Am I bipolar? I'm in two minds...

Comedian and bipolar sufferer Tony Slattery's recent death is a reminder the condition's no joke

Mind-bender. [Image: Mindworld.]

Over aerial shots of Hollywood the voiceover says, ‘You don’t have to be gay or Jewish to get on here – just bipolar.’ The quote comes from a Tinseltown producer, and the voice is that of Stephen Fry.

Sorry, Sir Stephen Fry – I beg his ‘creepy, arse-licking pardon’. Don’t cancel me – I’m only quoting Fry back to himself talking about the [Royal] National Theatre in the guise of a – presumably republican – narrator in his book The Hippopotamus.

Fry voiced the BBC documentary The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive. The condition, which describes wide chronic mood swings, is more commonly known now as bipolar disorder.

Writers Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath both seem to have had the condition, although Plath was diagnosed with depression, rather than its manic variant. When it comes to diagnoses, the past is a different country.

And while Tony Slattery’s immediate cause of death was a heart attack, it seems likely to have been as a direct result of the mental health condition.

And Stephen Fry is another sufferer. Sorry, Sir Stephen.

And me?

Some times I think I have it, though most of the time not. A kind of bipolar bipolarity.

Trust me to be different.

I made a mental note that night that Slattery was ‘one to watch’. And I did watch him, along with millions of other viewers of Whose Line is it Anyway?

Diagnosis. Or biagnosis? Or dire-agnosis?

My ears pricked up one day listening to mental-health show All in the Mind on BBC Radio 4. Presenter Claudia Hammond was saying how bipolar sufferers were on average having to wait nine and a half years for a diagnosis.

For once it’s not simply the old story of an underfunded National Health Service (NHS, for readers outside the UK). Nye Bevan’s baby often has its mental health provision described as a ‘Cinderella service’.

What gets me about that image is Cinders eventually got to go to the ball, while I’ve been waiting for a diagnosis for…[drum roll]…forty-two years and counting.

And not a bloody slipper in sight!

It’s not just underfunding because a big part of the delay in diagnosis is sufferers not presenting to their doctor when they’re on a high. Why spoil what feels like a good thing? Until you come crashing down… And then the doctor diagnoses you with depression, because they don’t see the other half of your mood cycle.

Not so much a Catch-22. More a Catch-11.

I was given a vague second-hand diagnosis in 1982 as part of the fallout from a catastrophic life event in my teens, which led to an extreme psychotic breakdown. At the hospital I asked if I was schizophrenic (though I barely knew what the term meant) and I was told ‘No – but you’re a bit manic.’

I can’t blame the person I spoke to for their vagueness; it was my dad, who you may remember was a graphic designer, not a clinician. He was given the steer – possibly with less vagueness – by my then doctors.

God forbid the doctors should have spoken to the patient direct.

In the eighties such a thing would have been thought of as quite – er, what’s the word? – mad.

Reopening the file

I’ve had mercifully few episodes of what I would call mania, and a few years ago was given the new diagnosis of ‘RDD’ or recurrent depressive disorder. I’m on the road less taken and have avoided psychotropic medication for years.

But that stat about the nine and a half years – which, sadly, is considerably less fun than 9 1/2 Weeks – made me want to reopen my own file. Surely after managing the condition for decades I had a right to know what it actually is, definitively?

Six visits to the mental health nurse, one or two official complaints and not one, but two letters to my MP later, the answer that comes back from the multi-billion pound 21st-century NHS that I’ve helped pay for is: apparently not.

That would be – what’s the word? – oh, yeah: mad.

What’s the mattery, Tony Slattery?

Portrait of the artist in pensive mode. [Photo: Jbeaver12.]

Cut to: the late eighties and I’m in the audience for Clive Anderson Talks Back at LWT’s studios on London’s South Bank. Anderson is a new breed of chat show host, along with the likes of Jonathan Ross, whereby the inquisitor’s more important than the guest. And Clive had an assistant who came across then as having boundless energy, like a dog let off the leash to gambol freely across Hampstead Heath.

That young pup was a certain Tony Slattery; I don’t remember much about his performance that night, but I remember his intensity and dark-haired good looks. And the geography: he was on the camera right side of the studio, and Anderson threw to him and watched with an older performer’s smiley indulgence at the speed and energy of his sidekick’s delivery.

I made a mental note that night that Slattery was ‘one to watch’. And I did watch him, along with millions of other viewers of Whose Line is it Anyway?, among his other appearances.

And then he disappeared for a decade.

It transpired he’d had a coke- and booze-fuelled breakdown, but the real revelation came in BBC 2’s 2020 Horizon documentary What’s the Matter with Tony Slattery? In it he told the shocking story of how he’d been raped by a priest at the age of eight. He then seemed to be unable to connect that event to his addictions and mental woes; paradoxically, I think, that inability is proof of a connection, and hints at what I strongly suspect was the shame and uncontrollable rage that would cause him to bury, or attempt to bury that traumatic past.

Bipolarity in poetry and prose

If you’re lucky enough to have no experience of bipolarity, you could do worse than read a powerful work by British poet Vicki Feaver. It’s called The Man Who Ate Stones. It captures the weightlessness and despair of the condition.

Or you could read this:

‘Showbiz is bipolar: you’re on-air or off-air, hero or zero, working or resting, waving or drowning, a hit or a shit.’

Forgive the sweary-Mary bit at the end; that’s from my first novel Waving, Drowning which I hope is going to be kind to me in 2025. Watch this space!

That extract doesn’t describe the condition itself, but it might go some way to hinting at why so many sufferers of bipolar disorder, which I read affects less than 1% of the general population, seem to be in showbusiness, or elsewhere in the creative arts.

You can see how it would be useful for a comedian like Slattery, who latterly fronted a podcast called Tony Slattery’s Rambling Club, to trade off the top of a bipolar curve. You wouldn’t necessarily want to stick around for the crash and burn, though.

Condolences to the performer’s friends and family, including his long-term partner, actor Mark Michael Hutchinson.

RIP dear Tony; from gamboller to rambler.

There’s more on mental health at the NHS website here.