What's Normal Anyway? Celebrities' Own Stories of Mental Illness (2 page)

***

In a way I was a therapist's dream, I reckon. I remember thinking, the first session: ‘This guy must think all his holidays have come at once.' First question every shrink asks you, the world over, is: ‘Tell me about your mother.'

They all start off like that. And I remember saying:

‘Well as soon as I do, you'll be like: Oh wow, I've got all the ingredients here.'

When I finished, he said: ‘Your mother was in a mental home?'

‘Yeah.'

‘She wasn't there at all when you were a child? Not even when you were a baby?'

‘No, that's right.'

‘She attacked your father a couple of times?'

‘Yeah, that's right.'

‘Wooah, I'll have you for about seven or eight years, with all this to go through!'

So, yes, my mother was in a mental home for most of my childhood and I personally have no memory of living with her properly at all. I was born in Rochdale in Lancashire and the setup, in the little tiny house, was: my father, who was an accountant at the electricity board down the road, and his mother who was, I imagine, in her eighties or something . . . maybe a bit less than that when I was actually born, but certainly fairly elderly. But not decrepit in any way, she wasn't being looked after, it wasn't a care situation, it was more a blackmail situation I think! My dad had taken her on as she kind of had to go somewhere and his brother had actually refused to have my granny in the house.

I didn't know any of this until much later but, basically, my childhood take on it was: there's my dad, there's my granny, who lives with us, and that's the way it is. So my granny became
in loco parentis
, which wasn't entirely appropriate, I don't think. But my dad was really the person who brought me up and, even though he was working long hours, he was utterly and entirely scrupulous, dependable, and everything else. There was no way I could ever fault him. Sometimes he was a bit over-organisational or something, or over-ambitious on my behalf, but basically totally reliable. There was never any feeling of being a latchkey kid in Rochdale, which would have been easy casting really.

How much I knew about my mother at the time I don't know, as I've pieced some of it together since, via my mother's sister, who I got in touch with about ten years ago. But as a kid of that age you simply wouldn't . . . well, I didn't, for example, do the sort of things you might have thought I would do, like saying:

‘Where's my mum by the way? Where did she go? I've noticed something: all these kids at school have this female that they . . .'

‘That's the mother, dear boy.'

‘Oh really? I don't think I've got one of those.'

Then a bit later I remember being told things like: ‘Oh, your mother's gone to stay in a hotel for a while.' Or: ‘She's gone to stay with a friend for a while.'

But there's a lot of things in life in general – and this is certainly one of them – where your take on it is different as the years go by. It varies, because it depends on what you know. And when I look back on it, what I knew about my mother at the time was pretty weird, but it didn't particularly strike me as that weird then. All I knew then, and this is the relevant thing really, was that she wasn't there. And I was used to her not being there and I suppose, relatively, not particularly troubled about it. In fact, I've since found out that she was first sectioned or whatever – they probably had some different name for it: ‘carted-off' or something – in 1940-something.

My only consciousness, my only memory really, of my mother at home during that period – and it was still in Rochdale so I must have been only about five or six, cos we left and went to Birmingham after that – was coming back from school and there being broken crockery. I can visually kind of see it. You know, it looked as though there had been Greek dancing in the kitchen – it was everywhere – and then I realised there was blood on quite a lot of it. And my granny must have been there somewhere, but my dad wasn't. I was later told – I think by my granny, but I can't be sure – that my mother had been at the house and had attacked my dad, who was in hospital but was okay. Later, some time after he got home, he told me that my mother wasn't coming back. And I was relieved because at the time I was, and continue to be, quite scared of what I knew, because I knew that there was evidence of violence.

My mother was in the classic mental home, a big sort of pseudo-mansion, called Barnsley Hall. I went to see her once when I was a teenager and that was the only contact I had. I don't remember feeling upset particularly and I don't think I did right through that period; it was almost too unreal to feel depressed or upset by it. Because it really was . . . it was like a film set, with all the lighting and stuff, and long corridors, and every now and again there'd be some ‘argh!' noise, or somebody crying, or somebody beating their head against the wall. And then you finally got down to these curtains and: ‘This is your mother!' And she was just sitting there and she didn't recognise me . . . I stayed for, whatever, twenty minutes, I don't know, and there was no recognition. She just said: ‘Television is dead bodies and cardboard.' (If only it were. It'd be more interesting than fucking chefs!) But, you know, I just . . . it didn't leave any impression except a visual one. The main impression it left was the fact that there wasn't an impression. That was the main thing. To actually come out and say: ‘I'm sorry but what just happened there? Was that my mother? Are you sure?' Because it didn't mean a thing, she was a stranger.

As to what was wrong with her, all I'd ever been told – back in the old days, back in the '40s and '50s – was that she had: ‘Trouble with her nerves, she has trouble with her nerves.' And I never knew what that meant. Did it mean: ‘Oooh, you're nervous all the time'? But it was always that – ‘trouble with her nerves' – it just filled anything in. Other than her ‘nerves', the only other so-called retrospective diagnosis I had around that time was when I'd left university and she'd just been taken out of the hospital by, I think, her mother. And I'd rung up the doctor and asked what exactly was wrong with my mother because nobody had said anything. And he said: ‘Oh, she was schizophrenic.' Yes, schizophrenic, and could be violent and dangerous and that sort of thing. And obviously, in her case, she
was
prone . . . I know because of the crockery incident that there was violence involved.

Years later though, in 2003, I got another perspective on it when I was doing the telly series
Who Do You Think You Are
? and I met a couple of nurses who had treated my mother at Barnsley Hall, who were now in their late eighties, nineties. And how the hell they were so clear I don't know, because they said:

‘Oh yes, we remember your mother, she was so jolly.'

‘Eh?'

‘Yes, yes, she was always singing and playing the piano.'

‘What? I had no idea she played the piano.'

‘Yes, she did.'

So at the end of that I said: ‘What do you think was wrong with her?'

And one of the ladies said: ‘Oh, I think she had what we would now call bipolar.'

And, well, you know . . . definitions. Having found out as much as I can over these last ten years – that's relevant to myself, not just from curiosity – diagnoses change, words change, don't they? So it's very difficult to know exactly what went on, but from what I've read and heard since it fits bipolar better than schizophrenia really. Looking back on it now I think, yes, my mother did have bipolar disorder.

***

What hadn't happened . . . I certainly hadn't gone through life thinking my mother had a very bad problem. I certainly hadn't gone through my life, at all, thinking: ‘I wonder if this will clobber me in any way or other?' But I have to say – although I wouldn't necessarily blame anyone – that looking back now you'd think that some doctor or somebody might have said: ‘Your mother did what? She was where? Ah. Oh. Well, we'd better keep an eye on you then.' But the suggestion that there was some flaw there that might have been passed on genetically never cropped up. So I was not aware, and I don't think anyone else was aware on my behalf, as it were, that I had any problem until about 2000, very late on, when I was about sixty. It wasn't 'til I had what one would have called in the old days a ‘nervous breakdown', which in fact was a heavy dose of clinical depression (or at least that was certainly what the doctor said then) that I actually thought: ‘There's something wrong with me here.'

I'm aware, thinking back – which is the best I can do in a sense – of a couple of little incidents which suggested that there was a bit of wiring starting to get loose in the lead up to the breakdown. Because, you know, it wasn't crazy, it was, sort of, disorientation. One time I was doing a voice-over in the morning, then I had to go somewhere else for a meeting, and then go back again. And I couldn't remember having done the voice-over. And the guy said: ‘You did that this morning', and I said: ‘No, I didn't', and he had to play it back to prove it to me. And I was, you know: ‘Oh fuck, what happened there then? Is it memory? Is it just something switching off?' And I had a couple of those. I think the other one was when I had to drive down to Newquay to give a talk and, again, I was suddenly: ‘Have I done the first half?' It was almost like you had concussion or something like that.

Something similar also happened to me when I was in Costa Rica and I was tipped overboard out of a white water raft type thing. And I was wearing a helmet and I didn't hit my head or anything – as far as I know – but I actually lost about an hour or so. I remember being in the boat, being in the water, and reaching up and somebody grabbing hold of me. Then the next thing I knew I was sitting in the front of the boat, paddling along quite happily, and the producer who was with me said:

‘Are you okay?'

And I said: ‘I don't think I am actually. Where am I?'

‘You're in Costa Rica.'

‘Am I? Are you sure?'

Eventually the only thing that got me round to accepting this was when we stopped and went to this little café by the river and I said: ‘I'm just going to go for a walk for a few minutes.' So I got my binoculars and wandered round and started seeing toucans and things. And I thought: ‘Ahh! This is not the Heath . . . you're in Kansas now!' So that's what brought it back. So I had quite a few little fades in and out of focus for a while.

Then . . . I don't remember the exact chronology of this . . . well, you don't write it all down do you? So it's fairly muddy in a way. But I do remember that first breakdown all too clearly. You know, all those clichés like: ‘You don't know what it's like until you've had it', came flooding in. And I couldn't believe it, I just could not believe it, and anybody who's had the full whack, I'm sure, would say that. It's not a matter of just: ‘I'm not feeling too good' or ‘I've lost a bit of enthusiasm.' It's cut off, cut off, you've been unplugged. I was just absolutely inert, I just really couldn't move. I'd just lie on this couch day after day basically. You really are catatonic: you won't do anything, you can't do anything, you really are down and out. And it was a terrible shock obviously.

And I went to the GP and I couldn't talk. Laura, my wife, went with me and I was just sitting staring at the floor and I couldn't put two words together. I'd just turned into some sort of awful vegetable. And he said: ‘You've obviously got clinical depression and it looks as bad as I've seen.' They were the words the doctor used. But at least we knew then, I suppose, that there was some sort of label on there, which was that I was prone to clinical depression, which was the first time that words like that had been anything to do with me as a patient. I don't recall anything else very much about the visit except some pills, some standard antidepressants or whatever, SSRIs or something. And there was a bit of a therapy attempt, which, of course, at that point, was with an NHS therapist. And it was fine, I didn't mind going, I didn't mind chatting, but I didn't find it . . . I don't know if I found it particularly helpful. Undoubtedly the biggest ‘flaw', in inverted commas, was the fact that you'd be very lucky if you went once every ten days, or two weeks, and they would say: ‘Look, I'd love to be able to see you every couple of days but I can't, it's not going to happen.'

The other thing you soon learn is that certain things are going to be part of your life. The ideas and the jargon – ‘you've got this, you've got that' – was one of them. Although bipolar, manic depression, didn't enter into it at that point, it was never mentioned then, or if it was . . . actually there was one time . . . it was suggested once, in the early days, by a consultant on the NHS. I remember one session with her, very early on, when she said something like: ‘We ought to look at the bipolar thing as well, let's have a think about that.' But, if you like, I almost dissuaded her because my concept of manic depression, as most people's concept of manic depression would be, was: you have your terrible downs, and these are balanced by ups that are so extreme that you think you can do all sorts of things you can't do, etc. And, you know . . . it's dangerously manic.

And I had an example because we knew some people up the road and the guy had been certified as bipolar. And his manic phases, of which I'd seen one or two, had been classically extreme. It was the early days of the Internet so he'd been on there buying all sorts of crap – he'd bought a house somewhere up in Scotland – and at one point he left his wife and was then seen advertising on the Internet or something. And God knows what. But he did the lot. And it didn't take you two seconds to say: ‘Uh-oh, he's crazy.' And then the rest of the time he'd be in bed and not move – and I'd recognise that bit – and in between times there might be a bit that's okay. So that was my example of bipolar.