by Anna Gekoski
When my stepfather became very aggressive and got me in a corner and started on me, at first I tried crying, putting my arms up, but that made it worse, it was: ‘Shut up, I’ll give you something to cry for.’ So I developed this thing where I would just go limp, because if I didn’t put any resistance up it still went on but not as long. So I used to just go completely limp; we all did, we all had this thing. One of my sisters said to me that if you wear lots of clothes it doesn’t hurt as much and she used to wear coats all the time, day and night. As an adult, weight became her issue. My thing was I’d just flop and I’d go somewhere else in my head. But one time he did it, the last time he did it, mum screamed at him: ‘Stop it, you’ll kill the child, you’ll kill the child!’ And that really frightened me because I had no awareness; you don’t, you don’t know what it is, you know? It wasn’t on television like now. So whether that was a trigger for my problems – I never blame – I don’t know.
I loved school. I went to a very posh, very strict, girls’ school and I realise now that I loved it because it was strict but it was strict without violence – there were a lot of Quaker teachers there so there was a lot of understanding. I was really good at school: I was the class clown and chatterbox because it was one of the few places where I could be who I wanted to be, so I could be bright and get As and the teacher would say: ‘Well done.’ I wouldn’t be told to shut up, or risk a backhander, or be told I was bragging, so school was my safe haven. But I felt a lot of anxiety at the time, especially when I woke up in the morning – that was the time when the anxiety was at its worst – so I needed a slug of drink to get me there. I used to climb up to the top shelf where they used to keep sherry for special occasions and have a swig of that for breakfast because it used to make the grown-ups at Christmas quite . . . you know. So I think that’s where it all really started, and that became who I was.
I think it’s important to realise – I know from experience – that depression isn’t something in a box that comes on its own: it’s like a fungus that has fingers in lots of different things and I became dysfunctional at eating. And then, of course, yeah, I started losing weight, and then you get compliments, so there’s nothing to say that you’re doing the wrong thing. I was a bit chubby, I suppose, but that wasn’t what it was about, it was a way of control, absolute control. I really get pissed off when people go on about magazines – like coroners saying that this girl died and it was directly down to magazines. It’s bullshit, you know? It trivialises it, it trivialises the pain someone feels, to think that someone who is perfectly normal is going to pick up a fashion magazine and think: ‘Oh, that’s a good idea, I’m not going to eat for the next five years.’ That’s not what it was about, that’s absolutely not what it was about.
Another thing that I did, I really believed in ‘four’ and four is still my problem number. I got it into my head – I don’t know where it came from – that I had to do everything four times, like touch the tap four times. And I never trod on the fourth stair of the house we lived in. And actually when The One Show took me back – they did a series about growing up in houses and I took my elder daughter back – I still knew, without looking at the step, where the fourth step was. So I had to skip over it, couldn’t touch it. Everything was in fours, I had this obsession, and all of that – that whole thing – was my depression, trying to control everything in a world where there is no control.
Round about puberty I got into writing poetry and I still to this day, forty years later, cannot read what I wrote at fourteen because it was so dark. I was actually, I think, a very descriptive poet – I managed to describe my moods without realising I was having them. When I was about fifteen I sent some of these poems I’d written about death into Poet’s Corner on the BBC and they devoted the whole of the programme to them – I’ll never forget he called me Pat-REE-cha – and as a result I got all of these letters from people. In those days to write into the BBC was quite different and they had two bags, two big plastic bags of letters, that were eventually delivered to the house. And 99 per cent of them said: ‘I’ve just come back from a funeral’, or ‘I’ve just buried a loved one’, and ‘I’ve just’ – you know – ‘seen my brother die’ . . . ‘and you described it perfectly’. Yet I had never seen death, I had no idea. And to me now, looking back, to think that I captured perfectly the mood of people who were burying, had buried, or were mourning, people who had died, as a fourteen year old, you think: ‘Where’d you get that from?’ And I think I now realise that, at fourteen, you don’t have all the social filters, you just write what you feel, and what I was feeling was what other people felt at really acute dreadful mourning times.
And that was me. That was who I was, you know? It didn’t have a label: it wasn’t depression, it wasn’t an eating disorder, it wasn’t OCD. It was me. And I think – I now know – having done work with early intervention mental health, that you have to be very careful with words. We all think we’re normal and when someone says: ‘You’ve got a mental illness’, it’s labelling how someone may be coping, albeit clinging on by the end of their claws. But that was how I coped, and that was who I was, and I had a cycle of similar behaviour right up until I had my breakdowns as an adult.
***
In 1985 I moved to Australia because I married – God knows why, probably as an escape – a very controlling man, an Australian politician who I met when I was an air stewardess. Robert used to do things like ‘accidentally’ lock me in the house and he tried to control everything, from what I wore to what I ate. He wouldn’t allow me to eat vegetarian food – I’d been vegetarian since 1980, again, that became my control food – so every meal time was a battlefield. And then I found out that he was playing all sorts of mind games, like going through my address book and ringing up my friends and saying ‘I’m worried about her’ – I was probably going through a depressive stage – and getting them to spy on me. He was finding out what I’d said to them and then he’d drop it into conversations. And that’s when I really thought: ‘I’m going mad.’ Because how is it he knows my thoughts? Eventually one of my best friends, Noel, who I went to the gym with, opened up to me and said Robert had sat down with him and had drawn up some plan that he would basically pay Noel to sleep with me so he didn’t lose me, as by this time we had no sex life and slept in separate beds, and . . . oh, all this.
And I used to be one of those people – and I still am, but not as bad – who never lost their temper, which means that anger becomes internalised. I had a lot of rage from the bursts of anger I’d seen as a child against me. So, anyway, I completely lost it, and I walked – ran – home from Noel’s flat with Noel running after me, saying: ‘Don’t tell him I told you.’ I was ranting and raving and screaming, I’d had a couple of glasses of wine, and that was it. I got in and Robert started on me again and there was a flashpoint when I had picked up this knife and he started with: ‘Oh no, you’re quite mad’, and I always say that if I hadn’t slashed my wrists I know I would have killed him. I know I would have stabbed him. It’s not dramatics: I was at such a pitch, I was alienated from everyone I knew, I didn’t know who I could trust because of his behaviour, and he was a politician so he was very slick and what have you. Suddenly I was being called mad, I was frightened, I was angry, and – bang! – you know? I absolutely see how someone could be done for manslaughter. I wasn’t sane at that moment . . . or actually, I think I was the most sane I’d ever been! And I slashed my wrists.
Then blood was spraying everywhere but I managed to do first aid on myself and shouted at Robert to call for an ambulance. I remember he said on the phone: ‘Don’t put the siren on, we don’t want a scandal.’ And in those days you went into hospital, they patched you up – I had four hours of microsurgery – and put you on a suicide watch ward. I remember I was with a nun who’d taken an overdose and another girl who’d taken an overdose of malaria pills, quinine, and had liver function problems. And they stuck you in the ward and, after they said: ‘You may never get t
he use of your left arm again’, it was bye-bye, and back to the same house, jammed full of – addicted to – Pethidine. And I knew as soon as I got back to the house and I couldn’t open this can of tomato soup, and Rob said: ‘No, you will have oxtail’, I knew that nothing had changed and I had to escape. I remember standing there looking at the Pethidine, just thinking: ‘I could just take all of those and this will be over’, and then I thought: ‘No, I’ve got to get away’, and phoned up a removal van. The guy came along and I just threw everything into plastic bags, because I knew Robert wouldn’t create a scene, and, with friends’ help, I kind of disappeared. I just sort of ran away.
***
So that was really my first big breakdown and nothing was done about it, so coming up to the next one in 1994, did I realise what was going on? No! I’d been working in television for some years by then – I was a TV presenter and also running my own production company – and I’d got talked into yet another unsuitable relationship and had two children. I had Billie at nearly thirty-two and Billie was my first love . . . I remember having Billie, breastfeeding Billie, and I think that was the first time I felt connected to the planet and it was not what I expected. So I had Billie and basically my second husband Mark, I’m not saying he didn’t love Billie, he did, but he was also a daily dope smoker, as was I. And I suddenly said: ‘Right, no more drugs! I’m going to be mother of the year.’ I went everywhere with Billie in the backpack but Mark wasn’t as one-track as me, so there was that polarisation, but I absolutely decided I was going to get pregnant again, and did, with my daughter Madi.
Now, with the benefit of hindsight, I can see that Mark was very angry about a lot of things but didn’t vocalise it and his way of dealing with it was to have an affair. She was a researcher who worked for my production company, a person who I didn’t particularly like or dislike, but someone who I’d given a chance, training her up, and she’d come to me with all her boyfriend problems. Little did I realise she’d finished with him long ago so I was saying: ‘I know what you’re going through’, when of course I didn’t! She was talking about my husband and screwing around with my head. Then, when I found out about the betrayal . . . I always say if he’d had an affair with somebody I didn’t know it wouldn’t have been as bad, but finding out that he’d had an affair with somebody I’d taken under my wing, it’s the classic: ‘Fuck you, I’ll show you: bang, bang!’
So if you take everything together: I had my own production company, I was working like a maniac, I was the main breadwinner, my husband was having an affair, and my new baby Madi had nearly died so I’d been up four days and nights with her. So there was nothing, I had nothing, in the reserve tank. I wasn’t sleeping, my head was just going ‘zuh, zuh, zuh’ – skidding I call it because it’s like a wheel skidding – with thoughts that jump, and go over and over again, and become faster and faster, and you become more and more awake. And I’d wake up at 3.30 in the morning like that. So it almost felt as if the day started at 3.30 and then, you know, it was like: ‘Where does night end and where does . . . ?’ It just all blurred, it joined up, not even really realising what day of the week it was, or anything like that.
Typically, at that time, I would skip breakfast because I was freaking out in the morning, I was just so jittery. It was like being on speed really. I remember when I was an air stewardess, we all used to take slimming tablets – this was in the ’80s, way before we knew what they were – because we were always on the fatties list. And that was the same thing: like this wide-eyed, jittery, grinding teeth, jaw ache, thirsty, too cold, too hot, too this, too that. Then I started getting all obsessive about my eating again. And then I started thinking, when I went power walking, that I had to get to the next corner before the next car or the kids would die. You know, it just all started again. Did I equate all that to when I was fourteen? No! It was only later, in therapy, when I was made to look back, that you start seeing the patterns, but when you’re in the middle of it, you don’t recognise it.
I didn’t want to be dead. I just wanted the noise, the crap, the everything, to stop, you know? My daughter had nearly died as an infant, meanwhile the husband’s having the affair, then I find out that. I just wanted him to stop shouting at me and calling me this, that, and the other. Then the bank manager would get on the phone and say he’s taken all the money out of the account. And then there’s work and I just, you know, I wanted the shit to stop. So I overdosed with pills and alcohol. Then I rang my friend Dr Rosie King, who used to co-present the show Live It Up with me, because I thought: ‘Ah . . . the kids.’ Not me. Then I vaguely remember going into Northside, a psychiatric hospital, and when I realised I was still alive, I remember I think I said: ‘Oh crap.’ Because it meant the shit hadn’t stopped. And when it hadn’t stopped, I didn’t think: ‘Oh, I’m still alive’, it was: ‘Oh, I’m still here’. And the world doesn’t change cos you’ve done something, although you have some hope that it will.
You very quickly learn in a psych hospital that nothing you do is normal. If you swore – you said ‘fuck’ – it was: ‘Aggressive behaviour.’ When I got cross it was: ‘Ohhh, patient angry.’ If you laughed: ‘Inappropriate.’ And that’s the thing, when you’re admitted to hospital, you’re just a mental illness, nobody knows what your personality is, do they? Everything’s mad: if you’ve got a filthy sense of humour, it’s madness. Then they came round every fifteen minutes at night and shone a torch in your face to see if you were sleeping, so you wake up and then you get reported for having interrupted sleep. And then I had my ex-husband coming in, well my estranged husband coming in, and shouting at me and I’d get angry and upset and they’d just sit there and let it happen. And then it was written up as: ‘I understand you became very agitated . . .’. No, I had someone there going: ‘You’re a nutter, you’re a psycho, I’m going to get the kids off you.’ So I’d lose my temper, you know?
Then there were psychiatrists asking questions – ‘How do you feel today on a scale of one to four?’ – and a trainee psychiatrist who was a bloody idiot. He came along and he said:
‘Oh, so you have sexual problems.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you’re wearing two bras.’
‘No I’m not, it’s a nursing bra.’
Then, when they gave me a medical:
‘I see you’ve tried to stab your stomach.’
‘No, that’s a linear nigra, cos I’ve just had a baby.’
So I just thought: ‘Right, I’m never talking to you ever again.’ Which I didn’t.
So then I was, like: ‘I won’t do anything, I’ll just sit there like this.’
And that’s what I really remember first and foremost about Northside – that I decided that if I sat very still in one place no one would notice me. I just thought: ‘If I sit really still, really quietly, and I don’t have eye contact, then I won’t be here, they can’t get to me.’ You know when two year olds cover their eyes and they think they disappear? It was like that.
The only person who got through to me at the time was this one nurse Elaine, cos she treated me like a human being. She fought for Madi to come to the hospital so I could breastfeed her, and with Billie playing, and breastfeeding Madi, that was my solace and Elaine worked that out. I remember that the skin contact of just holding Madi was so precious, and her face and her eyes . . . she didn’t look at me like I was mad, she looked at me like mummy. At first they had the door open with some nurse sitting there watching me, you know, in case I was a danger to my children. And I was so ashamed . . . I couldn’t understand why they thought I might harm them. But Elaine really read it and I remember her coming past and saying: ‘I don’t think we need this door open’, and kicking the doorstop.
I remember I had a TV in my room and Elaine would just come and lean up in the doorway and watch TV. Not sit, not trying to be my friend, just stand. And I’ll never forget I was watching Billy Connolly do his bike ride through Scotland and I used to love going to Scotland as a child. W
hen we were on holiday the parents would . . . I don’t know what they’d do, they’d just leave us to it. So we’d go to the ice-skating centre or just camp by the loch and sing and make our voices echo, so I had really fond memories of Scotland. So I remember watching that and she just used to make odd comments about Billy Connolly – not looking at me, just using the TV – and it was really clever of her. And gradually I’d sort of say something like: ‘Been there.’ And really she was the one who did more than all the psychiatrists. I learnt a lot from the way she treated me in that hospital.
At first, nobody in the business knew where I was, I just lied to everybody. I hadn’t even told my publicist what was going on, I’d just said I was taking some time off. This was despite the fact that I’d been on the public record talking about mental health – and working in mental health – since the late ’80s, after my sister Linda, who had schizophrenia, killed herself. At the time I was advised to just say that she had ‘died of an illness’ but I’d had enough of hiding it like a dirty secret, so I told it like it was: the stigma, the effect on the family, her suffering, everything. And you know what? I got a really positive response and a lot of people – both the public and well-known people – came out and said: ‘I’m glad you talked about it.’ And then the Minister of Health in Australia asked me to chair the National Community Advisory Group on Mental Health, which I jumped at and did for ten years, alongside my media career. So up until the point of my breakdown I’d been saying: ‘If only people with mental health problems would stand up and be counted!’ And then, you know, when it came to me it was like: ‘Screw that! All you other people, you stand up and be counted!’