The first time the actor David Harewood heard voices, the voice belonged to Martin Luther King. “Wake up!” the leader of the American civil rights movement bellowed at the British actor in the middle of the night 30 years ago. He ordered Harewood to go to Camden and put on a suit hanging at the back of a shop. So Harewood, in his early 20s and newly graduated from Rada, walked to Camden. “Obviously the shop is fucking closed,” he says, with a pained smile. Then silence. “I really didn’t know who I was.”
The next thing Harewood recalls is being back home and his two best friends throwing stones at his window. They had come to check on him, and immediately decided to drive him home to Birmingham. In the car, Harewood said he was dying and had three brains in his head. He collapsed. His friends took him straight to casualty. Harewood was sectioned and woke up on a locked ward, surrounded by psychiatric patients.
After speaking about his mental breakdown publicly for the first time on Twitter in 2017, Harewood still can’t remember “huge chunks” of what happened. In David Harewood: Psychosis and Me (BBC Two), one of three highly personal films marking Mental Health Awareness week (the others are Nadiya Hussain on anxiety and Alistair Campbell on depression), he tries to find out by returning to the people, places and mental states of his long-buried past. “What the hell was it all about?” he wonders at the beginning of this breathtakingly honest account, which as well as being a conventional mental health documentary has the mystery, pace and pathos of a detective story.
Such is the stigma of psychosis that Harewood, who comes across as a thoughtful, genial man, admits he has always referred to it as a breakdown. And because of the silence engulfing a condition that affects one in 100 people in the UK, no one ever explained what happened to him. And he never asked. So the investigation into his own head begins by accessing his medical records, which leads a psychiatrist to describe his psychosis as “fairly grandiose”. She reads out his file, in which he is described talking for hours about a friend buying him a wine bar that would be “like the Garden of Eden, where you could pluck a guitar out of the grass”. They chuckle. She explains that the content of psychosis has changed and religious delusions have now been replaced with ones about social media. Dear God.
In Birmingham, where Harewood grew up in a first-generation West Indian immigrant family, “life was fun, simple”. It was when he left home to go down to London for Rada that he became lonely and unhappy: smoking weed, drinking and profoundly stressed by auditions. He would walk all night, “buzzing out of my head”, feeling like he could “do anything, be anybody”.
It’s when Harewood reconnects with the friends who took him to A&E that the tone shifts from amused bemusement to deep distress. They go on a road trip to the hospital where Harewood was sectioned. He is told how six police officers wrestled him to the ground and sat on him for hours. How he was pumped with enough sedatives “to knock a horse out”. Harewood starts crying. “Fuck me. I’d brushed all this off and concentrated on the funny bits,” he says. For the rest of the film, in which he meets others who have experienced psychosis, he remains “an exposed nerve”.
What he finds (and this is also key to Hussain’s exploration of anxiety) is how much his psychosis – and the way he was treated – was rooted in the unspoken experience of race, and the impact of racism. “All I was being told I could be was a black actor,” says Harewood. He recalls playing the lead in Romeo and Juliet, fresh out of drama school, and the reviews comparing him to Mike Tyson, commenting on his “thick neck” and “threatening physical demeanour”. “The world said to me: ‘You are black,’” he says. “‘Your aspirations, hopes, and dreams are now restricted.’” Later, with tears in his eyes: “I sometimes feel I’m not good enough, not black enough …” Earlier, when a consultant psychiatrist listed the factors that make people more susceptible to psychosis, such as a strong family history and cannabis use, she included being a second-generation immigrant.
The investigation closes with a visit to his lovely mum, where the trail goes cold. Such is the family way: the past remains a foreign country. “Thanks Mum, you’ve been a real soldier,” Harewood says, shakily, nerve still exposed. “Don’t mention it,” she replies with an embarrassed laugh. “It’ll cost you.”
