Ted Hill: Being funny after a mental breakdown

Written by: Ted Hill
Published: Monday 25th July 2022

In late 2018 I had a major depressive episode and tried to end my own life. It was pretty rubbish, if I'm being honest.

Luckily I am really stupid and went to do this at an underground station several hours after the tubes stopped running. A friend then came to rescue me, and brought me to A&E, where I was then sent to a psychiatric ward for a few weeks. My Edinburgh show is about recovering from that breakdown, and how I did that by focussing on every US President.

Former US President (and former alive person) Teddy Roosevelt used to say 'black care rarely sits behind the rider who's pace is fast enough', which is old racist guy speak for 'if you're depressed, keep busy'. And he had A LOT to be depressed about. His wife and mother died on the same day, and that day was the birth of his daughter. Yikes.

When I came out of hospital, I thought about that quote a lot while trying to get my brain back on the comedy writing track. I happened to be reading a book about American history while I was in hospital, and so I decided that the way I would 'keep my pace fast enough' is to write my first stand-up hour.

The problem was that I literally hated myself with every fibre of my being, so writing about myself was out of the question. So I wrote a few jokes about how much Teddy Roosevelt loved killing animals, and that morphed into an ambitious plan to write a show about every single American President.

There are so many presidents and a lot of them are very boring, so it was a huge challenge to try and make it funny and fit into an hour; but that was the point. The bigger the challenge, the more there was for my brain to keep busy. The more presidents I had to think about, the less I had to think about how much I hated myself. And that's why writing my Edinburgh show may have saved my life.

I didn't set out to talk about my mental health, or about suicide; I've had to become a reluctant champion of mental health issues (no one else is aware of my champion status yet but that's only because I am SO reluctant!), but as I developed the show about presidents, it was hard not to talk about why I chose this random topic as the choice for my debut hour.

The problem is - and please don't cancel me over this hot take - suicide attempts aren't very funny. So, after watching Hannah Gadsby many, many times; I decided to counteract each moment of tension with other moments to break that tension; If I mention self-harm, sing a silly song. The silliest moments of the show come immediately after the most serious moments of the show. It means I can talk about heavy issues but palette cleanse it with the ridiculous stupidity that I enjoy writing.

For me, the very act of writing the show was 'keeping my pace fast enough'. I threw myself into the show; making elaborate graphs, videos, images, and I even built an AI to try and find silly ways to explore the presidents, because whenever I stopped thinking about presidents; black care would catch up with me.

Ultimately, can you overcome depression by 'keeping your pace fast enough'? No. You need therapy and medicine. Still, the show is written now so you might as well come and see it because it's very funny.