James Withey writes about mental health and mental illness. He has published three books, including The Recovery Letters, What I Do to Get Through and How to Tell Depression to Piss Off. His fourth and fifth books, published in 2022, will be How to Get to Grips with Grief and How to Tell Anxiety to Sod Off. He is published by Little Brown UK. He lives in Brighton with his husband and emotionally damaged cat.
James will speak at this year's Red Line Book Festival on Wednesday 13th of October on his experience living with depression and how to manage it and his latest book How To Tell Depression To Piss Off: 40 Ways To Get Your Life Back.
For World Mental Health Day on Sunday, October 10th, we talked to James about tackling depression
What sparked the idea for The Recovery Letters?
I was in my room, in a psychiatric hospital, where I'd been admitted for having suicidal thoughts and severe depression. I was five-minute suicide watch. I looked around this bare, uninspiring room and thought, 'If I’m ever going to start recovering, I need to hear from other people who have taken the same journey and are still going’.
I asked the staff if there was a book or website where I could read stories of recovery from depression, to give me hope – they said they didn’t know of anything. That’s how the idea was born, in that small room where the bed was nailed to the floor, where the window only opened a few inches and where my belt and shoelaces had been taken away. I thought, if I need this, maybe other people do too.
When I got home, I wrote my Recovery Letter to others with depression and then asked people to write letters too - they came flooding in. It is such a moving project and such a moving book because people write to others in order to give them some hope that things get better. The letters don’t disguise how hard depression is, they simply, beautifully and caringly say that it can get better.
What do you think people responded so well to the project?
I think people responded so well because they could see themselves in the letters. All the symptoms, pain and struggles they thought were peculiar to them were being validated by strangers on a page. It’s like a hand reaching out and taking theirs going, ‘I get it, it’s awful, I’ve been there and I’m here to tell the tale – you can too’. Hope is the antidote to depression, because the illness steals hope away from us and convinces us we’re worthless and that we’ll never improve. When you hear evidence from other people it makes you feel you’re not alone; that your journey is similar to theirs and despite how awful depression is, you can carry on.
How did you come up with the title of your latest book?
The title, How to Tell Depression to Piss Off, came about because I started to write down all the ways that I tackled depression, and a lot of them came in the form of seeing the illness as something ‘other’, within me, but not something that I’d invited in. Getting angry with depression, seeing the lies it tells, fighting it, refusing to be ruled by it, are all part of strategies that were not really spoken about a lot, but I find massively effective and since reading the book many others have too. I spend a lot of time swearing at depression – usually with worse swear words than ‘piss off’, to be honest!
Hope is the antidote to depression, because the illness steals hope away from us and convinces us we're worthless and that we’ll never improve.
Do you think people are better at discussing mental health these days?
I do, although we’ve a long way to go. Things have improved massively, through a combination of famous people being more open and those of us in the mental health community refusing to be shamed and ignored.
There is still huge stigma though, particularly with mental illnesses that people find harder to understand like schizophrenia and other psychosis related conditions.
If you can ’come out’ and tell people about your own mental illness or mental health struggles it helps massively. Whenever I tell people, nine times out of ten, the person will say ‘I struggle too’. Or their sister, mothers, uncle or grandmother struggle.
What is the one thing you would like people to take away from your latest book?
That there are many, many, many effective ways that you can manage depression, you don’t need to be a slave to this brutal illness.
The Red Line Book Festival takes place from October 11th - 17th - find out more here.
