‘FOOD HELPS ME KEEP THE BLUES AT BAY’

Searching for solutions after two crippling breakdowns, RACHEL KELLY discovered that food is one of the keys to managing her anxiety. She tells Margarette Driscoll how mood-boosting recipes help her stay calm and well

After two crippling breakdowns writer Rachel Kelly discovered that food is the key ot helping her stay calm (see her mood-food recipes on page 44)

IT’Sno surprise that a child should cry at the end of Tarka the Otter, but Rachel Kelly just could not stop. She cried through the night and was still crying the next day, which so alarmed her mother that she called in the family doctor. It may have been no more than the overwrought reaction of a sensitive nine-year- old, but in retrospect it seems like a portent.

Dr Ross was called to Rachel’s bedside again when she was in a state of acute distress more than 20 years later: by then, she was 31 and the mother of two small children, with an Oxford degree, a glittering career as a writer at The Times, an adoring husband – and a mind in disarray.

That evening, she remembers bathing her sons, Edward, then two, and three-month-old George, and kissing their tummies as she dried them. Then, an ‘ordinary night’ turned unfamiliar. ‘My heart rate sped up, I began to feel sick and had this slightly psychedelic feeling of observing myself, starting to feel split. I remember thinking, “What’s going on?” and panicking,’ she says.

‘I can see now there was a trigger, but it seems ridiculous. My husband Sebastian [investment banker Sebastian Grigg] had been getting up in the night if George woke up and it was my turn to be in charge. I felt overwhelmed, worried I wouldn’t be able to cope. It’s silly because I’d done it before, but all this anxiety started welling up and kept getting worse. The more I worried about feeling anxious, the more anxious I got, and I began to feel seriously unwell.’

Three days later, Rachel was in a psychiatric unit, clutching at her mother’s hand, screaming and pleading to be allowed to die. It was the first of two serious breakdowns (the second, seven years later, left her bedridden for a year) that have become ‘the defining episodes of my life’.

All of which is very difficult to imagine, sitting in Rachel’s beautiful, tranquil kitchen in London’s Holland Park – the ‘happy kitchen’ where she has regained her equilibrium and cooked up a recipe for serenity. It’s a bleakly grey day, warmed by the oven – which gives off a delicious aroma of chocolate brownies – and the glow from her cupboards. ‘They used to be a tasteful green but I repainted them bright pink as it’s so cheerful.’

In the throes of both breakdowns she was given tranquillisers to calm her down, then antidepressants to keep her fluctuating moods in control. Over the years, not wanting to become dependent on tablets (nor suffer the side-effects, such as weight gain), she has tried therapy, poetry, meditation, exercise and a raft of tiny adjustments to her everyday life (such as

trying to smile even when she doesn’t feel happy) in an effort to establish what really does alter or improve her mood.

Now she wants to share a powerful and gloriously simple answer she has discovered that tops them all: food. Her new book, The Happy Kitchen: Good Mood Food (co-authored with nutritional therapist Alice Mackintosh), synthesises more than 100 nutritional studies and is a treasure trove of good sense and tasty recipes aimed at making you feel more relaxed, balanced and good-humoured, whether you have a tendency towards being down or just feel overrun by the relentlessness of life.

So your New Year’s resolution can be to eat yourself calm: The Happy Kitchen includes recipes to enhance your mental clarity, beat the blues, boost your energy and help you sleep. ‘My experience taught me that when you are anxious, it can have a physical effect on you. Now I feel calm and well, but I have experienced not feeling so,’ Rachel says. ‘It’s the same with nutrition. I’ve experienced the effects of changing my diet, so I get it, I know it works.’

Sipping camomile tea, she says, can induce a feeling of calm. Rachel also refers to nutritional research which suggests that saffron may have a similar antidepressant effect to Prozac for those suffering mild depression: she herself finds it wonderfully calming. Reaching for a doughnut when you are tired is counterproductive, she learned, because science shows that a sudden spike in blood sugar can trigger anxiety. Many of the neurotransmitters that communicate information around the body and brain are made in the gut, including 90 per cent of our feel-good hormone serotonin, as well as dopamine and melatonin, which is important for sleep.

Today, scientists are discovering that there may be links between gut microbiota and anxiety-related behaviours as well as many other illnesses. Given the inseparability of good mental and good physical health, looking after our digestive systems should be a priority for all of us. ‘I was riveted when I learned that it is not solely our brains that control our bodies,’ says Rachel. ‘No wonder we talk about “gut feelings.”’

Rachel’s interest in food as more than physical fuel or a way to celebrate special occasions was heightened by a routine visit to her GP. The doctor scribbled down a list of foods reputed to promote feelings of wellbeing – green, leafy vegetables, dark chocolate, oily fish – and she began to include more of them in her diet. The power of food had already been brought home to her when she took one of her sons, who was suffering from eczema, to the Food Doctor clinic, then in West London. ‘It was fascinating to see how changing his diet – including reducing dairy and wheat – helped to calm his symptoms,’ she says.

And it’s not only changing what she eats that has helped Rachel find a happier balance: the very act of cooking is soothing, she says. ‘I am reassured by its rituals: weighing out the ingredients, chopping the vegetables, whisking, beating, folding, slicing… A joyful kitchen can calm me as much as the food itself.’

Much of the worktop in her rose-painted kitchen is cluttered with bottles and jars, giving it the feel of a laboratory where she has devised and tested her recipes. Rachel sits at the end of the long, wooden table, hair ruffled and glasses slightly askew, talking as if she can’t get the words out fast enough and looking much as she must have done as a teenager at the prestigious St Paul’s Girls’ School, though she is now 51 and has five children aged 13 to 21.

A colleague who worked with her on The Times all those years ago – before the first breakdown – remembers her as ‘the sunniest girl on the planet’. It has taken years of medication, therapy and slog to regain the person she once was, though she says, ‘I don’t regret what has happened. People tell you mental illness is debilitating and serious, but it’s only when you experience it that you understand. It’s like travelling to a foreign country where few people you know have been. I am well, but I still know that country. In a way I feel lucky because I’ve had a rewarding few years as a result of what happened and am now able to share what I’ve learnt.’

No one was more surprised than Rachel herself by her breakdowns, which she chronicled movingly in her memoir Black Rainbow. She said later that she had thought of mental illness as something that happened to those who were less lucky than her. What right had she, a cosseted member of the so-called Notting Hill set (her husband stands next to David Cameron in the notorious Bullingdon Club photo), to feel despair? ‘Everyone around me was stunned,’ she says. ‘Even I sometimes wonder what really happened. When very dramatic things occur in your life you’re like an actor playing a part. My breakdown seemed to come out of nowhere and brought with it the understanding that a privileged life doesn’t necessarily mean good health.’

Looking back, Rachel realised there had been a number of moments when her tendency towards anxiety could have turned into something more serious, but she had always managed to ‘right the ship’ just in time. At St Paul’s she was an ‘anxious striver’ who put intense pressure on herself to compete and excel academically. At Oxford, that pressure intensified. ‘There is no doubt I was driven and hardworking, but I was also collecting brand names – St Paul’s, Oxford, The Times – looking for affirmation, wanting to be good enough. I was part of a generation of women who felt they really were going to have it all – we were going to make it in the workplace, we were going to have families. We didn’t envisage any problems on the road ahead, we thought we were going to manage the job and have children and keep our marriages going. We took it all on in quite a spirited and optimistic way.’

The reality was long hours, exhaustion and snatched conversations in the ladies with other mothers about the torment of leaving the children every day. ‘No one was talking about work-life balance back then. A newsroom is a very exciting but stressful place. I always had the sense I could be called by the night desk, so I was forever on high alert, even at home. I suffered periods of insomnia but I thought everyone did. I had no idea what it could morph into.’

A few months after her first breakdown, Rachel went back to work as if nothing had happened. It was just before the birth of her third child, Katherine, that she conceded that travelling across London to the office every day was too much, and went freelance. But she was still working hard and the relentless need to achieve was mirrored in her social life, surrounded by friends who were publishing books, making films and getting elected to parliament. (Boris Johnson, who recited an ode he had composed to Rachel at one of her book launches, is a childhood friend and another of her husband’s Bullingdon set.) Meanwhile Sebastian

I was riveted when I learned that it is not solely our brains that control our bodies. No wonder we talk about ‘gut feelings’

(whom she’d known since she was 17, although they didn’t get together until they’d left Oxford) continued to work long hours as a junior banker at Goldman Sachs.

Their parties became leading social events – with guests including MPs, writers and actors – and Rachel was the perfect hostess. It is probably no accident that her second breakdown happened at their Christmas party in 2003. Earlier that year, without consulting her husband, Rachel had decided she wanted a fourth child. Though she had been ill after the birth of her second child George, Katherine’s birth and babyhood had been joyful. However, having missed much of Edward and George’s early years due to work and illness, Rachel was keen to have another go.

The baby she longed for turned out to be twins, Arthur and Charlotte, now 13. Her tiny frame was so overburdened by carrying two babies that she spent the final months of the pregnancy in a wheelchair. The twins were born in October. Rachel was determined to keep up the public façade while trying to cope with the demands of five small children – insanely stressful, some might think. Wanting to be the ‘perfect wife’, when Sebastian said she looked tired, Rachel insisted they go to Paris for the weekend, where she spent all night weeping in the hotel bathroom.

On their return, she proceeded with their high-octane Christmas party. She soon fled, overwhelmed by the pressure. Sebastian put her to bed, where she stayed for most of the following year.

That anxious, overachieving Rachel is still there, ‘but I think I have grown another personality, too, and that has helped,’ she says. We can have several selves, she explains, and her calmer self can observe and stand hand in hand with her anxious, frightened self. The parties have been scaled down to family events and she now combines writing with volunteering at a local prison and running workshops for a local mental health group, in which she helps people to use poetry as a solace and to explore their emotions: ‘I am a huge believer in the power of consoling words,’ she says. ‘It links to food: everything I’ve learned is about nourishing body and soul.’ Helping others is also known to boost your own mental health. ‘That is certainly true for me,’ she says, ‘and having suffered myself has given me a sense, in a tiny way, of what others go through.’

Life still isn’t simple: she has joined the ‘sandwich generation’, with both elderly parents and teenagers to look after. ‘Big children, bigger problems,’ she says. ‘The job market, exam stress, problems at school. It can sometimes feel very demanding.’ But there are no easy answers for any of us in this busy world, just what Rachel calls her ‘salad bowl’ of ideas – poetry, meditation, eating well – that might stave off the blues and get us through the day. Research shows that antidepressants work for around one-third of people on first prescription, for another third after a few months of trial and error, and for the final third they don’t work at all. The growing importance of nutrition as a key to good mental health is perhaps most relevant to this group. In the past, mental illness was thought to be caused by a chemical imbalance in the mind and low levels of serotonin in particular.

Now a more nuanced view is that anxiety and depression are not just about the biology of the brain, but about the body as a whole. One exciting new explanation that scientists are investigating is that those who suffer from low mood may also suffer from inflammation. A well-functioning digestive system could be one part of the answer. Processed foods and trans fats increase inflammation, as well as creating more fatty or adipose tissue which is also a source of inflammation. Stress is to blame, too: for example, studies show that if mice are stressed, it prompts a stressed digestive system. In The Happy Kitchen, Rachel explains how to nourish a healthy gut, chiefly by increasing the amount of healthy gut bacteria, as well as upping the amount of fish oil we consume, which has a powerful anti-inflammatory effect.

The key to a healthy mind and body is looking after yourself: eating yourself happy might just be the way to start.

I am reassured by the rituals of cooking: weighing, chopping, whisking, folding

Rachel and husband Sebastian