‘You take shards of yourself into mania and into psychosis that don’t crumble, that aren’t overpowered’
Travel writer Horatio Clare, whose new book tells the story of his journey into mental breakdown, talks to Rory Sullivan
In his latest book Heavy Light, the travel writer Horatio Clare describes his mental breakdown and explains how, after being sectioned, he slowly came to be healed. Clare’s family and friends play an important role in the journey, a supportive presence both throughout the worst of his illness and following his discharge from a locked hospital ward in Wakefield.
From his home in Yorkshire, he tells me how enormously grateful he is to them all. “You feel like you’ve run up a debt that you can never repay. And the book is an attempt to resettle that to an extent,” he says.
His unforgettable memoir, dedicated to his partner Rebecca, begins at Manchester airport as he and his family embark on a trip to Italy. All is not well, as Clare has recently been yo-yoing around the country publicising his two books, Something of his Art and The Light in the Dark, and dealing with the stress through a combination of alcohol and cannabis. Things unravel further when they arrive in the Dolomites, where he becomes detached from reality, his actions in thrall to hypomania.
Under the delusion that he has to save the planet, every exchange takes on a hidden meaning: even his choice of food turns into a challenge to appease different world powers.
Owing to his worsening illness, Clare’s behaviour turns ever more erratic back in England and he moves out of the family home, away from Rebecca, their five-year-old son and his stepson Robin. He grows exhausted by the “plots and counterplots” conjured by his mind, which include the belief that he will be assassinated at a friend’s house.
Despite check-ups, he manages to talk his way out of being admitted to hospital. But finally, after attempting to roll his car into a reservoir and getting into trouble with the police, he is transported to Wakefield Hospital under Section 2 of the Mental Health Act.
Recalling these events today, Clare says it is not his behaviour that hurts the most. “It’s the pain it caused my family and friends – dreadful.”
Following his arrival, Clare is unable to leave the confines of the ward for four days. Then he goes to the gym, a short walk across the tarmac, for some supervised exercise. He recalls it as a delightful taste of freedom. “Suddenly there’s a sparrow and a goldfinch. It was like I’d been buried and unburied, climbing out,” he tells me.
Clare loves the outdoors and writes about nature providing respite during his breakdown, including when he spotted a goshawk in Wales on the mountain where he grew up. “You take shards of yourself into mania and into psychosis that don’t crumble, that aren’t overpowered,” he explains.
In the book, Clare vividly describes the effects of an antipsychotic pill. “I half-sleep as if in a storm, drenched and plunging through sweat and rushing, falling sensations, awaking feverish, going under again,” he writes. Later, when given the choice of three drugs, he is horrified by their potential side effects. He chooses aripiprazole, which he later stops taking, convinced that the answer, for him, lies in therapy and not pills.
Heavy Light isn’t the first book in which Clare has confronted his mental health issues. In The Light in the Dark, published in late 2018, he detailed his struggles with seasonal affective disorder (SAD) during the particularly cold and dark winter of 2017/18, while at the same time describing the minute changes in the natural world he observed around his home in the north of England, as the light slowly faded and then returned again. And in spite of the fact that he struggles to cope with living in dark, northerly latitudes, he also seems strangely drawn to them. His 2017 book Icebreaker was an account of a period spent on board a ship clearing channels through pack ice in the Gulf of Bothnia between Finland and Sweden.
While the first half of Heavy Light focuses on his period of mania and his 23 days in hospital, the second investigates how acute mental health crises are treated in the UK. As part of his recovery, Clare speaks to people involved in his story, including the social worker who sectioned him and one of the nurses who cared for him.
He also talks to a consultant psychiatrist and other experienced professionals about “deprescribing”, and looks at increasingly popular treatments such as Open Dialogue, a drug-free approach pioneered in Finland. He hopes these will soon become widely available. “It will happen; I can’t believe that in 40 years our mental-health services will look anything like they do now,” he says.
As well as regular sessions with a therapist, a work trip to South America was a landmark moment in his recuperation, a journey that allowed him to return to travel writing. Lockdown, with its absence of travel, has therefore been fairly tough for Clare. However, he is brimming with future plans. How does he envisage his next trip?
“I’d want to go overland by train and we’d definitely be heading south,” he says.
Heavy Light: A Journey Through Madness, Mania and Healing is published by Chatto & Windus, at £16.99