I had two weeks to go on The A Word and managed to get back on the train north. I was full of lorazepam as I stepped aboard, and it worked. It stopped me feeling, which was an enormous relief.
I worked my way through the rest of the job, as before slipping in and out of Maurice, finding comfort in his shoes, stones in my own. If I did experience on-set anxiety, I now had the lorazepam. I was allowed up to four pills a day.
I didn’t advertise my issues among the cast and crew but one particular day I was working with Pooky Quesnel, my old friend from Salford, now playing Maurice’s love interest Louise. Pooky is one of those people who knows you better than you know yourself. She has inherent intuition. We talked and she understood completely. Not for the first time in the ensuing weeks, her willingness to listen was priceless. I also Skyped Anthony Venditti, an existential psychotherapist I’d been seeing in London. Twelve months later, I spoke to him about that session and he told me he knew I’d gone beyond his help. He could see I no longer had a sense of self. That’s a very frightening thing to hear, but that’s what happens with those with dementia and those who have nervous breakdowns. I also spoke to another old friend, Pete Bowker, the writer of The A Word, and the producer Marcus Wilson. But talk alone wasn’t going to provide the remedy. Inside, my mental processes were in freefall.
We wrapped on location ahead of moving to Manchester to do some work in the studio. Everybody was saying goodbye, including me, but as I did so I was consumed by a thought.
This is amazing. We’re all saying goodbye to each other, but they don’t know that they’ll never see me again – because I’m going to die. It wasn’t an idle thought. It was an absolute matter of fact.
Everybody was saying, ‘See you later. Cheers. Bye.’ And in my head, I was going, But I’m never going to see you all again. This isn’t me being dramatic. I’m talking about a mental state. I was immersed in it. That was my reality. My reality was that I was going to die.
When The A Word finally wrapped, I went straight back to the hospital in London and admitted myself officially. I was placed on antidepressants. Nobody diagnosed me.
One night I again became absolutely convinced I was going to die. My mortality was a constant conversation in my head – I was 100 per cent sure I was in the last few weeks of my life – but now it was shouting out loud, spiked and more pronounced. I found a pen and paper and started writing my will. I was putting it in black and white that everything I had would go to Albert and Esme. I was making an official document, and when an attendant appeared, an older guy who walked the wards, I asked him to witness it. Instead he disappeared and came back with a doctor. I was put on 24-hour watch. I was in bed and there was a man with a chair against my door keeping an eye on me all night.
As time went on, rather than just die I thought eventually I would kill myself. The doctors asked me if I had made any plans. I was always scrupulously honest with my doctors because I appreciated other people’s attempts to do their job properly. As such, I would always say ‘No’, which was the truth. But it was sophistry really. There had been an occasion a month previously when my brother had dropped me at Piccadilly train station in Manchester. I was going down to see Albert and Esme but couldn’t face the tumult of my marital situation. I walked away from my brother and on to the platform. A train was just pulling in.
If I jump in front of that now, I thought, I won’t have this feeling any more. I won’t have to suffer this train journey feeling as bad as I do. That moment passed. Serious intent or just an intrusive thought? I’ll never know, but what I do understand is that on various occasions during that period, I got into a physical, physiological, emotional and psychologically convinced state that, although I wasn’t planning to kill myself, I was going to die.
Another part of me was telling me full square, shouting in my head, that I’d walked out on the best thing that would ever happen to me, my Albert and my Esme. Every arrow, internal and external, was aimed straight at me. Add in utter exhaustion and I hadn’t the mental faculties to deal with what was happening to me. No wonder, like Macbeth, people in the grip of a breakdown start hallucinating – ‘Is this a dagger I see before me?’ I was no different. I was perceiving reality in an unrecognisable state. I hadn’t killed myself – but I still thought death was inevitable. It was the only way out of the extreme horror of my existence. Moment to moment, second to second, it was unbearable. A permanent state of abject dread. However it might end, I was living out the last few days and weeks of my life. I was dying. I didn’t want to live with all this pain in my head and my heart. It was impossible. I didn’t have the energy, the courage, to face that existence.
Again, I was so grateful for Pooky. She came every day to the hospital to visit me. At a very distressing time, it allowed me to be with someone who knew how I functioned. But there was another element to Pooky: I didn’t mind being unmanly in front of her. Mental health problems? In our family? In our class? I don’t think so. We’re stoic. We push our feelings down. To talk about depression is to talk about weakness, about effeminacy. ‘He’s got mental health issues? He can’t be a real man – he must be a woman. He’s weak. He’s got no spine. He’s not strong-willed. He can’t stand up to things.’
I wondered whether Dad had suffered those exact internal and external feelings. He was off work for a significant period so it was inevitable, I think, that people would have been questioning if he was up to it any more. Did he wonder if people were talking about him? A man born from a much more overwhelmingly masculine world than the one even I grew up in can only have felt deeply emasculated and shamed. That was certainly how I perceived myself. Shame and self-hatred, disgust, a sense of disappointing people, all warped emotions that accompany mental health issues. That’s why Pooky was so wonderful. There I was, need distilled, and she was calm, she was loving. I felt she understood.
In the background, another TV job, this time one in which I was the lead, was looming. Safe House 2, again filmed in the Lake District, would, supposedly, see me repeat the role of an ex-cop persuaded to operate a remote hideaway for those forced to go on the run. Filming was due to start in mid-February and the big panic for the production company and ITV was whether I was going to make it. I felt an enormous pressure to fulfil my obligations. There were long-term ramifications of being known as someone who couldn’t work due to mental health issues, what it could do to my future capacity to earn and, therefore, in my mind, provide for the children. Safe House 2 was a massive show with me in every scene. There was a lot of money riding on it as well as my professional reputation. The last thing I needed was an industry talking as one – ‘Chris? He’s gone nuts.’ My life, my career, were hanging by a thread.
My mum was also urging me to do it. She’d witnessed firsthand the state I was in when, a couple of weeks before I went to the hospital, I’d turned up at her house. She’d seen her son chugging through fags and unable to sleep. I was fully having a nervous breakdown and in front of me was this 83-year-old woman who was having to witness it.
A mother’s instinct is to help, to put things right, but she was powerless. It was incredibly difficult for her to see me like that, and so hard for me also to see her distress at being unable to help me. The pain I saw in her eyes can only have mirrored what my dad saw during his own despair.
‘I think you need to do this job, Chris,’ she’d tell me in her plaintive voice. I knew her way of thinking – He’s always functioned well at work – work has always saved him. Something which, after his breakdown, she was unable to say any longer about Dad. She was trying to give me a reason to go on. But, without being me, my mum could have no real perception of my state of mind.
A taxi picked me up for a read-through with the cast. Safe House 2 was Chris Eccleston. Everybody was looking at me. All these people, right there, relying on me. Stephen Mackintosh was among them, a great actor, as were Ashley Walters, and Jim Cartwright, the same Jim Cartwright I wrote my first fan letter to, the first also, he recko
ns, he ever received, prompted by his play Road, exploring the lives of people in a deprived, working-class area during the Thatcher government. It remains the greatest I’ve ever seen.
‘How are you doing, Chris?’ he asked me. I couldn’t tell him I’d come straight from a psychiatric hospital. I still haven’t told him what happened to this day. I had played people who had encountered mental issues, such as Trevor Hicks, who had suffered profound grief and PTSD, and Derek Bentley, who had a learning disability, and now here I was, with my own problems, putting on an act as me.
I managed to negotiate the read-through. The question was whether I could get on set. The idea was I’d go back and spend more time at the hospital before filming started. But I was feeling troubled at the prospect. I didn’t feel the staff had really engaged with me, to the extent I was going on the internet trying to find my own diagnosis. I felt like I was going under the radar, as if my renown was a barrier to them knowing what to do with me. I was also aware that people might talk about me because I was a celebrity. I didn’t want to be the subject of gossip.
A great friend of mine, Davy Jones, came to the hospital and we travelled up to his home in Liverpool on the train. The idea was we’d spend the night at his house before we drove up to Coniston for the next stage of preparation for Safe House 2. It caused an enormous crisis. During the course of that night, I changed from a human being to a mere embodiment of mental disintegration. I was reduced to an animal state. I felt very, very sorry for Davy. He was clearly scared, and understandably so. He was experiencing someone in the teeth of collapse, somebody he loved very much. We’ve known each other twenty years and are intimate friends and yet he barely recognised me. My self had disintegrated. He couldn’t see me. I wasn’t there. I wasn’t Chris.
Davy is a very strong and resourceful person. Now all I could see in his eyes was fear, and that brought me back a little.
‘Dave,’ I said, ‘I’m going to take two lorazepam to give you a break from me, and you’re going to drive me and we’re going to find a hospital in the north.’
While in London, I’d done some research about The Priory, in Altrincham. We drove along empty roads, knocked on the door, and somehow I got an interview. They couldn’t take me in that night, so we went to a hotel nearby. I became very calm. ‘You are yourself now,’ Dave told me. He was right. I knew I’d found somewhere safe.
Next morning, I returned to The Priory and sat down with a consultant, Justin Haslam, and a questionnaire.
He looked at my answers. ‘You’re very ill, Chris.’
I almost laughed. ‘What do you mean “ill”?’
‘You’re mentally ill. You have an illness.’
I pondered this. ‘Well, I’m very sad and I have some problems . . . ’
‘You are mentally ill,’ he reaffirmed. ‘You have been in fight-or-flight mode for a long, long time. But your brain chemistry can no longer fight and it can no longer fly. Your brain thinks death is imminent.’
It was a moment of great realisation. I’d lived fight or flight for three years, some might say fifty the way I am. Chemically and neurologically, I had nothing left. All there is then is death. You don’t know how it’s going to happen, but your body and brain are saying, very resolutely, ‘You won’t go on.’ The next part of that internal dialogue is to conclude, ‘Well, I’ll kill myself’ or ‘I’m just going to die.’ And I lived in that shattered mental frame for months. Is that a suicidal state? I don’t know. What I do know is I didn’t want to live the way I felt any more, and I couldn’t see a way of getting better. Every time I woke up, I thought I was going to die.
‘Your brain chemistry is seriously disrupted,’ Justin continued, ‘and I can help that with medication.’
He asked me what I’d been taking. I showed him the drugs I’d been given at the clinic in London.
He was incredulous. ‘This isn’t enough for a mouse.’
He looked me in the eye. ‘Did anybody diagnose you, Chris?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Did anybody diagnose what you are suffering from?’
‘No.’
‘You are suffering from a severe clinical depression, one of the worst I’ve ever seen.’ He paused. ‘But I can make you better.’
11
BALM OF HURT MINDS
The consultant told me, ‘Stop reading the Shakespeare sonnets, read something light.’ I picked up Graeme Souness’s autobiography in a charity shop. I’m not sure it was quite what he meant.
I was processed. There was no bed available on the private ward, but the feeling was I might get more privacy on the NHS ward anyway. Those on the NHS ward were severely ill. A guy who’d been the Doctor wouldn’t mean anything to them.
A nurse took me to my room, and it was then, as I looked at the others on the ward, that one of the great shames of my life occurred.
I’m a celebrity, I thought. I’m not as ill as these people. I shouldn’t be here. I should be on the private ward.
I’d been so used to being treated as different and now here I was on an NHS psychiatric ward. In my head, I was thinking, I’m not being treated as special here.
There was another thought, which makes me wince with self-disgust, and rightly so, to this day. These people are being treated the same as I am? How can that be? Surely my illness is the most important. I’m an ex-Doctor – my illness must be more important.
I actually thought, Why am I in here with all these working-class people? I can comfort myself a little that those thought patterns were a symptom of how ill I was.
I confessed my thoughts to the nurse, an admission of what I was thinking – ‘I’m special.’ He didn’t sneer at me. ‘Chris,’ he said, ‘you are very, very ill and this is where you have to be.’
The fact I’d come out with this snobbism, this sense of grandiosity, and he hadn’t had a go at me, had heard me out, recognised I was mentally ill, calmed me.
The next day was my birthday. I was given a cake. I went round the restaurant and offered everyone a piece. In my head, they knew I was a celebrity and I wanted to show them I was normal. Whenever we ate, we all had to go over to the restaurant together. I’d gone from being a lead in an HBO series, a lead in The A Word, the Doctor, to being escorted with a load of other people for my dinner and back. It was as though I had been transported to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, to the extent I realised I was walking in a way I’d seen people in institutions on TV walk – a shuffle. ‘Am I acting this?’ Having played a lot of characters who are mentally challenged also warped the reality, like I was hovering above, watching myself.
The two words ‘The Priory’ conjure up certain images in people’s minds, associated as they are with a pampered celebrity clientele being treated in semi-luxury. But the reality, certainly on the NHS ward, was very different. Here it was bare walls and lino floors, no attempt to cosy up what was going on. My room, in a corner, near to the nurses’ station, had a bed and a shower and that was pretty much all. In the room next door was a lad who was paranoid schizophrenic. Like me, he operated in the controlled conditions of a psychological hospital environment. No sharps were allowed and anything electrical was checked – the back of a plug, for instance, can be taken off and drugs stored within. I’ve still got plugs with ‘Approved’ stickers on them.
Early on, another patient came and stood in my doorway. I didn’t realise at that point, but patients aren’t actually allowed to enter one another’s rooms. He wanted an autograph. I have always been obliging on that front and I was again here. Soon after, Justin came to see me. ‘You mustn’t do that,’ he told me. ‘You’re ill. You’re not here as a celebrity, you’re here as a patient.’ I found that quite moving. He was looking after me. I felt like he was my dad.
There was a common room where we could watch TV. One evening, a new patient, a young woman, arrived and came and sat down. We were all men in there and I felt a bit concerned about her, but also pleased there was a feminine presence.
‘What are you here for?’ I wasn’t exactly subtle.
She was equally blunt. ‘I’ve got a personality disorder.’
It was the beginning of a friendship, based on that honesty. She was one of the few people I really connected with. There was another young man who’d been raped and tried to kill himself; we connected too. But apart from these glimpses into other people’s lives, the immense and unimaginable burdens they had to bear, I tended to keep myself to myself in my room. The staff understood that and left me to my own devices.
I spent a lot of time researching clinical depression. I sought out the best book on the subject and found The Curse of the Strong, by Tim Cantopher, which posits the idea that depression can strike high achievers, for want of a less arsey phrase, because they are so used to coping. They cope and cope and achieve and achieve – and then wallop. Professional footballers have been in The Priory, doctors, all sorts of creative individuals. But you don’t have to be well known, have letters after your name, to be a high achiever. Dad was a high achiever. He wasn’t messing about on a stage or on a football pitch, he made a factory work, everything loaded up and out on time. He had pride in punctuality, another massive thing among the working classes. Dad, like me, found his ability in himself. His background meant he didn’t have any other way of doing so.
Justin saw me with the book.
‘Where did you get that?’ he asked.
‘I bought it on Amazon. I wanted to research what was happening to me.’
‘That’s a very good book,’ he assured me. ‘My friend wrote it.’
I believe he was encouraged by my resourcefulness.
When it came to visitors, I wasn’t keen. I didn’t like seeing them upset. I didn’t like bothering them. But my mum and brothers would come. I’d not hidden my issues from them, but no one expected me to end up in a psychiatric hospital. One day Keith started crying. He saw that the Chris he knew had disappeared and he found that very distressing. On the next chair along, all my mum saw was a child in need. She was eighty-four. You don’t expect to be sat in a psychiatric hospital with your supposedly successful 52-year-old son when you’re eighty-four. What is it they say? You never stop being a parent. Their visits were too much for me. I’d be exhausted. Seeing them distressed, particularly my mum, was so hard.
I Love the Bones of You Page 12