Camilla's niece Emma Parker Bowles reveals her 10-year battle with bi-polar disorder

Posted by Lorie Orum on Monday, May 20, 2024

For a decade Camilla's niece Emma Parker Bowles has been paralysed with bi-polar disorder... now she reveals all

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We all like to dream, and there are few better places for it than here in Los Angeles.

Right now the sky is clear blue, the city is green with new foliage and the thermometer is rising above 80F. The Hollywood studios, just a short drive away, are hard at work creating fantasy, and beautiful people are tumbling out of dusty buses, fresh from middle America.

Like them, I came to LA with my fair share of hopes and expectations. Perhaps you imagine me driving from Santa Monica to Malibu, the wind in my hair and a huge pair of sunglasses perched on my nose.

I could be shopping in Beverly Hills with a gaggle of well-groomed girlfriends, perhaps.

Emma Parker Bowles

Chasing the dream: Emma just wanted to be happy when she left for Los Angeles but the reality was very different

A trip to the nail bar followed by a light lunch. Or maybe you can picture me in a summery dress on a warm California night, the scent of jasmine and bougainvillea wafting through the air as I dine al fresco on the patio at the Chateau Marmont surrounded by celebrities.

If I told you that I am 35, single, fun, quite pretty and, if the truth be told, well connected, you might think these fantasies made a certain sort of sense. Everyone comes here, as they like to say. This is Hollywood, land of dreams.

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As it happens, I never hoped to ‘make it big’ or be a star when, two years ago, I decided to settle on the West Coast. I came because I really wanted to be in the sunshine and have a simple, if slightly bohemian life.

I wanted a nice little house with a garden, a motorbike, lots of animals, some nice friends with whom I could go surfing or to the mountains, and maybe a boyfriend or three. My dream when I moved here was to be happy.

Yet within a matter of months of coming to the most glamorous corner of the planet, my life started shrinking. And it continued to shrink until it consisted of just one room. Outside on the warm, wide boulevards there were crowds of attractive, well-dressed people leading the life I wished to lead. But I never went anywhere or saw anyone.

Emma Parker Bowles with Camilla, The Duchess of Cornwall

Family ties: Emma, left, with her aunt by marriage, Camilla The Duchess of Cornwall, and her daughter Laura Lopes, right

It seemed, instead, that I had moved all the way to Hollywood so that I could lie in a darkened room watching infomercials selling Shammy WOW’s – a well-known brand of cleaning cloth – with chocolate smeared all over my miserable face.

This is not because my dreams didn’t come true, nor was it because Sunset Boulevard had somehow failed to meet my expectations. The thing that kept me penned in my apartment for days at a time is more important than all that, and a great deal harder to explain.

The truth is that I am sick and tired of being sick and tired, and I want to off-load the dark little secret that has kept me in its grip for years.

'I hoped a shark would bite my head off'

So here goes: I suffer from bi-polar disorder. Woo-hoo, I’m a nutter! I told my mum only a few days ago and it got stuck in my throat.

Bi-polar sounds so much less scary than ‘manic depression’ which is what it used to be called. The condition is about mood swings – from one pole to the other, from soul-sucking depression to total mania.

There are different types of bi-polar and I have been diagnosed with clinical depression with manic episodes. Only another person who has experienced depression (in whichever form) can truly understand how debilitating and devastating and horrible and lonely it is.

Winston Churchill called it his Black Dog. I prefer J.K.Rowling’s Dementors, another metaphor for depression. Dementors come from the darkest and dankest places which feed on positive emotions, on happiness and good memories. They make everything cold and dark. Genius.

Winston Churchill Stephen Fry

Former PM Winston Churchill referred to his depression as his 'Black Dog' while comedian Stephen Fry has spoken about his battle with bi-polar disorder

I can feel when an episode is coming on. And the curse of it is that it is not triggered by anything. I know this is not everyone’s experience; for many it is triggered by an event or a devastating loss. For me, I can sense that it is on the horizon, like an animal when an earthquake is about to happen.

I try to keep going about my business but everything is overshadowed by feelings of dread and foreboding. I start to feel emptier and emptier, like there is a leaking valve in my soul and it is starting to seep away. Indecision creeps in, concentration creeps away. Everything is bleak and grey.

It is often at this point that I have tried to stave it off by grabbing my suitcase and leaving the country (a popular solution for alcoholics and addicts too). I like the rather adorable idea that you can go somewhere else and leave all the bad and ugly stuff behind. You can check your baggage at Heathrow and then – whoosh! – the gloom disappears into thin air.

'I didn't care if I looked like Worzel Gummidge'

I know very well that the reality is different, and I have quite a few miserable ‘holidays’ under my belt to prove it. The worst was a week in Goa. I went all that way to this jewel of the Indian coast to spend a whole week lying in a darkened hut staring at the ceiling fan. I went swimming just once, and I remember hoping a big shark would come along and bite my head off.

I was a teenager when I first noticed that something was awry. It was, as I now understand, a manic episode. It was at school before my A-levels and I couldn’t sleep and kept drawing Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

Rumours went round I was taking heroin because I looked so pale and drawn. (That, as it happens, is something I’ve never done.) The fact that I had cut a large hole in the skirting board fuelled the rumours as it was said to be where I kept my stash.

Actually, I had lost my hamster and could hear him scratching in the wall so I took a kitchen knife and bored into the skirting board to rescue him.

I was sent to the doctor who gave me sleeping pills and a stiff upper-lip chat and that was that.

There have been manic episodes I have thoroughly enjoyed, I should say, times when I thought I was absolutely marvellous and invincible. Instead of feeling that I repelled people, I felt like sexual catnip, though I smoked about 30 a day and drank endless coffee. Nice breath! Normally there is some sort of new project that I am convinced is going to make me a millionaire or win me awards. I get excited by it and don’t sleep.

Just one example is my DIY phase.

Emma Parker Bowles

Emma hoped to spend time riding a motorbike in the LA sunshine when she moved there

I conceived grand plans for my flat, rushed out to Homebase and bought all the tools, including a drill and a saw. I had no clue what I was doing, but I was soon drilling holes and putting up shelves, which later fell on my head.

I made some sort of wooden contraption, too, but I can’t actually remember what it was.

I would be up all night, sweating, red in the face, toiling. Even when my neighbours complained about the late-night drilling, I didn’t stop. Eventually my brother came round and confiscated my tools. He found me in a sea of foam padding because I had sawed my sofa in half trying to make it into a chaise longue. I was the greatest thing to have happened to interior decorating.

There is nothing at all to be said for the depression that took hold as I entered adulthood. Typically, I would be in my flat in London, sometimes lying in a foetal position on the floor, sometimes in a bed that looked like Tracey Emin’s Turner Prize exhibit. I would feel profoundly sad, so lonely and desperate, and I would be so terribly tired.

In this state, the smallest task, even emptying the dishwasher, requires monumental effort. So I wouldn’t bother. And I wouldn’t bathe or wash my hair for days. Sometimes I didn’t have the energy to walk and would crawl from room to room.

I would completely lose my appetite and as I couldn’t leave the flat would order takeaways which I would shovel half-heartedly into my mouth. I was consumed by dark thoughts about how I would end my life. Luckily, it required too much energy.

I think the thing that saved me was my Battersea Dogs Home fur baby, my greyhound Wally. I would pay most of what I had earned each month to have him walked when I couldn’t get out of my own front door.

Sometimes when he was dropped off I would be so embarrassed to still be wearing the same tracksuit covered in curry that I would put on a long coat and a hat to hide my hair.

Sometimes I was beyond caring and would open the door looking like Worzel Gummidge.

I thank God for my dog who never deserted me or thought I was lazy or a freak and loved me anyway. I clung to him when the wild hours came and soaked his shoulders with my tears.

There are strong links between depression and substance abuse, and it’s true that I am a recovering alcoholic and drug addict. I’m no longer bothered if people know.

Maybe because I have nearly ten years of hard-won sobriety under my belt, I have absolutely no problem admitting that I spent my early 20s with half of Columbia up my nostrils and enough marijuana smoke to blanket Wembley in my lungs.

While I am not going to write it on a banner and fly it behind an aeroplane over the London skyline, if someone asks me I will quite happily talk about where my addiction took me and how I stopped drinking. The first thing you learn on your road to recovery is that the first step is admitting you have a problem.

Depression

Bi-polar disorder leaves sufferers feeling isolated and ashamed

Alcoholics are more likely than the majority of people to have some sort of mood disorder. Drinking and taking drugs have been described as ways of self-medicating – not that I have found them particularly effective. I spent eight years of my life trying ‘self-medication’, and now you know how well that went.

For the past ten years of my sobriety I have been on and off official medication. In LA, I’m pleased to say, the professionals know what they are doing.

In that way, at least, the move here has been fortunate. I have plenty of good times here, too. I’ve been the motoring correspondent for a national newspaper. More recently (as I wrote in The Mail on Sunday) I’ve been really learning about cars by putting on grubby overalls and working as a mechanic at a local garage.

A few months ago I was asked to take part in a reality TV show, Famous, Rich And Jobless, which gave me a chance to see what true hopelessness looks like.

But I was knocked for six when a dear friend over here took her life last year and my heart broke into a million pieces. Since then, I have to admit that my life has been tougher.

Famous, Rich and Jobless

Famous, Rich and Jobless... Emma, far right, with (from L-R) Larry Lamb, Meg Matthews and Diarmuid Gavin on the BBC One television programme

I lost her to the consequences of this illness. She was always brave enough to admit it, I never was. She knew about me, of course, and used to say, ‘Denial is not a river in Egypt’ and we would laugh.

I guess she knew I would talk about it when I was ready. In fact I have a few friends touched by the same malady, and they too have a good idea about my problems. But for the most part it has been a secret. People just think you are off doing better things  than sitting at home blowing your nose on a sock and watching Jerry Springer.

It turns you into a flake. I am allergic to my telephone when I am having a bout. It frightens me. I have to put it on silent and hide it.

So it is understandable that most people give up on you. It has cost me friendship and relationships. Who wants to be pushed away and avoided and cast aside?

Then there are people who just think I am incredibly rude. Like friends of a friend who went out of their way to drop me at my home after a wedding and after a four-hour drive they said, ‘Can we come in and use your bathroom?’ I looked horrified and said ‘No’. And then they looked horrified. I couldn’t tell them I had left my flat in such a state it looked like squatters had been in there holding a cigarette festival.

It might be hard to believe, but I say all this without a shred of self-pity. Quite the opposite. Because my depression brings self-loathing and feelings of uselessness and worthlessness, I become obsessed with people who I really consider to be suffering.

Depression feels so self-indulgent and self-obsessed, which is why I have been at its mercy for so long. Because I am ashamed.

If you are wondering why I have written this article it is for two reasons. The first one is selfish. Admitting I have a mental illness is the first step in the road to recovery. Sharing it takes the power out of it. To hell with you, bi-polar. I am not ashamed any more.

I have had help, too. The expertise here is phenomenal. There are so many routes to go down, be it holistic, counselling, alternative therapies or prescription medication. I am doing a combination of all of the above and it feels like there is light where it once was dark.

My second reason is this: I know I am not the only one. So if reading this helps just one person not to feel so alone, not to feel so lost in the fog, then it was worth it. Just don’t suffer in silence. Don’t be ashamed. Talk about it. Explore treatment options and find something that will work for you. I leave you with this African proverb: ‘However long the night, the dawn will break.’


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