What's so funny about mental illness? - Ruby Wax

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One in four people suffer from some sort of mental illness. So if it was, uh, one, two, three, four, it's you, sir. You, yeah, with the weird teeth, and you next to them, you know who you are. Actually, that whole row isn't right. That's not good. Hi, yeah, real bad. Don't even look at me.

Um, I am, uh, one of the one in four. Thank you. I think I inherited from my mother, who I used to crawl around the house on all fours. She had, uh, two sponges in her hand, and then she had two tied to her knees. Um, my mother was completely absorbent, and, uh, she would crawl around behind me, going, "Who brings footprints into a building?" So that was kind of a clue that things weren't right.

So, uh, before I start, before I start, I would like to thank the makers of latrine, cerine, and robotin. Because without those few simple chemicals, I would not be vertical today.

Uh, so, um, how did it start? Um, uh, my mental illness start? Well, I'm not even going to talk about my mental illness. What am I going to talk about? Okay, um, I always dreamt that, uh, when I had my final breakdown, it would be because I had a deep-kayas existentialist revelation, or that maybe Kate Blanch would play me and she would win an Oscar for it. But that's not, that's not what happened. I had my breakdown during my daughter's sports day. There were all the, uh, parents sitting in a parking lot, eating food out of the back of their car.

Only the English eating their sausages. They—Lord and Lady Riam Mortis—were nibbling on the tarmac. And then the gun went off, and all the girlyes started running, and all the mummies went, "Run, run, Camia, run, run like the wind!" And all the gires, gires running, running, running, everybody except for my daughter, who was just standing at the starting line just waving, ‘cause she didn't know she was supposed to run.

So, um, I took to my bed for about a month, and when I woke up, I found I was institutionalized. And, uh, when I saw the other inmates, I realized that I had found my people, my tribe. Because they became my only friends. They became my friends, uh, 'cause very few people that I knew, um, well, I wasn't sent a lot of cards or flowers. I mean, if I had had a broken leg or I was with a child, I would have been inundated, but all I got was a couple phone calls telling me to perk up, perk up, 'cause I didn’t think of that.

'Cause, uh, you know, the one thing, uh, one thing that you get with this disease—this one comes with the package—is you get a real sense of shame. Because your friends go, "Oh, come on, show me the lump, show me the x-rays!" And of course you got nothing to show, so you're, like, really disgusted with yourself because you're thinking, "I'm not being carpet bombed! I don't live in a township!" So you start to hear these abusive voices. But you don't hear one AB abusive voice; you hear about a thousand abusive, a hundred thousand abusive voices. Like if the devil had Tourette's, that's what it would sound like.

But, um, we all know in here, you know, there is no devil. There are no voices in your head. You know that when you have those abusive voices, all those little neurons get together, and in that little gap, you get a real toxic "I want to kill myself" kind of chemical. And if you have that over and over again on a loop tape, you might have yourself depression. Oh, and that's not even the tip of the iceberg.

If you get a little baby and you use it verbally, its little brain sends out chemicals that are so destructive that the little part of its brain that can tell good from bad just doesn't grow. So you might have yourself a homegrown psychotic. If a soldier sees his friend blown up, his brain goes into such high alarm that he can't actually put the experience into words, so he just feels the horror over and over again.

So, here's my question. My question is, how come when people have mental damage it's always an act of imagination? How come every other organ in your body can get sick and you get sympathy, except the brain? I'd like to talk a little bit more about the brain, 'cause I know you like that here at TED. So if you just give me a minute here, okay?

Um, okay, let me just say there's some good news. Uh, there is some good news. First of all, let me say we've come a long, long way. Uh, we started off as a teeny, teeny little one cell—a tiny just sticking onto a rock—and now voila, the brain, here we go! Uh, this little baby has a lot of horsepower. It's come completely conscious. It's got state-of-the-art loes. We got the occipital lobe so we can actually see the world. We got the temporal lobe so we can actually hear the world. Here we got a little bit of long-term memory, so you know that night you want to forget when you got really drunk? Bye-bye, gone!

So, uh, actually, it's filled with a hundred billion neurons just zzing away, electrically transmitting information. Zzing, zzing. I'm going to give you a little side view here; I don't know if you can get that here. So zzing away. And, uh, so, um, and for every one—I know I drew this myself, thank you—uh, for every one single neuron, you can actually have from 10,000 to 100,000 different connections or dendrites or whatever you want to call it. And every time you learn something or you have an experience, that bush grows. You know that bush of information? Can you imagine every human being is carrying that equipment? Even Paris Hilton! Go figure.

But I got a little bad news for you folks. Got some bad news. Uh, this isn't for the one in four; this is for the four in four. Uh, we are not equipped for the 21st century. Evolution did not prepare us for this. We just don't have the bandwidth. And for people who say, "Oh, they're having a nice day, they're perfectly FR," they're more insane than the rest of us!

'Cause I'll show you where there might be a few glitches in evolution. Okay, let me just explain this to you. When we were ancient man millions of years ago, uh, and we suddenly felt threatened by a predator, we would, thank you, I drew these myself, thank you very much! Thank you, thank you, thank you. Anyway, uh, we would fill up with our own adrenaline and our own cortisol, and then we kill or be killed. We eat or we'd be eaten. And then suddenly we defuel, and we go back to normal.

Okay, so the problem is nowadays with modern man, when we feel in danger, we still fill up with our own chemical, but because we can't kill traffic wardens or eat estate agents, the fuel just stays in our body. Over and over! And so we're in a constant state of alarm—a constant state.

And here's another thing that happened about 150,000 years ago. When language came online, we started to put words to this constant emergency. So it wasn't just, "Oh my God, there's a saber-tooth tiger," which could be; it was suddenly, "Oh my God, I didn't send the email! Oh my God, my thighs are too fat! Oh my God, everybody can see I'm stupid! I didn't get invited to the Christmas party!" So you got this nagging loop tape that goes over and over again that drives you insane.

So you see what the problem is? What once made you safe now drives you insane. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but somebody has to be! Your pets are happier than you are! So, kitty cat, wow, happy, happy, happy! Human being? Screwed completely. Another? So screwed.

But my point is if we don't talk about this stuff, and we don't learn how to deal with our lives, it's not going to be one in four; it's going to be four in four who are really, really going to get ill in the upstairs department. And while we're at it, can we please stop the stigma? Thank you.

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