Ruby Wax: ‘A fifth of people have dandruff, a quarter have mental illness...

RUBY Wax never seemed short on self-confidence. She was, after all, the woman whose interview technique involved persuading Bette Midler to sing a track from her latest album on a department store escalator, snooping in Sarah Ferguson’s drawers and sharing a hot tub with Pamela Anderson.

On television, she was the very embodiment of the brash American, asking the kind of questions no other presenter dared ask and not giving up until she got an answer. The viewers loved it.

Ruby Wax Meets... ran for just two years, but in those 20 episodes she punctured many a celebrity’s bubble and never once blushed as she mercilessly poked around in their private lives. She also showed there was much more to her than the loud-mouthed Yank who had first appeared on British television screens in Girls On Top in the mid 1980s.

However, behind the toothy smile and the blood red lipstick, Wax was hiding a secret. At the height of her career, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and after years of being in denial she could no longer run away from the condition which she had lived with on and off for almost as long as she could remember.

“For years I didn’t know what it was, I just knew that there were times when I struggled to get out ssof bed. It wasn’t about feeling a bit low, it was about being unable to do anything. It left me completely disabled. I guess part of me thought I wasn’t the kind of person to suffer from depression, but when the diagnosis came it was a bit of a relief. I finally had a name for it and once you have that, then you can start to deal with it.”

It was 1993, Wax was pregnant with her third child and after giving birth was admitted to the Priory. She’s been back a few times since, but her most recent visit was to première her latest stage show. While Losing It, inspired by her own experiences of mental illness, is a departure from the rest of her CV, the approach is typical Wax.

“One in five people have dandruff. One in four people have mental illness. I have had both,” she says. “I don’t want people to feel sorry for me, but I do want people to understand what mental illness is. Twenty years ago cancer used to be the C word that people wouldn’t or couldn’t discuss, now it’s the M word. The problem is that the brain is this wonderful complex thing and the idea that it can change just like any other organ in the body is just too spooky for people to comprehend. It’s easier not talk about it.

“The problem is that when no one is willing to discuss it, it just makes the situation worse and facts are replaced by myths. Losing It is about being honest about a condition which affects an awful lot of people and I wanted to perform it first at the Priory to give people who are often ignored and brushed aside a forum.”

The show recently moved to the West End, where it has been winning rave reviews and with Wax now clearly on a mission to strip away taboos, she’s also giving a talk at the first Love Arts Festival in Leeds. The programme reads much like any other festival – there’s music from the likes of the Unthanks, a series of art exhibitions, as well as dance and theatre performances - the difference is the event is being staged by Leeds Partnerships NHS Foundation Trust and the Arts and Minds Network who hope to use it as a platform to not only raise awareness of mental health issues, but also as a way of involving people who are often socially excluded.

“It can be incredibly lonely, but it doesn’t have to be that way,” says Wax, now 58. “When you are diagnosed with something like bipolar disorder no-one gives you a manual about how to deal with it, so a lot of people end up stumbling from one episode to another. I’m not saying I have all the answers, I don’t, but maybe I have a few.”

While it might have been expected that Wax would have dealt with her illness with comedy, what’s more surprising is that she is also studying for a masters in neuroscience at Oxford University. Her return to the classroom is part of a search for the roots cause of chemical imbalances in the brain, but she already knows that there is no simple mathematical formula.

Wax’s own upbringing was famously eccentric. Her mother suffered from what would now be called an obsessive compulsive disorder. Obsessed with cleanliness, she covered the furniture in the family’s Chicago home in plastic and the windows always remained shut. Her father was equally neurotic, a strict disciplinarian, who ruled with a rod of iron. An only child, Wax didn’t enjoy a close relationship with either of her parents and found escape from home through comedy. She has previously described the realisation that she could make people laugh as transforming her from a “VW to a Ferrari.”

Leaving America for the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow, Wax’s rise through the ranks appeared seamless. As a writer for Not the Nine O’Clock News, French and Saunders and Absolutely Fabulous’s script editor, she knows that her openness about mental illness makes her easily cast as the “tears of the clown” comedian. Nothing could be further form the truth, she says.

“Mental illness is a chemical and biological condition. Would I have been depressed if I hadn’t been a comedian? Of course I would. There were many times when I was incredibly busy and under an awful lot of pressure and I coped and other times when things appeared to be going fine and suddenly it would be back again. It’s an illness as simple as that. It doesn’t care whether you are a shoemaker or stand-up comedian. Sadly, there’s still a lot of people who don’t understand that.”

Wax, hasn’t been on television for a while – one of her last outings was on Comic Relief Does Fame Academy eight years ago. As the work dried up, she admits watching new presenters taking her place in the pecking order was difficult to come to terms with, but now she insists she has little desire to relive the days when she encouraged OJ Simpson to repeatedly stab her with a banana.

Aside from the masters and the run of Losing It, which sees her perform alongside singer/songwriter Judith Owens, she’s also heavily involved with the Time to Change campaign. The organisation was set up in 2007 to raise awareness of mental health issues and Wax, along with Stephen Fry and Alastair Campbell, is one of its most vocal supporters.

“Seeing yourself plastered across the Tube is a little strange, but it’s important as I think that if someone like Stephen Fry says, ‘Look, I have suffered from a mental illness’, it makes people more accepting of others. When my children were young of course I didn’t go into graphic detail about what was wrong with mummy, but as they have got older we’ve talked about. It’s been four years since I last suffered from depression, but I know it will come back. That’s the point, you can’t cure it, but you can talk about it and you can be open about it.”