Ruby Wax: Depression Isn't Just a Bad Day
On The Mend
High Performance
4.9 • 566 Ratings
🗓️ 3 July 2024
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week’s guest is Ruby Wax. A comedian, writer, and mental health advocate, who has wisdom to spare.
When she was younger, Ruby often felt lonely - like she didn’t fit in - and she turned to comedy. A reinvention that gave Ruby a taste for attention and led her to drama school, and eventually her own television show in which she met the biggest celebrities of the day.
After 25 years in television, Ruby reinvented herself once again. She studied mindfulness-based cognitive therapy at Oxford University. And she now works to remove the stigma around mental health. Not least in her book - I’m Not As Well As I Thought I Was - a very personal account of depression and the adventures she followed to find meaning in her life.
Related links:
Ruby’s website
Ruby’s books, including I’m Not As Well As I Thought I Was and A Mindfulness Guide For Survival
Ruby’s tour
When Ruby Wax Met (BBC series)
NHS Guide to Local Mental Health Services
Mind’s Guide to Crisis Services
Esther Perel (one of Ruby’s heroes)
The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel van der Kolk
(02:14) Soft toy vs green juice (04:22) Ruby’s book (I’m Not As Well As I Thought I Was) (12:00) Depression, and coming off antidepressants (13:38) EMDR, ECT, and other treatments (17:19) De-stigmatising depression, while taking it seriously (20:24) Psilocybin therapy (22:41) Mindfulness and a 30-day silent retreat (28:24) Ruby’s mindfulness practice (37:36) The addict label and the victim mentality(39:55) Ruby’s heroes, including Esther Perel, Bessel van der Kolk, Dan Siegel and Sam Harris(42:17) Reinvention (and the addictiveness of fame)(45:15) Ruby Wax Meets (Pamela Anderson, Carrie Fisher, Donald Trump & Liza Minnelli)(48:42) Ruby’s tour (and playing all the parts in her book)(51:26) Matt’s outro
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Want to know who's coming up next? Hit follow wherever you get your podcast and you'll be the first to find out. |
| 0:09.0 | Hello everyone and welcome to On the Mend. I'm Matt Willis and the first season of this podcast, |
| 0:13.0 | Sean Alight on Addiction and Recovery of my guests sharing their expertise, experience and hard-earned wisdom. |
| 0:19.0 | Now I am opening up the conversation to include |
| 0:21.5 | broader stories of resilience. And this week's guest is the one and only Ruby Wax. Now, |
| 0:27.1 | I'm not going to lie, I was really nervous about interviewing Ruby Wax because Ruby Wax has been |
| 0:31.5 | on my television since I was a child. She's an icon. You know, she's, um, she's interviewed some of the most |
| 0:38.7 | incredible people that I've ever seen, you know, in a time when celebrity wasn't really that. |
| 0:45.4 | It was more like they were stars, you know, and you had no real kind of, um, no real way of |
| 0:51.1 | seeing them. There wasn't social media, there wasn't the internet, you know, you kind of, this show really kind of shone a light. Ruby Wax Meets was something where I got to see these people and find out who they really were. And she was incredible at it. There was no one that had done it like her before or has ever done it like her since you know since then she's done |
| 1:12.3 | so much you know she's been on our tv all of our lives you know she's um she's then reinvented |
| 1:16.9 | herself she went to oxford and studied mindfulness with like leaders of their field you know she's |
| 1:22.2 | gone on to open the frazzled cafe and all these kind of incredible things you know and she's um |
| 1:27.3 | she's been really open about her struggles of mental health you know and these kind of incredible things, you know, and she's been really open about her struggles |
| 1:29.3 | of mental health, you know, and her kind of the depths of depression and where it's taken her. |
| 1:34.1 | You know, I find her such an incredible woman and I was a bit nervous going into this because |
| 1:40.9 | she is, I don't know, she means a lot to me, you know, I didn't want to let her down, you know, so, but here it is. Here's our chat. This is me and Ruby Wax, enjoy. Hello, Ruby Wax. Hello. How are you? Yeah, I never answer that question. I never do. It's a hard one to answer, isn't it? It's a stupid one. Yeah, yeah. |
| 2:01.1 | No, no offense. No offense. But I'm not as perky as I used to be. Right. So, fucking. Is that okay, fine. Fine. Yeah, I think that'll do. It tells you nothing, but everything. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But my eyes tell you something else. I'm suffering. |
| 2:19.0 | Before we started with a little spage of some green drink. Yeah. And there was a cat toy. Okay. So you have a new cat? I'm, I sort of lied about it, okay? Okay. I sort of lied about the cat toy. First, I'm ashamed that I have the green drink. Okay. Why are you ashamed about the green drink? Because I'm not, I think I'm a sucker to buy it. |
| 2:36.0 | Yeah, yeah. |
| 2:37.0 | But I'm also a sucker, I have exactly the same green drink. |
| 2:39.0 | But you're a sucker on a large scale. |
... |
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