What Depression Actually Feels Like And How Ruby Wax Learned To Live With It

0:00Depression, you know, is you're dead, but you happen to be breathing. So people always think it's because you're sad or something happened. I go, nothing happened. You can win an award and you want to die. So that's that. But they're my people. You know how, like, if you're Jewish, you can say things about being Jewish, or if you're black, American, you can do that. Well, I'm mentally ill. So my people let me go and let me say whatever I want. So when I first started doing this publicly, I've said this before, I was outed by Comic Relief. Oh, I didn't know that. They took a picture of me, but they blew it up into a poster size, and they put it all over the tube stations.

0:43And it said on it, one in four people have mental illness. Gets worse. One in five people have dandruff. I have both. I don't have dandruff. That's unbelievable. and a picture of me looking slightly miserable with a red nose on my face. So when I saw it in the tube, I hurled myself against the wall, but then there were more. I couldn't hurl enough all the way down the tube station, and I was mortified, so I thought, I'm going to have to write a show and pretend that's my publicity post. You know how they put it in the tube station, that I had done that on purpose because I didn't want anybody to know I was ill because good luck holding a job at BBC.

1:23So I pretended I was doing a show. Didn't they have to get rights to put that up? Didn't they have to get your... They didn't ask. It's comic relief. Right, okay. And I let them take the picture, but I thought, because my career was nosediving, the bigger your poster is, the more popular you are. So I was surprised Stephen Fry, I thought, was on the upward. His would be gigantic and I'd be a stamp. But they used my picture. So it's nobody's fault. I just never asked. So then I performed in mental institutions for two years to write a script about mental illness. And I used to say that the bipolars would say I laughed, I cried.

2:00I'd give myself reviews from them and the psychotics. But they loved me because I could deal with them directly. I mean, if you give me somebody in the depth of it, I will be able to. And I'm not ill. I can make them laugh. So these people in these clinics, and it was heartbreaking. They didn't have a stage, so I'd do it on the counter of the buffet or sometimes in the ladies' Louvre for three people. They'd be wheeled in and really severely sick, but I'd get them to, my motive was to make them laugh, and they'd make me hysterical because there'd be question and answer. And one woman asked me, how do you get a poltergeist out of a Hoover?

2:39Or there's a communist living in my back molar. They were sensational reactions to my show, and I loved them and my my payoff was I would be able to stay overnight in the mental ward because that's my home away from home I feel really safe there wow why because I'm being taken care of and nobody can harm me right and there's a lady with that kind of you know cupcake on their heads the nurses in this country don't they wear a kind of weird thing on their head you mean like the little triangles I think so bonnets isn't that quite old school isn't that like an old yeah but the priory was they were wearing it.

3:15And they'd come in and they'd give me my little cup with my pills in it and I would suck my thumb and I'd be, I loved the people. So you go back to childhood. I go back to childhood. I, when I was on tour about, I don't know, 20 years ago, I'd make them stop if I was in the South at the Priory so I could smell the lobby because it brings me back to safety. That's a mother I never had. And then when they did, who do you think you are? I saw that I came from five generations of people that were incarcerated. Incarcerated meaning in a mental, they called it an insane asylum. That I kept going to different archivists and they said, guess what your great aunt did?

3:53And I said, was she an actress? And they said, no, she was insane. How did that make you feel? Well, it... Because that labeling, I just feel so... Well, they'd had something called agitation. So did they have what I've got? Which is agitation. It's not mental illness. but it's funny they used to put them in cold baths and now I have a cold bath in my garden so they weren't so often I don't have a whirling chair but I've got I've got a tub anyway I'm going off piste but I kind of think about this right I'm quite um what's the word quite protective of how I speak about mental health because I think mental illness has had a bit of a bad rep and people get quite scared about connecting to that and I think I think everyone suffers in some way shape or form because we have a brain and we live in the world that we live in.

4:43I have to disagree. I have to say everybody suffers, but mental illness is cancer. You know what a tumor is to cancer. I mean, a mental illness is to depression. But I think also people can also come and go from these states, right? Rather than just feeling like they can. Oh, you come and go. That's why people think it's a, that's why there's a stigma because they say if you're okay, now Ruby, you're sitting here having you couldn't possibly well herpes comes and goes that's the first direct reference I've heard but yeah I love that um you know so yeah I want a t-shirt that says herpes comes and goes with no explanation so how would you define mental mental illness the the real illness I mean schizophrenia borderline personality depression bipolar how do I say I've had I'm going off again because that's how my brain works.

5:36I do shows for 15 years and in the second half I speak to the audience. I've had a lot of people maybe once a week stand up and go I have cancer I now have depression. I say which is worse. It's always it's always a depression. It's always it is agony. That's why people commit suicide. Yeah of course. Not because they had a lump. Well because it's so isolating. Yeah. In that space. It hurts. It hurts. You want to die. It's a it's pain beyond any pain you could imagine. So the thing the thing that is incredible about what you did with your mental illness is you actually went back and studied about it.

6:12You went to Oxford. I don't know if I mean I think maybe a lot of people do know this but you went to a master's degree in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy back in 2013. I mean you were new to this right? Yeah. 2013. Am I getting that date right? Yeah. Mindfulness now is spoken about a lot a lot more even with nutrition even with things like oh everybody's mindful now people talk a lot about it but back then it wasn't spoken about as much as it is today it was kind of this new emerging area of research did you did understanding how your brain work help you resolve or support your depression or did it not did it kind of any way kind of help you explore that more or do you think that because I think about this with knowledge and food we have so much information now with food and diet and health but some of us still really struggle to do those behaviors right a lot of us can still struggle to eat really well did understanding about the brain and mindfulness help you control your mind in any way shape or form it's not about it's not about control I had gone to every therapist known to man and I became a therapist I was there best thing about you But I was awful because I used to say to people, oh, just cut to the punchline.

7:32Come on, let's just say what we think is in the room. Let's name the elephant. I didn't say that, but that's what I thought. So I never would have the patience. But once I got thrown out of television, I thought I got to find something. So I immediately went to study to be a psychotherapist. But that's not what we're talking about. Do you see how my mind jumps? You've got a lot to say. You've got a lot of lived experience. And I jump. I play jazz out of my mouth rather than a symphony. So I didn't understand depression because not enough money's been thrown at it. So nobody knows depression. If they had thrown as much money to depression as to smallpox, we'd have a cure.

8:15I'm not negating what Bill Gates does or malaria, but I'm just saying there's no money in it. It's not sexy. Well, now it is, because now we're looking at numbers, especially for kids. But I don't understand where depression comes from or where it is in the brain because nobody knows. But I did the mindfulness I caught on because A, you do exactly what we've been talking about. You learn to have distance from your thoughts and that's liberating. Is that I now don't have depression, but depression is in the room. So my whole being isn't anxious. There is anxiety. So it really teaches you to just notice specifically where, you know, there is depression, but I'm not, there's still Ruby.

9:04So once you can make that separation a little bit, I can observe the thoughts rather than be caught in the slip stream of there. And my thoughts are annihilating all the time. It's like machine guns are pointed at me. And this is from childhood. I don't have to keep going and bore everybody senseless about what happened. And I've turned that into comedy. But it doesn't liberate you. I just have the machine guns pointed. So when you have depression, they fire. They start firing at you. But usually, the thoughts are annihilating. So mindfulness gives me a little distance to go, Ruby, it's just a recording.

9:39It's just a recording. It's just a habit that is ingrained that helped you survive. So I can still function behind the annihilation. I mean, there's a bit of me that's adorable. but I didn't know that until I did mindfulness and when I go on retreats like a 30-day silent retreat I can get to that the beginning is the guns are really pointed and they're really trying to show you know how I don't deserve to live but after a week the guns go down on the ground and I become enchanting and colors are really vivid and food tastes delicious because I go back to who I was before the guns. How long does that last for?

10:20Well, if I keep doing, I do it every morning. It's not 100%, otherwise I would be Buddha. But it's, there's moments, let's say when I walk in and I see somebody who scares me, like we were talking about earlier, I can go, it's just the guns, Ruby. It's not you. You have guns pointed from an early, early childhood, but it's not you. there's something quite, you know, innocent about me.