How To Spot If You Are Going Barmy

The stuff I wish I'd known when I had my first panic attack

Dec 24, 2020

Nowadays, everyone is mad. It’s dead trendy. But back in the 1980’s, when I was a kid, hardly anyone was. ‘Mad’ was a powerful term reserved for only the most overtly strange people in society. We all knew a couple of mad people and regarded them with a mixture of pity and amusement.

My family had a number of certified fruit-loops in its orbit. My mum has a bigger heart than most so our household was what might be referred to in today’s vernacular as ‘a safe space’ for the ‘mentally ill’ and ‘emotionally vulnerable.’ Back then we called our house a magnet for nutters.

One Christmas day when I was 14 we invited an all-star cast of our very maddest associates over.

First, there was Auntie Ella, an elderly relative whose eccentric, train-of-thought babble throughout our festive lunch alternated between wailing tearfully over her dead husband, Uncle Fred, then suddenly producing tins of mints from her handbag and offering them round the table with a beaming smile.

My brother’s mate Jason was a giant, wild-looking and hugely charismatic drug addict who sat next to Auntie Ella at lunch, showing an uncanny affection and warmth towards this old lady he had never met before.

Then there was Alberto, our neighbour from the flats up the road. He was a Bolivian chef, a diagnosed schizophrenic whose innate mental health problems had been compounded a few years earlier when a kitchen colleague at the fancy hotel he worked in had spiked his tea with LSD. He started tripping and just never seemed to come down.

We invited these people because they didn’t have anywhere else to go. And we loved each of them, in different ways. But there was no denying that their behaviour was entertaining. I must stress, we didn’t invite them for their entertainment value. But, if I am honest, it was a bonus.

All sounds a bit cruel, I know, but what we didn’t understand at the time that these people - the nutters, the basket cases, those who were ‘out where the buses don’t run,’ were more like the rest of us than we realised. Or at least cared to acknowledge. Their conditions had names that could be found in medical dictionaries: senility, schizophrenia, addiction. So we could categorise them neatly as ‘barmy’ and regard them as completely distinct from the rest of us, who merrily drank, smoked, shouted, snorted, argued and fought our way through the festive season in the manner only truly sane and stable people can.

That year, on Christmas Eve, I hadn’t slept all night.

That song ‘Spanish Flea’ by Herp Albert And The Tijuana Brass just kept looping through my mind. Where had it come from? What did it mean? I don’t know. But I’m telling you now, this was no whimsical, amusing ear worm like when you say you can’t stop whistling Jona Lewi’s ‘Stop The Cavalry.’

It was a serious mental episode. That song came from nowhere, launched itself into my brain as my head hit the pillow on December 24th 1989 and set up camp for nine long, agonising hours. It got louder and louder and ever more intense. I covered my ears. I tossed and turned. I fought back tears. It was very distressing. Then morning came and I didn’t mention it to anyone. Because it sounded mad - and mad was one of the most embarrassing things you could be.

Once the high-octane excitement and hedonism of the 25th had passed I began to sink quite quickly into a dark place. It started out as standard anti-climatic sadness then morphed, by new year, into my first taste of existential malaise. Christmas was over, the fun was dead, the future was cold, uncertain and pointless. Those were the thoughts that haunted my adolescent mind, like dismal accompanying lyrics to a backing track of Spanish Flea.

Share The Reset by Sam Delaney

On the night of January 1st 1990 I couldn’t sleep because the dark thoughts had started to completely overwhelm me.

I became short of breath and started to sweat profusely. I must have been in big trouble because I decided to try and distract myself by actually picking up the book I’d been given by my English teacher to read over Christmas: Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen. But the more I read it, the more anxious I became. I might not have been in the best frame of mind to judge the book objectively, and I am aware that many regard it as a right rollicking read, but I bloody hate that novel. . These days, I can’t even see it on a library shelf without having a mild anxiety flash back.

In the end, I just got this thought locked in my head that I was going to grow up alone and that everyone I currently knew and cared about would die. It was fucking weird. I couldn’t sleep in my bed so I took my blanket and pillows out into the hallway and set up a makeshift bed on the landing. It was closer to my mum’s room which I figured would come in handy if I started dying and needed her assistance in the night.

Of course, I know now that what I was experiencing was my first panic attack.

But it took me a quarter of a century, numerous more panic attacks, an ugly battle with drugs and alcohol and several dozen therapy sessions to understand that. These were my first brushes with what we now call mental illness. One of the reasons that stuff is so common at this time of year, I reckon, is that we stop distracting ourselves with work or whatever else we do the rest of the year, leaving space for the buried thoughts and feelings to jump out and have a runaround all at once.

For me, the signs should have been clear in 1989: I, too, was a out where the buses didn’t run. Not quite as far out as Auntie Ella or Jason or Alberto, maybe. My mental illness didn’t have a proper name, not back then anyway. Maybe it would have been better if it had. Then I wouldn’t have hidden it from everyone so studiously like a dirty secret. The mad thoughts I had, the scary voices in my head, the scatter gun paranoia and the relentlessly irritating songs that plagued my nights just seemed stupid, embarrassing and trivial. So I did what I think 99% of all people did back then: I learned how to pretend to be okay. And I got pretty good at that. I hid all of the weird shit in my brain that was upsetting me. I figured it would eventually just go away. It didn’t, it just got worse and I had to get better at hiding it. If I’d been able to recognise it as an actual problem and talk to someone about it with honesty and an absence of shame I might have been able to skip the bits of my life that came years later with the drugs, drink and therapy. It would have saved me a great deal of pain - not to mention a shitload of time and money.

A few months after that Christmas, Auntie Ella started shitting in her handbag.

Then she died. Jason died that year too, of a heroin overdose. I’m glad we at least got to give them both a bit of fun and laughter on what turned out to be their final Christmas. Alberto is still very much around and remains a good mate, but his struggles continue to this day.

I can’t pretend his conduct doesn’t remain a source of amusement in my life. Some of the shit that bloke comes out with is fucking hilarious. But I’ve got more understanding of what he has had to live with now. And a more humble sense of ‘there but for the grace of God.’ I am privileged to have reached a point where I could seek help and talk to people before my brain went too far in the wrong direction (plus, mercifully, I never had my tea spiked with acid at an upmarket west end hotel).

If you’re feeling miserable or your worries begin to overwhelm you; if low-key fears are starting to mutate into something more like panic or you’ve been haunted by a nauseating brass-pop Latin hit from the 1960’s, then just recognise it as an issue. Maybe not a problem just yet. But just something worth talking about. Something worth taking seriously. And certainly nothing to feel ashamed of.

Talk about it, laugh about it, own it. Because we’re all a bit mental, aren’t we?

Merry Christmas and be lucky.

Sam

The Reset by Sam Delaney