Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
After I was sectioned and sent to the hospital saw William Shakespeare reciting his works to me
, which David promptly binned. Still aving erratically David reached the nt where the authorities believed he ded to be sectioned under the Mental Health Act for his own safety. “I got to the stage where my behaviour was deemed to be, I wouldn’t say dangerous, but I didn’t really care.”
David spent an indeterminate l at the psychiatric ward at Whitton Hospital in Archway, North don. “I remember bits of it,” he says, member friends coming to see me the odd moment of lucidity but I very heavily sedated. Most of it I was ep for, to be honest.” itially delusional and unaware of his mental condition David was bemused by his new surroundings.
“I had absolutely no idea where I was or why I was there or how long I was in there. I can remember at one point thinking, ‘Why can’t I get out of these doors?’ I can remember trying to get out and thinking, ‘Why are these doors locked?’ and then people coming towards me and helping me back into bed. And I was thinking, ‘Why can’t I go home?’ and just being very confused.
“I didn’t really know where I was and why I was there. And in the 30 years since no one has actually been able to tell me exactly what happened.”
David hopes to banish his sense of psychological amnesia by exploring the frightening episode in greater detail in a documentary he’s filming for the BBC called David Harewood: My Psychosis and Me. “It’s been a fascinating journey so far and I’m talking to all the medics and doctors and people involved at the time and trying to put dates to events and what I’m already realising is that it was probably happening for a lot longer than I had realised.”
One memory still fresh in his mind is where his sense of reality was so distorted he believed that William Shakespeare was reciting lines to him as he lay watching in his hospital bed.
“I remember just lying there and I heard somebody talking Shakespeare and even in my drug-addled brain I thought, ‘I recognise that.’ And I sat up and looked for him, and looked around and he was wandering the ward. And I’m sure it was, it was Shakespeare. And for some reason it made me feel better.
“It comforted me because I didn’t know who I was. But I knew Shakespeare when I heard it. Then I remember drifting off to sleep thinking, ‘No, it’s OK, everything’s OK, I’m all right,’
did feel stronger and I can’t ever see that happening to me again,” says David. “Maybe something needed to break in order for me to kind of put myself back together. I’ve never had a repeat of that and I don’t ever intend to have a repeat of it.
“I’m very lucky that I’m in a profession where you get to live 1,000 different lives so I can use all this experience, which is why I’ve never felt stigmatised by it.
“In a strange way I’ve almost seen it as a badge of honour. I mean how many people go crazy? How many people get the chance to go have a breakdown and then go on to play the head of the CIA or some of the greatest roles in Shakespeare?
“Having a mental health problem is not a death sentence. You can bounce back. You can find help, whether it’s through therapy or hard work, or other means of assistance, but these things can be overcome so it’s so important that we encourage people to seek help before things reach a crisis point.”
David is hoping that the green ribbon he’s wearing to symbolise Mental Health Awareness eventually becomes as synonymous with the cause as the red poppy is for Remembrance Day.
Plenty of other celebrities have posted selfies wearing the ribbon, among them actresses Olivia Colman and Samantha Womack. “As an ambassador of mental health I would urge the authorities to ramp up all forms of advertising around mental health and publicise contact numbers to make it easier for people. There’s a lot more help out there, but as a society we need to start taking more care of each other.” Order your green ribbon to raise awareness and support good mental health for all from The Mental Health Foundation at: mentalhealth. org.uk/green-ribbonpin-badges