Behind it of course is the tragedy of what happened to Sylvia Plath. I called my book Mad Girl partly for her poem ‘Mad Girl’s Love Song’, which is also the inscription: Gordon, Bryony (24 April 2011). "How the other half lives". The Daily Telegraph. London . Retrieved 11 July 2014.

It has always been a sign of strength and dignity to keep it all inside, and our Royal family have always been the embodiment of that, God bless them. But Prince Harry just redefined strength and dignity for a new generation. Taylor Hawkins, the prodigiously talented drummer with the Foo Fighters, died last week at the age of 50. He leaves behind a wife and three children. Though a cause of death has yet to be found, a toxicology report showed traces of 10 different substances in his body, including marijuana, antidepressants and opioids. You know the type… we’ve all had one, usually in our student days, or house-share days: the kind of boiler you can’t really be bothered to call your landlord about, because it sort of still works if you fiddle around with it a bit, and the landlord will probably blame you for whatever’s wrong with it, and take away your deposit to pay for fixing it. That kind of boiler.Introducing the YA fiction debut from bestselling author and journalist Bryony Gordon in a modern twist on Rapunzel and one girl's quest to find a different sort of happy ever after.

B: A few years ago I was having a really bad episode with depression. I didn’t really want to get out of the house. I was scared and I couldn’t think of anywhere I could go to tell someone about the stuff in my head, so I started running. One day I was on Clapham Common and I had a look around and saw footballers and people doing their exercise classes and thought, we know that 1 in 4 people suffer with their mental health and we also know that exercise is also one of the things that is proven to help. I wanted to knit these two things together. There was, however, one big difference that I could see between alcoholism and overeating, and it was this: while I didn’t need to drink booze to live, I did need to eat food to live. Abstinence was not an option. So what could I do? Put myself on a diet? I tried a bit of that, but they rarely worked for more than a few weeks before the desire to binge returned, stronger than before. And as a naturally larger woman who had done a lot of work to fight the pernicious message that a woman’s worth is found in her weight, diets didn’t sit comfortably with me. I didn’t want a ‘solution’ that made me look acceptable. I wanted one that made me feel acceptable. Heartburn isn’t strictly a book about depression. It’s a book about heartbreak and failing marriage and all that stuff. But what I really like about it is that it is really very funny—horrible things are happening to her, but it’s very funny—and it is really important to find humour in the bleakest of moments, wherever possible. Certainly, when I was writing Mad Girl, I didn’t want it to be a misery memoir. There’s a hundred billion misery memoirs out there, but what I wanted this to be was an upbeat book about depression, and it’s perfectly possible to do that.I know. You can’t have five books about depression and not mention The Bell Jar. I first read it when I was a teenager. Official statistics show that crisis referrals for mental-health cases are up 30 per cent compared to pre-pandemic, while last month, the NHS forecast that there would be an additional 230,000 cases of PTSD due to Covid.

The great thing about Reasons to Stay Alive—apart from the fact that it is brilliantly written, and apart from the fact that it is a really amazing portrayal of being suicidal, and apart from the fact that it is a book that really chimes with people—is that it is an easy book, in a depressive state of mind, to dip in and out of, and find that solace. I am writing in a state of desperate concern for my 15-year-old grandson, who has quite suddenly changed from a loving and nice natured boy into someone unrecognisable. He frequently threatens to kill himself and has even attempted self-harm. He says he hates everyone and everything. He is very bright but is displaying all the serious symptoms of ADHD. We do not dare go to sleep for fear that something truly terrible is going to happen. Living like this is having a severe impact on our health and stress levels. This is particularly hard on my daughter as she has to hold down a demanding job. We are exhausted. We cannot go on like this. Is scrolling mindlessly through social media going to help my pilot light? Might calling my boss and explaining that I am feeling overwhelmed because I have a mental-health issue help to keep my pilot light on?M: I think Mental Health Mates has played a massive part in people being able to talk openly about their mental health. I read this when I was in my late twenties. I’ve always really admired Emma Forrest as a writer and as a young journalist. She was one of those super-talented young girls who started writing for newspapers when she was about seventeen.

I think that sharing stories of mental illness is really, really important because the thing that all mental illnesses have in common is that they lie to you. They tell you you are a freak. I always say that if mental illness was a politician, it will be Nigel Farage. It wouldn’t be nice to you. It tells you you’re a freak, and it tells you you are weird, and it tells you nobody else feels the same way that you do. And… that’s just bullshit. Eventually, Bryony gathers the strength to challenge the role her aunt has forced on her and finds out some surprising news. In this context, a collective sense of not feeling quite right is actually the most right thing during a pandemic. Of course life feels hard: you have been living in fight or flight mode for almost two years.Even though I was so ill and in such a terrible state, I can remember thinking: ‘There’s an important story in there’,” she says. And indeed there was. As soon as she was well enough to leave hospital, Mandy posted the picture on social media, with an accompanying post explaining what she had been through. Her post, entitled “From NHS director to mental health inpatient in 10 days”, went viral, with thousands of people commenting on her bravery in sharing the story. Just last year, Hawkins opened up about his struggle with drugs, having spent a week in a coma in 2001 after an accidental overdose. “I was partying in London one night, and I mistakenly did something and it changed everything,” he told Kerrang! magazine. “I believed the bull***t myth of live hard and fast, die young. I’m not here to preach about not doing drugs, because I loved doing drugs, but I just got out of control for a while and it almost got me. I was heading down a road that was going to lead to even worse paths.” B: OCD isn’t what you think. It’s not keeping stuff clean unfortunately, as my husband says! It’s about intrusive thoughts and it can be really disturbing, especially when you’ve got children. My history of alcoholism and addiction meant I could pass the eating off as something harmless by comparison. Did it matter that I was throwing myself at cheese and onion crisps given some of the states I used to find myself in? If that was the worst I was doing, then shouldn’t I just go easy on myself?