Occasionally, a member of staff would come in and ask, ‘How are you doing, Chris?’ Often they’d find me crying. If not, I’d start talking about my predicament and then inevitably the tears would come. I felt very sorry for them that they had to listen to my misery. Looking back, I suppose that is part of their role – to walk in, say, ‘How’s it going?’, and for you to have a cry. I didn’t know that at the time, though, and it felt very self-indulgent, especially as a celebrity, which is why what Justin said to me about being a patient, nothing more, nothing less, was so important. He was impassioned about it, and put me in my place. In so doing, he gave me the ability to be that patient.
My respect and belief in Justin were total and immediate. A few weeks into my stay I had a conversation with him about suicide and wanting to die.
‘Chris,’ he said, ‘think of the legacy you’ll create for Albert and Esme.’
He was quite tough on me – ‘You’re a parent.’ The legacy for Albert and Esme would be simple – ‘Dad didn’t love us enough to stay around.’ Suicide would have accompanied them wherever they went. They’d have known me only through DVDs, and people idealising me the way they do when somebody’s dead. You never hear people say, ‘Oh, he was a bit of a twat.’ It’s always, ‘He was a great actor, a lovely guy.’ And they’d be thinking, ‘Well, was he? He didn’t hang around long enough for us ever to know.’
When Justin said that about Albert and Esme, it was my wake-up moment. I knew I had to get better for them. It was abrupt, but necessary.
Justin was like a god who I saw every Thursday. I could have left at any time, but he held the ultimate power because I so trusted his judgement. No way would I leave without his say-so.
One Thursday, I convinced myself I was going to get out.
‘I think I’m ready to go home now,’ I told him.
‘Do you?’
I went from yes to no in a split second. I went back to my room and started crying. Always in my head, seen through a blur of medication, was Albert and Esme. The only reason I wanted to get better was because of them. I didn’t want to go back to my marriage, wasn’t interested in my career, I just wanted to see Albert and Esme again.
In came the ward doctor. She was amazing. I loved her. The day-to-day contact I had with her gave me so much, but in a very normal manner.
On this occasion, she was leaning against the wall with her arms folded, looking at me quite dispassionately.
‘You’ll be all right, Chris,’ she said.
I almost laughed through my tears.
‘I see people come in and out all the time,’ she continued. ‘There are things you see in people that tell you where it’s going to go. You’re going to be all right.
‘Remember, Chris, you weren’t sectioned. We didn’t have to come and get you. You knocked on the door. That’s an indicator of strength. You knew you were ill. You realised you needed help and you went and got it.’
That was a little step for me. Up to that point I’d thought of it as a weakness to knock on a hospital door and say, ‘Let me in – I need help.’ It confirmed to me also that I’d been so right to leave the hospital in London. It wasn’t the right place for me. It wasn’t going to help; it was going to hinder. Not only did the care feel like it was lacking coordination but, for me, there was something incredibly alienating about being in a city that had become a place of terror, of nightmares, an ogre. A place that, whenever I approached it on the M1, made my shoulders hunch up.
I wanted to go home, be somewhere in the north, and part of that was quite definitely because of the accent. Psychiatric hospital is a rarefied experience, so if I could have it grounded in an accent that I recognised, then it had to help. The way people spoke, the ward doctor, a northerner, being a case in point, gave me some element of subconscious reassurance. Then there was Justin. It turned out his mother had taught me at secondary school and we’d been brought up a couple of miles apart. Justin was so very clear about my brain chemistry. ‘You’re ill, I can make you well.’ And I believed him. My instincts about going north were good. I began to feel safe in the hospital. Maybe I was always going to be treated as a celebrity in London institutions, while up there they just saw the illness.
Every day, I had to tell people where I was going, what I was doing, until at 9 p.m. I had to go for my medication – 375mg of the antidepressant venlafaxine; 350mg of quetiapine, an anti-psychotic drug, which, at that level, is a sedative; 10mg of zolpidem, a habit-forming sleeping tablet; and 50mg of Phenergan, which is an anti-histamine, but, if you double the dose, becomes a sedative. I was allowed lorazepam during the day. Fair to say, I was very heavily medicated. The consultant said to me once, ‘You have got the constitution of an ox. We are having to give you so much antidepressant even to touch this depression, and yet you’re still not getting any of the side-effects that other people get.’ I’m a unit, but he was talking about my psychological as well as physical make-up.
I didn’t do much therapy in The Priory. They basically put me to sleep, and that for me was a huge, huge release. With my life crumbling around me, I hadn’t been sleeping for months. I’d take my medication at nine and by half past I’d be asleep for the next eleven hours.
That sleep was the beginning of my recovery. I was starting to repair my brain chemistry and in so doing I reverted to type – I started reading. I’d read whatever books were around the hospital and then, occasionally, we’d be allowed to walk into Altrincham as a group. There was a Waterstones and a Costa. We were allowed to go off independently, but we’d always have to come back to Costa. School was the last time I’d heard someone say, ‘Right, I want you all back here at one o’clock.’ Then, it would have irked. Now I was glad of it, glad of the security it represented, albeit a little ashamed. This grown man should have been looking after his children, holding their hands, not having his own held while taken on a day out.
On one occasion, I bumped into Paul Abbott, the writer and producer who I’d worked with on Clocking Off and Cracker. I was with the group and so couldn’t really explain what was happening; ironic really as Paul has been incredibly open with his own mental health experiences. On another occasion, I was sat outside a café and the director of the first series of The A Word, Peter Cattaneo, walked up.
‘Hi, Chris, what are you doing here?’
‘Oh, I’m just out having a coffee.’ Nothing to see here!
There was a period in the last month at The Priory where I was allowed to go out on my own. I’d leave at ten in the morning and go back at six at night. The hospital approved it and were keeping an eye on me. During that time, I’d be trawling the charity shops in Altrincham, buying biographies, an escape from my own reality. But whatever the words in front of me, I’d inevitably start thinking about Albert and Esme and how much I missed them. My heart would start to beat too hard, too fast, and I’d think, I want to die. Then I’d remember the lorazepam and, twenty minutes later, I’d be back reading the book. Sat in café after café, reading and reading.
It’s interesting that in all that time I spent around Altrincham, I was never once stopped for an autograph. Perhaps that side of me shut down and I went unseen. As Justin had said, I was a patient, not a celebrity. It was something I came to physically embody. There were places I went where people might normally have gone, ‘Are you that bloke from . . . ?’ But they didn’t. I was shut down, and my persona shut down with it.
In the unit itself, I happened across people whose lives had become invisible to themselves. On two consecutive days, I saw several teenage girls, skeletal, carrying drips down the stairs. Anorexia. My heart broke for them. I thought about the twentieth and twenty-first century and the bombardment of sexualised, idealised body imagery that had afflicted them, me, and, in all likelihood, will affect Albert and Esme.
Eventually, with spring in the air, I found myself functioning at a slightly higher level and was starting to think about coming home. By now, I was on the private wing, but whatever the war
d, I had been in The Priory for approaching three months. Originally I’d only packed for an overnight at Davy’s. I was wearing his T-shirts and undies for weeks. He never did ask for them back.
Justin concurred that it was OK for me to continue my recovery outside the environs of the hospital, and so I left. The Priory had done me a great service in allowing me to be in that environment and see people so much more ill than me. Not only that, but I’d felt part of a whole, not separated from normal people by being a C-list TV celeb. In my intense vulnerability, and I’ve never felt so vulnerable in all my life, I’d felt part of something larger. I’d had such fortune in my life and yet here were these people who’d had no luck and had then been landed with everything from anorexia to paranoid schizophrenia. Those days will stay with me for ever.
I went to live at my mum’s house. But this wasn’t the classic screen moment of the hospital doors shutting behind the man reborn as he stands there drinking in the beauty of the world around him. The credits don’t role in real life. I’d spent seventy days in The Priory. They had passed in a fog, which was yet to clear.
The reality of those weeks post-Priory was that I would either lie on my bed all day in my old childhood bedroom or go to Waterstones in Manchester and just sit there in the café. Effectively, I was behaving at Mum’s house just as I did in hospital, to the extent that at nine o’clock I’d even swallow the same cocktail of drugs. By half past nine, I’d be asleep, until half past eight in the morning when I’d come down and have some breakfast. I’d then go back up, lie on the bed, and read. All the time, I could smell the hospital on me. It took a long time for it to come out of my clothes and pores.
Mum didn’t cajole me too much. She knew I was stubborn. But she’s clever. She knew that asking me to drive her to where my dad’s ashes were scattered was a tactic that would work. It would get me out of my bedroom and engaging with someone else’s life, someone else’s feelings. She knew she was asking me to do something for her, something that was about her emotional life, not mine.
We stood on that bridge and thought about Dad and what Whiteacre had meant to him. I am struck again now, especially in the knowledge of our respective breakdowns, how the years he enjoyed there contrasted so differently with what was to come. He left Whiteacre a care free young man, oblivious to the burdens he would accrue. A realisation would soon dawn that, for him, personal expectation was something only to be glimpsed at, that his own life would be dictated by the overwhelming need not to experience but to provide.
I think of his frustrations – how, as a very bright man, he spent a lifetime in a job that, although he was proud of his work, asked so little of him. That frustration, I truly believe, ate away at him, inched, and then plunged him into depression. The weight of unexpressed potential, conscious or otherwise, was simply too much to bear. When breakdown eventually came, whereas for me it offered a slow release from a tortured mind, for him, living in an era when psychological help was either not available or simply a matter for a higher social strata, it signified the start of the end. When Dad did return to work, he started to come home earlier and earlier. Some days he’d be back at half past three. It felt like he wasn’t needed as much and in the end they let him go. My mum was cleaning at the baths when my dad turned up crying his eyes out. She thought something had happened to me, Alan or Keith. Eventually she managed to get it out of him that he’d been made redundant.
While from that day on the bridge, according to Mum, I began to improve, Dad never rediscovered his previous self. He was fifty-nine. Devastated. Never the same Ronnie again. He became much less active, less engaged, less interested, an isolation of the mind exacerbated by the fact he’d never really had any hobbies. While I slowly dipped back into my previous life with an audition for Mike Leigh’s film Peterloo, and read the scripts for the third series of The Leftovers, practising my American accent at Mum’s kitchen table, Dad’s life descended into spending every day as he had his weekends away from work – sitting in his chair and doing nothing. Whereas before he’d been selective in what he watched on TV, now he’d watch anything. We kept urging him to go there, do that. One escape he had enjoyed in the past was golf, which would have been ideal for retirement, offering exercise, companionship, and the great mental boost that comes from a few hours outdoors, but he couldn’t be persuaded. Occasionally, he’d go back to Salford and walk round the market trying to find old faces, and he loved the reunions for the Colgate factory and Whiteacre, but otherwise there was a refusal to break from the routine. My dad loved friendship and companionship but just wasn’t very good at initiating it. He never wanted to start anything. I’ve detected all those things in myself but, perhaps with my dad in mind, I’ve pushed myself to be at least a little bit more proactive.
The latter stages of my recovery didn’t come easy. The Peterloo audition was in London, the first time I’d been back since I’d been in the clinic, and the feelings of terror returned. I had a lot of lorazepam in my pocket as I sat on the train, but I didn’t take it. I needed to negotiate the audition with something like a clear mind. As I left afterwards, I told Mike I’d spent some time in a psychiatric hospital.
‘Keep smiling,’ he said, a very droll, Salford kind of remark, which I appreciated.
The Leftovers, meanwhile, offered a larger step towards getting better. At the end of May, I got on a plane and flew to Austin, Texas. It was vital I took that track. Had I stayed in my mum’s house, it could have been dangerous. The isolation, the constant company of my own head, would not have been helpful. I knew I had to get back on the horse for practical as well as spiritual reasons. The Leftovers gave me exactly that, offering the comforting challenge of a role that had been a great success for me personally, alongside people I liked.
As soon as I got to Austin, I started reducing my medication. I joined a gym and began running every day. Exercise, again, became massive for me. I really stepped it up, including weight-training, which I’d never done before. Perhaps it was a response to feeling so spiritually vulnerable, but I began to build myself up. It was a discipline and I did it with trainers. The interaction and friendship I built with them was as important as what they taught me, while at the same time I revelled in wanting to learn again. As an actor, learning is key, be it accent, dance, or whatever. Through learning to weight-train, that desire came back. For my mental recovery, investing in my physical health was enormous. Austin allowed me space to breathe, to repair, so that I could get back to Albert and Esme and do my job – be their parent.
When I returned to the UK in August, finally I saw them again. I hadn’t wanted them to see me in a psychiatric hospital, or in that state, full stop. Not only would it be awful for them, but I knew the emotional bruise left on myself could possibly derail what Justin was trying to do. I wanted to be recovered. Equally, I could barely imagine the impact on them of our separation. I’d been in their lives every day and then I wasn’t there for six months.
The plan was I would collect Esme from nursery, picking up Albert from home first. I knocked on the door and, as it was opened, I could see through the hallway and down the stairs into the kitchen. A pair of legs were swinging on a chair. Albert was having his lunch. When he realised I was at the door, he jumped off his seat, ran through the kitchen, up the stairs and towards me as though he was going to launch himself into my arms. He then did an extraordinary thing. He stopped right in front of me and looked straight into my eyes, almost into the back of my head.
I knew what he was telling me – ‘Do you know how important this is to me? Do you? You can’t do this again. You can’t disappear. Do you know how this has felt?’
I replied in kind. My answer too was in my eyes. ‘Yes, I do know how it’s felt, Albert, because it’s felt like that for me too. I’m sorry, son. I’m not going to disappear again.’
He hugged me, and, as I held him, I felt a million emotions. Through them all, my respect for him was overwhelming. His complexity, and dignity, was amazing. We’d ha
d a conversation and he’d driven it and taken control. I’ll never ever forget what he did that day. I know it will be the last thing I ever think of. Through him, we had a conversation with our eyes. We knew that this, for both of us, was enormous – and then we got on with it. We got in the car and it felt normal.
I picked up Esme. She saw me – ‘Daddy!’ I went then – I burst into tears.
I wish I cried a lot more. I shed more tears than some of my generation, but they don’t come easily. I hope they will. I want them to. Afterwards, I always feel fantastic. It’s a rather more epic and excoriating scale, but I will be forever amazed at how much strength I accrued from my mental collapse. I would never have been disturbed had someone talked to me about their mental health, but I consider myself more of a man now because I am so willing to talk about my own. The flipside is how the industry views depression. Before Safe House 2, I’d never had a day off in thirty-two years. My breakdown meant meeting the commitment was impossible. As an actor, that’s the biggest no-no there is. The upshot was the cast was disassembled and the programme abandoned, eventually to be remade with a different cast elsewhere. I’d let everyone down, left them floundering with no work. The result was that insurers demanded a much higher premium to cover my involvement in a drama. That production really has to want me if they are to make that investment. That’s what acknowledging mental health issues can do for an actor. For some, there would be no way back, and for many, no doubt, it’s an illness they prefer to keep hidden, with all the damage to themselves and others around them that brings. As it is, since not doing Safe House 2, I’ve never stopped. The more I work, the more the insurers relax, until my breakdown is seen as a blip, which is exactly how I see it – a blip that strengthened me hugely. My depression was triggered by close personal traumatic events and, from the education I received in the darkest of days, I know I now have the strength to deal with anything of that nature in the future. I wouldn’t wish clinical depression on my worst enemy, but it launched me into a new, positive and different life. It deepened my humanity, deepened my tolerance, deepened my empathy and deepened my sense of brotherhood. It taught me life is a very delicate thing. I walk among the human race with a lot more sympathy, feeling and love. I’ve always had those elements but they’re a lot more pronounced now.
I Love the Bones of You Page 13