Stephen Fry - Discussing Mental Health

hi Alan you've been very outspoken and gotten helped many people sort of deal with their own inner issues that sort of thing and by sort of dancing with your demons in public and talking about the very very meaningful and very potent moments in your life yeah and what has been the biggest challenge in terms of connecting with your audience and going about that well it's a really good question and and I would I would tell all the young men here that it's very unfortunate you fall into what is rather unpleasantly called a Democrat our demographic is that you belong to the demographic that is most likely to die from suicide not only that suicide is the greatest cause of death in young men under 35 in this country greater than cancer greater than heart disease greater than car in car crashes anything else suicide if you're going to die and you're under 35 the most likely reason is it will take something to end your life that's a really serious issue and because behind it all that's the it really is the best image you can think of a tip of an iceberg cliche as it may be underneath it all is the vast bulk of this hideous floating monster which is all the things that aren't quite suicide which take enormous care enormous understanding enormous coping from those who have friends family and lovers of those miserable enough to be afflicted as I am with some form of mental disorder in my case bipolar disorder which is one of the more common ones it is on a spectrum supposedly like many many of these things like of course autism is famously on a spectrum from Asperger's to severe autism supposedly different ways of looking at it but bipolar has a bipolar one a bipolar two cyclothymia which i used to be diagnosed as having cyclothymia nor other unfortunately my psychiatrist whom you'd be pleased to know I visited today not just to top up on my madness before speaking to you but I just happened to be off to America tomorrow and I wouldn't get a chance to speak to him until the new year or something so I thought I'd better have a word see how we're going and he said to me he said well I'm the the bad news is he said dim that we're gonna have to change your diagnosis I don't why is that I've been having issues of late a minute most of which are kind of quite happy ones but are what you would call a hypo was introduced actually called the hyperactivity hypomania is the technical name for it which is the opposite of depression literally polar opposite in the case of the image it's literal images can be literal and so that if the North Pole is hypomania extreme activity rapid speech grandiose ideas huge amounts of self-belief none of which I would actually say I have and the opposite is is a total blank darkness refusal to engage with the world the sense of absolutely no future whatsoever but there is an equator which is equable and pleasant as equators would be but there's also something else which where the the spherical image falls down which is what's known as a mixed state where you cut the the worst of both worlds you get extreme mania but he also feel completely useless I've been having quite a lot of that and so the good news according to my psychiatrist is a change of medication which is was an exciting thing in the life of the loony something else to try out oh this one gives me constipation as well that's nicer or and warning make may cause excessive weight gain yeah and sweating we noticed incidentally so there are and yes I am open about it but I'm open because I'm in a position to be so I'm not in a position where I might lose my job tomorrow if I slightly overstate or at least not overstate but I state the absolute truth and the message if there is a message and where what's the name of the spending local charity that we're representing in fact my mind your head that's right yeah not absolutely mind out that's that's particularly gay minded gay loonies which is a very specific subgroup that I remain remain a member of proudly mined out but anyway yes mind your head which is a good title I think and other challenges I think one of the most important things they in fact at the top of a list is not the illness itself but the public perception of the illness in a sense it's the illness the public has what you might call stigma a huge question of stigma and I was talking to some of the people on another committee and earlier on and saying when I was when I was at school the phrase did not exist the concept didn't exist in our heads and so far as I know there wasn't a single example of someone exhibiting this behavior and that is self harm and I was shocked to discover over the last 15 20 years since I've been involved in mental health charities just how pervasive and pandemic this thing is and at first I thought well it's probably I say well it's not as Evan excusing it I think it's it must there must be a reason there must be a because constantly one wants to attribute reasons to mental illnesses that you would never attribute to physical ones you don't say why is someone got lymphatic cancer this is preposterous it's either a genetic disposition or it's just bad luck in somebody's you know you might say there are lifestyle illnesses like diabetes and and heart disease but you certainly wouldn't say how come he's got diabetes he's really rich and famous there would just be a radicular thing to say he's asthmatic and all that money but it's just absurd and that's the state we're so often in they self-harm even so I had thought well self having people might be people who live in in really unfortunate conditions in the states what you know what used to be called that awful title sink estates with you know mothers on drugs fathers who left them before they were born brothers who beat them up or abuse them you know all kinds of terrible life issues you can imagine would make them turn to some screaming form of self attention or indeed self harm and I was talking to I have a string of God children 13 of them like my little string of pearls and the charming they all are getting older and older course as you are as everybody is you knew that and one of them she's at B Dale's a school in Hampshire rather advanced so liberal school well-known for the fact you know everyone you know calls the Masters mistresses by the first name or probably a buttface you know hahaha there's but it's quite you know it's quite expensive so it's expensive progressive liberal school and the children seem very well-balanced calm children the students will be called seemed very well-balanced very at ease very charming anybody limpid aliens in the house no you see they've got better things to do and and to embarrassed his head probably so I talked about the fact one of them said what plans we got for any future documentaries maybe on mental health and I said well I I don't want to keep making myself the subject now I know I'm I don't want to be a professional bipolar person any more than want to be a professionally gay you know brings us back to being a rent boy actually immature I think I've been faintly disastrous tweed is tweed your thing it's unlikely um but anyway I thought I'd make sort of suggest this to be receiving seem quite interested his prem kölsch because because it's a sort of hidden unspoken about thing and also it happens happily to be the initials self-harm and i talked about this and said gave my opinion that maybe it was something to do with coming from an appalling background and you know it's something that's all part of this misery that is associated with poverty and deprivation and lack of education and so on and in the selfie scrum which I'm afraid isn't going to happen today because I've got a plane to catch tomorrow morning and I don't get to bed before midnight Oh going to be up at 4:00 it's the ads that bad no plane leaves at 6:00 but anyway so I just thought to plant that seed in your mind because you know just one go on please because em but in the selfish crumb at this school about three people whispered in my um actually seriously um if you want to do something about self harm this is a place to come about ten friends who regularly so far it's a verb this is what astonishment it's a verb how can it be so pervasive as to have become a verb and I found myself utterly puzzled I thought I knew that you know the full truth in neurons to live on tie sociology same plant in French air all all the nuances all the all the shades of the of the human spectrum in terms of good bad at happiness misery and so but is this was one I simply well I could understand and since I could grasp the fundamentals of it but I couldn't put myself in the position of imagining it I couldn't imagine myself putting a knife against my flesh flesh Azzam Wilfred Owen said in the poem futility can limbs so dear achieved and these are dear achieved put a hand on your leg but a hand on your other hand how dear achieved is that how what an achievement is that of nature over hundreds of thousands millions of years and indeed just your own lifetime how dear achieved to take a knife to it what is what are you asking for and I really really wanted want still to make this program because the more people I speak to the more they say Oh Katya I'm going to school oh you're kidding no she did she did he didn't eat it she did she didn't eat it what why isn't this better Newton my parents have never heard of it I said this is something I think I'm doing self harm what do you mean sort of being drunken things well actually that's quite smart because I can understand that form of finishes chronic self harm over time you slowly poison yourself with drugs and alcohol cigarettes and so on it's maybe psychologically you are saying I hate my body I hate myself well we all hate ourselves some degree to some part I think self judgments of analysis indeed quite sometimes negativities quite a positive thing if I could be absurd you know in other words you know all the great artists if you read their Diaries the number of times they tell you to tear up what they did very feeling cocky I mean a lot of them very very self-confident in terms of what they knew what art was they knew everything else was crap you know Turner van gock all these kind of famous of signature children of the tormented artists they knew a everybody else was but they also questioned themselves constantly and very often viciously and we know about Van Gogh self-harm he is the most famous example of it with the ear I used to tell this joke about having van Gogh's ear for music but it doesn't really work but a there are I suppose other examples of people doing that to themselves in earlier periods but I'd love to invest that so anyway it's an endless subject I do go on did I come up as asking me

Channel: OxfordUnion

Views: 274,003

Keywords: Union, Society, University, Debates, Debating, Interview, Mental Health (Field Of Study), Stephen Fry (Celebrity), Health (Industry), Debate (Quotation Subject)

Id: 7TopruGzX4U

Length: 12min 32sec (752 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 01 2015