Ruby Wax supports early intervention

14 February 2012

With a number of high profile projects including Losing It, her comedy that looked at the stigma of mental illness, and more recently the creation of Black Dog Tribe, a social networking site for people with depression, Ruby has paved the way for more open public dialogue about mental health. So, when it was announced in November that she had became a trustee of the AFC, we were very excited to have her on board and spoke to her to see why she supports the Centre.

Ruby told me that she first became familiar with the AFC after taking a mental health course at the Centre. No stranger to childhood problems herself, having had a difficult relationship with her parents, Ruby was impressed to hear about the work of the Centre. “There’s not many places that deal with parents and children and that’s where the vortex of pathology lies. If you don’t work with the mother, or the parents and the child at a time when they’re malleable then we’re just heading towards problems when they’re older, you need to intervene when they’re young. To me it’s unbelievable that people don’t realise that.”

With a postgraduate diploma in psychotherapy and counselling under her belt, and currently studying for a master’s degree in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy at Oxford University Ruby fully recognises the importance of the work being done at the Centre “Now that they’re cutting public sector funding, I think it’s more important than ever because everything starts from the childhood brain. Once you’ve invested in that then you can worry about crime and everything else, so, yes, it’s the most important thing we could be doing.”

In fact, Ruby’s vision for the future is that more focus and funding are given to the Centre: “I hope the government will give more money to places like the Anna Freud Centre so they can just get on with it” she says. “We’re kind of in an emergency state, or we’re going towards it especially because people now can’t afford treatment and they’re closing institutions, so if the Centre can’t continue their research on parents and children because of a lack of funding I really despair.”

She tells me that she is “on a mission to break the stigma around mental health.” She is going about this in an innovative way, using comedy to get her important message across and to highlight the work being done by places like the Centre: “What I can do is turn this really inaccessible stuff into comedy; when people laugh their ears are more open, they can really hear your message.”

Ruby is very excited to be a part of the Centre and wants everyone to recognise the importance of our work; ““They’re doing a great thing, probably the most important thing they could be doing.  I think it’s fantastic that they’re doing it and their results are unbelievable.” Her only wish? “That the Centre was 50 times as big!”

< Back