 Good evening and welcome to tonight's discussion between David Harewood and Gary Young on Why Literature Matters. I'm Kamala Shamsi, a vice. You forgot my vices. A vice president of the Royal Society of Literature and it's my very great pleasure to welcome you all to the first in-person gathering of the RSL since March 2020. We are very pleased. Yeah, let's all just have a little moment. We're very pleased to be here with you all in the room and online because there are people joining us online as well for this special evening of conversation. Tonight we have the latest edition in the series of discussions celebrating the RSL's five-year Bicentenary Festival, RSL 200, bringing together writers and thinkers to reflect on the importance literature has on our lives. Other speakers over the last year have included Claudia Rankin, Brian Eno, Stephen Fry, Ali Smith, Philippe Sands, Marlon James, Marina Warner and Neil Gaiman. You can watch many of these back online through the RSL's website. In this evening's joint event between the RSL and the British Library, our speakers will explore the duality of growing up both black and British, David Harewood's personal recovery from crisis and their most treasured texts. It's a privilege now to be introducing Gary Young, an award-winning author, broadcast and academic, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Formerly a columnist at the Guardian, he has now been appointed Professor of Sociology at Manchester University. He's also the Alfred Nobler Fellow for Type Media in America. His books include Another Day in the Death of America, The Speech, The Story Behind Martin Luther King's Dream, and Who Are We and Should It Matter in the 21st Century. Please join me in welcoming both Gary and David. I am delighted to be here, to be in conversation with David Harewood. David was born in Birmingham. His parents, like mine, from Barbados and moved to England in the 50s and 60s. He's best known as the actor with roles in Homeland and Supergirl. But tonight, a lot of what we're going to talk about stems from his critically acclaimed documentary about his descent into psychosis. And this excellent book, Maybe I Don't Belong Here, which explores issues of mental health, race and the challenge of being black in an overwhelmingly white British society. David, when it was announced that we would be doing this, went on Twitter and, first of all, his first tweet was, It's on! This is going to be a great event between me and Gary. I'm going to stay off the pies for this one, to which I tweeted back and said, Well, can I have your pies? And then two days ago, Monday night at the British Library, still a chance to come see me chatting to the brilliant Gary Young. He's buying drinks after. Which I'm not. There are books to buy afterwards. There will be a chance for you to ask questions. And we will also be taking questions from those of you who are watching around the country and maybe the world online. But for now, I'd like to introduce the man I'll be in conversation with for the next hour, David Hairwood. He is buying drinks afterwards, by the way. And he didn't stay off the pies. You don't know that. I saw you demolish your five guys back in the green room. I want to start, David, with the beginning of your book, which describes an upbringing very much like mine. You come home from school. You dump your bag. Your parents may be in. They may not be in. But the telly. You go straight to the telly. You go through the telly until kind of, you know, the end, the last Captain Pugwash or whatever it is, the cartoon. Then it's the news. And you kind of tune out. And then you tune back in for Citizen Smith, Terry and June, Robin's Nest, all the kind of greats of the 70s and 80s. And this is an event about literature matters. Neither of us were avid, particularly avid readers as children. What did you get from the telly? What did it give you? I think I got performance. I loved watching, my favorite was Tommy Cooper and Frankie Howard and Leonard Rossiter. People who could just hold an audience, just hold them spellbound. And with a sort of twist of the head or a kind of raise of the eyebrow, just have people in fits of laughter. I loved that. So I sort of, that's what I sort of kind of latched onto. As you say, there weren't many books in the house, but it was the idea of performance and particularly laughter. You know, I loved the sound of laughter. My parents had these fantastic laughs. The pair of them had these fantastic laughs. And just something about hearing people, particularly my mom, having this raucous laugh, which is used to film me with joy. I think as a kid, I was aware outside the house there was danger, particularly racism. But inside that house, when there was the sound of laughter, I just felt like the safest kid in the world. Those are my best memories of sitting, watching TV, laughing, hearing my mom and dad laugh. That's kind of what got me into performance. I think about you, but I remember there was a girl in, it would have been my third year, which would now be year five, who was reading Wuthering Heights. And I remember just thinking, why would you do that? Not understanding, because books seemed like a thing you might do, but that didn't have that, didn't prompt that sort of joyous kind of response or a collective response. You know, in that scenario that you painted, if your family had been readers, you'd all have been sat around. And so it wasn't until I was much older that I discovered the joy of reading. I had books in the house, but I didn't read them, because I loved the telly. The telly was the main focal point. I'm the same as you. Even at school, I think I was pretty bad academically. I just didn't get, I went to school to play football. I went to school to play with my mates, to laugh with my friends, to kind of, I enjoyed the camaraderie, the sort of company of school. But I didn't get it. I think even as a young kid, I can remember some of my friends, some of my white friends, sort of going off to different classes and thinking, why are they going down the corridor? And then sort of understanding that they were sort of in the smarter group. And I was sort of in the naughty group, because I was always laughing and messing around. And I guess I was sort of deemed disruptive. When you say you were deemed disruptive, you mean you were disruptive? I just used to make people laugh. I wanted to make people laugh. Again, that was where this performance thing came in. And I write that in the book. As soon as I knew I could sort of hold an audience, as soon as I knew I could sort of make gags and make people laugh, that was my sort of go-to thing. It was never sort of, I want to be the brightest kid in the class. The meat was like, I want to make as many people in this classroom laugh as I can. I want to come back to that, but I want to just talk about some of the books, because there were, well, they were plays really, weren't they? It seems from the autobiography, there were moments with the King Lear or fellow, that kind of where pennies dropped, where you thought, and it's a film, but it feels more like a play, the jury, what's it called, 12 Good Men? 12 Angry Men. 12 Angry Men, that was the moment where you thought, God, I would love a piece of that. I'm wondering at what point a penny dropped that there was, you were very good at football, but you kind of figured out that wasn't going to pan out? I knew I wasn't going to, yeah, I wasn't really cut out for the game, but for me it was, you know, I was in a bit of a naughty group of guys, and I think my class, my head teacher, my classroom teacher, told us one day he was going, we were going to see King Lear, and we just thought it was a night out. So we just thought, you know, I'm going to put our hands up, and for some reason, four of the naughtiest kids in the class got to go to this King Lear, and we honestly, we fully intended to laugh and mess around and drink and just mess around, and literally at the end of the play we were all in tears, but for these big, burly lads, and we were all fighting at this Shakespeare play, and I remember just thinking it just blew my mind that anybody could write like that, or anybody, you know, somebody could perform that, and I think that was, for me that was the moment, I mean there were always a lot of pennies that dropped, but that was the one moment where I thought I had no idea drama, acting, a play could create such sort of magic. So all the things that you have referred to, Rosta, Tommy Cooper, they're all twelve angry men. They're not black people in any of them. I would be amazed if there were any black people in the King Lear production that you saw. No, they weren't not then. And I have a reliable authority that Shakespeare was a white guy. So they said. And you found inspiration in them, and later it feels like that was also the beginning of a house of cards, if you like. But let's start with the inspiration, because people can get very binary about this stuff, I think, quite often. Black kids need black books, as opposed to black kids need books that are good and relevant, and they may be written by black people or they may not. And I think people can get quite utilitarian about it. But you were inspired by different kinds of camons that were all very white. I was wondering whether that was the naivety that I had, but I didn't see any difference between me and the performance. It wasn't until I left drama school. When I went to drama school, again, you're in a very creative world. You're playing Hamlet, you're playing Romeo, you're playing all these different characters. Even from the National Youth Theatre, when I went to the National Youth Theatre, it was just the ability to play that I loved. I could sort of be anybody, do anything, go anywhere. And it wasn't until I came out of drama school that the sort of world said to me, you're black and you can't do this and you can't do that. And suddenly I was realizing that I was going for parts that were black parts and not lead roles or not. And I suddenly started realizing there was a difference. And I think that was sort of the moment for me that, in my head, that I started to understand the significance of my color. And up until that moment, I hadn't seen it. I just thought I could play anybody and do anything. And I think that was probably the beginning of what I would say my unraveling, really. But you do chronicle a range of racist experiences that you had as a child. The guy who walks up to you takes the effort to walk all the way up to you and tell you to fuck off back to where you came from or something like that. And there are a few situations that you're in. How did you understand them? I buried them. And I think that's part of the experience. I think that is part of the experience of maybe British black people, how we internalize a lot of those uncomfortable feelings. And I think I did. Whenever I experienced racism, I just always remember being very tense as a kid and not knowing how to talk about, not knowing how to deal with it. And I think with my dad, I always used to ask my dad about how I deal with it. And he would never speak about it. And I'm not surprised because there are times when I don't want to speak about it because it sounds comfortable. And I think I just buried all those experiences. I just sort of just put them away or compartmentalized them and shoved them away. And just tried to brush over them. But I think when I did my documentary, when I found out why I had my breakdown, I was just really surprised by how many times in my medical notes, because I was given my medical records from 30 years ago in this documentary. And there was a scene in the documentary where I'm supposed to open my medical records and read what I see. And the first thing I saw, I just made me just shut the envelope when I said, Stop filming. I don't want to film anymore. And I buried, I put that envelope on a shelf and I didn't open it for two years. And when I started writing my book, I knew I had to open that envelope. And the thing that I saw that's frightened me, and this was from 30 years ago, and again, this shows just how much I buried it. The first thing I saw was I'd said to the doctor, or the doctor had said, The patient believes he's merged hearts with a young black boy. What is that? What do I mean by that? I think I just got so lost in this institution. I was so deluded. And for me, it was almost like I had to get back to that young kid that sat in front of the TV and wanted to, was impressed by Tommy Cooper. I wanted to get back to that kid because I'd lost myself in the world of going to drama school and play acting. And I'd buried all this racial stuff in the years, in the interim years of being a young man. I'd buried all that stuff. I just had to get back to the person that I knew, which was that young black boy. I mean, one assumes that's a coping mechanism, right? I mean, in my family, we talked about racism a lot, but I had an interesting moment in 2010. I was back from the States to cover the election, and I met up with some friends from school. I grew up in Stevenage. Pretty much everyone I knew was white outside my family. And pretty much everybody that I knew was white. And I'm having a drip, we're catching up with friends, I haven't seen them for a long time, and they've read my first book, No Place Like Home. And the first chapter of that book is about growing up black in Stevenage. And I don't write about a litany of bigotry, but I do write about some of the stuff that happened to my family. And they were all, it felt like they were almost disappointed. And they said, you know, why did we not know any of that stuff? Why didn't you talk to us about that? And the disappointment or the kind of hurt came from them thinking, but I know you and now I think I don't know you. And the truth was that there was a way in which they kind of didn't, because there was a bunch of stuff that I'd been inculcated, never explicitly, but like, you just got to get through it, you know. And to the extent it was talked about explicitly, it was like, look, there's no point in coming home and complaining about the racism in this country, because this is what, so you have to just go out and deal with it. You come back and complain about it. I'm going to take you to go out and kind of find a way. And that is a kind of quite a heavy load. And what's scary, I think, and what comes out in your book and in the documentary is you don't even realize you're carrying it until something happens, that something either breaks or opens. In your case, it felt like a break or unravelled in your case. Certainly in unravelling, but I think you're absolutely right that just on a daily basis, just how normal these things are, how normal those experiences are, that you just have to, as you say, you just have to kind of, you just have to accept or not even accept, but I remember going to school with the NF signs written everywhere and you would literally get off a bus and find yourself chased down the street by a gang of skinheads. And you didn't know why they were chasing you. Well, you knew why because you were black. But running through gardens and having old ladies direct your pursuers to where you were and that was just part of the experience. You'd sort of hide, you'd get away, you'd get home, and then you'd eat your dinner and sort of, what's Tommy Cooper? And then you'd get up the next day and it might not happen the next day, but then it would happen the next day after. Or just randomly walking home in the street on the way home from school, random Wednesday afternoon, sun shining, suddenly, out of a car, tense up. That was just part of the course. Just an experience that you just sort of, was just normalised and normalised. And I think, you know, I just think the sort of, the coping mechanisms that we have for that is just to sort of bury it and just almost pretend it's not happening or just try and get over it. But as you say, you know, with me in particular, I think there was, eventually at the age of 23, it just broke. And as I say, literally most of my medical records are just littered with some very uncomfortable things that I said that, you know, racially are very uncomfortable for me to read now. Some of how dislocated my mind was. To what extent do you think that the access to availability of stories, and here I don't mean kind of Godlocks and Three Bears kind of stories, but I mean narratives of who you might be would have helped in that situation. Because there are so many narrow avenues that we might go down. You're getting into acting. And if you were to say, like, I want to play a drug dealer, a pimp, or they'll be like, you know, we have so many parts for you. And if you say, I'd like to play King Henry VIII, they're like, yeah. We will call you. Never. We will never call you. And that what I've seen with, what I've noticed with white friends and with rich friends was a kind of range of things that they thought they might do. Like the presence of me and you on this stage, given where we started, is implausible. If my mother was alive, she'd be like, doing up there. Yeah. And yet here we are. And so we are kind of... Almost anomalies in that sense. Well, we're like those cartoon characters that run off the edge of the cliff. And so long as you don't look down, you can keep running. But as soon as you look down, you're sunk. Right. And I'm just wondering the degree to which the route maps for you at that age. Well, what am I going to do? You've done a couple of plays. You've seen how stereotyped and typecast you would be. It was enormously frustrating because you are only limited by, you're limited by the perceptions of others. I knew I had talent. I've always known that I'm a talented actor. A drama school people told me, and I knew I had talent. Yet when I came out, that was the frustrating thing, is I couldn't get beyond people's perceptions. And that was enormously frustrating for me. And I think that's why so many black actors ended up going to America. British black actors go, because their horizons are so much higher. And you were almost allowed, you have a much more wider palette to draw from. And I don't know whether that's because in American society, you have a black people right through the start of American society. So it's plausible to have a black sheriff or a black chief of police. Over here they go, well, there isn't really a black chief of policemen, so you can't really play that. And that sort of limited idea is so frustrating, not just for me, but for a lot of black actors, because you can only play what they can believe. And that's when you start sort of, that's when you start unraveling, that's when you start getting very frustrated. So you're absolutely right. But those stories, as you would say, James Baldwin used to say, he grew up watching the Cowboys and Indians, and people thought he was the Cowboys. He thought he was the hero. And then in reality you find out, actually, no, you're the Indians. And at that point you suddenly start realizing, oh, the world is very different. And I can only play certain roles and not the sort of, the bright shiny ones, the hero roles. And that's when you start getting frustrated. I just want to ask you one question about class, because when it comes to the title of your book, Maybe I Don't Belong Here, I feel that it could be that I have simply priced in race from the get-go. All of my school pictures, nobody says which one are you. The nativity play, both me and both my brother, we all were kings in the nativity play, because the kings came from afar. You can play that, you can get away with that. We got you, yeah. And so it was kind of priced in, but some of the keenest feelings I've had of not belonging have been about class. And you wear a black kid, a rider, you're also a working class kid, a rider. And when I think of, for example, reading, I didn't read for pleasure until I was surrounded by a bunch of posher kids who had read. And I started reading out of spite, not love. I was like, you fuckers aren't any cleverer than me. But you've read a lot more books than me, and that's something I can do, something about. And then I found out I liked it in you. And that was the beginning of me reading. And I'm just wondering, in your book, you explore the white space. And I don't think that they are opposed at all, the white space and the class space. I think they're intimately entwined. I'm just wondering how you experience that class. I didn't really have that same feeling as you. I kind of got to Rada. And for me, suddenly I'm studying Molière and Chekhov and Dostoevsky, and I'm like, wow, this stuff's incredible. I never paid any attention at school. I thought it was all, I just didn't really get it at school. Maybe it just wasn't ready for it. But at Rada, I was like, I love this stuff. It really set me alight. I didn't have that sense of that I was surrounded by sort of more intelligent kids or posh kids. I just sort of, it's like a blanket that I wrapped myself in. I just loved it. So I sort of ran towards it and sort of soaked it in. But for me, that maybe I don't belong here, it has always been essentially a racial question for me. Because particularly when people are telling you to fuck up back to where you came from or go home, there was always that sense of me, well, you know, I know I'm not necessarily, I've never always felt particularly comfortable here, comfortable but welcome. There's a part of me which feels as though, I don't know, that I'm sort of, I'm from somewhere else. Yeah, I mean, I've always thought of my presence here as qualified. You know, that I would have to, it's contingent and qualified. And that somehow I'd have to explain it to both myself and others. And that kind of weird, a guy at university, saying to me on the university court, Mr Young, where are you from? And I said, Stevenage. He said, well, where were you born? I said, kitchen. He said, before then. No, there was no before then. He said, where are your parents from? I said, Barbados. I said, no, I'm from Hitchin. And he said, I was in Ghana. I'm thinking, that is a long way from Barbados. And it's a long way from Stevenage. And I don't know what you want from me right now. And that notion of always having to qualify, which actually I found, after a while, I just stopped bothering the geography for community. I call myself Black British, because those are the two kind of things that make sense as a kind of shorthand. But when people ask me, where do I feel most at home? I say, I feel most at home where my people are. People who like a drink and laugh and aren't too pompous and preferably with some kids about. And that could be anywhere. But the geography, there's no place. Because I did the thing. I don't know if you did this. I went to Barbados when I was 18. Not exactly expecting people to be waving flags and welcoming me, but imagining that this was my home. And then you really quickly find out. In Barbados they call you an Englishman. Yeah, and I'm like, fuck. Just been dealing with that. Exactly, so then you come here and they ask you where you're from. Or they need to go home. So for me, there's this constant state of dislocation, which I think plays right into the high rates of psychosis and mental illness of a lot of people of colour. Yeah, so I was going to say that sense of dislocation of not belonging. And also the sense of a kind of both specific, because it's coming to you because you're black, but random, because it could go to any black person, sense of unfairness that kind of compounds your fragility in that moment in the book. And you crawl out of that. You kind of, you really fight your way out of it. There's a wonderful section in the book where David describes, he thought, right, to get out of here, I'm going to have to do everything right. Normal. Normal. And so normal is he wants to change the date on the calendar because it's got the wrong day. And this is a kind of long process for him, which he described, and he gets it done. It's such a sense of achievement. And he describes it. He says, it's like I did the Rubik's Cube with my arse, which was an image that I struggled to get out of my head. What you have to understand is that as a black person in a mental institution, and apparently this is standard, that you are generally over-medicated. And I was given, I didn't know this. Again, this has all come from my medical records. I was given four times the legal doses of sedatives. Four times. So I was completely out of it. And I knew that I'd have these moments of lucidity where I'd come around in this, and I'd just think there were no black people on the ward, no black staff, and I just knew I had to get out. So my brother had said to me, if you want to get out of here, you've got to start acting normal. So I just literally acted my way out of the place. I just kept it down. I didn't answer back. Because normally the first week I was in there, people are trying to give you tablets. You don't know what's in the tablet. What's in this tablet? I'm not taking that tablet. Next thing you know, there's two big nurses coming around ready to just hold you down. So I just said to myself, I'm not going to answer back. I'm going to take whatever the fuck they give me. I'm not going to act up. I'm not going to play up. I'm not going to get in your face, I'm not going to question you. I'm just going to play the game. And that was how I got out of that place. And I humourized it. That was my escape plan. My Shawshank escape plan to get off this mental wall. But it worked. After five days, I was released into the care of my mother. But I know for a fact that that still happens to this day. And since writing this book and since talking about this, I've been contacted by people who run facilities around London that are 80% full of black men. 80% of their hospital wards are full of black men. And all of them are over-medicated. And not all of them are going to get off that ward. So even in that moment where you're kind of reaching bottom, where you're in this facility, there is racial isolation even then. Completely. And do you, at what point, given that part of the descent into psychosis, fair way to put it, was the unraveling was realising, was a racial skewism and undoing. I mean, I had no idea. Again, once I suddenly, just to dive in there, once I understood the reality, and it seems bizarre, but the reality of the consequence of my colour on my career. I'm not going to sugarcoat it. I smoked a lot of weed. I drank. I was very unhappy. Because I suddenly realised that my dreams are playing the hero. My dreams are playing Bond. We all come out of drama school thinking you're going to be the guy. They were all dashed. I suddenly realised that none of that was going to happen. Because I'm only playing what people can see me as. And that reality was crushing. So I remember walking around... This is when the delusions and hallucinations started for me. I remember walking around town trying to find an image of myself in any movie poster in the West End, or theatre poster. And I couldn't find a single black face on any movie poster, or any theatre poster. I thought, what am I doing? What am I doing? What have I done? Wasting my life. And this panic started to just overwhelm me. Because I realised I'd almost been bamboozled. I sort of believed I was going to be this famous... It's come to pass, but I believed I was going to be this... I could play anything. And suddenly what I was looking at was... It just wasn't happening. I couldn't see myself reflected anywhere. And is your racial consciousness growing while you're in the facility? Are you kind of... Because it sounds like there's a realisation... I'm the only black person in here. They are kind of... I'm not going to be treated... The understanding you're going to have to act yourself out of that is partly born from a racial understanding from what you're saying. You could see that there were only white people and so on. Which seems like a really hard place to be processing that fact. Which is why my... I have a friend of mine who's a clinical psychologist and she said that's one of the reasons why particularly black males tend to... only tend to enter the mental health system at a point of crisis. You don't go for help. You go in your section. And it's because you fear being in a place where you're going to be othered. And if you... I mean, my dad was sectioned. And I only learnt this the other day. I only learnt this the other day because... I was speaking to my mother and she said that he always feared that they were going to take him back. And he did not want to go back into that place. And it was only my skill, as I said, as an actor that got me out. It was only because I knew I was playing a game. I was playing... a gentleman gym. I was playing a nice, well-behaved black person. Talking to her and talking to the nurses. You know, being very communicative as much as I can... being drugged up. But I was doing my best to behave myself. Because the minute I started to get lively here's another tablet. The minute you get agitated there's a couple of nurses, you know. So that was only my... because I'd assimilated because I was used to being in the white space because I was used to being in that environment. It was only because I was used to that that I just knew how to get myself out of it. Which was just play... the nice, gentle, well-behaved black person. Just want to talk about masculinity for a little bit. Your dad having been sectioned. Your own experiences. And the notion, first of all, regardless of race, that men don't cry. That men don't talk about their feelings. That men don't talk to each other honestly about kind of, you know, how things are going. And the pressure, I would say, under late-stage capitalism for men to provide and perform when those jobs don't actually exist and the structure isn't there. And then maybe, and I'd be interested to know your views on this, a kind of black masculinity which actually ups that quite a lot. Like, you know, real men. And I mean, look at... you talk about walking through the city and not being able to see a vision of yourself. But the visions that one would see of black men, you don't see tenderness. You don't see emotional intelligence. You know, you see brutishness and so on. And I'm just wondering where masculinity fits into this, a particularly black masculinity. I can be honest with you, there was a part of me that actually thought that by writing this book I was going to sort of fall foul of letting the side down. You know, people say, oh, you've been weak. You know, crying. You've been emotional. You've been vulnerable. And actually, it's been anything but that. And the amount of people, particularly young black men who have come up to me and said, thank you. Thank you for doing that. You know, particularly someone like you. Successful, big black guy crying on telly. It's... I've not seen that before. And rather than it sort of negatively impacting... I mean, the day after the documentary went out, which was... I was in a really vulnerable place. I bet. Really. This is an odd thing, but this whole thing has sort of been a little bit of a journey for me. I actually thought the documentary was going to be a laugh because part of psychosis, an early psychosis is kind of... it's preceded by mania, high dopamine levels in your brain. You were actually quite up. And I did lots of crazy things, lots of funny things, lots of... again, my whole impetus was about entertaining and making people laugh. So I was walking on the train, singing to people. Hiding weed outside Buckingham Palace. Hiding weed outside Buckingham Palace. Just doing crazy things, but people were responding. And I was like, this is great. And I actually thought, if I can control this, this is going to be great. I'm having conversations with strangers and laughing with them. But what I had forgotten was the crash on the other side of that, which was really painful. And the documentary really shocked me. You could see that. The thing you talk about will be about burying. Yeah. There was a consequence for that in the psychosis. But then what came out of the documentary, and it's kind of really illustrated in the book, that you kind of then... kind of buried the psychosis. Buried the psychosis. And made it a kind of story you could tell. It was a joke. I buried the pain of it, the trauma of it. And the documentary reintroduced me to that in a big way. And I was terrified. And actually when they started running adverts for it, I had a real panic. Because I thought, what have I done? I remember seeing the first advert for it, and I was really scared. And I didn't watch it when it came out. I went to bed. The entire house went to bed. I think my anxiety must have spread through the house. Because my kids just went to... just, like, disappeared. And my wife was, like, gone, she went to bed. And I was just sitting there in the dark, and I thought, God, what's happening? Everyone's watching this, me unravel. And I went to bed, and then I fully expected... Well, I don't know what I expected, but I just remember... I remember just about to drop off to sleep, and my phone's, like, beeping, and my email's pinging. Everything was buzzing and beeping and twinking, bing-dong, bing-ding. And I grabbed the first thing and turned it off, and then the second thing and turned it off, and then the house phone rang. And I ran to the... I didn't want to wake anybody up, and it was my mom. And she just said, well done, son. Well done. And that... That was the one that made me just go, I did it. You know, she just said, well done. I'm proud of you. And then I suddenly started having the confidence to look at some of these other messages, and they were all positive. Some from really people I haven't seen for years. Some people, one from... somebody very high up in the BBC just saying that he'd already shown it to somebody in his family because it happened to his father. Just something... just telling me this out of nowhere. It said it happened to their father, and they'd never spoken about it. And he said he saw the documentary, and he phoned his brother up and said, you've got to come in and watch this. And he said, we haven't spoken about it in like 30 years. But because you've done that, we thought we'd got to talk about what happened to our dad. So I thought I'd done something that was useful. And then I went to bed, and I got up in the morning, I went for a walk, and literally people were crossing the street and saying thank you so much. It was just so overwhelming. I was like... I didn't expect any of that. And I had to just go home. And I remember rushing into my therapist and just bawling my eyes out. Because I just couldn't take it. It was too much. But after a while I started to kind of process it, and now people come up to me and say, I can engage in the conversation. I can talk to them about psychosis. It is so common. And in the newspapers today, there has been a 75% increase in the amount of psychosis in this country since the pandemic happened. It is so common. But he's the least talked about mental health condition because it's the scariest one. It's where you get taken away. It's where you lose your mind. I'm just lucky that I came through it. And the amount of people, young people, that has happened to him is extraordinary. So there's you suppressing it, but what you're saying is that there's a societal suppression of this condition. And you've kind of... It seems like you've unlocked it or given license, maybe. Given license to talk about it, because as I say, it is one of the most common mental health conditions. But it's somehow shrouded in shame. And I've never understood that because it was one of the most extraordinary experiences I've ever had. But I guess if you're... I mean, I'm imagining people feel ashamed because they're out of control. They're doing things that they wouldn't do normally. I mean, there are some... I mean, they are quite funny stories of you pissing out of a window in one of them. I mean, I thought it was funny. I'm glad you did. But I only remember... That's been in my mind for years. And I kept thinking, was I drunk? When that happened, I kept thinking, I must have been drunk. Must have been when I was drunk one time. And then when I was looking through my medical records, it says that I was incontinent in the middle of a meeting. The patient got up and urinated out of the window. And I went, fuck. That's where that memory came from. And it was only because my... The therapist... The psychologist in my documentary, Erin Turner, who's wonderful, she's become a really good friend of mine, she read my medical records. And it was her that told me that I was over-medicated. It was her that told me that those drugs are no longer in use because they had massive side effects. Weight gain. Stiffness. I can remember, I couldn't... I couldn't walk, I couldn't move. And I've always wondered what the hell that was about. But these drugs, they were just filling me with this crap. And it also had an effect on my urinary system. Because I would literally just piss. And I don't know why this is because I'm an actor. I have no shame in talking about this. You know, I really don't. And I feel very blessed about that. But the fact that I can talk about it seems to have made this... People now say, oh, thank you, I had psychosis. And now I'm talking about it. It was a girl, Cheltenham last week, who had a psychotic breakdown. And she said, when people saw your documentary, they don't look at me as weird anymore. Because they know it happens to people. So that's why I'm kind of talking about this, is because I'm trying to reduce that stigma. Because the more we can reduce that stigma, the more people will talk about it, the more we can have an open discussion about it. And people will feel less shame when experiencing mental health conditions. And where are we in terms of particularly black men? You said they're still over-medicated. They're still over-represented. Has anything changed for the better? And if so, why? I'd like to say yes, but I don't think there is. I'm doing an event on Wednesday with mental health practitioners who were telling us that this thing happens today. That there are still black men sitting in mental health facilities over-medicated. People dying, being medicated. So it's a major problem in this country that no one seems to be talking about. And whether it's growing up in this, as you say, this system, this space, and being... I saw these two guys today. I was walking down the street today. I saw the matted beard. They're just sitting on the street. Obviously, they just lost it. Given up. Just given up. And I don't know. I think there's something particularly to England and America. And many of the people in America who are shot by police, people will see a strange man walking down the street. They'll call the police. They'll get shot. Get tased. End up in a mental institution. We end up in prison. Certainly in Chicago where I used to live, the prisons were the biggest purveyors of any mental health. Basically, you would have a mental health problem. Because of that, you would end up in prison. And in prison, you might get medicated because there's no social... Exactly. No social... But I'm just thinking, because you talk about these people that you saw and have given up, but there is something societal there, isn't there? They may have given up, but also society has given up on them. There is a kind of... I always worry as I get older that it could be that I'm just misremembering what things were like. I do know that there was a time when I don't remember there being food bags. Now I see a lot of them. And similarly, I feel like I see more people struggling openly in a way that you're talking about. On the street, uncared for, unkempt. I see more of that now than I did. And that, obviously, is partly about them and their condition, but it's also partly about us. It's about society. And I've been back. I've spent 10 years in America, in Canada. It's different. I've come back to a different country. And I've found myself getting a little down. I've found myself, I find it tough. It's tough here. And, you know, you've got to be careful. I've got to be... I use... I stop using social media. I stop engaging because I can't take it. It's just overwhelmingly depressing. And sometimes I just have to say I can't engage. And that's bad. I think that can be unhealthy. But I have to do that to preserve my mental health. Because if I don't, I'm going to get... I'm going to get depressed. Well, there's something about... And you mentioned the rise in psychosis since the pandemic. And there's something about this last year-and-a-half where we've all been at home and we've all had social media. And yet, I don't know about the other people in the audience, but kind of didn't take long for me to crave something like this, that I didn't actually fully appreciate the... What we missed? Yeah, the power and the joy of actually seeing people. It was so common. But also, like you, I did not grow up. It's what I do. I find a young inspiring in a range of ways. And I worry about them in this way. I didn't grow up with social media. We grew up with Ateli. But I wasn't then texting my friends about it. I mean, I see... I won't say my son because then he won't be able to say that. I talked about him. But I see young people hanging out. And they'll be hanging out. They'll be in the same room. They'll each be on their phone. And I kind of think that can't be good for you. And then I realized that I thought that when I looked up from my computer on a Saturday, and I'm thinking, well, first of all, what are you modeling here? But secondly, we're all at it. And I do feel like this last year has given me a lesson in what I might be missing. Certainly. I was having the same conversation with my daughters the other day. And I think we're all going to see what is going to happen in the next 10, 15 years. Because the kids that were born in this mobile communicative generation will be 30, 40. It's going to be interesting to see what the toll of that is or what their aspirations are. But we hope it's not too catastrophic. Well, I mean, and I wouldn't want to overdo it because they were the ones that came out for the Black Lives Matter demonstrations. They're more connected. And they're much more connected. Actually, they're much more in certain ways. More savvy. More savvy. They're more gender fluidity. They're not okay with racism. So maybe there is some sort of collective identity that they have or that they will have or collective understanding that they will have that might actually be beneficial. We don't actually know, I guess. I'm going to start taking some questions from, first of all, from our audience beyond. From those who are watching us on the streaming. And the first one says, what was the greatest difference for you between making a documentary and writing the book? That's a very good question. How did the writing shape the way you encountered your memories? Well, the documentary was a shock to me, as I say. I had no idea. When I, there's a scene where I go back to the hospital with my two friends who were with me on the day I got sectioned. And I literally had forgotten all about that. I buried it. And it was very scary to suddenly be confronted with that pain. And again, you know, I was, you know, Nick was saying, I was on my knees saying, I have to save the boy. Screaming at the top of my voice in the hospital. I have to save the boy. I mean, it's extraordinary. And then I realized that that boy is me. I had to save my young, I had to get back to my younger self. And I think in the book, that's what took me back to this young boy sitting at the knee with my dad and mom watching TV. And that's the boy I had to get back to because I'd lost contact with that. And so for me, the book enabled me to look back, search how that boy came apart. It was a chapter called The Collapse of the Young Black Boy in my book. And now I understand how that young black boy fell apart. I mean, you fell apart like a rocket, though, because you were flying high. You were doing really well. I mean, you were, you were a Rade, you had graduated from Rade. I mean, you were kind of... I was, you know, fresh out of drama. It was a kind of hot, young thing. But I was being asked questions, you know, you're playing Romeo, but Romeo's not really black. What do you think about playing a black Romeo? And I just didn't understand that stuff. I came out into a very politicized. I suddenly realized I was politicized. My talent was politicized, and I just didn't understand it. So I just, you know, I spent the majority of my life dreaming of acting and fun and make-believe and costumes and makeup, and suddenly it was all about my color. But you're black, you can't do that. And it just, it was just... And very, very personal reviews and very, very personal articles about me. Nasty stuff being written about me because I was doing Shakespeare. It was tough. I mean, here's one of the things that's intriguing about the way that you describe that, is that there will be people, maybe not watching now, but who will listen to you now and say, why do you keep going on about it? I get that kind of often. Why do you keep going on about it? What's it? Race, why do you keep going on about being black? Why do you keep... And my feeling is always like, because it's always there and because I don't really have a choice and you don't have to keep going on about being white because everything's white. Like nobody ever asked me, when did you come out as a straight guy? Because you don't have to come out as a straight guy. You can just be straight. And what's interesting is that you went from really talking about it at all. Not being aware of it. And that was actually part of your undoing. Yeah, and that's why I say you have to understand yourself. You have to have that self-knowledge, who you are, in order to progress. Because if you don't, as I say in the book, everything's okay until it isn't. Rightable to the moment it isn't. And it's only when it isn't that you suddenly realize, oh shit, I'm the only black person here, or I've got this... It's an odd experience. Was there any kind of catharsis in writing the book when reading your medical records was such a shocking and distressing experience? Was there any sense of rewriting your narrative? The medical records for me, as I said, I didn't open them for two years. I didn't look at them for two years. I was too scared to look at them. But having read them now, literally cover to cover, I sort of see and remember everything. So it's been about recovering lost memories. We... Like I said, I'd buried all that. I'd buried all of that experience. I'm sort of in possession of it and I own it. Whereas before, I think... Because I feel like I've found a missing gigsaw puzzle piece. And now that I've kind of slotted it in, I just feel more hollow. I mean, now I'd say to myself, for 30 years I've been walking around not quite myself. I was play-acting David Hale. But now I kind of really feel as though I'm in full possession of my own story. And that's... Sometimes I get sad about that because I think I don't really know who I was for 30 years. But at least I'm glad. I'm glad I know it now. There's an interesting... I don't know if you've read the book or aware of it. My name is Lance Hussay. Right, you've heard about that. He is a poet. And he has... He's written this book which is... He finds... He is put into the foster system. And there's a whole... And then just spat out. And there's a whole awful scenario of someone playing God. Almost literally. His mum trying to get hold of him. His mum trying to get him back. And this social worker thinking he knows best. Anyway, he gets his records. And the book is about him getting his records. And he actually did a play about it. And the more I think about it, the more I think... He's about our age. Which is... And there is something about... And this would probably still be true. About who we think we are and who we know we are and how officialdom in whatever guise understands us, describes us, frames us and what those consequences are. That we are walking around thinking we are being ourselves. Which we are in a sense. And yet we are being understood, categorised in these official ways. Which I cannot imagine how many prison records, police records must be out there of different people which kind of would distort in that way. Or describe in that way. They could be describing things that actually happened or they could be framing things in ways that didn't. It's also... There's a programme on tomorrow night A Thousand Years of Slave on Channel 5 where I go back to Barbados and find my... I'm given my... I uncover my links to my great-great-great-grandfather who was born a slave on the Thickets Plantation. And that's literally the moment the name Harewood was when we emancipated. That moment that Richard... Richard was the first... I basically found my great-great-great-grandfather great-grandparents, Richard and Betty. And that's where the name Harewood. And then they gave me the family tree and they go, Richard had a son, Nathaniel had a son, Bartholomew had me there. And then you go Romeo and then David and you think, wow, it's a really powerful moment when you see a slave to David Harewood and you just understand your story What do you think? Well, in the notion that we even have a story, I think growing up it was like my story started in Hitchhick somehow and the notion that there was a before that I knew I had a granny but I didn't know my granny because she lived in Barbados and the kind of... There is this notion that we don't have a history which, given this is a literature event I also recommend Fruit of the Lemon by Andrew Evie which pursues that. She kind of follows... A fictional character follows her kind of family tree and kind of finds her story because then she's able to locate herself in the world as being part of something bigger than your... Well, that's exactly what I'm saying. Now I understand... The first time I went to Harewood House it was just a coincidence which I now think is ridiculous but now I understand it Now I understand myself and the bigger picture of myself So it's like feeling all these different... It's color... it's like a painting that you're kind of... It's getting deeper and deeper So I'm getting a deeper understanding of myself as I get older I'm sure he won't mind me saying this My best friend Ben who, as it happens, went to Eden and in his house somewhere his parents live in this host house there is this kind of... you know, so-and-so bagasse so-and-so family tree all the way through and... I think, obviously, they're white Ben gets a phone call at a certain point and it's an African American lady saying, we're having a rakes reunion you know, and... we saw that, you know and we're just wondering whether you're related it's quite an unusual name R-A-I-K-E-S Anyway, he starts following it back and of course there's slave owners and Jamaica and so on and one of the things that I find interesting about these conversations is the amount of heavy lifting we have to do and the fact that actually these stories are very intimately entwined and that slavery isn't just our story R-Not at all, no R-It's all of it. Well... R-How did he feel about it? R-Sorry? R-How did he feel about having slave living? R-Oh, he was kind of like... I mean, he was up for it. Do you know what I mean? He was kind of... you know, he thought that figures that figures and figures that I wouldn't know and I mean, he lived in Hackney in a reunion was in Brooklyn and he wasn't going to get to go but there were these people who he you know, who he was in contact now with now and it, you know, set the hairs racing but that sometimes I wish more white people would do more lifting in terms of finding their connection to us R-We literally, I did an event in Cheltenham with Alex Renton who's just written a book called Blood Legacy where he traces his... he basically found a whole load of records in the attic and has, you know, started asking questions and Granny said yeah, we dabbled in the slave trade when your great-grandfather dabbled in the slave trade and so he's now trying to find all this out and some of his family no longer talk to him they no longer talk to him because he's you know, you're sort of doing Britain down you know, and that's the essential as you say about the heavy lifting there's a lot more heavy lifting needs to be done R-It's a peculiar thing isn't it when people do kind of put the great back into Great Britain and you think, well, how did the great get into Great Britain you know, and who paid for that and the notion, which I always find intriguing the people will say, we won the war even if they weren't born, even if they didn't fight they'll say we won the World Cup even if they didn't play, even if they weren't born who enslaved people? Well, that wasn't us I wasn't born, I wasn't there R-It wasn't me R-Yeah, and so that notion of a collective identity it all kind of varies, so very selective and I say this, not as a kind of kumbaya but just as a kind of like if one wants to know your history really your history, not your mythology then it wouldn't be a surprise that we're here and many of these things would become your world would make more sense to you you were to kind of understand it fully and I'll ask one more from online which is Gary, you mentioned you didn't read for pleasure as a young person what were the books that first got you hooked? The book that first got me hooked on fiction was The Colour Purple just it was an easy read these letters and it was kind of captivating and clearly it didn't speak to me personally I've never been to the south, southern states of America but it kind of electrified me I thought there's something in this reading thing I could get used to that How about you, was there a book that got you hooked? Yeah, The Master of Margarita Oh wow I remember as a kid, I think I was 15 but I was laughing out loud on the bus on the way to school just reading this obscure Russian I don't know how I got How the hell I got hold of it but it was just one of the funniest books I've ever read and it's so imaginative This cat, this cat who gets loose in Russia but it's just extraordinarily funny and that's the one that really got me a light and I thought, I love the idea of books now I might get some more I want to open it up to the audience if there are any questions, if you raise your hands first people with microphones Thank you I've got huge respect for you Thank you so much, huge respect for both of you Who do you have the most with? If you have to choose, see more than him Moving on To me, it makes complete sense that you wanted to reconnect with the young boy who felt safe and it's just extraordinary that that is couched in a term called madness and actually it makes complete sense and as a doctor I've never believed that medication is the complete answer and rather than suppressing things I think it's about understanding the situation of course, medication as you've said just suppresses everything so people can't think straight and I wondered whether your documentary is being used as part of training for mental health workers and all health workers really It is, which I'm really proud of It's now watched by young people who are studying psychiatry I've actually been awarded the President's Medal by the Royal College of Psychiatry this year because it's called about psychosis rose 107% the day after my documentary because people suddenly go, oh that's what happened to mum that's what happened to dad, that's what's happening to my sister there's been no language about it it's just dad's gone a bit funny that's what it's been over the years so suddenly someone talking about psychosis and I think somebody who's actually been through it talked reasonably articulately about it has enabled people to understand subconscious how that plays a part in your delusions and hallucinations and realise the importance of it so if anything I'm most proud of that doctors and young doctors are watching the documentary yes, very much so, me too thank you the gentleman, yes thanks very much David and Gary I think it's really brave of you to come out here and talk about your experiences is there anything you think you could have done at an earlier age would you have wanted to talk about things earlier rather than bury them, would that have helped? I don't think so I think people use that word brave I just don't recognise it I don't understand that word it's something that happened to me for me it was one of the most extraordinary experiences I've ever had so I'm sort of again I have no shame of talking about it but I think everything happens at the right time for the right reasons I just happened to tweet out I tweeted it out as somebody who's had a breakdown his World Mental Health Day and I just tweeted out randomly as somebody who's had a breakdown I just want to say look after yourself today and get some help if you can go easy on yourself put my phone away, got on a plane, flew to Vancouver got off and was like 40,000 retweets and I had a bit of a panic because then the BBC were ringing me up but suddenly the whole thing exploded and that's where this whole thing started the documentary started because then I wrote an article and papers and my friend who was with me on the day I got sections and said that's not how I remember it and I went oh am I got this wrong so that led me to then ask questions and find out so it's been a bit of a journey for me of self-discovery nothing was planned it just happened at the right time I'm just glad that I got to tell it and I'm glad I got to experience it because as I say I feel so much better for doing it I've got to say I think there is in no small part the bravery resides and you're not recognising it as brave actually a sense of like well this happened and I want to share this moment in which I was very vulnerable and in which I was quite scared at times is something that I want to talk about the general thing on social media is to show everybody how much your life is and how lovely your kids are and how pretty your garden is and you don't see you see pictures of people's nice meals you don't see pictures of look what the fuck happened here but again I get all these really crazy experiences when I was walking I walked my dog across the heat and this black guy saw me across and he ran to me Gary and he went I don't know how you did that man I don't know how you did that but thank you I don't know how you did it I could never do that but I just want to say thank you thank you brother and I'm like wow it seems as though it's helped a lot of people and that's all that matters yeah I mean I do get it in fact they're like well this is what happened and I'm going to but that that man's response is because nobody before had come forward and done that and that's what I thought I'd broken some some code some masculine and you can say you're not brave that's your but like I'm not buying it um uh yes sir hi there David as you were saying before and it's part of your journey of not seeing representation that's part of kind of what helped what led to some of the unraveling and things that happened that's the reason why your story has resonated so much because especially young black men are going through psychosis and things like that and the reason that as you said they don't want to talk about these things or they feel that there's a taboo or a stigma about it that seeing someone like yourself who is successful see many of the world at their feet and still had that happen to them and then being able to talk about it and do so in a way that's so candid and as I said without shame is ultimately why what you have done has resonated so much um I have family members who have had psychotic breaks and things like that um you know other people that are close to me have had that as well so I think what I would like to say is thank you thank you for doing what you did um as you said you have had small snippets of people coming up to you and and giving you an indication of how much that meant but especially in the black community we don't tend to talk about these things it's swept under the rug it's um made into you know sometimes it may be demonised but it's about being human and you have shown that not only are you a human and with feelings and everything like that but actually being vulnerable is sometimes the strongest thing that you can do and thank you appreciate that thank you very much and what a way to end we I'm afraid we have to end we could go on and on some of you may be thinking first night for a year and a half yeah I think I'll go and listen to a story about breakdown, race, racism Britain, psychosis that seems like a night out and yet here we are we've been inspired we're grateful I do think that you have you've offered you have offered one of those options to people one of those stories that people can tell themselves about who they might be about who they could be you've done it eloquently you've done it both in film and for those who do read books you've done it in books and you you talk about it in an accessible human way you're not trying to be you didn't come in a cape I have got one I should hope so super girl and and for that I mean we've been engaged and I think I speak for the audience when I say that we're grateful and I echo the words of the young man there thank you so thank you David thank you thank you