What's Normal Anyway? Celebrities' Own Stories of Mental Illness

by Anna Gekoski

  But then, after a few weeks at Northside, there was a phone call – the nurses said: ‘There’s a phone call for you’ – and I went to the phone and it was this journalist saying: ‘Oh, so you are at Northside Clinic, yes we heard.’ And I freaked. I was freaking out anyway at that time – you know, I couldn’t even look at the leaves on the trees out the window, I didn’t like the way they moved, let alone dealing with something like this. So I got really upset, really agitated, and I was ashamed. Because I was a journalist myself, I just knew it wouldn’t be honest, it would be sensationalised. I could have written the bloody headlines: ‘Nutter’ and/or ‘Suicide bid’. And then you get everyone going: ‘How selfish! These people! Don’t they think of their families? How selfish!’ And I remember ringing my publicist up and talking to her, crying, saying: ‘I’m in Northside. What are we going to do?’

  So she came and signed me out for the afternoon, collected me – because I virtually couldn’t walk – and took me to her house. And we sat down and she said: ‘We’ll do this in our own words, we’ll kill it.’ And that’s been my thing ever since: ‘I’ll kill it first.’ So anyway, we did the story with this journalist we knew, in a woman’s magazine, and they had the exclusive, and I was allowed to sit down and go through it all, which was unheard of in those days. But they had a scoop and the story was, you know, it was as good as it could be, it was really good. And the public reaction was okay actually. It helped that I handled it my way: the way I talked about it and explained it just normalised it, and a lot of other people could say: ‘Yeah, I’ve felt like that.’ It wasn’t just done in sound bites and sensational headlines so the general public, en masse, was less scary.

  Having said that, after I came out of hospital none of the good old journos I knew could meet my eye. Nobody talked about it, it was never mentioned, it was like it never happened. It was only when I went back to the first mental health group meeting that I felt really okay with everybody. I remember one of them said: ‘We’d just like to welcome you back and tell you how great it is that you’ll now be able to hear exactly the same voices we can!’ We had all these in-jokes that only we could understand, and they were really great.

  ***

  When I got the call from England out of the blue to come and do the chat show, Trisha, in 1998, I hadn’t worked in television for . . . oh, several years. After coming out of Northside, me and Mark divorced and I gave up nearly all my media work to concentrate on really just getting better, bonding with my daughters, and doing voluntary mental health work. During that time I also met my husband Peter, while interviewing him for a government job in mental health, and we’d only been married a matter of months when the job offer came in, so I left the final decision to him. And even though he had a great career in Australia, he told me it was an amazing opportunity and to go for it. So I accepted the job, having told them everything – the breakdown, the panic attacks, the depression, everything – and insisted on having lots of rest time written into my contract so I could concentrate on my family and not be so career-driven. I’d come to recognise some of my patterns by then – through therapy, which I’ll come back to – and there was no way I was going back to how I was.

  The only problem was that I was taking quite a lot of antidepressants by this time, which I wouldn’t have at Northside – I refused, I refused – as I was breastfeeding. I was on . . . oh God, what was I on? I can’t remember now, my memory’s crap. But I didn’t want to be on antidepressants when I came to do the job so I came off them in a matter of weeks, really quickly, and it was . . . urgh. I was saying to someone the other day, it was the worst experience, the worst, I didn’t know anything could be so bad. And I’m not a wimp – I had two children, no pain killers, no nothing, I can do pain like no one else, I zone out. But man, that was bad. They didn’t tell me, they said, you know: ‘There may be side effects’, but whoa.

  The things that stand out in my mind? I was chairing a mental health group for service users and carers and we all met at this hotel at Sydney Airport because people had to fly in from whatever country. And it had this big sweeping open slat staircase in the middle and I was talking to a dear friend, Judy, and we’re walking down the stairs, and I couldn’t judge where the next step was. And I was halfway down, or a third of the way down, the first flight – cos there was a flight, and then a flat bit, and then more – and I just remember thinking: ‘How the bloody hell am I going to get down?’ I was in the middle, I couldn’t even hold on, and I was, like: ‘Woah.’ And the terror . . . I was like: ‘Judy, I can’t.’ I said: ‘Judy, Judy, get me . . .’ and she got me to the rail and it was literally like holding on and going step by step. Then I sat there and had some water and I said: ‘I’ll be alright, I’ll be alright’, like an idiot.

  I remember I had a little Kia Sportage and I drove from the airport and it was horrific. All the traffic from the different terminals converge and there’s this one place, this roundabout, and it’s like: ‘Go to this turn, go to that turn’, and I got this tingling in my mouth and then I thought: ‘I can’t read, I can’t read.’ And then I thought: ‘I can’t even see’, I couldn’t understand the lanes. And in Australia we always had automatic cars and I just thought: ‘I can’t drive.’ It was a complete cold, confused panic. Now I’d had panic attacks before – with the breathing and all that – but you know they’re coming because there’s that build-up, you know? And I remember just thinking: ‘Jesus’, and putting my hazard lights on and sitting there and people beeping at first and then thinking I’d broken down. And then I was thinking: ‘Well, what do I do?’ Because if it was panicking I’d breathe but I remember trying to do all my breathing exercises and nothing. Then, after about ten, fifteen minutes, it sort of went and I remember crawling, just thinking: ‘Is it going to come back again?’ And it didn’t, but that’s what it would do.

  So coming off the pills was just . . . just horrific. If I hadn’t had Peter and I didn’t want to be off the antidepressants because of the job, I’d totally understand people saying: ‘Well, you know what, I’ll just stay on them.’ You know, I can absolutely understand that, because boy. Being on them was fine, I just felt whatever normal is, but coming off them was just God awful, really awful. It was so bad that I didn’t think I’d be able to cope with going to England and doing the show but, with support from my therapist and Peter, I did it.

  ***

  I’ve said it before but that’s cos it’s true: since 1998, when I married Peter and moved to England to start the Trisha show, I feel like my life’s been blessed. Before, I was totally career driven, went from bad relationship to bad relationship, and had no support. Bugger all! Nothing! But now, well, my family understand. I am married to someone who’s at the top of their field: Peter’s not only a psychotherapist, he lectures and trains other psychotherapists, so blimey. Then there’s my daughters. My younger daughter’s done mental health first aid – she’s one of the youngest people in the country to have done it – and she’s worked in her summer holidays in a halfway type house, and both my daughters have worked at Mind on a voluntary basis. So I’ve got a family around me who are very aware of mental health issues and aren’t frightened to flag those up.

  It’s so different to when I think about growing up with my half-sister, Linda, who had schizophrenia. If the rellies came over, and she was off her face on Largactil at the hospital, they’d race up there and get her out and then mum would make a joke about teenagers out on the town, you know: ‘Ooh, she’s got a hangover.’ It was all secret, secret, secret. Even though they worked as psych nurses, it was always: ‘No one must know.’ So the beauty of my family now is that all of us are allowed to bring it up and talk about habits and situations and behaviours that might be worrying us. So there’s this complete contrast from growing up in the ’60s and ’70s in terms of understanding and support.

  Another huge part of my recovery process has been talking therapies. I first started them in 1994 because, in order to get out of Northside,
I’d had to agree to have six months of therapy. I had to sign up for that. So I started seeing a psychotherapist up to three times a week at first and then, after the six months, when I could have given up, I carried on until I left for England because I found it really helpful. I also had relaxation therapy, which I thought was bullshit and wouldn’t work, but I remember once this woman did this session with me, with all these sea noises and imagining this, and that, and the other. And she said: ‘There, how do you feel?’ and I said: ‘Yeah, great nap, thank you for that’, and she said: ‘You weren’t sleeping at all, you were awake the whole way through.’ And that’s the first time I thought: ‘Ohh, maybe it’s not bullshit.’

  I then went back into therapy in about 2005/6, after mum died and my stepdad went to my husband and said: ‘Has Trisha ever had any issues about her, er, identity or parentage or childhood?’ And Peter said: ‘Er, just a bit!’ And he said: ‘Ah, alright, why?’ And he said: ‘Well, she doesn’t feel she fits in and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.’ And he said: ‘Well, I’m not her dad.’ I’d known from the word go really, you know, but it just brought up so much stuff that I said to Peter: ‘I need to go into therapy’, because I now do things to safeguard myself against becoming ill. So I saw this chap, John, who’s a psychotherapist who works a lot with children, which was really, really good for me. Everybody talks about the here and now but with John he almost, not treated me as a child, but because he’d worked with children so much – it sounds corny – but he could talk to the child within me. Because there was this child, there was arrested development. Oh, I wonder why?! So there was a part of me that was very vulnerable and very scared and he took me really, really back. Things like phobias and fears I had, he was: ‘Right, let’s look at that.’

  Because CBT’s good at how to manage things but there’s a risk of it coming back if you don’t . . . well, it depends what sort of person you are. I like to understand things. I can deal with things if I can deconstruct them and understand them because I have that sort of analytical mind. If somebody says: ‘Just do this, this, this and this’, never mind about the why, I’m like: ‘Well, I’ll give it a go, but . . .’. But when you can understand how those things came about, for one thing you stop beating yourself up. So the talking therapies made me realise where this fear of lack of control, and disordered eating, and ritualised depression, came from. It was my way of trying to survive and it had outlived its purpose.

  So for me, and it’s different for everyone, the most important part of my recovery process was understanding and forgiving, forgiving myself. Because the thing about mental illness, partly because of the way society looks at it, is that you spend so much time and energy – you don’t even realise you’re doing it – being angry with yourself for being like that. You know, a lot of people take on a victimised persona and that’s a form of anger. That: ‘I can’t help it’, that absolute helplessness. I wasn’t one of those people, I never felt a victim, I was like: ‘Argh, why am I like this?’ But that victimisation – that inverted form of anger, of frustration – saps the hell out of you. I think once you can forgive yourself and understand why you became that way, and it doesn’t matter why – could be brain chemistry, childhood, coping – for me, that was important. And saying: ‘You know what? You’re not that mad or bad or stupid. You survived.’

  You’re only as much of a victim as you make yourself. Any illness – I don’t care if it’s physical, mental, whatever – any illness requires putting some part of yourself into getting well. And that’s not a bad thing, it’s a good thing, because you take back some control, no matter how small. You just need to get your nail underneath and worry that bit of control because that’s the first step. And it’s the little things, not the big grand things. It can be: ‘Right, today I’m going to go up and down the stairs twenty times – even if I have to miss the fourth step!’ That can be a start; having a small goal is good. Like, even if you have to write down what you’re going to eat and when you’re going to eat it, which I remember doing and sticking on the wall. Or, you know, a mood chart – brilliant – get a big old calendar, or make one, and use gummy stars or just a felt pen and chart shit days. At the end of the day: ‘How was today?’ And for every bad thing, you put a blue star. And then you ask: ‘What was a good thing?’ Because then you start seeing if your moods follow a pattern. And it helps you to recognise that there’s dark and shade, there’s light and shade.

  It’s about, as I say, getting that fingernail under reality and stripping reality right back down to all those tiny things which help connect you. So get a pet, look after the pet. Get a plant, a pot plant. Mad things, but they work. Sensory things are good. I did quilting for a long time, with lots of different scraps of material, which I had to go and choose. I didn’t want to go out, I hated going out, but I had to choose the scraps, so I had a reason. And I could feel the scraps and I had to hand sew them, so I felt the rough bits and the silky bits. It’s a bit like food. I make sure that I have lots of different textures of food and I make myself stop and think about it. And I always have flowers around the house for the smell, so I can go and just close my eyes and smell. Again, it’s a sensory thing, because my issue is disconnecting from things, so feel and smell are important. Or if you’ve got a camera on your phone, start taking photographs. Even if they’re stupid ones, like I did yesterday . . . I took one of a poppy, a red poppy in this field of white peas, just one on its own. And it’s not a great picture, it was a bit blurred, but for me it’s more about what it represents. I thought: ‘Ah, this is different, that proves you can be different.’ The beauty in difference. So things like that – it’s a bit like food for the mind.

  For me, running is also really important, although I don’t think of it as exercise. I need it because I naturally have a lot of energy, I’m really bad sitting in one place and doing nothing. It probably is obsessive, but that’s another thing I recognise: that I am obsessive, so I look for good obsessions, or helpful obsessions, or diverting obsessions. I think it’s my way of coping. I don’t think: ‘Right, you’ve got an obsession so get rid of those’, or ‘You’ve got panic or anxiety, get rid of those.’ These things were developed in me. I created them in me – added with brain chemistry and childhood and all the rest of it – as a way of protecting myself, so they’re not all bad. So I’m going to look for what I can get, you know, what I can do, that’s utilising that.

  I think as an adult if you come to be treated, or helped, with a mental health problem, it’s very hard for someone to say: ‘Right, I know this is how you’ve been operating for the past thirty-five years or forty years but bugger that, we’re going to start again.’ I think it would help to say: ‘Right, you’re really good at being obsessive about something so what can we do? Let’s see, what if you were to walk every day? And where’s a really good place? Okay, if cracks in the pavement are a problem, we’ll do cross country.’ And that’s what I do, cross country, so I don’t get obsessive about traffic, and green’s really calming. So I haven’t had to ditch all those protective elements of my mental health problem so I feel a lot more secure, I don’t feel stripped of who I am. It’s important that we don’t just see it as: ‘That’s mental illness.’ Because where do I end and where does the mental illness start? It’s better to see it as: ‘You’ve got some good qualities in this mental illness and let’s use them to help you live a more productive and happier life.’

  I think the other thing that’s really helped me is being allowed to incorporate my spirituality, because that was never allowed and it’s not readily accepted within a mental health system. But it was actually one of the things I went to when I was fourteen, because I was dealing with death and darkness and destruction, and at fourteen the only thing that could save me – that anybody had as a way of being saved – was stuff that was in the Bible. Because you were told: ‘And the Lord said I will save you’, and: ‘You walk through the valley of death.’ I remember reading Pilgrim’s Progress. The only thing on the
horizon, where anyone was talking about getting you out of hell, and describing the kind of hell that I was in, was faith. You know? And I guess, as a child myself, through schoolwork and this idea of a faith, and a God – something bigger – that was my lifeline. If I was going to be anything now I’d be a Bahá’í – because I believe all faiths are the same – but now my church is really outside: the green. I need the green, the trees, I love being out, and I love being with my dog, Alf.

  Also, I think it’s so important to recognise the child within you and to play. Like yesterday, it was really muddy and I was skipping and Peter’s saying: ‘Those people are laughing at you’, and I don’t care, I think it’s okay to be that child. And both my girls play, we play a lot, we play every day. They’ll say something to me and I’ll sing: ‘Today, I’m in an opera, we’re going to sing!’ But you’re not allowed to be like that when you’re with grown-ups . . . well, with some grown-ups you can, but a lot of them you can’t. I think a lot of people struggle to do that, especially in my industry. In order to lose control they have to get pissed and act stupid, and I think that’s really mentally unhealthy. Whereas I’ve seen it’s really important for me to include it as part of my day: to be absolutely stone-cold sober and enjoy it and have that sense of relief, of laughing, and being silly and frivolous. Again, it sounds corny, but there is a child inside and I need to embrace it, allow it, enjoy it. It is very, very therapeutic.

  ***

  Have I ever faced stigma? No, I don’t think so, not personally. You’re allowed to have a mental health problem and be a celebrity: it’s almost de rigueur, isn’t it? You know, it’s like: ‘Oh good, another one!’ It’s like artist and mad, sort of thing. I think the ‘risk’, in inverted commas, is facing stigma because of the people who you advocate for or support. So while celebrities might be allowed to have those eccentricities, I don’t kid myself, because I see how it is with the advocates and people I work with, with refugees and how they’re treated. So I’m under no illusions. There’s no glamour in being a mental health patron – with mental health they think it’s catching and they still connect mad and bad. Where are the big balls to do with mental health? Who are the glitzy stars who hold star-spangled do’s for mental health? You know, there’s no glitz, there’s no glamour, no pink or red ribbons, no Liz Hurleys and Elton Johns.