‘I’ve found my life’s purpose’
BASSINgThwAIghTE fINdS rEwArd IN hELpINg CO-SuffErErS Of mENTAL ILLNESS
After nearly 25 years acting, singing and dancing on stage and screen, as well as a chart-topping music career, Natalie Bassingthwaighte has finally found her purpose.
The multi-talented mother-oftwo hosts the new ABC documentary Space 22, which follows seven strangers living with mental illness as they take part in an experiment run by the Black Dog Institute to see if participating in art can help heal their wounds.
Given her background in the arts, not to mention her own struggles with mental health dating back decades, it felt to Bassingthwaighte the gig was something she needed to do and pitched hard to land it.
“After the first day of filming I was so moved and taken aback by the honesty and vulnerability of the participants,” she says from the spacious yard of her home in the Northern Rivers of NSW which she shares with husband Cameron McGlinchey and their two children, Harper and Hendrix. “I rang my husband and said ‘I think I have found my purpose’.
“That’s a big thing to say after a life of lots of different flavours, but I felt like it was so honest and raw and real and I thought it was the culmination of my entire life all coming into this one big spark. I thought, this is where I am supposed to be, this is why I have done what I have done, and this is why I have been through what I have been through.”
Bassingthwaighte opens the six-part series, which also features psychotherapist Noula Diamantopoulos, artist Abdul Abdullah and musician Eddie Perfect, with some candid mental health admissions of her own. She has been dealing with anxiety and depression for most of her career in the spotlight, first in musical theatre, then on Neighbours, and as a singer for ARIA-winning electro-pop act Rogue Traders.
She recalls being mystified by her emotions of overwhelming sadness and feeling “broken”, and went into therapy three times a week while starting medication. Her star rose at a time in the early 2000s when mental health was still very much taboo and she worried that if her issues became public, her career would suffer.
“Life has seemed to be perfect from the outside, and for the most part it has been amazing,” she says. “But it’s also been really hard at times and to try to navigate that
in the public eye can be confronting, and to feel that you don’t want to talk about it because of the stigma and fear around people not employing you and thinking you are crazy. Now I just go ‘I am crazy – that’s part of who I am and part of what makes me fabulous’.”
Bassingthwaighte wishes now that she’d been able to use music as therapy in much the same way
that the participants in Space 22 do, but admits that there were times before going on stage with Rogue Traders that she was almost crippled with fear. “There were times when I was singing in the public eye when I was not in a good way,” she says. “I had to perform and I was just terrified and thought ‘I can’t go out there’. I didn’t think I was very good and I was doubting myself but again, it was just one of those moments in my mental-health brain that wasn’t working.” Things came to a head for Bassingthwaighte about five years ago when she suffered a breakdown after taking herself off her medication without consulting a doctor. She says the ordeal left her feeling like she was “in a vortex” of negativity.
“It was so terrifying and I felt like … if that was going to be my every day forever, I couldn’t do it. It was so hard. I felt like everything around me was negative – like everything. I couldn’t speak to my kids, I couldn’t go anywhere, it was just negative thoughts on top of one another. Anyway, I did all the work, I went back on medication and did all the other work, too.”
And if there was a silver lining, it was that she emerged with a renewed determination to be open about her journey.
Space 22 made such an impression on her that she’s keen to do more to keep the mental health discussion going.
“We put so much pressure on ourselves in certain situations for them to be the be-all and end-all but time goes fast,” she says.
Space 22, May 17, 8pm, ABC
Anyone experiencing distress can contact Lifeline 13 11 14, Kids Helpline 1800 55 1800 or Head to Health headtohealth.gov.au