The Truth About Ruby Wax’s Mental Health Crash
On The Mend
High Performance
4.9 • 566 Ratings
🗓️ 29 December 2025
⏱️ 22 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Ruby Wax has spent decades making people laugh, but this conversation is about what happens when the jokes stop working.
In this episode, Ruby speaks with rare honesty about living with depression, relapse, and the exhausting work of trying to hold yourself together when your mind won’t cooperate. She talks about coming off antidepressants to explore psilocybin therapy and ending up in a mental health ward, the shame that can creep in when you “should” be better by now, and why mental illness doesn’t care whether you’re on holiday, winning awards, or doing everything “right.”
Ruby also opens up about letting go of old identities, including the version of herself built for attention, validation, and success, and how terrifying it was to walk away from a huge TV career to start again. She describes fame as addictive, relapse as confusing, and recovery as anything but linear.
This isn’t a polished guru’s guide or a neat redemption arc. It’s a conversation with someone still doing the work, falling over, starting again, laughing at herself, and telling the truth about how messy it all can be.
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Need Support?
Samaritans: Call 116 123 or visit samaritans.org
Narcotics Anonymous: na.org
Alcoholics Anonymous: alcoholics-anonymous.org.uk
Mental Health Mates: mentalhealthmates.co.uk
Shout: https: giveusashout.org
IAPT: england.nhs.uk/mental-health/adults/nhs-talking-therapies/
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Want to know who's coming up next? |
| 0:01.6 | Hit follow wherever you get your podcast and you'll be the first to find out. |
| 0:06.3 | I wanted to go on life changing journeys to find meaning or to be more enlightened about who the hell I am rather than just somebody desperate for attention. |
| 0:15.3 | You can go to Shrinks for 50 years and tell them about how angry you are, but you'll just get more angry. |
| 0:20.8 | Or if you tell your life story too many times, you'll start to believe it. |
| 0:27.6 | Hey everyone, it's Matt. |
| 0:28.7 | Welcome back to On the Men, the show that looks back on life's toughest moments to learn how |
| 0:32.5 | to move forward. |
| 0:33.7 | If you've been following On The Men for a while, you'll know why we wanted to bring back today's episode with Ruby Wax. Ruby doesn't do surface level, right? She doesn't do polite. She doesn't do media trained. She goes straight to the messy stuff. And she does all of that while being outrageously funny. So whether you're new here or you've been listening for a while, settle in ruby wax let's get into it i did not get |
| 0:55.3 | mentally ill on purpose yeah i happen to get ill um and you can say oh were you really exhausted did |
| 1:02.4 | you know whatever did you uh did you work too hard and you want to go read my lip sweetheart when you |
| 1:07.5 | have depression you can win an oscar yeah and you want to kill yourself the next day. |
| 1:12.0 | Yeah. |
| 1:12.2 | It has nothing to do with the situation. |
| 1:14.9 | You know, I've been on holiday and had depression. |
| 1:16.9 | Yeah. |
| 1:17.8 | It may have to do, but this didn't occur to me until after I wrote the book. |
| 1:23.2 | It may have to do, I don't know why I didn't think of it, one of my journeys was going to do, |
| 1:28.3 | I was going to do psilocybin. Yeah. And so I had to get off my antidepressants six months earlier in order to do it. You can't do that and take psilocybin. So you have to be off them for six months before you can take psilocybin. Yeah. to wean yourself off, so that may be, duh, the reason I ended up in a mental war. |
| 1:47.3 | So you were off meds? I was off meds. And then I was getting ready. This is after, you know, the silent retreat, going to Afghanistan. You know, I was on a role. And I was about to get on the plane to Holland because it's the only place you can do it. Yeah. And they gave me a COVID test and I had COVID. Yeah. So I had to cut out the psilocybin trip, then get seriously back onto those meds. Yeah. But it was too late. So that may be the reason I ended up in a mental ward. Did you, I mean, you kind of speak about it in the book as though you didn't really see it coming. |
| 2:35.0 | You know, I feel like it's funny. Like I heard someone say that life has to be lived forward, but it only makes sense in reverse. You know, like, and I find that. Who said that? I heard it on a podcast recently. Right. I was like, I fucking love that. Yeah. You know, because that's so true. like if I look back on my life I'm like oh that's because that fucking makes sense |
| 2:37.3 | yeah yeah never fucking realize that in the time. You know, so, and it's quite easy for someone to say, for instance, the silent retreat, right? Like, I'm, that kind of starts the book with talking about that. and I've heard about these things and I've thought to myself that I try to meditate |
... |
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