On The Cover Nicky Campbell “My Dog Changed My Life”
Golden lab Maxwell was Nicky’s lifeline when bipolar disorder had brought him to breakdown
Long Lost Family presenter Nicky Campbell explains how his dog helped him through a mental health crisis…
When Nicky Campbell got the shock news in 2011 that he had bipolar disorder, he started taking medication and sought help from his therapist, but Nicky’s therapist wasn’t the traditional kind.
“I have a therapist and you can hear him barking in the background,” chuckles Nicky, 59, down the phone from his London home. He’s referring to his 12-year-old Labrador, Maxwell. “With him I don’t have to articulate anything and that’s why dogs are so amazing – it’s unspoken, it’s understood, it’s not mentioned – it doesn’t have to be.
“Dogs have incredible empathy – they know when stuff’s wrong because in the wolf pack they have to scent the hormones and know how other members are feeling in order to function as a pack. Dogs still have that ability.”
Maxwell and Nicky’s beloved childhood dog Candy feature heavily in Nicky’s new book about his adoption and diagnosis of bipolar disorder, which came after a breakdown had left him in despair.
Nicky is well known as the presenter of WheelofFortune and Watchdog and for his Radio 5 Live breakfast show and Sunday morning BBC1 series, TheBigQuestion. As co-presenter of LongLost Family for the past decade, Nicky has delved into others’ adoptions as he and Davina McCall reunite long lost family members. He’s shared his own adoption story many times
– as an infant he was adopted by Frank and Sheila Campbell of Edinburgh, a brother for their daughter, Fiona.
Yet no matter how much his adoptive parents loved him, Nicky was unable to escape his past. He finally met his birth mother, Stella Lackey, an Irish nurse from Dublin, in 1990 after hiring a private detective to track her down. After meeting her,
Nicky discovered from a newfound Irish cousin that Stella had fought a lifelong battle with manic depression – now called bipolar disorder. He never thought much about it until his own diagnosis over two decades later.
He didn’t look like Stella and had felt little emotional connection to her, but there was no getting away from their genetic connection.
“It’s definitely an irony, but I suppose the question is, would I want not to have it?” he muses today. “It’s affected me and made life so difficult at times. But it’s given me a lot of focus and intensity in life that have helped me. It is me.”
Although Nicky is able to embrace his inherited condition now, he endured years of difficulty and tumult – and a breakdown – before his condition was diagnosed and he got treatment. In adulthood he had developed an interest in the issues of animal cruelty and litter louts, but they began to preoccupy him to an unhealthy extent.
“They became the be-alland end-all and I felt I had to solve these problems,” explains Nicky. “When it came to animal cruelty, I opened myself up to immense horror and torture. For hours and hours, I’d sit online looking at
“AFTER I GOT MEDICATION, I REALISED THAT THE WAY I’D BEHAVED WASN’T NORMAL”
images of dead animals and films of cruelty that will never leave me. It destroyed me.”
Nicky’s wife, Tina, and their daughters (Breagha, now 22, Lila, 20, Kirsty, 19, and Isla,
17) would be perplexed when he’d come downstairs and share the horrific images with them, then disappear to look at more.
“I’d have to spend a couple of days in bed after that, then get up and do the radio show and go back to bed.”
When it came to the litter louts, Nicky would chase them across the local common or collect their discarded receipts with a view to revisiting the shops and viewing the CCTV.
Eventually his obsession was so intense, Tina persuaded him to see his GP, who sent him to a psychiatrist. “Tina had been aware of myy interests for years, but she realised when it had got out of control.
“When the psychiatrist said it was bipolar disorder, it was a huge relief – it explained a lot. I’d thought mental health problems were what other people had. Then I got on medication and things calmed down, I realised that the way I’d behaved wasn’t normal.”
Now Nicky’s highs and lows are far less severe and he can have perspective on the issues that used to consume him. Through it all, Maxwell has been at his side. “Having Maxwell, an animal that I had saved, was a lifeline for me,” says Nicky. “And he’s always understood. I believe dogs bring out the best in us.”