I accept depression is part of who I am
FORMER SPIN DOCTOR ALASTAIR CAMPBELL TALKS TO LUKE RIX-STANDING ABOUT HIS LONGSTANDING STRUGGLES WITH MENTAL HEALTH AND THE STEPS HE HAS TAKEN TO MANAGE THEM
FOLLOWERS of Alastair Campbell’s career will already know he has mental health issues. In 1986, while working as a political journalist, he suffered a psychotic episode in the middle of the Scottish Labour Party Conference. After a night of heavy drinking he found himself standing in the foyer “enveloped in a kaleidoscope of sound” – some of it real, some not.
Though treatment helped him kick his alcohol abuse, deeper problems remained. During his years in Government they bubbled beneath the surface before returning with a vengeance when he (nominally) left politics.
A nadir came during a walk, when a particularly punitive depression left Alastair hitting himself in the face. It was also a turning point: “Even as I was punching myself,” he remembers, “I was saying to myself, ‘ You have to get some help.”’
Since then his mental health campaigning has pushed his problems into the public eye, but his family history with mental illness is less well-known. Older brother Graeme lived a self-destructive life, and lost both his legs – “one for the booze and one for the fags” – before dying prematurely. Oldest brother Donald “loved people and loved life,” but suffered from severe schizophrenia.
Both siblings were 62 when they died – Alastair’s age when he started writing Living Better, his new book on living with depression. He’s now 63. The book is an attempt to rationalise and utilise this journey.
You might think the pages would have been tough to write, but Alastair found the experience cathartic, even agreeable. “I’ve never shied away from talking about this stuff,” he says, “and I like writing about mental health. The only difficult bit was writing about family members.”
His current mental state is “generally good”, but depression is a beast he’s learned to live with rather than conquer. “I accept the depression is part of who I am,” he says, “and that requires me to put in place things to help me stave it off.”
When it does come, it’s “a dark grey cloud... that fills me with dread”, Alastair says, though he admits it’s difficult to describe it accurately.
In print and in person Alastair is characteristically solutions-based, and he spends the book’s latter half marshalling a dizzying array of tools and coping mechanisms.
He’s tried all sorts: mindfulness, gratitude lists, a best-worst log, dream diaries. Indeed, just about the only thing he hasn’t tried is the so-called ‘croft plan’ – a pet project of his psychiatrist’s that would see him live in an attic for a month with zero contact with the outside world.
He laughs when it’s brought up: “I saw [my psychiatrist] two days ago, and he said, ‘So, are we ready for the croft yet?’ He really swears by it, but no, I’m not.”
Most useful was the so-called ‘jam jar’ – an imagined container that holds all the different aspects of his life, and helps him work through them. His most frequent ally is his ‘depression scale’, a one to 10 rating he gives himself every morning, to assess his prospects for the day ahead. Two is full of the joys of spring. Seven is “the signal to cancel meetings, stay indoors, avoid people”. Eight means stay in bed.
Alastair has hit nine on several occasions, but 10 is “out of bounds”.
Now a seasoned mental health campaigner, strangers sometimes stop Alastair in the street to ask his advice. “I’m not a doctor, I’m a spin doctor,” he tells them, but he does pass on practical suggestions and, if possible, puts them in touch with suitable professionals.
For those that last saw him stalking the corridors of Downing Street and savaging opponents on Newsnight, this more intimate portrait of Alastair may seem difficult to reconcile.
The intense pressure of his job seemed a buffer against, and catalyst for, his problems. “I can never tell why a depressive episode comes on,” he says, “but I can see why people might see top level politics as a laboratory for psychiatric struggle.”
Alastair has long argued against public cynicism about Government, but he’s currently finding it hard to practise what he’s preached. He found lockdown tolerable, but hated watching the news.
“My daughter found me watching TV one afternoon when I was a bit low. She said, ‘Dad, what are you doing, that’s self harm’. I said, ‘I’m watching Matt Hancock’s briefing’. She said, ‘Exactly’.”
He’d certainly make some changes if his hands were on the levers of policy – reforming the Mental
Health Act, for starters, and investing heavily in child mental health services – but he’d like to see shifts across society.
He’s adamant about the power of language, and the differences between how we discuss mental and physical conditions. “I remember talking to one of [my brother] Donald’s doctors,” he says, “and he said one of the hardest things when someone is diagnosed with schizophrenia is stripping all the things the family think it means.”
‘Committing suicide’ is another bugbear, as, he points out, the phrase dates from when suicide was a crime. “You don’t say, ‘He committed influenza,’ or, ‘He committed a broken leg’.”
There has been some progress – “people talk about it more, and there is less stigma” – but Alastair is clear there is “a long, long way to go”.
Through it all his partner, journalist and campaigner Fiona Millar, has been at his side, enduring difficulties Alastair admits many would not. He describes her role as “absolutely fundamental” and she gets the final word by writing a postscript, detailing firsthand his workaholism, demonic energy, and bouts of depression.
She writes that she is frequently and inevitably asked what it’s like living with Alastair Campbell. “Bl**dy difficult,” she replies, “but never boring.”
Living Better: How I Learned To Survive Depression by Alastair Campbell, is published by John Murray, priced £16.99.