Fascinating insights as television goes mental

You could say I went ‘mental’ during the week with my television watching as Channel 4 concentrated on raising mental health issues with a series of documentaries.

It kicked off on Monday with Ruby Wax’s Mad Confessions where she asked three people to tell their workmates of their condition. She suffered a breakdown in 1993 at the height of her own TV career and she kept that quiet in case it would interfere with her career prospects. But as she recovered, she realised that the stigma of mental illness needed to be erased so she simply tweeted if anyone was interested in ‘coming out’ so to speak. She found her three volunteers and so she made a documentary.

Ruby, who started out as a comedian but whose career took an upwards move as a quirky and cheeky interviewer, was the perfect person to front this programme having confessed her own mental health issues. In fact she has turned it into a stage show, which she uses as a way of raising awareness and getting people to open up about their own mental health issues after the show. I saw the show in London’s West End and it’s amazing how Ruby can raise a laugh out of a crisis.

The following night it was comedian Jon Richardson’s turn to find out if he suffered from OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) as he likes things to be neat and tidy and has a peculiar way of avoiding certain shapes on the footpath. Anyway, it turned out he didn’t but he did meet others with worse compulsions than him. Basically, it is not OCD if your habits, no matter how precise or annoying they can appear to others, don’t interfere with your daily life.

For instance if your fear of germs kept you indoors – and it does in some extreme cases – then it is clearly OCD and is regarded as a mental health issue.

That programme was not as interesting as Ruby’s but that might be personal on my part. It’s not that I don’t have my own touches of OCD (as in I won’t share drinks and I do carry a hand cleaning agent in my handbag) but the subject doesn’t enthral me as much as other types of mental disorders.

On Wednesday night it was a fantastic five-day experiment involving eight people who volunteered to be interviewed by prospective employers and observed by two professional health care experts, a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst.

For more, read this week's Connacht Sentinel.