How mindfulness helped Ruby Wax through depression

Ruby Wax
Ruby Wax Credit: Andrew Crowley

Ruby Wax is out of it. Her words, not mine. “Can he [the photographer] take pictures of me with my sunglasses on?” she asks, and for once, she isn’t joking. She is semi-slumped on the sofa in the living room of her Notting Hill home, eating kebabs that her housekeeper has made. “I’m really glazed. I’m out of it with the medication. They’ve added something new and I’m supposed to take it at night but I took it in the day.”

What’s it called? “I don’t know what it’s called. It starts with an R.” She pauses, breaks into a smile. “Is that helpful? Maybe he’ll let me put my glasses on.”

Wax, who refuses to reveal her age but is thought to be in her early sixties, has never hidden her experiences with depression and she’s not about to start now - hence the openness about the way she’s feeling today, zonked out on medication for the mood disorder her psycho-pharmacologist thinks she might have.

In recent years she has morphed from TV star to poster girl for mental illness via a masters in Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy at Oxford University. Not that she can stand the term mental illness. “It’s just illness. Mental health is physical. It’s your brain, which is a physical part of you. You either have a disease or you don’t,” she says. 

Still, her OBE for services to mental health is framed in the downstairs loo and she is about to publish her second book on the subject, A Mindfulness Guide for the Frazzled (the first, Sane New World, is a bestseller about dealing with being what she calls Normal-Mad or Mad-Mad).

Ruby Wax
Ruby Wax Credit: Clara Molden

She has both stayed in the Priory and performed in it, taking her one-woman show about the brain around mental health institutions. And though she is supposed to be talking to me today about the six-week mindfulness course featured in her new book, which she based on her studies at Oxford, she seems distracted. 

“I feel like s***,” she says, to the point as ever. “I’m on antibiotics. It could be a virus but it could be a thing from last year.” What Wax means by that is that she could be on the edge of a depression. Exactly a year ago, while writing Frazzled, she had her first bout of the illness for seven years, and she is remembering it now, wondering if it is going to return. “It was this temperature, it was this weather. I don’t have a seasonal thing, but this time just reminds me a little of what was going on,” she says. 

At the time, Wax was also promoting Sane New World in America, a place she describes as being “the land of my failure”, one she left in 1977 and has absolutely no desire to return to. 

She was in New York when it hit, and as she tells me now, “I’m never going to go back again. Never.” It was like a “gang rape on the senses”, she writes in the book. 

“They say it’s the city that never sleeps but it’s the city that never shuts up,” she tells me. “There were things that reminded me of my home, my childhood.” 

Ruby Wax
Ruby Wax Credit: Andrew Crowley

Edward and Berta Wachs fled the Nazis from Austria in 1938, moving to Illinois. Their daughter was an introverted only child and had her first bout of depression when she was 13, “though they just thought it was glandular fever”. Edward was sometimes violent; Berta suffered terribly from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and covered all the furniture in plastic. 

Ruby discovered comedy at the age of 16 as an unsuccessful way to get boys; she studied psychology at Berkeley but dropped out and moved to the UK, where she could escape her parents and train with the Royal Shakespeare Company. 

Her parents are dead now. Was she ever reconciled with them? “Well, we never said ‘oh I love you, I made a mistake,’ but yeah, I forgave them. They were mentally ill.” Does Wax feel sorry for them? “I feel sad they didn’t know they were mentally ill because they could have been helped with drugs. But nobody knew back then what mental illness was.” 

So did she ever worry she recognised qualities of herself in her parents? “Oh yeah, it’s way back there,” she says pointing to her head, “like a snake.” She never found refuge in drink or drugs. “I was addicted to rage. I’ve weaned myself off it with the medication and stuff.”

The practice of mindfulness has helped her a great deal though. “It isn’t for everyone, and it might not even work for me forever, but it helped me know it [the depression] was there. I’ve been doing it maybe for seven years. I have to do it every day. I have to because if you had a bad back and it hurt you’d have to do, you know, stupid little exercises. So I know it’s a muscular thing. That’s all it is. If you don’t do the mental exercise the muscle gets flabby. It’s directly exercising your brain.” 

Ruby Wax at home
Ruby Wax at home Credit: Jessica Alexander

She says the depression last year was just as bad as it has been before, but that mindfulness helped make it go quicker. But Frazzled is really not about depression, and in any case she can only remember what she wrote down at the time, which is all there in the book: “I’m sitting here now in my bedroom, feeling the darkness descend, blocking out all thought. At least when I practise mindfulness I’m able to separate myself a little from all those abusive thoughts that are trying to bomb me to total destruction. With the mindfulness practice, I can say ‘this is depression’ rather than ‘I’m depressed’. It’s the little things that count. I’m trying to ride the wave and not go under. Wish me luck.”

When Wax returned from America, she went to the Priory for a week, where she did nothing. “You lie there. That’s it. You lie there while they balance the medication. You can’t move, you can’t read, nothing. You’re not playing ping pong, otherwise you wouldn’t be in there.”

Depression, she thinks, “is worse than cancer. I hear it every night when I do my show. There’s always someone there who’s had cancer and who’s had depression and they say the depression is worse. They tell me a really good line that I couldn’t have made up: ‘with cancer, I wanted to live, and with depression, I wanted to die.’”

Her eldest daughter Marina, who is 27 (Maddy and Max are 22 and 24), helped her get better this time. It was only after Wax had Marina that she realised the thing she occasionally felt, or didn’t feel, was not a virus but depression.

How did she explain her illness to them when they were young? “They didn’t see it. I would go away. I used to lock myself in hotel rooms.” When they were little and she was in the throws of her her TV career, interviewing Madonna and Donald Trump and Imelda Marcos, “I wasn’t available for them. I really wasn’t available. I was on the phone hustling for my career.” 

Ruby Wax
Ruby Wax

The only thing she misses about TV is that it might help her sell more books. “Even when we went on holiday, I’d still be in the depths of my career. Now they know I’m really focused. When they’re telling me something I make sure I’m listening, whereas before you could tell I wasn’t. You can tell in people’s faces,” she says.

Her kids, meanwhile, are “really well adjusted because I married the right guy. I married him on purpose because I knew he could deal with me.” Her husband is the director Ed Bye, whom she met while starring in Girls on Top with Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders. 

“He came from a military background, and he knows what to do because of that background,” she says. “It’s like a war, so they know how to find the bunker.” She starts to laugh. “They know how to deal with napalm.”

Next year Wax wants to open walk-in clinics for the frazzled population she talks about in her book. “Like Alcoholics Anonymous but for people who are very stressed or very anxious,” as she puts it. 

She thinks anyone who goes to work with depression should get “some kind of medal”. 

Wax has warmed up now and is engaging and chatty. We talk a bit about the voices in our heads, and how they are mostly negative. “For us, taking a compliment is like taking a punch,” she says. “I’ve never had a thought in my head that says ‘what a wonderful thing you are doing and may I say how attractive you are looking today’. Stand in front of a mirror and tell yourself you’re amazing and you’ll be depressed before you know it.” 

A smile breaks out as wide as the moon. Ruby Wax is more with it than she could ever know.

A Mindfulness Guide for the Frazzled by Ruby Wax is published by Penguin priced £14.99. To order your copy for £12.99 plus p&p call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk

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