It was an extremely honest and frank interview this morning on Today with Sean O’Rourke, with writer and food columnist Sophie White taking the presenter through some of the most harrowing turning points in her life, from her father’s diagnosis with early onset Alzheimer's in his fifties to her own mind-altering experience, following a disastrous encounter with a mysterious pill when she was just 22 years of age.
“I had just come out of college, through NCAD…. I had done bits and bobs of experimenting with drugs. I wasn’t an Angel by any stretch. I was at Electric Picnic in 2007, took a pill on the Saturday night, and literally my whole life changed in that one night. I woke up on Saturday morning a completely average person, an average 22-year-old. By Sunday morning, I was unrecognisable as my former self.”
What Sophie describes as “a nightmarish trip through the night” was characterised by paranoia, visual and auditory hallucinations, and a “feeling of all pervading dread that you have in a nightmare”. Except that this was her waking feeling.
At the time, Sophie was engaged to her now-husband Seb, and the fallout from this bad experience with drugs almost made her pull out of their wedding. She was eventually treated with an antipsychotic drug, and during the interview with Sean, she looked back on her conflicted feelings at the time, feelings of guilt and stigma of having landed herself in this situation.
Sophie White is known to many for her column,'The Domestic', in the LIFE magazine of the Sunday Independent. Her latest book is entitled Recipes for a Nervous Breakdown, and it details the decline of her father’s health following early onset Alzheimers in his 50s.
“Unbeknownst to us he was suffering from a form of psychosis,” Sophie recalled of those days before her father’s diagnosis. She also looked back on one particularly difficult occasion, where a dramatic change in her father’s behaviour led to an uncharacteristic incident of violence.
“One night, just after my first son was born, my husband and I had left my baby with my mum and my dad. My dad was still living at home and he was still going for his walks and you could still talk to him at that stage and he could talk back. I arrived home after dinner with my husband and there was a very strange atmosphere in the house. A few of my mum’s friends were there in the kitchen but no sign of my dad or the baby. As soon as we arrived the friends packed up and left pretty quickly and there was just a funny atmosphere. It turned out that my dad had attacked my mother.”
Sophie’s father was then only about 60, a very fit and able man. But at that stage, the family knew it had reached “crisis point”.
All of these experiences have fed into Sophie’s new book, Recipes for a Nervous Breakdown, which she describes as “part memoir, part cook-book”. It's published by Gill Books, and retails for about €24.99.
To listen to the full interview with Sophie White, click here.