I was 19 when my thoughts stopped being my own. No explosion, no body. I was driving out of a car park at about 10 miles an hour when the big end on the car went and it stopped dead. I jolted forward, maybe knocked my head, nothing more. My dad picked me up. That night I lay in bed shivering and couldn’t work out why. The next morning I woke up and my mind belonged to someone else.
What I didn’t understand then was that the accident was only the last ingredient. During the fortnight before it I’d proposed to my then girlfriend, my family had moved house, my grandma had died and someone close had taken his own life. A psychiatrist later called it a tinderbox, and that small stall in a car park was the spark that set the whole lot alight.
Within three days I was a wreck. My imagination, which has always been my superpower, turned on me. The intrusive thoughts were relentless and macabre, and they fixed on the one thing I feared most: that I was a danger to other people. I’d pass a child in the street and my mind would throw a horrific image at me, unbidden. I decided I must be a psychopath, a monster who needed locking up. The only comfort I could find was knowing I’d take my own life before I’d ever hurt anyone. Then I’d think, what if death isn’t the end and the devil is waiting? There was no escape. It was, and still is, the hardest thing I’ve ever had to face in my whole life.
This was around 1989 and there was no language for any of it. The only mental illness I’d ever seen on television was the knife-wielding lunatic, so I assumed that was what I’d become. I told no one for as long as I could. I was certain that if I spoke the thoughts aloud, they’d lock me up and throw away the key and I’d never see my mum and dad or my new fiancée ever again. Eventually I broke down in front of my parents. I was so thin by then, my mum could lift me, so she carried me to the car and to the doctor.
It took three months and money we didn’t really have to see a clinical psychologist privately. The first thing I said when I saw him was that I couldn’t believe he’d given a man like me his home address. Surely he knew what I was capable of? He just chuckled and said he was sure he and his family were quite safe. Spoken out loud, in that room, the terror sounded almost silly, and that was the first hairline crack in the monster bearing down on me.
He explained that the people tormented by the fear of doing something terrible are precisely the people who never will; that the thought horrifies you because it’s the opposite of who you are. He told me how often exhausted new mothers are ambushed by appalling thoughts about their babies, and how it terrifies them because they love them. Slowly it made sense. Living with this thing had been like arm-wrestling myself – a fight I could never win because I was on both sides. Now, for the first time, there were two of us pushing on the good side.
It wasn’t quick. I was in and out of therapy with him for about six years before I felt completely free of it. The voice in my head, I came to realise, sounded like an older, more powerful version of me, telling me this was my life now and he was in charge. Naming it, talking it through, dragging it into daylight – that was what finally shrank it back to what it always was: my own frightened imagination and nothing more.
Years later, writing for television, I found the proper name for what I’d had. Back then they called it PTSD; really it was Pure O, a form of OCD nobody had a word for at the time.
For a long time I stayed quiet, until I saw other people in the public eye begin to speak – and I thought, if just one person hears this and realises they aren’t on their own, they’ll suffer less than I did. So here it is. You don’t have to have been to war to be floored by your own mind. A trivial thing on top of a hard few weeks can be enough, and it doesn’t mean you’re going mad. It means you’re a person processing something, and you can survive it.
I’m at peace now. I’m no longer running, no longer hiding. If you take one thing from this let it be the smallest possible step, a text, a stranger on a helpline, even a few words written down only for yourself. Pull back the curtain. There’s no wizard there. Just talk.