It’s brave to talk about psychosis, but did David ignore the obvious?
Case study: a young man smokes powerful cannabis repeatedly and experiences weeks of hallucinations, followed by a psychotic breakdown. He does it again, with the same disturbing effects.
Why did he behave this way? The patient, David Harewood, was a young black actor in the late eighties who felt audiences saw only his skin colour. He blamed the stress of this, and of living away from home for the first time, for the fact that he had to be sectioned in a mental hospital.
Documentaries such as Psychosis And Me (BBC2) are rightly praised for their bravery. The previous instalment in this series — Nadiya Hussain’s attempt to confront the demons behind her panic attacks, which aired two nights ago — was truthful and raw.
But everyone Harewood met seemed as determined as he was to blame everything but the cannabis for his mental collapse 30 years ago. He even included bad theatre reviews among the pressures that tipped him over the edge and left him wandering London’s streets at 3am, convinced he was on a mission from Martin Luther King.
Only his mother was prepared to identify illegal drug abuse as the underlying cause. Talking about
the reasons for his second disintegration, she said with weary forgiveness: ‘You smoked something.’
It might be, of course, that cannabis had nothing to do with Harewood’s illness — just a coincidence that he was, by his own admission, smoking it every night after graduating from theatre school. We have no way of knowing, because none of the doctors and psychologists he met offered any insights or statistics.
He provided vivid descriptions of the hallucinatory voices that plagued him, and some of his ordeals were recalled with filmic clarity — such as the moment he was seized and sat upon by six policemen when he reported to a hospital.
Harewood genuinely appeared to want to understand what had happened to him. For 30 years, as his career took off and he starred in TV hits such as Homeland, friends and family tried never to refer to the episode. It was an embarrassment and he deserves great credit for hauling it out into the open. But the programme was greatly diminished by its failure to examine what must have been a possible factor in his illness.
The most vivid depiction of a mental breakdown in art is edvard Munch’s The scream. everyone knows the image of a skull-headed figure on a bridge, surrounded by swirling colours like a migraine, shrieking into the void.
But what few realise, and I certainly didn’t, is that The scream was created as the last of a loose series of about two dozen paintings called The Frieze Of Life.
Great Art (ITV) put the work into its proper context, as the culmination of pictures showing love affairs, break-ups and bouts of loneliness.
It’s like the final scene in a movie — and not a happy one. That’s hardly surprising: apparently young edvard was such a morbid child that he imagined that two angels, Fear and Death, followed him everywhere and even sat by his bed at night.
These educational, thoughtful programmes air much too late. Without jargon or pretension, they explain the big ideas behind masterpieces, supply a potted biography of the artist and give us plenty of time to admire the art.
We’ve all heard how Vincent van Gogh cut off his left ear for love . . . but I didn’t know Munch was shot in his left hand by a jealous lover. It’s tough being a genius.
DESPERATE DATERS OF THE NIGHT: The potty-mouthed pizza sitcom Sliced (Dave channel) sent its characters to a posh restaurant for a romantic evening, and even had the Cupid wine waiter from First Dates behind the bar. Scabrous, filthy, but funny.