- If you gave me a pill now,
and I could take that pill
and I would never, ever get depression again, ever,
I would worry that that would necessarily mean
that I wouldn't get the energy that I get as well.
(upbeat music)
- So Alastair, great to have you here to talk
about your brand new book, "Living Better."
So this is a book about your life
and how sort of your mental health has intersected
as you know, your life has gone on,
and also about treatments and things like that.
To start off with, I wanted to ask,
why did you wanna write it?
You've spoken lots about mental health and things,
what did you want to add with this book?
- It's not a memoir, but it's a kind of,
it is I guess a psychological and psychiatric memoir.
And I kind of just wanted to get it all out there,
and also, you know I'm involved in campaigning
on mental health and I think you need these moments
where you wouldn't be talking to me now
about this subject if I hadn't written a book.
- And once you decided that this was roughly
what you were gonna write,
what was that experience like to write it?
- So I know what I want to say,
I know roughly how I want to say it,
I know all the things I want to get in there,
but then I go through this process that I call
Putting the Vomit on the Page.
It's quite chronological in other terms,
you know, my childhood, journalism,
politics, Fiona, friendship, grief,
I go through all these things
and try to kind of knit them together.
But I didn't write them in that order.
I wrote stuff as it came into my head.
And then the second part of the book,
which I call Search for a Cure,
and I kind of reached the conclusion
there won't be a cure.
There won't be a vaccine for depression,
like, hopefully, one day there will be a vaccine for COVID.
But these are, if you like,
the reason it's a search for a cure,
is these are things that other people do
and the stuff that I've done that has helped me.
- You've spoken about before,
feelings of, feeling suicidal,
like you want to take your own life,
and when you're not in that
can you, do you fully, you know,
remember what that feels like?
- No, it's really weird.
No, it's strange.
I can't, you know, I say in the book
as I, having been at the birth of our three children,
I can't really understand how women ever do it
more than once because it's so sort of, right?
And I think depression is a little bit like that.
I think if you could remember it,
in the sort of absolute detail,
if you could recall it to yourself,
it's horrible.
So like now, I'm in quite a good mood today.
And if you were to say,
"I can read you how it is, how it felt."
But even that won't be a 100% accurate
cause if I'm really depressed, I don't want to write.
(Alastair laughs)
So, no, I don't, I can...
I've found ways of describing it,
but as I'm describing it, I'm not feeling it.
- Knowing that you have those manic spells,
and knowing that, you know,
you come out of the depression,
but it's something that will
kind of always be there,
how do you sort of make peace with that
in yourself not having, you know,
the why's and things like that?
- Well, I sort of, I have bits of the why's.
I don't know all of the why's, there's not
well put it this way, there's not one,
I don't think there's one why.
There's lots of different things that come in.
I think that one of the reasons I wanted
Stephen Fry to be the front cover quote,
was because Stephen Fry once did an interview like this,
and somebody said to him,
"If you had a red button there now,
and if you press that button,
your bipolar disorder would go.
Never come back.
Would you press it?"
And he said, "No."
And I thought about it,
and I think if I...
I would worry that if I said to you now,
if you gave me a pill now, and I could take that pill
and I would never ever get depression again, ever,
I would worry that that would necessarily mean
that I wouldn't get the energy that I get as well.
I wouldn't get the drive that I get when I've got drive.
And I wouldn't get...
I'd worry that my mind to become less active.
I'd worry that my creativity had become less productive.
So, that's how I made peace with it.
I think it's part of who and what I am.
I deal with it better than I did.
I used to deal with it by drinking very, very heavily,
by workaholism, which I still have,
but I now have it in a completely different way.
I still have to be doing stuff,
but nine times out of 10,
in the '80's, the '90's and so on,
if I was doing something work focused
and something else came in from there
that maybe needed my attention,
my instinct will be to push it away.
Whereas now my instinct will be to say,
I can push that away for a bit.
And that's just, again, it's like,
it's just, you know, learning how to deal
with things from, I guess, from experience,
but also I do think it's helped to go and
talk to other people about how they've dealt with it.
- Yeah. I think a massive thing is,
'cause you say in the book you know,
it took you quite a long time to acknowledge
that some help would be useful.
And I wondered where you think we are in terms of
whether we're going in the right direction,
whether we've gone backwards in terms of the provision
that's available, you know, if people can't afford to
go private, what they can actually access
through the NHS for mental health.
- No, I think we're in a bad place on services.
And I think COVID has made it worse because the,
you know, the inevitability of so much of
thinking and the, if you like the bandwidth
of the government and the health service going on
dealing with the pandemic means
that inevitably, it's become more difficult.
But I still, I also think by the way that people
sometimes might underestimate what services are out
there that aren't necessarily run by the health service.
In terms of charities and community groups and so forth.
There is a lot of stuff out there, but you know
one of the other effects of the pandemic of the,
you know, the pandemic was
that a lot of the organizations that delivered support
to others had to shut down as well.
So I think we are in a, in a pretty tricky place.
I also think that if you add together, you know,
children and their mental wellbeing, when, you know, if you
I can't imagine what I'd be like if I worked my
butt off for an exam and then I didn't get to take it
and then they screwed up my results and all that.
That's pretty tricky.
Parents who are trying to, you know, look after kids
and have a job and, you know, look after an elderly parent
all that stuff that people have to do.
You look at the frontline workers and
the stress they've been under.
You look at the people who've lost members
of their family and weren't able to bury them,
weren't able to say goodbye and all that stuff.
So, you know, we're in for a very tough period, I think
but certainly I think, do we need to get to a better place?
Yes.
The big thing for me is that we get to a place where we,
as individuals and as government and as businesses,
people look at mental health as in exactly the same way
as they look at physical health.
It's just something we've all got,
and you either look after it or you don't.
- And so, to bring it back to the book to finish off,
is there anything that you would love people to...
Like a main takeaway from the book?
What would you like people to come away with?
- If you're depressed, or you get depression,
I hope you can read that book
and there will be something in it,
large or small, that will help you through it.
If you don't get depressed, but you know people who do,
I hope it will help you understand it better
and that might help you
deal with them better and also deal with yourself better.
And I know 'cause we talked earlier that if I said to you
which was your favorite bit in the book,
you would say it was Fiona's chapter.
I think it's important the people who do live
with people who get depression, don't blame themselves.
Because I think that there's no doubt for years,
Fiona did blame herself for my depression
and I probably played into that.
And I think that not playing the blame game
is really important.
And I think the final thing I'd say is, you know,
there is stuff there that we can all do.
Even when I'm really, really, really, really depressed,
I was quite proud of this, during my really bad crash
recently, I did exercise every day.
I didn't enjoy it.
It didn't necessarily make me feel better at the time,
but I did it.
And doing it was just like a way of ticking a box
in my jam jar.
- Yeah. Well, thanks so much, Alastair.
There's tons more in the book for people to discover.
Always pleasure to chat to you.
- [Alastair] Thank you.
(smooth jazz plays)