The PM who outed himself

By Sunil Peck

It is hard to imagine a British politician “coming out” as a mental health service-user. But ten years ago the Norwegian Prime Minister of the time did just that – and kept his job  – when he was diagnosed with depression.

That was during his first term in office. In 2001, Norwegian voters elected him for a second term.

I caught up with Mr Bondevik as he was about to address a packed, cross-party parliamentary reception organised by the charity Stand to Reason, which campaigns to combat the stigma faced by mental health service-users.

“It should not be something mysterious. I feel that you should have the same openness about mental illness as physical [illness],” he says. “If you get a heart attack or cancer, normally you are open. People can recover, people can come back – as I did.”

Kjell Magne Bondevik was elected Prime Minister of Norway in 1997. But one Sunday in August 1998, he became too ill to summon up the energy to get out of bed and realised that he needed a break. His instinct was to resign but his foreign minister talked him out of it.

He then went public on his illness – first, to quash any speculation about his absence, and second in the hope of contributing to more openness around mental health issues.

The electorate respected his frankness and he got thousands of supportive letters. “Some said: ‘We have similar problems, we are so happy that you were open because it is now easy for us to be open and talk to family and friends, and get professional help.’”

When Mr Bondevik fell ill, Norway was facing tricky economic and political circumstances with the price of oil falling and interest rates rising. But his psychiatrist pinpointed different causes of his illness: “One is that I worked too hard for too long and had heavy burdens on my shoulders. Second is that I lost many of my close friends during a limited period, most of them from brain cancer, and I had no time to work on this grief.”

Mr Bondevik told Disability Now that he thought mental illness was “rather common” among politicians. That coincides with estimates that 1 in 4 people in the UK undergo mental illness at some point in their lives. But he thinks it could be some time before we see more frankness among British politicians.

“What people say to me here in [the] UK and in other countries [is]: ‘That could never happen here.’”

Stand to Reason says that a person harbouring ambitions of a political career could be prevented from standing as an MP by a common law dating back hundreds of years which disqualifies “lunatics” and “idiots” from standing for parliament.

The charity has sent an anonymous questionnaire to MPs, peers and their staff, looking at attitudes to, and awareness of, mental illness. The results will be published later this year.