I remember walking a local nature trail with my mother when I was 21, and her casually mentioning that she used to walk along the same path with my grandmother when she was small, "on Sundays, when we used to visit Grandad in the Old Manor."
Old Manor was the local psychiatric hospital. A sprawl of Victorian buildings hidden behind a tall brick wall, it was scary and imposing. Whenever anyone acted at all strangely, local people would joke that they would "end up in the Old Manor." It became defunct in 2003. Its brick wall was knocked down and it was replaced by modern buildings that are light and unthreatening. Still though, people round here talk of ending up in the Old Manor.
That walk was the first time my mother had mentioned my grandfather's stay there. Apparently he suffered brain damage after a motorcycle injury and was in there for a long time recovering. But nobody ever spoke of it because, you know, the Old Manor. Crazy people.
When I was 29, I had a massive and life-altering breakdown. My boss all but physically removed me from my desk, telling me "I am very worried about you; please go to the doctor and get yourself signed off. Don't come back until you are ready." I spent several months in limbo while my GP attempted to get me onto the correct dosage of the correct medication. All of the drugs seemed to have the same bizarre side-effect – a combination of suicidal ideation teamed with lack of inhibition. The result was many serious and lengthy conversations with anyone who would listen, in which I calmly put forward my case that people with depression should be able to go to that clinic in Switzerland and end it all.
People in my family don't talk about important things. Four years into my recovery, my mother has still never had a proper conversation with me about what happened that summer. If it's at all uncomfortable, we put it to the back of our minds and do our best to pretend it's not there. That attitude is not the exclusive territory of my family, though. Everyone does it. Nobody wants to be thought of as bonkers, unstable, crazy.
I read a memoir recently in which a man traced his grandfather's military career through the Second World War. He reached a point where the man had been sent to a hospital in India, and then there was a gaping hole in the record. Historians told him this was because his grandfather had been sent to Deolali, the hospital from which the term "doolally" comes. Because of the stigma attached to being sent to that particular hospital, the records of his time there would have been burnt.
I have written at length about my breakdown. I forgot how to live my life, and even now cannot recall how I passed most of that summer. I think it's important to tell people about that, because I know I am not only one. I remember meeting friends for lunch and quietly admitting that I had been taking antidepressants. Four of the five people around the table said, "me too."
And so we come to that statistic: one in four. One in four people will suffer with a mental health issue, and the most common is depression. But as well as feeling depressed and miserable, we also feel shame. It's a dirty little secret, something to which we must never admit. This stops us from seeking help, and so we suffer alone, scared to ask for help lest the three in four think we're crazy.
Well, guess what? I went crazy. Properly, unashamedly, batshit crazy. And then I managed to claw my way out of that hole, and get on with my life. I don't look crazy now; I don't act crazy, and as far as I know, nobody has caught it from me. I am able to string a sentence together; I'm even able to raise a child alone while running a business. Life does not end when our mental health falters; it is entirely possible to recover from a breakdown, and I am living proof. I am not ashamed of my breakdown; I am proud to have come out the other side. Perhaps if people can see that a mental health problem is not the end of the story, they won't worry so much about admitting to their own.