Trisha talking the talk

With so many celebs claiming mental health conditions, it seems that depression is this season's tiny-black-dog-in-a-handbag but talk show host Trisha Goddard is no one-week-in-the-Priory-wonder: Kelly Mullan discovers that she's a veteran mental health campaigner with almost 25 years of awareness-raising under her designer belt

Trisha first campaigned to end the stigma of mental illness after the suicide of her youngest sister who had schizophrenia. At the time Trisha had a high profile as the first black presenter on Australian TV and used her celebrity status to do the utmost to “get rid of the shame”. However, she admits that when it was her own mental health that the Australian media were interested in when she was hospitalised for depression in 1994, she would have preferred to have kept her privacy.

“A journalist was going to ‘out’ me so I decided to give an interview. We talk about destigmatisation and ‘speaking out’ about mental health. I was one of the loudest saying ‘stand up and be counted’ but when it’s you and you’re in the middle of it, I do believe you need some distance. Talking about lived experience is a very good way of breaking down barriers but we’ve got to be careful not to keep using the same people over and over again because it traps you in that experience.”

Talking about her breakdown in her autobiography As I Am Trisha says: “Rightly or wrongly, I was ashamed about what was happening to me.”

Trisha traces this sense of shame back to her childhood when her stepfather worked as a psychiatric nurse. “It gave us the ‘us and them’ thing. I was brought up in hospital accommodation and we knew patients who talked to imaginary horses and thought ‘isn’t our dad a good guy working with them’. So when my sister became ill, for one of ‘us’ to become one of ‘them’ it was: ‘Oh my God!’ My parents didn’t tell anyone because they’d always seen, in a benign custodial way, that it was ‘us and them’.

“In Australia when we researched social attitudes to mental health, the mental health professionals reflected the rest of the population. Some of the most difficult situations were people who worked in mental health being unable to admit they had mental health problems.”

When Trisha was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008 she saw sharp contrasts with her experience of depression: “Journalists said to me, ‘breast cancer must have been the worst thing to ever happen to you.’

Yes, it was awful, but with breast cancer people are compassionate, understanding, and can even bring up the subject. With depression there is no understanding and no flowers. In a psychiatric ward no one even wants to make eye contact or ask how you are. People say: ‘You’re weak. Pull yourself together.’ No one ever says that to a breast cancer patient.

“Depression took a lot longer to recover from: it took three years for me to manage it. There’s no doctor saying, ‘we’ll give you an operation and the depression will be gone.’ It’s a muddle that you have to negotiate for yourself and at a time when you feel incapable of doing anything and the world’s a very scary place. And you don’t have that compassion at all: no one was going on fun runs and having bake sales, throwing balls and wearing pink at specific times. It’s not like they have blue ribbons for depression. No one wants to bloody well talk about it.

 “My mental health issues were far, far more disabling than breast cancer: I worked during chemo but recovering from depression I couldn’t work full-time for three years. I was lucky that I was doing a health show and my executive producer was a doctor and she made all sorts of changes for me: I didn’t have my back to the lift, I wasn’t in an enclosed space, I could work from home. She did all that for me and never once did I think about A, being disabled and B, my employer recognising that. At that stage, absolutely I had a disability.

“I know people with mental health issues far more disabled than the classical view of a person in a wheelchair. I know people with physical disabilities who are far more capable of engaging in everyday life than people with mental health disabilities. I’m interested in looking at that. Just as there are prejudices within the mental health world, so there are prejudices within the disability world as well. So I wanted to be involved to bring up the whole issue of mental health because there are still misconceptions.

“It’s two steps forward and two steps back. It doesn’t help when certain celebrities get themselves in a spot of bother and take themselves off to the Priory for three days. That sets the mental health cause back.“

Another label Trisha resists is Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD).

As a teenager, she began using obsessive compulsive behaviour to exercise some control over her life at a time when she was at the receiving end of domestic violence from her stepfather. She tells me how she manages her obsessive tendency and explains the positive aspects of this trait: “It’s my way of coping. I recognise it, I understand it, and I’m lucky that I can be open with my family and it can be pointed out to me. I ‘m careful of overlapping obsessions but I recognise that that obsessive part of me is part of my success. So yes, it can be an asset as well as a pain in the arse!

“If used properly it can be productive: that’s rarely talked about in mental health. A successful approach is asking what are the positives in mental illness? What can we build on to help somebody rather than strip everything away?”

Having lived in England, Tanzania, Bahrain and Australia, as well as travelling the world as an international campaigner, Trisha has been able to compare attitudes: ”Different societies have different takes on mental ill health. The person may not be stigmatised depending on their usefulness within society. If you’re part of a small farming community, ‘it doesn’t matter if you’re talking to voices, we need you in the field’. I remember when I lived in Africa meeting people who clearly had mental health problems who had jobs and responsibilities and people depending on them. There was none of that isolation or feeling useless or feeling a burden. It’s the stigma and the approach to illness things other than the illness, that isolate somebody and make them feel useless.”

On racism in mental health she says: “I went through the Australian mental health system and I was seen as a television person first, colour came afterwards. But here in Norwich there’s a service for people of non-English speaking background to get together and share experience. It’s about mental wellness: investing in building fences at the top of the cliff rather than paying for ambulances at the bottom.

“People didn’t want to engage with services in case they were seen and talked about. One scheme we had was training hairdressers and barbers to steer people in the right direction to get help when they talked about mental health problems. I’d recommend it for black and non-English speaking communities. In a hairdresser’s, you could have a mental health nurse drop in every Tuesday afternoon.”

Trisha has seen many changes in mental health care since her childhood living in hospital accommodation: “You tended to see in the 60s and 70s psychiatric patients bedridden and dribbling because they were just being warehoused, not treated. A lot of people can’t understand the dismantling of the old asylum system but I remember that there were people in those hospitals who were only there for having a child out of wedlock.

“Now it depends where you are. It’s patchy. It’s hit or miss how good your GP is. In Norfolk we’re lucky because my husband runs the local branch of Mind and he’s brought over a lot of innovations from Australia. But a lot of people still miss out because to engage with services you’ve got to admit you have a problem.

“In Norwich there’s a mind, body, soul centre that looks very nice and it’s next to John Lewis. It’s got a shop front, it’s bright, not hidden in a hospital in a psych unit. No one knows if you’re going in there for a massage, or a manicure, or to talk to a counsellor. It destigmatises mental health and makes services accessible.”

Ironically for a presenter in a confessional genre who talks openly about her private life, the eponymous host of ITV’s Trisha and Channel five’s Trisha Goddard Show evades the question of what her next presenting role will be, saying “there’s a lot I can’t talk about”. Well, I suppose we can excuse a bit of regal reticence from the Queen of Chat who says she’ll be ready to announce plans in a couple of months.