By ALASTAIR CAMPBELL
VISITING my brother Donald in hospital when he was first d i a g n o s e d with schizophrenia was one of the most traumatic days of my life.
And I know it was thereafter that my own drinking habit reached dangerous proportions.
The day he died last week I faced yet another trauma.
And as I saw him lying there, bruised, a bit discoloured, I felt as sad as I have ever felt in my life.
But I also thought: “At least he never has to hear those wretched voices in his head again, caused by his illness.” He really was at peace. Above all I thought he was the best big brother anyone could wish for; and every single person ever touched by him had a better life, because he was a part of it.
I am determined to stay strong – for him and his memory. And for other people dealing with their own battles against such cruel mental health problems.
The Government has talked a good game on mental health but there is a shortage of beds and too many people living on the streets who need to be in hospital.
This is the time to make the change. But for now, I am grieving.
“Grief is the price we pay for love.” So said The Queen, after the attacks of September 11, 2001.
It is so true. And the intense grief I and many others feel right now underlines how much love my eldest brother inspired in us.
Like most of us, I have known grief before. I have lost both my parents. Aunts and uncles. A muchloved cousin who took his own life. I have lost too many friends too young.
University friend Mark Gault. My best friend in journalism, Mirror colleague John Merritt. My best friend in politics, Philip Gould. The man who was my boss at the Mirror and also edited my diaries, Richard Stott.
I loved them all, and grieved. But this is different. Donald was my brother and very, very special.
I have long talked about my own issues of depression in the work I do for the Time to Change campaign to end mental health discrimination. I have not talked about Donald till now because our mother didn’t want me to.
She worried about the impact on him. But he was the real reason I got involved in all this.
Because Donald didn’t always know he was so special. He didn’t do very well at school, didn’t go to university, didn’t make much money. He had a wife, briefly.
But to me, Donald was the real star of Clan Campbell. Because his achievements were all in defiance of the most awful illness on the planet, schizophrenia.
A top musician, he turned his love of bagpipes into a career, first in the Scots Guards, then as a performer, competitor, composer, teacher and official piper to the Principal of Glasgow University.
He worked for the university, mainly in the library, for 27 years. They knew about his issues. Knew he might go haywire occasionally. Might need spells in hospital. Might cause the odd incident at work. But he was not, to them, “a schizophrenic”. He was an employee who had schizophrenia. We were planning a documentary about him, The Happy Schizophrenic. But in the last few months his health deteriorated – years of smoking didn’t help – and the effect of 40 years of anti- psychotic drugs battered his ability to deal with them. Something had to give and, like so many with schizophrenia, he lost 20 years of his life. He never complained; he had only good to say of the Army, despite it deciding after diagnosis that he could no longer serve. I never heard him say “why me?” or Tony Blair’s former spin doctor and ex-Mirror journalist Alastair Campbell lost his big brother, Donald, 62, last week after a battle with schizophrenia. Here, he tells of his grief, the impact Donald’s illness had on his own mental health and finally seeing his brother at peace.
“it’s not fair.” I did, plenty of times. He didn’t. “It is what it is, Ali. Got to get on with it.”
His death makes me yet more determined to fight for better funding, services, treatments and understanding for mental illness.
Though Donald had a good life, and a lot of happiness, schizophrenia is at the “really bad” end of the scale. It is not a “split personality,” that awful cliché.
With schizophrenia the mind’s workings become separated from the reality around you. And it can be terrifying. A cacophony of voices in your head, screaming, telling you to do things you normally know you shouldn’t.
Plugs, sockets, light switches
talking to you. In a crowd, every word said is about you. On TV, everyone is talking about you.
Then snakes come out of the floor and animals charge through the walls. Donald had all that and more when he was in crisis.
So imagine the strength of character it takes to deal with that in a way that had so many people love him – the real him – so much.
It’s an achievement of epic proportions. And why we are grieving with such pride at a life well lived but all too short.
Alastair Campbell is an ambassador for Time to Change, Mind and Rethink, and patron of Maytree suicide sanctuary.
Using unique insights from tens of thousands who raise their flight delay complaints via
every month, I’ve looked at which airlines drew most complaints this year and what you can do when things go pear-shaped. Ryanair British Airways Thomson Airways easyJet Thomas Cook Airlines Flybe Jet2 Norwegian Air Vueling Airlines Monarch
Rule 1: The flight must be delayed by more than three hours and the delay has to be compared to the time the flight is meant to arrive and not the time that it takes off.
Arrival is the point at which the cabin crew open the doors.
Rule 2: The flight must take off from the UK or European Union. If it’s a long-haul flight into the UK/EU, it must be via a UK or European airline and the flight must be longer than 2,172 miles.
Rule 3: The issue must be “within the control of the airline” – so tough luck if it is down to bad weather or industrial disputes.