Brash, irrepressible comedian Ruby Wax was once a fixture on our TV screens, but behind the scenes she had struggled with depression for decades. Here she explains to Lydia Slater why studying neuroscience put her back in control

Ruby remains mindful in the craziness of everyday life...

Sshh! Listen!’ says Ruby Wax, holding up a forefinger. We are sitting in a meeting room and, sure enough, there is an irritating whirring sound coming from the office next door. I’d prefer to block it out, but simply by noticing it I have, explains Ruby, changed the chemicals in my brain. ‘As soon as you fully focus on one of your senses, your anxiety goes down because your brain can’t be in two places at once. That’s all it is. You’re tricking your body,’ she explains. 

Ruby was once famous for her motormouth persona and her excruciating celebrity interviews (I’ll never forget her chatting to Madonna wearing crotchless knickers on her head). But in recent years she has carried out a career volte-face. Having taken a postgraduate diploma in psychotherapy and counselling and a master’s in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), the comedian has written a book about neuroscience that’s also an odyssey through her own mind.

Sane New World is an exploration of the make-up of the brain, the chemicals it produces, and how it can be changed for the better using strategies such as mindfulness, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), deliberately breaking old habits or keeping a diary of your emotions. It’s a dizzyingly complex subject that Ruby has turned into a very readable book, which is by turns fascinating, funny and moving.

She researched it for a year and a half. ‘Understanding how the human is built is the most interesting thing on the planet,’ she says. ‘I hope people don’t think that this is a celebrity book  about me and my fabulous career. That would destroy me.’ The message she wants to spread – especially to the one in four who will experience some kind of mental health problem each year – is that you can literally change your mind.

Brain science is still comparatively in its infancy. For most of the previous century it was assumed that after early childhood, the brain structure remained more or less unchanged. Now scientists have shown that the brain is constantly adapting because of changes in behaviour or environment. What’s more, it is an effect that we can achieve deliberately. Focus on your worries and you’ll develop neural structures of anxiety; but engaging in relaxing activities can rewire your brain for calm.

‘It’s about working-out the brain like a muscle,’ explains Ruby. ‘You’re not stuck with what you were born with. Gloria Gaynor is going to have to change those lyrics, because I’m not who I am. But what rhymes with neuroplasticity?’ she cackles.

Ruby’s interest is personal as well as intellectual. For years, she has ridden what she calls the ‘roller coaster ride’ of depression, keeping it under wraps because she feared the stigma. ‘I’m too scared of being out of work; I have a family to support. Once, I was doing a show for the BBC website where every week I interviewed a person with a pathology, such as schizophrenia. I interviewed the depressive while I had depression – I didn’t want to let anyone know. The depressive saw it, though. I was just – dead. I was talking…like…this…’ she says. After the show, Ruby was ferried back to the Priory where she was an in-patient.

Medication has helped, but not cured her.

‘It’s about working-out the brain like a muscle. You’re not stuck with what you were born with’

And she had so much therapy that she says she grew sick of her own story. But eventually her researches into mental health led her to discover mindfulness. This ancient meditation practice has its roots in Buddhism and, put simply, requires you to spend time paying attention to your thoughts, feelings and sensations – such as, for instance, that whirring noise we heard earlier. ‘You have to train your attention. Once you train that, you can regulate your focus and you won’t stay up all night listening to the voices in your head,’ explains Ruby.

Petite, with a crest of red-tinged black hair and a penetrating voice, Ruby reminds me of an exotic bird, an impression enhanced by her scarlet jacket and the bright green laces in her trainers. Hard to believe that, according to press cuttings, she turned 60 this year – though I can’t say for sure, because she resolutely refuses to reveal her age. Why? ‘I have a fear of ageing.’ [In her book she says she’s ‘haunted continuously’ by thoughts of her own imminent death.] ‘But I don’t think it’s anybody’s business because I don’t want to be blocked in as being a Jew, being a woman, being a feminist, being a depressive – I just don’t like labels.’ 

Ruby takes time out to be mindful

What is she, then? ‘I’m just – curiosity,’ she says. It was this innate curiosity that led her to investigate mindfulness as a possible way of regulating her own mind.

Depression has been part of Ruby’s life since childhood. She was brought up in Illinois, the only child of Austrian Jews who had fled to America to escape the Nazis. Ruby’s mother Berta was herself depressed, angry and prone to fits of rage.

‘My mother was very sick,’ says Ruby. ‘Her behaviour would have switched my [depressive] genes on because of the screaming.’ As a teenager, Ruby would spend days asleep in bed. ‘That was depression but nobody had a name for it. It was black,’ she says.

Throughout her successful acting and presenting career, which has encompassed the Royal Shakespeare Company and numerous TV shows including Ab Fab, she suffered periodic lows but never realised what was the matter.

‘I knew I was in bed, unconscious, but I thought I had glandular fever,’ she says. ‘That was until I was pregnant with Marina [her third child, now 19]. I started getting that dead numbness like you have when you’re stoned or you have a fever, and I was diagnosed with clinical depression.’

She was put on medication, but the depression kept coming. The episodes would follow a similar pattern: initially, Ruby would find herself becoming more frenetic. ‘I speeded up because I wanted to pretend everything was OK,’ she explains.

Of course, being the woman she is, she can’t help flagging up the comic aspects: getting fixated on finding the perfect blue and white cushion covers, dishing up a dinner party that consisted almost entirely of rice, having a panic attack at her daughter’s sports day and ending up in the Priory. ‘It was part of my persona but it was also part of my illness. Your good news is part of your bad news. Some people who are crazy are hilarious.’

But always the crash would come and she’d end up in hospital, feeling like an ‘empty thing’. 

Did she think about suicide? ‘A lot of people will say that mental illness is more difficult than physical,’ she says. ‘It is torture. You want it to stop. You don’t think “My life is terrible” but you want to be out of the pain. You think, “If I was in an accident right now, it wouldn’t be so bad”. Everyone who has killed themselves probably had depression.’

Meanwhile, she researched everything that might help her with her condition – which is why she studied psychotherapy before deciding it wasn’t for her. In 2009, she took a mindfulness course. This standard eight-week programme requires dedication and homework from participants. As well as weekly meetings of up to three hours, you’re supposed to spend 40 minutes daily observing the sensations in your body and carrying out mundane activities, such as tooth-brushing, with total awareness. Which must have been a tall order for Ruby, I suspect.

‘It was agony,’ she admits. ‘It’s like starting to go to the gym. Your brain isn’t disciplined so you have to do the exercise.’ But she found, to her amazement, that it helped her gain some control over her errant brain (which she compares to a bucking bronco). ‘With mindfulness you learn to focus on an anchor – listening, seeing, tasting, smelling, touching or breathing – which you can return to when the mind gets too rough or tries to suck you into its never-ending story,’ she says. 

What is mindfulnes?

The founder of modern-day mindfulness is Jon Kabat-Zinn, who developed the mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) programme at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in the late 1970s, to help with conditions as diverse as chronic pain, high blood pressure, cancer and cardiovascular disease.

Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy — which Ruby studied — was adapted from MBSR in the 1990s by clinical psychologist Mark Williams and colleagues to aid patients with recurrent depression by helping them to relate differently to their distress. 

MBCT has been shown to be as effective as antidepressants in preventing a
relapse into depression and the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has recommended it for people who have experienced three or more episodes. 

Now MBSR and MBCT are also used to help anyone with normal everyday anxiety and low mood. 

Regular mindfulness meditation has been shown to develop thicker layers of neurons in the attention-focused parts of the brain, and to boost the activation of the left prefrontal cortex which suppresses negative emotions.

After finishing her course, Ruby decided she wanted to study the science behind how mindfulness works. She went to the top, winning a place on the Oxford University master’s course run by mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) co-founder Professor Mark Williams. Thus, she laughs, she was the first member of the family to leave home to go to university. ‘I’ll show them who’s empty-nesting!’ she growls.

At Oxford, she studied alongside serious scientists: one fellow student was a geneticist, another was a therapist at Broadmoor, a third the head of a trauma unit in Norway. Ruby was the only one who was allowed to present part of her dissertation in the form of a play. Losing It, her show about depression, which draws on what she’s learnt, has been a success around the world.

But arguably the greatest benefit has been to Ruby’s own mental state. Since she started practising MBCT, she has not had a full-blown attack of depression. ‘You still have a disease but you can hear it coming before it takes over and take precautions – such as cancel every dinner party, go somewhere quiet, not make so many phone calls. This means it won’t be as intense.

‘Recently I’ve gone to a really quiet retreat where I don’t get any stimulation. I’m just out – sometimes asleep, sometimes just lying there as I can feel the chemicals coming down. A few days later, I feel really good in my skin.’

During a recent bout, her friend, novelist Kathy Lette, invited her to dinner with Gordon and Sarah Brown and Neil and Glenys Kinnock. ‘Five years ago, I’d have jumped in the car, sweat running down me, had the worst evening of my life and humiliated myself,’ she says. ‘But I didn’t go. That’s self-regulation. It was such different behaviour.’

Do her friends notice the difference? ‘I guess so. I feel as though people like me more rather than being scared of me. I listen to them, and people love to be listened to, whereas before I would just show off and hope they liked me,’ she says.

Ruby still meditates daily – usually just after she wakes up, but on the move if she has to – ‘in a taxi, on the Tube, always before a show to get my cortisol levels down. I do it for half an hour, but just a few seconds makes a difference. Paying attention to the present moment in a non-judgmental way changes the chemical make-up of the brain,’ she explains.

She has even started reducing her medication. Under medical supervision, she’s come off one drug entirely and is on a lower dose of the other two; so far it’s going fine, she says.

Ruby lives in West London with her husband, Ed Bye, whom she met when he directed Girls On Top, in which she starred with Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French. Dawn got them together. ‘At the wrap party, he had a girl standing next to him. Dawn went up to her and said “Get out of here.” Then she pushed me in,’ she laughs. Was it love at first sight? She scoffs at such soppiness. ‘I married Ed because he was tall, he was funny and I knew that he could produce hopefully normal kids. He’s positive. He’s got a lot of serotonin and I wanted to break the chain of 2,000 years of madness.’

Being a comedy director, Ed has also got a sense of humour, which he must have needed at times: for instance, when they walked into the Richmond register office to get married and she whispered to him that she’d been married twice before. (‘Oh, they were gay, I was getting work permits for them,’ she explains casually.) 

That was 24 years ago. She and Ed now have three children: Max, 23, who builds apps and video games; Madeleine, 22, who is in PR, and Marina, who wants to be an actress. Her daughters still live at home. ‘It will be really hard when they leave, but

I might travel the world.’

I suspect she won’t have time. She has a new stage show to write based on this book, and having set up a website, blackdogtribe.com, for people with mental health issues, she hopes to establish a British network of drop-in centres, along the lines of AA. ‘The trouble is, everyone’s too ashamed to admit to having mental illness, and if they come out, their job is affected,’ she says.

How ironic that her decision to go public has given her own career such a fruitful twist.

Sane New World by Ruby Wax is published by Hodder & Stoughton, price £18.99. To order a copy for £15.99, with free p&p, contact the you bookshop on 0844 472 4157 or click here

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-2332818/How-RUBY-WAX-trained-brain-beat-depression.html#ixzz3aA0Dgecd
Follow the Daily Mail : @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook