What's Normal Anyway? Celebrities' Own Stories of Mental Illness by Anna Gekoski

the other didn’t, that would swing it, and they sort of did. And we said: ‘Look, you don’t look like a bunch of positive discriminators, but maybe once in a while go the other way and see if you regret it.’ And it’s amazing how many of them thought: ‘Yeah, yeah.’ And I think if they don’t they’ll lose out, as sometimes edgy people can be more creative, they can be harder working. So I would say: don’t allow it to define the totality of your assessment.
    Take when Tony Blair asked me to work for him. We were in France and I basically sat down and, from a proper kind of news perspective, told him all the things in my life that could become a problem if I was really put under the microscope. And a lot of it he knew – he knew I’d had a breakdown – but he didn’t really know how bad it had been, so I told him the whole story. I told him about the voices and the music – and I could see him do one of his: ‘Hmmm, okay’ – and I told him about the paranoia, all the stuff that went through my head. Basically just saying that I did crack under pressure, that’s the truth, and who’s to say it wouldn’t happen again? And he said this thing – which
Time to Change
used in one of their first posters – he said: ‘I’m not bothered if you’re not bothered.’ And I said: ‘What if I’m bothered?’ And he said: ‘I’m still not bothered.’
    There’s not one person on the planet who doesn’t get physically ill from time to time, even the fittest people in the world might get a cold, might get flu, might have backache, or toothache, or earache, or cancer: they might have any number of diseases of the body. So given that the brain is the most complicated, sophisticated part of the body, why do we labour under this illusion that mental health is different? I suppose what I’m saying is that if you’re mentally ill – whether it’s a product of your birth, or a product of your background, a product of the way your life develops – you should see it, and treat it, as no different from physical illness. Some days we have good physical health, some days we have bad physical health. Some days we have good mental health, some days we have bad mental health. We’re all no different. And if you approach it like that, you do what you do when you’re physically ill: you try to find expert help, you get family support, you think about it, you do the things you’re meant to do. And I think if we were all open about mental illness then we would all, not instantly, but over time, benefit. And along the way – because of stigma, because of taboo, because of discrimination – that may mean that, for some people, there may be adverse affects to being open. But over time we will all of us get to a much better place.

STEPHANIE COLE
Actor
    â€˜I just became so anxious about everything. I was a walking jelly. Some anxiety is copeable with, it’s containable – you know, slightly raised heartbeat, breathing, slight nausea, slight over-reaction to loud noises – but in my thirties it wasn’t like that, it was that times a million.’
    S tephanie Cole was born in Warwickshire in 1941 and started her training as an actor at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School at the age of sixteen. Since her stage debut at seventeen, she has had a hugely successful and varied career as a stage, television, radio, and film actor. On the stage she has appeared in West End productions of
Noises Off
,
Steel Magnolias
,
Quartet
, and
A Passionate Woman
. As a television actor she is perhaps best known for her roles in
Tenko
,
Open All Hours
,
Soldiering On
,
Waiting for God
,
Doc Martin
, and
Housewife, 49
. She now stars in
Coronation Street
, where she plays Sylvia Goodwin, for which she won Best Comedy Performance in the 2012 Soap Awards. Stephanie has suffered episodes of