CLOCK TICKS I remember I had a watch.
I remember I...
I'd cracked the glass on my watch.
And I kept thinking I was playing with time.
And I would say, "It's not 5:00 in the morning,
"I'm going to make it 2:00 in the afternoon."
Thinking...
I'm not part of...
..the normal...
..world - I'm separating myself off from the normal world.
I'm making my own reality.
The actor David Harewood is probably best known for his roles in the big
budget TV shows like Homeland, Supergirl, and The Night Manager.
But we all have our demons.
Homeland star revealed last year that he suffered a mental breakdown
at the beginning of his career.
I am very, very open about it
but of course I hadn't realised that I hadn't gone public.
I don't always remember that I'm supposed to be famous
or well-known so I just tweet things out.
Like, 25,000 retweets and I did have a bit of a panic
cos I suddenly thought... "Oops"? "What am I..." Right...
"So, it's World Mental Health Day today, so as someone who's
"had a breakdown and was sectioned in my 20s, I'm here to tell you
"that there's no shame in talking about it if you're struggling.
"I haven't done too bad since.
"Go easy on yourself today, and get some help if you can."
30 years ago, I had a period of psychosis.
And I lost my mind.
It's a period that is kind of scary because...
..I don't remember huge chunks.
I've always wondered what happened to me.
I'm not bouncing off the walls.
I'm perfectly stable, married, two beautiful kids,
very, very happy, successful...
But I was sectioned.
You know, I was in a mental institution, locked away.
I'm wondering, what the hell was it all about?
Maybe I'll find some answers.
When we talk about psychosis,
there's still that stigma.
Even I say, "I had a breakdown."
If somebody was to say somebody's psychotic, you would instantly think that they're crazy, dangerous,
a mad sort of raving loony...
You know, that that's what we think when we talk about psychosis.
I remember going for long walks and I remember waking up,
or coming to, becoming lucid, walking down Tottenham Court Road.
And I'd be, like...
"What am I doing here?
"I'm sure I was at home ten minutes ago.
"I'd better go home."
And I'd start walking home.
I'd sort of black out and next thing I know,
it would be 2:00 in the morning and I'd be walking through Camden.
I had so much energy.
I'd be buzzing out of my mind.
Everything became...
..kind of visceral and just seeing the sunrise was, like,
"Wow, look at the sun come up, I'm at the start of everyone's day."
So, I was kind of almost saying hello to everybody in the morning.
I'd be like, "Morning, morning!
"What a great day!"
So, it all just became, like, "I can do anything.
"I can be anybody.
"Do anything."
People say, "Crazy people hear voices."
MAN SCREAMING I heard voices.
And it was clear as a bell in my head.
PEOPLE SPEAKING
Next thing I remember was waking up...
..on a locked ward surrounded by psychiatric patients.
And I was REALLY confused as to why I was there.
I do remember moments.
But at no point in the last 30 years has anybody really told me,
or explained to me, what had happened.
Hello. How are you, sir?
I'm David Harewood. I'm here to collect some records.
Thank you.
It's pretty thick.
There's quite a lot in here.
I think it's really important for me to find out what happened
and why it happened.
There is a very important part of my life that I really haven't
been able to explain.
Hello. Hi.
How are you? Hello, I'm Rowena. Nice to see you - David.
Hi. Very nice to meet you. Do you want to come through? Yes...
VOICEOVER: Dr Rowena Jones is part of a team of psychiatrists
at Birmingham's Queen Elizabeth Hospital.
She's dealt with patients with psychosis for the last decade.
I'm hoping she'll start helping me put the pieces together.
Psychotic symptoms are when people have experiences
that aren't based on reality.
So, commonly, people will have, say, hallucinations
where they see or hear or feel things
that aren't actually happening. Mm-hmm.
Or delusional beliefs, which are beliefs that develop
without fact behind them.
It would be really nice to sit down and talk to you about
what I experienced, and maybe you can explain to me what it was about.
It sounds fairly grandiose...
Really? ..as a set of delusions.
There's things here about you talking for hours...
..about a friend would buy you a wine bar,
which would be like the Garden of Eden
where you could pluck a guitar out of the grass.
See, there was something really extraordinary going on in my head.
And I was a great lover of literature.
So, I think... And, as an actor...
Yeah. ..a lot of that was coming out in my sort of delusion, I think.
The form of a psychiatric symptom is fairly constant.
But the content, very much people bring to it themselves,
so they have changed over the years.
Religious delusions used to be a lot more common when we were...
before we became such a secular society.
So people were more, like, "Oh, it's the gods, it's the gods."
Today, you'll meet people who've got delusions about social media.
This is the time when you're actually in the hospital
and very unwell.
So, suspicious and frightened and shouting,
"I've got to save the boy."
So, that's somebody who you felt, life was in your hands.
I mean, I don't understand that.
I don't know who that boy refers to.
It might be...
..me.
This was my local park, this was it - this was where we used to play
from when I was about six.
First-generation West Indian family.
Probably the only black family on our end of the street.
We used to ride my first chopper, chopper bike round here.
So...
Climbed these trees.
Life was fun, life was simple.
I was never the brightest kid in the class.
I was never the most handsome.
So, I guess in order for me to stand out...
..I just became the clown.
I just became the guy who was funny and loved it.
At the end of secondary school.
Auditioned for drama schools and...
..got into Rada.
CROWD ENUNCIATES
You were doing elocution lessons but suddenly you were being taught
to say "bahth" and not "bath".
And I remember my mum looking at me and going, "What's going on here?
"What's happening to my son? He's changing."
And I was, you know, I went there with probably a very thick...
Birmingham accent, talking like that, you know,
and suddenly I was talking like that and, you know, being very, very posh.
In those final days at drama school,
the real world started to creep in.
My agent had put me up for jobs and I was always working.
But I didn't feel I was in control of it.
I didn't feel like I was in control of my life.
I'm supposed to be young and having the time of my life
as a young actor, and the reality was I was away from all my mates.
I was totally alone, and I was really unhappy.
And that's not really the time to start smoking weed and drinking.
But that's exactly what I did.
And, erm...
..that's when...
..the...
..breakdown started to...
..become something completely different.
Everyone's psychosis is different, is unique to each individual.
But actually there's a lot of shared experiences.
And the three main symptoms are
delusions, believing things that aren't real, like, you're a messiah
and that you can control the weather.
Also, hallucinations - that's hearing or seeing things
that aren't there,
and thought disorder.
So, that is where thoughts feel jumbled
with difficulty concentrating and communicating.
Hello. I'm David Harewood. I'm looking to speak
to Dr Erin Turner. Yes, I will give her a ring.
Thanks very much.
Hello. Hello, David. How are you? I'm good, how are you? Really well,
nice to see you. Good, and you.
Shall we go outside, then? Yeah, let's go. Brilliant.
Have a little wander.
Erin works with young people who've experienced psychosis.
So, I'm hoping she might be able to shed some light
on why it might have happened to me.
Psychosis never just happens.
You don't wake up one day and suddenly you've got psychosis.
It generally builds up.
So, there may be some anxiety, some sleep disturbance,
and then the stress levels reach that tipping point
and that's when psychotic symptoms begin.
And I think it's really helpful to consider it
with the stress vulnerability model.
This shows us that we're all in somewhere in the spectrum
of vulnerability to develop psychosis.
But if you've got high vulnerability,
it doesn't take much stress to tip you over into psychosis.
So, the things that would move you from a low to high vulnerability
would be if you've had significant trauma in your life,
a strong family history of psychosis.
If you're smoking a lot of cannabis...
People who live in the city, high-pressured environments,
second-generation migrants... There are a lot of different things
that can predispose you to psychosis.
At the time it happened to me, huge stresses...
So, what were all those stressors, then?
Being away from home, moving every week, being reviewed,
people talking about me...
Now, I did smoke cannabis so I guess that edges up but as I speak
to you now, it was the stresses... Yeah.
..that were getting - piling up and piling up.
And because of my professional...
..you just get on with it.
I do remember going to an audition.
And the audition was on Windmill Street and I know where Windmill Street is in Soho.
And I couldn't find it.
I could not find Windmill Street, and I was walking around for hours.
I don't remember what happened,
but eventually I found Windmill Street.
I was about three hours late.
And the casting director...
She could tell I wasn't right.
So, the casting agent was this lady called Janey Fothergill.
And I always remember the name,
and always remember she was very posh, but really sweet.
PHONE RINGS DOWN THE LINE
Hello?
ON PHONE: Dave...
Hello, gorgeous, how are you?
Very well, how are you?
I'm really, really well.
Is that, like, 25 years?
Janey, do you remember when I turned up late for the audition?
Wow.
I had these two very, very good friends that I used to live with
when I was at drama school.
Nick and Jez.
LAUGHING: We all liked to drink a lot.
We'd get stoned!
We'd get stoned every night and laugh.
Just laugh into the wee small hours, crash out, get up,
and then go and study Shakespeare all day.
PHONE RINGS DOWN THE LINE
We were nearly always together.
ON PHONE: Hello? HE LAUGHS
Hello, mate!
And, actually, I probably haven't spoken to them for a long time.
Could you meet me at the Marlborough? The Marlborough?
Yeah, yeah, yeah - no worries. Brilliant. Lovely!
There's things that I want to make sure I cover.
I'm hoping that they will be able to help me fill in
some of the behaviours.
Perhaps, be able to explain...
Like, yeah...
How I was... how I was acting, how I was.
I wasn't sleeping, I was up all night.
Overthinking things.
Are you all right, mate?
I get these weird memories.
And I don't know whether I'm making them up.
So, when did you first hear there was things going wrong, then?
The audition, to me, is the day that it all went horribly wrong.
We were out looking for you and then we went to the house.
You went looking for me? I think so.
We discovered you sitting -
there were all these Scruples cards all over the floor.
There was a copy of Shakespeare
with a corkscrew screwed right through it.
The thing I remember is being helpless, and now I remember there
being quite a long period of time, maybe a week or five days,
of us coming back to see you and you not being right.
You guys took me to the doctors, didn't you?
We went to see a doctor.
He said you had a mania -
you had a "mild mania", is how he described it.
They sent us away with a few tablets.
Fucking hell...
Yeah, but this wasn't the big...
No. This wasn't the big...? No, this was the lead-up.
And I remember taking you back to that flat and both of us...
It had been such an effort to get you there,
and they give you these tablets.
And I remember saying to him, "This is just ridiculous."
"Don't take them." Yeah, I think we all did. We did - I remember that.
I do remember that. I feel resp... ..that makes me feel bad cos... No.
But, you know what I mean, we did say, "Oh, this is ridiculous.
"Just chuck them down." And we chucked them down the toilet. We chucked them down the toilet?
And, sometimes, I wonder what would have happened if you'd taken those. Me too, actually.
I kept convincing them that I was OK.
Because the energy was really exciting.
Maybe, if I'd taken those tablets,
all that energy would have gone away.
And I didn't want it to end.
Looking back on it, I was just so young and naive.
I mean, I was in my early 20s.
I guess I just didn't really have the language or the insight
to actually understand what was happening to me.
If you have a vulnerability to develop psychosis,
late adolescence is really when it will emerge.
There's a lot of stressors, and there's a lot of biological
and psychological changes that are taking place.
So, it becomes quite a fertile field for development of psychosis.
And if young people start using strong cannabis
at a very early age, their risk of developing psychosis
is so much greater.
Erin's invited me to a drop-in clinic she runs as part of a service
called Early Intervention, which is just
for young people who have experienced psychosis.
Hello. Hello. Hello, David. Come on in. Very excited about this.
Welcome in to the drop-in. We're very excited to have you.
Thank you very much.
I've never met anyone who's had psychosis before.
So, I want to see if there are any similarities in our experiences.
Guys, this is David.
I'll let you introduce...
How are you doing? Nice to see you. Another Brummie.
Nice to meet you, David. Hey, man, how are you? My name's Conrad. Nice to meet you - how old are you?
20. 20? Yeah. Callum, 24.
Callum, nice to meet you, man. Good to see you.
Really appreciate you guys doing this.
Tell me a little bit about your experience of psychosis.
Basically, I started hearing voices when I was about 13, 14,
and then I was out socially smoking cannabis,
as many young kids do.
Started hearing voices and then it sort of come to a build-up
around last year, I was about 19.
Just going through a lot of stress, and that.
And that's when I realised I was losing it.
So, that's when I thought, "I need help." Right.
That's when the voices started taking over, so...
Can you remember a moment when something began to unravel?
Yeah, I mean, the first ever time...
It was like an alligator at a watering hole.
It sort of just drags you in, you know?
I just lost touch with reality.
Do you know, like, in a computer game,
you might get, you know,
your main character and these story arc characters,
but then everybody else is just an NPC - a non-playable character.
Everyone else, you're just drones but you're...
This is your world.
And you can understand that.
What's really encouraging about you guys is that, you know, you've got
a very good handle on it and that's really encouraging for me to see.
Yeah, I'd say early intervention has helped a lot with that because...
I mean, normally, if you wanted to see a doctor, you'd wait weeks
or you wait, you know, just however long and you can't do that
if you're mentally unstable.
Whereas with early intervention,
you see doctors once a week if you need to.
Or change your meds if you need to.
You wouldn't get that back in your day. You would not have that.
No.
And that's what... That support. That support is what has made
probably a lot of us still alive right now.
It was just...
..brilliant to be able to just be with them, you know,
and sit with them and talk to them.
And then I spoke to Callum off camera and he was...
He's got a... he's got a business degree.
He ain't no slouch!
He spoke about things that I...
I understand.
That sense of feeling that you're a god,
that sense of feeling that you are, like in a computer game -
I understood aspects of that.
I remember one night...
I sat in front of the mirror, convinced...
..that my reflection was going to move...
..and go...
"You got me.
"Let's swap sides."
I was convinced of it.
I was staring at myself like this...
I know, I know, I know, I'm going to outstare you.
And I know at some point you're going to own up that you're
really me and I'm really you
and we're going to swap sides,
and actually I'm going to cross into your reality
and you're going to cross into my reality. I was convinced of it.
And I felt that, um...
..that, um, I wasn't me.
I felt that I was not real.
When someone is experiencing a psychotic episode
there are very real biological processes going on in the brain.
They may produce an excess amount of certain chemicals,
one of which is called dopamine.
Now, dopamine occurs naturally.
It is used to help nerve cells communicate with each other.
But if there is an excess of dopamine in the brain
it can play a part in the development
of delusions and hallucinations.
Psychosis can be really difficult to articulate
and so I would encourage my group to use whatever means
that they can to help communicate, such as writing or drawing.
Hello, mate.
David, how are we doing?
Sometimes there's so much that's going on in our unconscious
that we can't access through words.
This is very nice. Thank you very much.
What's all this on the wall? What's all this?
That's a constant reminder of who I am.
If I'm in a sort of dissociated state,
the way that I sort of react to it, I'll draw or I'll write
how I'm thinking, what I'm seeing, what I'm feeling.
So when I'm grounded in a reality,
I can look back and think, what was I thinking,
and try to understand sort of where my mind-set is at
so I can sort of help myself
to get better, if that makes sense.
Yeah.
What's this one with an axe?
When I when I first started having psychosis,
before I started the anti-psychotic medication,
I had a lot of visual hallucinations and I saw him numerous times.
He was always from a distance, you know? Hmm.
But he was very, very scary.
I was looking out the window
and he was in the garden... Wow. Just standing there
with the axe, and...
You'd run down the stairs, you'd go outside and he's gone.
And you're thinking, "Was it real or wasn't it?"
And you do honestly think that you are crazy.
But then there'll be other stuff like this,
where I'll be suicidal and I'll go off, and so I sort of...
I think... I think it's interesting here because, because...
..the stuff outside is in black and white. Yeah.
And the stuff inside the noose is in colour.
Yeah. It's almost as if...
That's, that's the better way. Yeah. Yeah.
Did you have any outlets or anything when you were...?
I drew sometimes.
I mean, mine's different. Like, mine's completely different.
I mean, it's not anything that's as elaborate.
I mean, I don't know why. That is very interesting.
I don't know why I drew it. You know, the glasses...
This was before I even wore glasses.
There's something coming out of the top of my head, something
coming out the top of my finger - it was a real sort of...
an arrival of this character.
I thought it was something coming out of me.
Shooting out. That...
That shows you that you were in a sense Superman.
That's, that's actually, er... That's, again, that's...
That's given me a new perspective on you, a little bit.
Just that you're more like me than I thought.
Although Callum has to live with his episodes almost every day,
I do see a lot of similarities between him and me.
I mean, while I didn't have any visual hallucinations,
I do remember the first time I heard voices.
I was completely on my own and I was lying in bed.
Literally, all I heard...
It was as if it was like a...
SHORT SHARP PUFFS OF AIR
Wake up!
I just sat up like this. I was like, "What the fuck is that?"
And it was... I went...
I was literally like that.
He said, "Don't panic. I'm Martin Luther King."
"Listen, I'm Martin Luther King and, um...
"Remember, I did that speech, I have a dream?" I was like, "Yeah."
He says, "Well, when I was killed...
"..the whole of reality became my dream.
"And, tonight, various people around the world are going
"to sacrifice themselves.
"And become angels."
It's going to end violence and end world hunger and all that.
It was like this huge fucking thing, and I was... I was in my bedroom
crying my eyes out because I thought this is going to... Me?!
You know, I'm part of this worldwide...
..effort to end, to end poverty and, you know, violence
and, you know... He said, "Oh, yes. Yes."
He said, "I want you to walk to Camden right now."
And part of this mission was I was going to go to this -
it sounds ridiculous - I was going to go to this shop, walk in.
He said, "Don't be surprised if the shop is open.
"Even though it's three o'clock in the morning, go to the back
"of the store, there's going to be a suit hanging up.
"You're going to put the suit on.
"You going to turn around and when you turn around
"THAT is the moment
"when life is going to change for millions of people."
Obviously, the fucking shop's closed.
And I get there, I'm trying the door.
And I said, "Look, this isn't really working,"
and then this voice was going, "OK, um... Something's wrong.
"Something's wrong. You have to go home right now
"because this isn't... this isn't working."
I got home, went to bed.
I was so tired.
The voices in my head were gone.
And there was like a silence and I was really deeply confused.
And I really didn't know who I was.
Next thing I know...
..I...
..heard these stones...
..being thrown at my window.
And that freaked me out, because I thought
it's the voices again.
And I looked out.
And, uh, it was Nick and Jez.
I think I eventually opened the door.
And that's when Nick and Jez thought it best to, um...
..drive me back to Birmingham, to my mother's house.
And it would be interesting to ask them why, but they decided to...
..take me to hospital instead.
You sort of virtually collapsed in the back of the car. Right.
Saying, "I'm dying."
Your eyes were rolling to the back of your head,
I started hitting you. And so you were properly, you know,
it was as if you were properly passing out.
We thought you were dying. That's why we took you to casualty.
You said, "I've got three brains in my head,"
and if you died, they died, too.
So, we wheeled you through here.
Yeah. DAVID EXHALES SHARPLY
And I think it was all systems go.
This was all open - you could get straight through.
So, I was out? You were sort of out in a wheelchair.
Passed out, yeah. You were in the wheelchair. Yeah. Yeah.
Nearly unconscious.
But then you really came to again and really freaked out and lost it
and ran, ran into a room and were raving.
On your knees, screaming to the sky.
They then called...
They called the police.
So there's about six officers turned up, wrestled you to the floor.
And they were wait... They were waiting by the door
saying, "We're not going in until the riot shields turn up"
and you got slightly too near to the entrance.
And they just went, "Now!"
And pounced and just...decked you, and sat on you, like six of them.
And then they start pumping sedatives into you.
And they said to us,
"He's had enough sedatives to knock a horse out."
It's all right. Yeah.
But, mate, you did it!
Fucking hell! You know what I mean? You came through it.
Fucking hell! I know.
HE EXHALES SHARPLY
It's coming back, some of it's coming back.
I remember policemen sitting on me.
I'm wondering what they were doing.
I thought they'd caught me.
I've done half the job by getting to Camden.
I'd done half the job.
But I hadn't completed the job.
And now... And he had kind of been warning me about, you know,
if I don't do X, it's all going to go horribly wrong.
And it was all going horribly wrong.
So, I just had to really...
..fight to stay awake.
Just to kind of...
HE EXHALES
Got to really thank you for what you did.
I-I... I don't know what I'd have done if you hadn't have been here.
No. I don't know what would have happened.
Fuck!
Oh! Fuck me. We've got real now, lads. Yeah.
I'd kind of, I'd kind of brushed all this off.
I know, I know. I'd kind of concentrated on all the funny bits.
But this is, this is very real.
Yeah. And very scary. Fucking hell.
I just didn't remember any of it and it's suddenly getting here
that you suddenly realise... Fucking hell.
You were in that building there.
That red brick building over there.
Behind, behind the trees.
It was in this now derelict building that I was held
under a section of the Mental Health Act for 72 hours
so that mental health professionals could assess me.
I can remember these roofs.
I can remember looking out the window and seeing these roofs
and just wanting to be outside.
I just wanted to get out.
I can remember all these trees, I can remember all these buildings.
I just wanted to get out. Get outside.
But I couldn't... I couldn't get out.
I have completely underestimated
just how much this whole process would dig up and...
I feel like a bit of an exposed nerve at the minute
because I'm-I'm... I'm realising that there's, you know,
I just kind of buried a whole load of trauma for years,
which was, you know, going into hospital.
Now I know why I was so sore for weeks afterwards.
It's because I had six coppers sitting on me for hours!
30 years later and some things have changed.
So, I'm up in Birmingham, my hometown.
They trialled an initiative called Street Triage.
And, basically, if they think there's a mental health case,
this special unit will go and make sure
that they are treated correctly.
We've got a 17-year-old
and she's got this unusual kind of dissociative experience.
So if she's got a psychotic illness
or the beginnings of the early stages of one
we want to kind of assess and put the right kind
of treatment or care in place.
So, what's happened, then, tonight?
When we found her, she's basically, she's not engaged with us.
Yeah. Playing with her wrists, got blood on her wrists. OK.
I found a half written suicide note in the car. OK.
There's something not right. OK. Let's go and have a chat with her.
There's more people going into a mental health crisis
than ever before.
They cannot cope any more and they are suicidal
and they want to die, or they're completely psychotic
where they have no idea about what the world is around them.
I asked if she can go to Dad's. Dad won't have her.
So, there's nowhere else for her to go at the moment.
But have a chat, see what you think.
This lot have made fools out of me and I'm not accepting it.
Tried to blow my house up.
He had the petrol can in the back of his car.
The police searched his car and they lied and said there's
no petrol can. But when I searched it, there was a petrol can in there.
They're trying to say I'm mad.
How can I be mad when it's real?
If I reflect on what happened to me,
I'd put me in her position right now,
the triage team would have perhaps calmed me down
and perhaps have settled me a lot earlier than I was.
There's a lady that I thought you might be interested in seeing
called Rachel. She's a 29-year-old
who's presented yesterday to the hospital.
Dr Rowena Jones has allowed me to shadow her on one of her rounds.
She's had quite a long history of psychiatric problems.
She had an admission back in 2010 with a psychotic episode.
Right. She's not been very well.
There's possibly some drug withdrawal.
Family are concerned about her mental state.
So I thought we'd go and have a chat and see how we can help.
Rachel's at a severe moment of crisis
but her family have kindly let us film.
Hello. This is Rachel.
Rachel, do you want to say hello?
Rachel? Come and say hello.
Hello, Rachel.
I'm David.
How are you? Yeah.
I'm here making a programme
because I myself had a psychotic episode.
I think it was emotional trauma that led to using drugs
in the very beginning, at an adolescent age.
Then I think things like postnatal depression...
..stimulate episodes.
And when you're not diagnosed, you don't understand.
So then you look for other ways to heal yourself,
which increases the drug aspect.
And then before you know it, she crashes.
It's so traumatic for the family.
It's really hard.
Sorry to ask questions when I know you're not feeling well.
I know from looking at your notes, you've had these voices
and sometimes you've had some problems with your thoughts.
The Devil?
Yes. What do you mean by that?
What makes you think
that's something that's been done by the Devil?
Right.
The Devil being in her throat. She said, "The Devil's in my throat."
and she kept, she kept doing this.
Yeah, yeah. There's obviously something that's bothering her.
Sometimes it arrives completely unannounced.
People suddenly develop a conviction that
"The Devil is in my body" or something.
I had that... When I...
When I was admitted 30 years ago,
I had the belief that I had three people's brains in my brain
and it was, you know, completely real.
It's something that comes out of the studies as well
that the power of a voice is what controls...
It's not necessarily the nastiness of it, it's the power that you feel
it has over you at that time. And that's what you were talking about
in there and again now. Absolutely.
I can really attest to the power of...
..that delusion.
Probably, this is the first time in 30 years
I'm beginning to put the pieces together, and I'm beginning to...
..really understand in my head...
..what was going on.
"This young man was admitted under the care
"of consultant psychiatrist...
"Patient is acutely psychotic, aggressive, inappropriate...
"Four days before admission, he started to behave bizarrely
"and said that he'd been invisible..."
"..believed that he had merged hearts with a black boy."
It's almost as if my brain was just clearing out a whole load
of confusion and crap and pain,
all the things that were causing me enormous stress.
What was confusing me so much back then was that suddenly
I was being all I could be.
And all I was being told I was...
was a black actor.
I got a job almost straight out of drama school,
which was playing Romeo in Romeo and Juliet.
You know, I just thought I had a job.
I thought, "Great. Nice job, lead role."
And then, when the reviews came out...
..I suddenly started realising that they were all...
..prefaced by...
"Black actor David Harewood"...
"Black theatre company, Temba Theatre Company..."
The "black production of Romeo and"...
I thought I was just doing Romeo and Juliet.
No, no, no. You're doing a BLACK production of Romeo and Juliet.
And you're a BLACK actor.
Although I was conscious of myself as a black person
it really wasn't until I got out of drama school
that the world said to me, you are black.
Your aspirations,
dreams, your hopes...
..are now...
..restricted.
I'm starting to wonder how much my psychosis was connected to the racism I was dealing with
and if my experience is shared with other young black men.
There are lots of reasons why young black men are being sectioned more.
One reason is that black men come to the mental health system later
than their white counterparts
and that's for fear of being hospitalised,
fear of being stigmatised.
They arrive at hospital at crisis point, really.
Let me just... I'm going to go for my bag here.
I'm going to look, show you my records from 30 years ago. Oh, wow.
See, look at this.
I mean, this is like... This is what a doctor wrote.
"Lively, bit of a clown but sly underneath."
That's awful. It's awful. It's absolutely awful.
"Very hostile and angry shouting and fighting. Given diazepam with the help of six policemen." Gosh.
Do you think that authorities consider us more dangerous? I do.
And I definitely think that there's a story that exists
over how black men are seen in society and that influences people's
perceptions, images of black men as violent, hyper masculinity.
So I think when a black man presents in crisis, sometimes people's ideas
about what black men are like
overshadow the person that's actually in front of them.
So, you think all those negative connotations, all those negative...
All that negative language plays into the...
It can play into your perception of yourself.
Conception of self. Exactly. Exactly.
And the ideas of who you want to be and who you can be.
And I guess that's the part marginalisation plays... Mm-hmm.
..of images of self.
If everybody you see on TV is white
and all the police are white, all the heroes are white,
it can subtly seep into your... Yes.
Yes, that's exactly it.
I think it's sometimes referred to as the everyday struggle,
which is just what life is like for a young black man.
Experiences of marginalisation, oppression, discrimination.
That's really interesting.
And I think that actually things like that, experience like that,
can have a cumulative effect in the development of psychosis. Mm.
It's good to hear that, kind of, what happened to me
wasn't just as a result of my individual issues, problems,
but that there are factors at play in people that look like me.
Obviously, I'm not that confused young boy but it's...
It's really painful to...
..to...
..to look at it.
It's really painful to look at it.
I'm thinking, "Wow! You were really lost."
Really lost.
Seeing those kids at early intervention,
I almost envied them.
I would love to have had that.
I would love to have had a shared experience like that,
where we all sat and talked about what was happening to us.
Hey, bud. Oh! How are you doing, pal? Good. How are you?
I'm not too bad. How are you? Good, good. Tired, man. I can imagine.
Yeah. Tired, tired.
How was your week? Nah, yeah, man. It's been good.
As I was saying to other people, if it's not a bad week, for me, it's a good week, if it makes sense?
I know exactly what you mean. Nothing special has happened. Yeah.
But because nothing bad's happened,
I've considered that as like a good week.
Psychosis is a really isolating experience.
They often feel that no-one else can understand
what they're going through and avoid their friends
and actually coming to a group like this where everyone is going through
a similar experience, it really does help to normalise it.
My voice was...it was religious.
It was based off good principles
and doing good deeds for other people.
So when I explain people my psychosis,
I don't see it as, like, something negative.
Psychosis goes to the heart of your identity.
People feel that they're putting themselves back together
like a jigsaw puzzle, so this, a place like the drop-in,
when they can share experiences, can help them to realise
other people are going through the same thing.
"If they can get through it, then so can I."
That's all right. Well done.
I've got this third party voice.
There's my voice...
..your voice...
..and the voice that sounds like it's a teacher
in an overcrowded classroom.
And she's trying to talk, but nobody's listening.
Does it tell you to do things? Yeah.
It did do.
I had to martyr myself to save my family.
"Throw yourself in front of a white lorry,"
because the white resembles this kind of purity thing
where you have a chance that you might come back.
And when you saw it, you stepped out in front of it.
I didn't step out in front of it. I took a really deep breath
like I did now and just went for it.
Hit it, rolled.
I can remember just getting off and running off. I left that lorry.
Did he stop? I'm so sorry. He did.
He stopped and another car stopped and I ran.
I... And I... I'm really sorry...
..to have done that to that person in that...
But I really thought that this was the way that I had to go.
Yeah. I can't believe that I did it, but I did.
If I'd gone to a doctor just days before I hit that lorry,
I wouldn't have gone into hospital.
Yeah, I'm the same.
If I'd have taken the bottle of tablets...
..when I was probably supposed to, I wouldn't have had this huge...
..dramatic crash that I ended up having.
But I remember how much I used to fight it,
how much I was in denial about things and how angry I used to get
and refuse help.
But then...
..when you know you need it, get it.
Yeah. When you know you're really off balance, don't...
I couldn't... I can't believe I could let myself get that bad.
I don't know if you still hear voices or see things.
What do you do when you...?
Check in with myself. SHE EXHALES
Remind myself that this type of thing has happened before.
And it's just my third party voice.
Don't have to listen to it,
certainly don't have to answer to it.
It's just my third party voice.
Get on with what you're doing. Keep washing up.
You guys have really kind of helped me out a little bit.
You guys are...
..kind of helping me out a little bit. But it's...
..because we're being honest with each other.
That's... That... Yeah.
I've nothing... Sometimes you hit a place where you have to be honest...
Yeah. ..about everything.
Incredible girl. Incredible girl.
She's just astonishing, how she's dealing with it.
And the things that she's talking about, I recognise all of them.
And she's still able to kind of be articulate and...
..together, because I'm a bit of a mess at the minute.
I've got to be honest with you.
I've not necessarily been...
..honest with myself over the years, and...
..this process has made me realise
how much of myself I probably buried.
I've never felt ashamed of it, I've never felt ashamed of the breakdown.
But maybe I felt ashamed of the reasons,
the reasons why I had the breakdown.
I sometimes perhaps feel I'm not quite enough
or I'm not good enough or I'm not black enough or I'm not...
You know, I think there's... There are times when I've...
..had that issue.
By finding out about my most vulnerable moment,
I feel like I'm starting to own it.
But there's a part that's missing.
PHONE RINGS Hello.
Hello, Mum. Oh, hi, kid. How are you doing? I'm well. How are you?
Oh, not too bad.
VOICEOVER: Even though my family were a huge part of my recovery,
we've really never talked about my psychosis.
Once I'd been released from Whittington...
..my sister and my mum came to take me back to Birmingham
and hopefully start my recovery.
But something happened again which made me relapse.
Hi, Mum.
Oh, hi, bab. How are you?
Where are you off to? Good.
THEY CHUCKLE Thanks for doing this.
Oh, OK, love. You all right? Yeah.
VOICEOVER: For the first time since it happened,
Mum's agreed to talk about it with me.
We have to go around... Oh, goodness. It's so long ago.
I'm still trying to work out the chronology, then, Mum.
Yeah. Don't forget it happened twice.
OK. Remember you had the first...
You had the first incident when Jeremy...
When Jeremy called... Mm-hmm.
..and told me what was wrong and we came and fetched you.
Brought you to Birmingham and you got better
but then you went back to London and then something...
I think you did something, you smoked something or did something, I don't know.
Possibly. Possibly smoked again.
I think you did it, smoked something.
So then you came to get me. And that's when we fetched you.
Yeah. You came back here. Yeah, yeah.
And the doctor said, "Well, you'll have to go away for a while," he said.
Four weeks after being released from the Whittington Hospital in London,
I ended up here, in what was then
the Hollymoor Hospital in Birmingham,
on another locked ward.
I don't remember arriving at the Hollymoor but I remember trying to get out.
I remember sitting there thinking, "Where's my mum?
"I don't know anybody in here, I don't need to be in here,"
and I remember going to the doors and trying to push the doors open,
and they were locked.
I didn't enjoy leaving you behind. Honest to God. Mm.
You know, I remember having a prayer and I just said to the Lord,
whatever else is...
Just whatever is wrong, just...
..let it be me and not David.
As I walked down here.
Just let me, you know... Take me and not David.
I remember having to take the anti-psychotic medication every day,
and it...
SLOWLY: ..made me...like...that.
Really slow.
They were really depressing me.
I would never advocate psychosis is treated with medication alone,
but the medication helps to treat the symptoms,
help people feel better, help them become more robust,
and it also minimises the risk of a further episode of psychosis,
particularly in that first 12 months.
Around 15% of people never have another episode of psychosis
and never need to use medication again.
But some people need medication longer term
to prevent multiple episodes of psychosis.
KNOCKING
Hello, David. Hello. How are you? Nice to see you again.
Nice to see you. Yeah. Nice to see you.
Shall I give you the grand tour?
I mean, only... Only if you want. It's only a one-bedroom flat.
It's not used to... It's not.
The lobby. The lobby. THEY CHUCKLE
Oh, that was my very first ship.
In my 20s. That's me.
Employee of the month.
You got employee of the month. Cheesy... Cheesy cheese balls.
Yeah, I used to get employee of the month.
Yeah. I was in Langkawi in Malaysia.
Thailand. You've travelled a hell of a lot.
Yeah. I did seven world cruises before the age of 30.
Not bragging, but that's... CHUCKLES
Do you miss those days? Thailand. I miss the travelling days.
I miss the travelling. Would you want to go back to it?
I would go back to it, but with a very different approach.
A lot of these pictures where I'm happy and gleaming
and it all looks good,
the night before I would have been up until 3:00 in the morning
drinking, smoking and just being
very self-destructive. Mm.
But my motto was as long as I get to breakfast, you know,
as long as I get to breakfast I'm all right.
I'm OK. As long as I make it to breakfast.
Wow. These are my tablets.
These are the other tablets sometimes I have to take.
I take three tablets a day.
I have diazepam and zopiclone as a patient request when needed
and I have a depo injection once a month.
The injection is the anti-psychotic.
It's called paliperidone.
Some of the side effects of my injection makes me lactate...
..which is weird, cos I'm not pregnant.
That can be a bit invasive,
but the main side effects are quite positive.
I'm not hallucinating.
I'm not hearing as much as what I was hearing before.
Not anywhere near what I was hearing or seeing before.
So those are positive side effects.
What happens if you don't take them?
Can you sense it coming on?
The anti-psychotic when I stopped taking the quetiapine,
I would...
I would be quite irrational and...
..quite aggressive sometimes, I'd hallucinate before bedtime.
Wow. Yeah. Wow.
Good girl. I mean, phew.
Oh, you inspire me, actually.
Really? Yeah.
Despite the condition and the tablets and all of the stuff
that you're having to deal with,
you still can look me in the eye and smile and make me laugh
and, you know, you've still got that.
I think that's a real testament to you.
You don't have to let it defeat you.
I don't have to let it defeat me, and I don't have to wear a sign
above my head to say I've got a mental illness
or I'm suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, leave me alone.
Mm. But, yeah.
I have to... I have to accept what's going on.
I'm a lot calmer, I'm a lot rationaler.
You seem very calm today. Yeah. Yeah.
Try not to let my past haunt me too much.
I think I've been extremely lucky that my confusion, my delusion...
..was almost like a fever.
That's not true for everybody.
Some people, their mental health is a real battle
just to get through the day.
It's been really tough to do this
but at the same time,
I've learned a hell of a lot.
One of the things that was told to me was that people in psychiatric hospitals...
..get less "get well" cards than any other form of illness.
Because there's no language to talk about it.
People don't want to tell people that they've had a psychiatric problem.
People are ashamed of their psychiatric problems.
But what's hopeful is that there's a way back and there's a...
Not for everyone, but there's a way back.
Over to the right, there. Do you remember? That top flat, that was my flat.
This one here. Yeah. That top one there.
After 15 days at the Hollymoor Hospital, Mum brought me back home.
My medication was slowly reduced.
When they said you could come home, I just...
We just got the bus and we came home. And that was it.
The old David came back.
I don't think it was the old David, I think it was a new David.
Oh, well.
No, you could be right. Yeah.
You've come a long way.
CHUCKLES
Look, Mum, you know, I mean, I say one of the things I've realised
throughout all of this is how much I relied on Nick and Jez,
but, I mean, you've been a real soldier.
I did try. I did try.
Try? You did it!
I did try.
You'll always be my David.
Thanks, Mum.
OK. Don't mention it. It will cost you!
THEY CHUCKLE
Oh, God!
Shall we get some food? Huh? Shall we get some food?
Yeah. I suppose so, yeah. Get in the car.
If you want to find out more about psychosis
and understand the misconceptions around it,
go to the web page on the screen
and follow the links to the Open University.