"Its so funny - to put theatre and mental illness together is
kind of ironic, cause you know people used to go to the insane
asylum to be entertained." Ruby Wax is telling me about her new
show Losing It, currently running at London's Duchess theatre. The
two-hander play performed with friend and knock-your-socks-off
singer-pianist Judith Owen presents highlights of the nadir moments
in Wax's life that eventually led to her nervous breakdown and
beyond.
The corollary of too many attempts at home decorating and an
unhealthy addiction to Farrow and Ball paints - "They don't do
beige there," she explains, "their colour swatches have colours
like 'shaved lesbian beaver'" - Wax first realised she suffered
with chronic depression in the 1990s when she had firmly
established herself as a funny woman. She checked herself in at the
celebrity-favoured Priory Clinic in Roehampton from where she later
first performed her show Ruby Wax Live from the Priory with fellow
'inmate' Judith Owen.
Since then she's been through therapy, taken a bunch of
medication, and is now studying for her masters in neuroscience and
psychotherapy. Not that she's training to become a therapist, mind:
"My masters will be the next show. They're letting me do that. I
still have to do the 10,000 words [dissertation] though. Instead of
becoming a practitioner that'll be my next show. To explain how the
brain works." That's brilliant, I say. Exciting. "Isn't it?
Exciting and shitting myself!"
Wax spent the summer in Edinburgh where the show - which is
laugh-out-loud funny and poignant - went down fabulously. Of
particular interest to punters was the 'show and tell' discussion
groups that she and Owen also now run weekly in London at the
theatre. Here anyone with mental health issues - however they may
manifest - can meet and talk with experts from mental health
charity SANE, as well as other sufferers, about pretty much
anything.
Some have commented that Wax, Owen and SANE are doing for those
with depression what Alcoholics Anonymous has done for problem
drinkers. Does she agree? "I can't believe nobody ever organised
forums, especially because this disease is so lonely, and so one
thing led to another. The show started and then the audience really
started to unpeel like an onion and then we had to give them a
forum, and now this website is starting." She's referring to the www.blackdogtribe.com
website that SANE is shortly to set up, following a World Health
Organisation prediction that by 2020 depression will be the world's
most disabling condition, above cancer and AIDS. One in five
people, WHO says, will experience depression at some point in their
lives, and it underscores most mental illness.
"If I had this and knew all the neat people [like Marjorie
Wallace, SANE's CEO and tireless campaigner] 20 years ago, I
wouldn't have felt so ashamed, you know, I mean really, its not
that [the website] cures it, its just the relief when you finally
find them, your tribe. The people who aren't going to tell you to
'just perk up.'" She rolls her eyes skywards, nodding, knowing.
Losing It is certainly a panacea for anyone who is in therapy or on
medication. It's touching, in the Q&A session that takes place
in the second half, when a young man says he's not sure who he is
on medication. Is he still himself or have his daily pills shaped
his personality? It's the kind of questioning that could drive one
quite literally mad. The answer, apparently is that, like the
diabetic who takes insulin, he is still himself, but on medication
- but it's a vexing issue that Wax hopes she might help to resolve.
At the end of our interview she asks, rhetorically I presume, "Why
is there such a stigma around having a sick brain? If you tell
someone your kidney isn't working you get sympathy, if you tell
someone your brain is sick, you might get sacked from work or
shunned. In a way I'm sort of a physical \manifestation of what
that website is going to be".
Losing It runs at the Duchess Theatre until 1
October. For tickets go to www.nimaxtheatres.com
Wax/Owen Mental Health Forums with SANE take place
from 2-4 on 20 and 26 September. Visit www.sane.org.uk for more
information
(Photo credit Trevor Leighton)
