For most of her life, Lucy Nichol has had to cope with anxiety. Now she has written a book about it. She tells DAVID WHETSTONE why mental illness shouldn’t be stigmatised
Ensconced in an armchair, feet tucked up, a blue sky through the window behind, Lucy Nichol looks happy, relaxed and... well, just fine as her three cats prowl and purr.
But it turns out she’s not quite as fine as I might have imagined.
“I’m actually off work with anxiety at the moment,” she says. “Yesterday I really wasn’t good.”
Appearances can be deceptive. But just because Lucy is smiling as she nurses her cup of tea doesn’t mean there isn’t something wrong.
This much I have learned through reading her book.
It’s called A Series of Unfortunate Stereotypes: Naming and Shaming Mental Health Stigmas and it’s indicative of what you might perceive to be a new mood of openness and understanding.
Mental health didn’t get talked about much in years gone by, certainly not when I was growing up in the 1970s and then it was mostly in a derogatory way.
According to Lucy, who’s younger than me, things hadn’t improved a great deal by the 1990s when she was spreading her adolescent wings.
But now people are starting to talk about mental health which is perhaps why Lucy’s book has struck a chord, earning a lot of pre-publication plaudits.
In it she tells her own story with startling honesty, not holding back on some of the things others might be inclined to keep to themselves.
It helps a great deal that Lucy – who does work in public relations, after all – has the gift of sparkling prose and a mischievous, self-deprecating sense of humour.
“We do talk more openly about mental health now, but if we’re really honest, perhaps we’re still a tad frightened of it,” she writes at one point.
“Do we still conjure up, in our minds, stereotypical images of mentally ill people, of those who appear to have an edge to their madness?
“If you saw a photo of me, you wouldn’t think, ‘she has a mental illness’. I do not have PRONE TO PANIC stamped on my forehead.
“I am relatively normal, whatever that means. But sometimes, my illness makes me do some pretty ‘out there’ things, just like some of my physical illnesses do.”
She makes the point that “seemingly anti-social, ‘embarrassingly cringey’ behaviours and symptoms” (rocking back and forth, appearing to be a bit spaced out and unsteady) aren’t always down to mental health issues and are much more likely to be excused if the cause is physical.
Lucy says the story of her book began after she started work in 2015 for Home Group, the housing association.
In looking for stories for the company magazine, she was chatting to colleagues in mental health services who help people in supported housing.
“I was sharing all these different stories but I was thinking this was something I’d never done myself. That seemed really ridiculous.”
Lucy wrote a piece for The Journal to coincide with World Mental Health Day and then was invited to write a regular column for The Standard Issue, the online magazine set up by comedian Sarah Millican as an alternative to the mainstream glossies.
She called the column A Series of Unfortunate Stereotypes after the Lemony Snicket books, A Series of Unfortunate Events, in which, she notes, Aunt Josephine is extremely paranoid – afraid of nearly everything, notably estate agents – and ends up being eaten by leeches (probably).
Lucy thought that was a terrible fate for the poor, terrified woman with her anxiety and phobias. She wrote a story in which a sassy Aunt Josephine, far from conforming to stereotype, defeated the leeches and rode away.
In her Standard Issue articles, Lucy dealt with stigmas and stereotypes one by one and they caught the eye of Trigger Press, who have published her book as part of its new Inspirational Series, about people who have “battled and beaten” mental health issues.
The book has a dedication: “For anyone who’s ever been labelled a ‘whiny needy twerp’ or an ‘attention seeking bastard’ for bravely battling mental illness.”
Chapters deal with a succession of stereotypes, including The Narcissist, The Hypochondriac, The Party Addict and The Toxic Triffid, and Lucy has been subject to all of them.
Along with greater openness has come social media with its trolls and its readiness to label people as OCD, schizophrenic or depressive.
While declaring that she doesn’t have a psychology GCSE to her name, Lucy understands how this can exacerbate a tendency to self-stigmatise.
“Somebody pierces our wrists with a nasty insult or a negative idea, and we continue to twist the rusty nails until they’re embedded in our very being.”
Consequently each of the above chapters has a subheading called ‘Reality’ – respectively The Self-Loather, The Poorly Mind, The Lost, Anxious Soul and The Wilting Wallflower.
In her book Lucy describes her first panic attack at the age of 15. In her cosy sitting room she says she was 20 when she first sought professional help.
“It got to the point where I couldn’t carry on. I went to the doctor’s and burst into tears.
“I had about a week where I thought my throat was closing up. There wasn’t a single thing that could relax me. The doctor offered me drugs but at the time I was terrified of taking drugs (afraid they would cause deep vein thrombosis).”
She was signed up for a course of cognitive behavioural therapy, “learning how to rationalise your thoughts”.
Lucy remembers the therapist, when she explained about her throat, saying: “Could you just walk to the loos at the end of the corridor and look in the mirror and see if your throat really is closing up.”
Her throat, she discovered, was perfectly OK.
Lucy also mentioned the alarming numbness in her legs. The therapist learned that she had been watching TV while kneeling and Lucy came to see that, yes, that could have been the cause.
It would be all too easy to scoff.
Lucy’s a bit too mature to be a millennial. A photo in the Party Addict chapter shows her seeing in the Millennium “a little worse for wear”, probably after an infusion of the fizzy Lambrini which she used to mask her inhibitions.
But she bridles at the term ‘snowflake generation’. “I hate that,” she says. If young people are becoming aware of mental illness, that’s good.
Currently taking beta blockers to combat her anxiety, Lucy says: “My mind jumps to catastrophe. I was really bad yesterday, so strung out.
“I think over the years the panic attacks haven’t happened so much but if you become complacent, they can sneak up.”
Lucy has had a succession of counsellors. She remembers a conversation she had with one of them.
“I said, ‘I can’t stop looking for danger’ and she said, ‘You remind me of a meerkat, always on the lookout’. It made me smile because meerkats aren’t scary creatures, they’re really cute, so I couldn’t beat myself up about it any more. Thinking about that helped.”
But the anxiety has never gone away. Getting on a bus could be an ordeal and there’s the jaw. Lucy says she has always had a thing about the shape of her jaw which, of course, looks absolutely OK to me.
In Lucy’s youthful mind a small rash, which she feared might be a sign of meningitis, triggered her first attack. Now she can worry that a bout of forgetfulness could be a sign of early onset dementia.
She has even been known to send a GP friend WhatsApp pictures of rashes.
All this fear and anxiety from someone who once did a parachute jump and felt fine. I wouldn’t do that. Lucy did.
And the woman who has shied away from prescribed drugs makes no secret of the fact that she has dabbled, in her youthful past, with their recreational equivalent.
She laughs at how crazy (is that a permissable word here?) it all sounds.
“The thing with my anxiety is it seems to be to do with the unknown. When I know what something is I can deal with it.
“A few years ago I had pleurisy. As soon as I knew what it was, I was fine.”
On a similar note, in her book she recalls a teenage diagnosis of pneumonia. Her relieved response? “Cool. I’ll go clubbing.”
Lucy, who lives with her 19-year-old stepson and her husband, actor Chris Connel, says of her condition: “It puts a strain on relationships because you project your fears onto other people. But I’ve been lucky in that sense. Chris is great and he totally gets it.”
If her book can persuade other people to ‘get it’ too, Lucy will be more than pleased.
A Series of Unfortunate Stereotypes (Trigger Press) costs £11.99 and is out now.
On Tuesday, March 6, at 7pm, Lucy will be in conversation with Anna Foster, of BBC Radio Newcastle, at Waterstones, Blackett Street, Newcastle. Tickets are £3 from the store or via www.waterstones.com/events/an-evening-with-lucy-nichol/newcastle
