Comedian Stephen Fry feels sad and lonely, but with the help of a psychiatrist and a “pharmaceutical regime” is keeping on top of the feelings that led him to attempt suicide last year.
Writing on his website, Fry said he thought his mental health was now better than it had ever been, but he could still be forlorn, unhappy and lonely.
“In the end loneliness is the most terrible and contradictory of my problems. I hate having only myself to come home to,” he said.
“If I have a book to write, it’s fine. I’m up so early in the morning that even I pop out for an early supper I am happy to go straight to bed, eager to be up and writing at dawn the next day. But otherwise …
“It’s not that I want a sexual partner, a long-term partner, someone to share a bed and a snuggle on the sofa with – although perhaps I do and in the past I have had and it has been joyful.
“But the fact is I value my privacy too. It’s a lose-lose matter. I don’t want to be alone, but I want to be left alone.”
Fry, who has a bipolar disorder, said the outburst of sympathy and support after he talked about his “attempt at self-slaughter” had touched him deeply.
A “surging, warm, caring majority” of people had been kind.
“Almost too kind. There’s something a little flustering and embarrassing when a taxi driver shakes you by the hand, looks deep into your eyes and says, ‘You look after yourself, mate, yes Promise me”‘
It was also perhaps not helpful to his mental health when it was the only subject people wanted to talk about.
“But I have nothing to complain about. I won’t go into the terrible details of the bottle of vodka, the mixture of pills and the closeness to permanent oblivion I came,” he said.
“The episode, plus the relationship I now have with a magnificent psychiatrist, has made made my mental health better, I think, than it’s ever been.”
The thought of ending his own life used to come to him frequently and obsessively, but medicine could help and he had not considered suicide in anything other than a puzzled intellectual way since the pharmaceutical regime kicked in.
He could still be sad for personal reasons because he was often forlorn, unhappy and lonely.
“Lonely I get invitation cards through the post almost every day. I shall be in the Royal Box at Wimbledon and I have serious and generous offers from friends asking me to join them in the South of France, Italy, Sicily, South Africa, British Columbia and America this summer.
“I have two months to start a book before I go off to Broadway for a run of Twelfth Night there,” Fry said.
While he did not have a right to be lonely, he also said: “Feelings are not something to which one does or does not have rights.”
He had not written the piece for sympathy, or because of his commitment to mental health charities.
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“I think I write it because it fascinates me. And perhaps I am writing this for any of you out there who are lonely too.”
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