Sane New World, by Ruby Wax – a review

Ruby Wax, who is best known as a comedian, dedicates this book ‘to my mind, which at one point left town’. She says: ‘I am one of the one in four who has mentally unravelled.’ She tells us what it’s like to fall apart, why she thinks so many people fall apart, and what you can do if you start to fall apart yourself. ‘The feeling is that of being a corpse,’ she says. It happens because our brains are not adapted to live in the relentless global village we’ve created. And: ‘YOU CAN CHANGE YOUR MIND AND HOW YOU THINK.’ More on this last bit later.

It takes courage for a rich, famous person to write about depression; most people, depressed or not, can’t imagine feeling like a living corpse if you have a big house in London and a car waiting to take you to a TV studio for your latest performance. But reading this makes you consider how affluence and celebrity, far from being the solution, might be part of the problem. Wax tells us gruesome stories about the envy and fear that can exist in a celebrity’s mind. When you’re affluent or famous, the world can seem predatory; you have a lot to lose. There’s a moment of abject self-awareness when Wax is lowered into the sea in a cage on a reality show called Celebrity Shark Bait; a metaphor, perhaps, but I don’t think it is.

In his book Darkness Visible, William Styron said that ‘depression’ wasn’t a good word for depression, because it feels more like a storm. Here, Wax writes about ‘hurricanes of depression’; she says that depressed people have ‘this dictator barking orders in their minds’. She says she’s prone to self-criticism, which she describes as ‘self-immolation’.