How Neuroplasticity Could Help with Depression, with Ruby Wax | Big Think

About eight years ago in the U.K., I was outed by a mental health charity because they asked me if they could take a photo of me to raise money in one of their little, you know, pamphlets. And I said yeah, and I thought it was going to be a tiny fingernail clipping of a picture, but they were huge posters all over the U.K.—gigantic. And I looked like a Lithuanian peasant, and it said on it—I don’t know who wrote this—one in four people have mental illness, one in five people have dandruff. I have both. I mean, you know, mortified.

So I thought, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to write a show, and I’m going to make that look like it’s my publicity poster. So I did write a show, and I did it in mental institutions for the first two years. And I think they liked it. Well, I couldn’t tell because they weren’t always facing me. And then I made a joke. I said the bipolars used to say, “I laughed, I cry." And really, if you can make a psychotic laugh, you’re halfway to Broadway.

What happened was, then we would have—I would do my show. Then we’d have a little bit of a lunch break, and we used to steal food from the anorexics because they didn’t mind. And then we’d come back. We’d have a discussion—fabulous discussions. I won’t even go into their questions. Oh, P.S., I wasn’t talking down to them because they knew I was of the tribe, okay. So you know how people go, “How’d you do that?” I was one of them.

So then the show took off, and I did it in all theaters. In Australia, in Capetown, in London. Everywhere I did the show, and the audience would ask me the same questions, and it became a kind of—even for a thousand people one guy would stand up, and he’d say, you know, a real butch guy—“I’ve been on antidepressants for 20 years. I’ve never told my wife,” and she was sitting next to him. And it was like the Muppets in there; like people would be beside themselves, you know, where do I go? How do I get help? And sometimes it was heavy, you know. One woman said, “I have cancer and depression,” and I said, “Well, which is worse?” And she said, “Well, with the cancer all I wanted to do was live, and with the depression I just wanted to die.” Other people were quite funny. So this became a walk-in center.

And on my days off, I would use it as a walk-in center, and I’d bring in doctors and neuroscientists and invite people off the street and have a whole army of therapists so they could get help—bully for me. You know, we needed a kind of AA, have it so organized. And this is like, you know, how did they get it together? They’re drunks. So I made this a walk-in center.

And then what happened was I had a depression. It doesn’t define my life. Seven years ago, I had a really bad one. I ended up on kind of a chair for a few months. Let me just say, people think I’m just going sideways. That depression is about having a bad hair day or your cat left town. It isn’t sad. Nothing to do with sadness. It’s like your old personality slowly leaves town, and you’re left with a block of cement which is you.

I mean, it’s like being in hibernation, but you can’t wake up. And so I ended up in a chair. To take a shower was unimaginable. I didn’t tell anybody. I didn’t tell my friends because, you know, what comes with this disease is a real sense of shame because everybody thinks, well look at you, you know, you have everything. You’re not in a township. You’re not being carpet-bombed.

So I always say you get these abusive voices—like, but not one voice but a hundred thousand voices. Like if the devil had Tourette’s, that’s what it would sound like. So I was sick. I never told anybody. I got a few phone calls from a few friends saying, “perk up.” Yeah, perk up because I never thought of that.

So then I was really interested in how the brain works because I thought, well, every other organ in your body can get sick, and you get sympathy—except your brain. So I thought, let’s learn about the brain. So I gave up my career, kissed that one bye-bye, and decided I would do research as to ho...