Alastair Campbell on why he's supporting Time to Change

Alastair Campbell is one of Time to Change’s most high-profile ambassadors, and recently won the Mind Champion of the Year Award, in part for his involvement with our campaign. He co-wrote our ‘A World Without’ report, which highlights the achievements of five major historical figures who had mental health problems. Here, Alastair tells us why he’s passionate about fighting stigma and discrimination.

“When Tony Blair asked me to work for him in 1994, I said to him Tony, you do know about my breakdown and that I get depression from time to time? He said, “I’m not worried, if you’re not worried.”

I had a pretty heavy nervous breakdown in 1986, and I’ve had depression on and off ever since. In a way, I think the breakdown helped me: I used it to sort myself out, and get help. I see the experience of having survived the breakdown as a great strength, and I use that to get through my depressive episodes.

I was lucky in my experience with Tony. But lots of people aren’t. More employers need to understand that you can’t write people off for the rest of their lives because they have had a mental health problem. In a recent survey, only four out of ten employers said they would employ someone with a history of mental illness. That means six out of ten are discriminating, and keeping people out of the labour market who could and should be working. And those employers are turning their backs on a lot of talent.

That’s why campaigns like Time to Change are important. It’s helping to break down the myths – like the idea that mental health problems aren’t that common. Actually it’s very common, and we all know people with mental health problems, but as a society, we keep these issues quiet. If we could be more open, it would benefit people with mental health problems, but it would also benefit employers and it would benefit society at large.

In the World Without report, we focus on some of the greatest individuals in the history of humankind - and the fact that every single one of them had some form of mental illness. Winston Churchill, Charles Darwin, Abraham Lincoln, Florence Nightingale and Marie Curie. They all made an enormous impact on our world, still felt by all of us, but it is worth asking how they would have fared had they been alive today, with our intense media scrutiny and public prejudice about mental health.

To take Churchill for example - he was by common consent Britain’s greatest ever leader, and voted the greatest ever Briton, but I wonder whether his depression would have stopped him becoming Prime Minister in modern Britain. I am not convinced that a modern politician who admitted to mental health problems would be able to get to the top.

The incredible achievements of the ‘fantastic five’ in the report show just how wrong we, as a society, can be about people with mental health problems. It is about time the six out of ten employers who say they wouldn’t consider taking on someone with a history of mental illness follow Tony Blair’s example and join the four out of ten who say they would.

When I was guest editing the New Statesman recently, I took the opportunity to ask Rethink’s Hilary Caprani to write a piece about Time to Change. She rightly said that it should not take well-known names to have to make the case against mental health discrimination but sadly, with the modern media, that is the way it is.

But we can all be ambassadors in different ways. In reading this, you are expressing an interest in the issue. The next step is to fight for it, in your workplace, your community. Ever since I made a documentary about my own breakdown – and I know the same goes for Stephen Fry about the film he made on his mental health problems – virtually every day I have met someone who says they or someone close to them had a similar experience. It is all too common. Therefore it should not be as hard as it is to make change. We all have to keep on keeping on.“

Read our 'A World Without' report.