're obsessed with something and you totally believe it. I've been completely obsessed over the weirdest things, like a mole, and I've gone to ten, fifteen doctors, and they humour you, but you have to have that mole removed and you have to have it removed that week. There's a real urgency. And it takes a hell of a lot of strength to be able to work it out and overcome it and find different ways of coping and different ways of living your life where you're happy and using that obsession that you focused on – and the organisation skills that you developed to get all the work done – in a more productive way. It takes a lot; it takes a lot to work out why you're in that place in the first place and it takes guts to change it.

For me it took rehab to get to that place. The first time I went to rehab was actually for a programme called
Celebrity Rehab.
My agent rang me up and said: ‘Do you want to go to rehab? Thirty days, for free, and you get treatment, and it's in Malibu.' And I said: ‘Nobody goes to rehab for body dysmorphia, that's just embarrassing.' And they said: ‘Listen, speak to the counsellor and see what you think afterwards.' And because it was in Malibu they said: ‘Look, we have people coming here for shoe addiction, shopping addiction, all sorts of things', and they said: ‘We've never had body dysmorphia but we've had other things similar to that and we will treat you like any other addict. We'll treat you the same as a heroin addict or an alcoholic. Just the same.' They said to me that body dysmorphia is treated the same because it's the same kind of thinking: you're addicted.

So I went. And it wasn't like normal rehab, where you have to scrub the floor with a toothbrush, and they break you down to build you up again. It was kind of alternative, so they believe in things like acupuncture, and they combine counselling with massage and Buddhist philosophy, healthy eating, just changing your way of life. In a way by breaking you down, but mentally, by making you understand why you did what you did, getting to that point of opening up. And then they build you up to make you realise that you're not the piece of shit that you were brought up to believe you are.

But it was hard and I ended up running away from rehab twice – no, three times – because I couldn't handle it when they went into my past. To me, it was very uncomfortable thinking about my childhood because I'd changed my name, I'd changed my life, and that part of my life was dead. And Sarah Howes was dead. It was very hard and I refused to do that, I didn't want to go back, but they said I needed to go back to go forward. So I kept running away because I just didn't believe in their philosophy, until eventually they said: ‘You're never going to get better until you stop running away from things.' So I came back and I finished the reality programme, which took all the strength I've ever had in my life, and then I went straight back afterwards and had loads of therapy, more so than I've ever had.