It could be you...
"I had a pretty spectacular nervous breakdown when I was a journalist at the Mirror. I was poached by Eddy Shah’s Today when it launched. It was a disaster. I was over-promoted, I hit the bottle pretty hard, went completely manic and cracked up.
"On the day it happened, I was doing a piece on Neil Kinnock in Scotland. It was like this piece of glass cracking in slow motion into thousands of pieces inside my head. I was struggling to hold it together but the harder I tried, the more the glass cracked, and I ended up with an explosion of sounds, memories and madness reverberating through my mind.
"I got detached from the main press pack and was picked up by the police because I was behaving oddly, putting all my possessions into a little pile in the foyer of a building I’d wandered into.
"I was in a psychiatric hospital for a few days, heavily drugged. I was treated for depression and was on medication for a few months. There are not many things as deadening as real depression, when you feel unable to move a muscle and you’re incapable of getting out of bed, or speaking or thinking, or doing anything, and you can’t see a way forward. But I got through it eventually.
"I was really lucky. Fiona, my partner, was incredibly supportive. Richard Stott, who was editor at the Mirror, took me back. He gave me a chance and that was a huge thing for me, an act of support people often don’t get when they become ill.
"When Tony Blair asked me to work for him in 1994, I said “You do know about my breakdown don’t you? You do know I still get depression.” He said “I’m not worried if you’re not worried.” I said “What if I’m worried?” He said “I’m still not worried.” I think that’s an important signal for us to take on board – if a Prime Minister can take that attitude, we all can.
"I suffered severe bouts of depression during my time at Downing Street. At times I was so depressed I’d wake up and couldn’t open my eyes, I couldn’t find the energy to brush my teeth. The phone would ring and I’d stare at it endlessly, unable to answer it.
"I’ve wanted to be open about my mental health problems, because I know from my own experience how it helps to know there are other people out there who have been to the brink and come back again.
"If it happened to me, it can happen to you – it will almost certainly happen to a friend, colleague or relative. Help encourage more openness about mental illness and challenge the stigma – don’t reinforce it."
Alastair Campbell
...Or someone you love
“My sister Linda had schizophrenia. She had made threats to kill herself, but we really didn’t expect her to do it. But she did – she burnt herself to death. I was working in Australia at the time and came back to England to be with her for the six weeks it took her to die.“Trying to explain to people back in Australia why I’d dashed over here, without mentioning her mental illness, seemed not only to deny my sister’s struggles but to deny her very existence. That’s when I decided to tell people about the mental health problems in my family.
“Secrets and lies will destroy you every time. If I hadn’t ‘come out’ safely to a journalist in Australia after I ended up in a psychiatric wing, I’d be tip-toeing around today coping with the added stress of secrets and lies.
“My sister had schizophrenia, but that wasn’t what killed her - it was the stigma. With the stigma comes ignorance and fear and people have personal life choices taken away from them.”
Channel Five talk-show host Trisha Goddard
“I loved my father, Ron, dearly but he was a manic-depressive, and his mood-swings cast a long shadow over my childhood. When he was ‘low’ he would take to his bed for days on end - crushed and inconsolable.
“When he was ‘high’ it was, for me, my brother and mother, like trying to cling on to the tail of a comet.
“There was no rest for him - or us. He’d walk for miles until the blood came through his plimsolls. He painted our front door at midnight. He smashed every breakable item in the house. Lithium would stabilise his moods but it destroyed his internal organs. At 63 my father died of a heart-attack.
“I never considered my father ‘mad’. He was not a ‘loony’. And I was lucky that, good, generous and loving man that he was much of the time, nobody who knew him ever labelled him as such. But mental-illness has always been feared and its sufferers shunned or politely avoided. This is where the media must play its role. Mental illness must be discussed, debated – brought out in the open – with sensitivity, understanding and, above all, love. Because often it is the people closest to us who are silently suffering.”
Martin Townsend, editor of the Sunday Express
