A little bit of Stephen Fry

The much-loved writer, actor and TV presenter Stephen Fry helped many other people with bipolar disorder ‘come out’ with a documentary about his condition. He tells Sunil Peck why he believes people with mental health problems should develop a sense of pride

It is easy to see why Stephen Fry has been one of our most cherished celebrities for over 20 years. He can have an audience hooting with laughter at a bum-hole gag one second, then in silence a few words later with his account of the devastating effects mental illness can have in economically-deprived areas like the East End of London.

Fry was speaking at an event organised by the user-led mental health charity Stand to Reason, where he was publicising a book about recognising the signs of manic depression and ways of managing it*.

Before rushing off after his speech, Fry spoke to Disability Now about his own bipolar disorder.

One thing he has talked openly about are his attempts to treat his depression with drugs and alcohol.

So, I ask, would Fry have found a book like the one he was publicising useful?

“Definitely, I think anything like that would be useful. But I think particularly it’s the knowledge that there are people you know around you who are comfortable with the condition and are not ashamed of it, so you don’t have to hide it.”

Fry is passionate about the need for people with mental health problems to develop a sense of pride.

In a rallying cry to the people he jokingly referred to as maddies who crammed into a club to see him, he had said earlier: “There’s a word that Stonewall [the gay rights organisation] and others used a great deal. It’s used in an annual march in London, it’s a word that was used by the African-Americans from Rosa Parks onwards when she first sat on that bus, and that word is ‘pride’.”

Without pride, Fry continued, we would never reach a day when a person could chat about their mental health problems in polite conversation.

“Once that pride is there, once we all stand up and account for ourselves and not be ashamed of ourselves, then it makes the rest of the population realise two things. One, that we are just them but with something extra. And two, how close we are.”

It’s this pride, he tells Disability Now later, that will help banish the stigma people with mental health problems face from the rest of society. “To follow some of the examples of the gay and racial movements. Honesty from those affected and a refusal to be ashamed.”

Fry’s condition was diagnosed in 1995. He had been starring in a West End play but vanished after critical reviews. He contemplated suicide in London before resurfacing in Europe a few days later. The diagnosis was pivotal. As he said in his 2006 television documentary, which explored his experiences of his bipolar disorder, The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive: “I’d never heard the word before, but for the first time, at the age of 37, I had a diagnosis that explains the massive highs and miserable lows I’ve lived with all my life.”

His career as an author, actor and comedian stretches back to the 1980s. By the time he was diagnosed in 1995, Fry had starred in the film Peter’s Friends, and had roles in TV shows including Blackadder, A Bit of Fry and Laurie and Jeeves and Wooster. Nowadays, Fry hosts the BBC TV quiz show QI, has a technology column in the Guardian and produces podcasts to download from his own website. He has also penned four novels and an autobiography, Moab Is My Washpot.

Chris Danes, who has bipolar disorder, was among the adoring crowd at the Stand to Reason event. Danes has admired Fry’s work for years. But he says that his respect for him increased when he watched the documentary. For Danes, the programme went a long way to reducing the stigma around mental illness. His friends watched it too and began to ask questions about his condition and the ways in which it affected him.

“The fact that Stephen Fry is so famous and so well-liked and so talented and intelligent was enormously moving and important for me and it was easier for me to hold my head up high afterwards,” says Danes.

Neil Tinning, patron of the user-led bipolar organisation Manic Depression Fellowship (MDF) and the official photographer for The Jam in the early 1980s, says the stigma of bipolar disorder still means that people with it are statistically more likely to attempt suicide than people with other mental illnesses. Nevertheless, Tinning says that Fry should be applauded for his courage in publicising his own experiences.

“Coming out with a mental illness can be a very difficult task. It can be even more difficult if you are a celebrity. Stephen has opened up some of the floodgates and I think we will get more people who will come out in the future because of what he has achieved.”

Fry came out as gay before coming out as someone with mental health problems. So, as people jostled for an autograph and a hand-shake with Fry before he left the publicity event, I asked him whether he thought there were similarities between the stigma facing gay people and the stigma facing people with mental health problems.

“There are some things that are similar,” he tells me. “People can get beaten up in parks for looking as if they have a mental health problem by cruel children and they can get beaten up in parks for looking gay. So there are similarities in the violence and contempt that the worst sections of society extend towards both classes of person, but there are obvious differences too.

To call being gay a chronic condition would be quite wrong. You can have an immensely happy gay man that doesn’t necessitate medication or isn’t suddenly threatened by a mood change or an allergy or something like that in the way that mental conditions can be. But there are enough similarities to make the comparison valid I think.”

Fry says his condition has been influential on his career, but he does not know to what degree. “Hard to quantify,” he tells me later, “but probably a great deal. For good with creative splurges, for ill with black moods and creative blocks.”

Although Fry holds up the civil and gay rights movements as shining examples of tackling stigma, and talks up the importance of collective pride, he does not feel that he belongs to a community of people with mental health problems. “No. No more than I belong to a community of gays, Jews, or asthmatics. Maybe that’s just me.”

Fry refers to his condition as an affliction, but one that he would not want to be rid of. As he put it during his speech: “If you have a hundred people in a Stone Age village, you want some of them to stay in a cave boiling up the bones, some of them to go out and do the hunting. But somewhere you want one of them who is just a little off-kilter, whose ideas are just a bit weird, who has a creative imagination that is technically mad because he or she is suggesting doing things or trying things that no one has ever thought of before.

“It’s actually necessary for our gene pool to have some people in it who are just not normal. It is an immense privilege to belong to a group of people who are not normal.”

*The A-Z Guide to Good Mental Health, by Jeremy Thomas and Dr Tony Hughes