I'm Spartacus

Yesterday morning, I awoke with an all-too-familiar feeling. I’d worked a 55-hour week, running a 3-day event for new students arriving in the UK for the first time from 82 countries. On the Wednesday morning, they had never met; by the Friday evening, they packed out the student bar, where I left them singing a raucous version of Let It Go together. It was a lovely feeling. On Saturday, I paid the price. I woke up feeling as though I was drowning, and that I did not have the energy to tread water. The flood engulfing me whispered “I’m an unnecessarily pretentious and overly-laboured metaphor for depression, and I will never be far away.” I went back to sleep and didn’t get up until 3.

Depression and its sidekick Anxiety, Mental Health’s Bonnie to its Clyde, have been a constant presence in my life for many years. Even when I’ve been completely free from them they’ve been there, skulking behind a hedge patiently waiting for a weak moment in which they can pounce. As I’ve become more open about it, and as I have become more involved, as part of my job, with others who suffer similar problems, I’ve not, as I hoped, witnessed a growing understanding and awareness. Where I’ve no doubt we are, as a society, becoming more confident and more knowledgeable on mental health issues, far more often I have witnessed evidence of fear, misunderstanding and even downright discrimination.

Most recently, I was told by someone in a position of some authority that I can’t have  depression, as I have a lot of hobbies and a social life. “If you had depression,” she asserted confidently, “you wouldn’t be doing these things. Depression has a significant effect on your everyday life.” I ought to get round to telling my doctor this, lest he continues to prescribe me antidepressants, or indeed telling my brain, wide awake and racing at 3am with illogical fears, that it shouldn’t have the audacity to believe this is a symptom of a wider condition.

It is because of these experiences that I’ve started – tentatively, at first, but now wholeheartedly – to talk about mental illness in my standup. Encouraged by a very positive reaction – the I’m Spartacus moment Imentioned in my last post – I now have a ten-minute set dedicated entirely to discussing mental health. I acknowledge this doesn’t sound immediately hilarious (I open my gigs now by saying “I suffer from depression, which is always a promising start to a comedy set”, then joke that audiences tend to laugh out of fear of what I might do if they don’t) but, as with everything in life, there is humour to be found in mental illness, if only we have the confidence to bring it out into the open. It is amusingly ironic, for example, that the side effects of the tablets I take can include “excess sweating” and “excess wind” (implying, perhaps, that there is an optimum level of flatulence to which we should all be aspiring), yet they are prescribed, amongst other things, for social anxiety, a condition probably not helped by persisting farting accompanied by the smell of body odour. It is darkly comical, in a Darwin Award sort of a way, that, of the 30 or so people who fall to their deaths from Beachy Head each year, 1-2 fall off accidentally whilst hilariously pretending to jump for a photo opportunity. It is, I remark, typical that Beachy Head itself is only the world’s second most popular suicide spot, because America ALWAYS has to go one better than us, as they have done here with the Golden Gate Bridge.

 

I have, to my surprise, had absolutely no negative responses to this new set, despite its being a little close to the line in places. On the contrary, the positive reaction I’ve had has felt overwhelming. The first time I did a full set on these issues was at a competition, and it got me through to the final. At the final itself, a woman threw her arms around me as we waited for the toilet. “I’ve seen your set twice and oh my God it’s so true!” she said, and proceeded to list for me the different antidepressants she’d tried. Later on, I got an equally positive but far more restrained reaction, as a big lad with tattoos came up to me, gave me a manly pat on the shoulder and said “the mental health stuff. Yeah. Just want to say, I have depression too. Nice one, mate.” After I posted the video on Facebook, I received both positive comments and private messages from friends and acquaintances. One was from a schoolfriend I haven’t seen for many years, telling me that my talking about depression so openly had really helped her, as she suffered herself but hid it from colleagues at work – I had had no idea she had suffered from it, and like me she has, on the surface, an “active” life; another took it as their cue to try standup themselves; a third asked me for some advice as she had just started taking the drugs I’d joked about in the set. Some commented openly that they had depression too – another, sort of cyber “I’m Spartacus” moment.

The experience of talking openly about mental health has been incredibly liberating and rewarding, as well as unexpectedly moving. If I’ve helped even one person, that’s an amazing feeling. If I’ve just made people giggle a bit, well that’s fine, because that’s what standup is meant to do. Either way, I Am Spartacus, and I now know I’m not alone.