Stephen Fry Spits in Stigma’s Eye with Honest Talk on Tough Subjects

With a new memoir out, More Fool Me, the iconic British comedian and actor, Stephen Fry, continues to speak honestly and openly about living with bipolar disorder.

The 2006 documentary Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive has a somewhat misleading title, because Stephen Fry himself is incredibly open about his bipolar—and pretty much everything else he is and does.

Exhibit A: More Fool Me, the recently released third installment of Fry’s memoirs. As in the previous volumes—which touched on his adolescent expulsions from private schools, a brief stint in prison for credit card fraud, crippling self-doubt, and an attempt to take his own life—he is candid about the darker side of his incredibly successful life as a multi-hyphenated entertainer.

Comedian, screen actor, stage actor, game show host, radio personality, playwright, columnist, novelist, et cetera, et cetera … the scarily prolific polymath has been called a national treasure in his native England. He’s best known on this side of the pond for his movie roles (most recently as the Master of Lake-town in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug) and for his guest stint on the TV series Bones as the wise, warm and humorous therapist we all wish we had.

The new book picks up his life story in the late 1980s, when his career as part of the British comedy duo Fry and Laurie was soaring. (That would be Hugh Laurie, who went on to play the curmudgeonly doctor solving medical mysteries on TV’s House, M.D.)  Fry has characterized the following decade or so as “a foolish period in the life of an often very foolish man.” He was partying as hard as he worked—which is to say, relentlessly—partly as a way to mask symptoms of his unrecognized bipolar disorder.

The book wraps up before Fry’s diagnosis in 1995—a story for Volume Four, perhaps. Which would no doubt also cover his ambivalent feelings about fully embracing treatment until just a few years ago.

In 2012, while filming the documentary Stephen Fry: Out There—a look at how gay people are treated in different countries—he fell into a deep despair that nearly proved fatal. In the wake of that attempt to take his own life, he dedicated himself to a trial-and-error search for the right medications to manage his moods. Now, at 57, he’s feeling more balanced than he ever has.

Training a camera lens on bipolar disorder and homosexuality was all of a piece with Fry’s relentless contest with shame and silence. He has lent his prominence to various mental health awareness campaigns, and in 2011 he stepped in as president of Mind, a British advocacy organization.

Perhaps his most powerful weapon, however, is his willingness to share personal details with the widest possible public audience—and always with a huge measure of charm and sincerity, as he does here.

Question: In your hugely varied career, what’s the most fun thing you’ve done?

Answer: Bungee jumped, I think [while in New Zealand filming The Hobbit]. I don’t picture myself as physically brave, so I shocked myself.

Q You’re been a soccer fan since childhood. What’s your favorite pursuit outside of work?

A I would say watching cricket, soccer, golf, and snooker [a form of pool] are high on the list, but mostly sitting round dinner tables talking with friends.

Q You top the list of celebrities with whom the British public would most love to share a cup of coffee. What personage, living or dead, would you most like to grab a latte with?

A Oh, Oscar Wilde, every day of the week. So charming, so kind, so inspiring, as well as, of course, so wise and funny. There are two types of brilliant conversationalists, they say: Those that make you feel 2 feet high because they are so loftily brilliant and those that make you feel 10 feet tall because their intellectual generosity brings you up to their level.

Q What is the best thing about your life right now?

A That the meds are working! That I am more or less in a level space as far as my moods are concerned, that I have finished a burst of publicity for my latest book, and that I am in love with and loved by a wonderful, calm, generous, kind person.

Q What do you find hardest about sharing your life story?

A I seem to have a compulsion to share. To overshare, some would say. This latest book deals with a time when I was a foolish and inveterate cocaine user. Looking back, I can see it had something to do with self-medication, which all people with any form of mood disorder can recognize as tempting. But I wish I had resisted and never created that receptor in my brain that will always be there and always be tempted.

Q So what do you do now to calm your mind?

A Simple things like walks or watching great episodic TV with my partner.

Q How have you accomplished so much despite bipolar depression?

A It has been hard sometimes, but work for me is a compulsion. I look forward with such excitement to days in my diary that are free and it takes all my effort (and the persuasion of my partner) to allow myself to relax and not invent work for myself.

Q What has your treatment journey been like?

A It took the worst turn of events possible— an attempt on my own life and its messy aftermath of shame and embarrassment— for me finally to realize that I couldn’t carry on with this chronic condition without consenting to try everything. Fortunately I have a wonderful psychiatrist and he and I tried and tested and tweaked medications until we came up with the right mix that seemed really to work without taking the edge off my life, without chemically “zombifying” me, which had been my terror.

Q You play an FBI therapist on Bones. What did you bring to the role from your own experiences in psychotherapy?

A That it’s more about listening than talking. Being an echo chamber, a friendly ear. It’s not about what the therapist says but what they allow their client/patient to find it in themselves to say.

Q Do you think there is a connection between your creativity and your bipolar?

A I used to repudiate that as an unwelcome cliché, but it is just too prevalent amongst my kind for me to deny. It is not a coincidence it can’t be, that so many comedians suffer from depression. As for whether the hypomanic side of bp can be said to help creativity, I hesitate to say yes because of all those out there living with the disorder who are not in creative industries and have to get on with other, I hope equally rewarding and fulfilling, métiers and professions. But certainly the energy, self-belief, exuberance, tirelessness, optimism and yes, grandiosity that mark out hypomania can really help one achieve much in terms of writing and creation.

Q What inspired you to make the documentaries Stephen Fry: The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive and Stephen Fry: Out There?

A I had been open about my sexuality [ever] since I was well-known in Britain and I had seen that it did make a difference to young people, and indeed even fully adult people, who were afraid and felt unendorsed and unvindicated by their sexuality. It seemed natural, once I had my diagnosis, and considering what an unspoken subject it was, to do the same for mental illness. It was the stigma that struck me that needed to be addressed. Society’s mental illness, if you like, not that of any given individual.

Q Do you see any signs that social attitudes are changing for the better?

A I do think there is a greater understanding now. The British government has funded TV commercials, U.K. mental health charities—I have the honor to be president of one, Mind—as well as the National Health Service and others all have concentrated very hard on the stigma and understanding issue. I think most people now at least know that mood disorders are chronic conditions. One should no more ask why someone like me, prosperous, “successful” and well-known, could ever be depressed than one should ask why someone like me might have asthma. I think that message is getting across.

Printed as ” Shameless: Stephen Fry”, Winter 2015