Waking up in a mental institution is a strange experience made slightly more bearable by the drugs administered the night before arrival. It’s an odd sensation to come round on a ward – in my case, one at the Hollymoor psychiatric hospital in Birmingham – and not recognise your own body. It took a while for my hands, feet and legs to understand that they were attached to my body. I just lay there for an hour trying to make sense of what was going on. I knew I was awake and alive, but that was as much as I could make out. I wriggled my fingers and toes repeatedly to be sure they hadn’t been removed. Once I was 100% certain that all of me seemed present and correct, I turned my attention to opening my eyes. My eyelids felt like 40lb kettle bells and refused to stay open. After a minute or two, they settled into a thousand-yard stare as my brain tried its best to focus and understand what all these people were doing in my fucking bedroom. Slowly it started to come together. I realised I was on the locked ward of a psychiatric hospital. Thirty years ago, fresh out of drama school, I had what I now understand to be a psychotic breakdown. I had consumed a fair amount of marijuana and was under a lot of stress; over the course of two years, I’d slowly come undone. I had spent weeks walking all over London, sometimes throughout the night, talking to strangers and following them wherever they led me. I’d black out only to regain consciousness in a completely different part of town, hours later, afraid and with absolutely no idea what had happened in the interval. Had it not been for some extraordinary friends who decided that I needed to be hospitalised, I might have vanished into the night for good. Worse still, I could have taken heed of the incredibly real and convincing voices in my head and simply thrown myself off Westminster Bridge. Instead, I found myself sectioned under the Mental Health Act. I was 23 and I’d never heard of psychosis. I was confused as to what the hell was happening. The doctors were equally unsure. At one point, I was looked at by a neurosurgeon. At another point, they thought I had schizophrenia. The jury was out for quite some time as they worked out how best to deal with me. The actual breakdown probably didn’t last very long, but I think I was suffering from the effects of psychosis for months. Black people are four times more likely to be detained under the Mental Health Act than white people, and are far more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia and psychosis. Out of 16 specific ethnic groups, Black Caribbean people have the highest rates of detention in psychiatric hospital. Clearly, there is something about living in Britain that is tough for Black people. When I look back, it’s clear that I came close to death. Many men, Black men in particular, have died being restrained by the police while experiencing psychotic symptoms. I’m convinced that had I been in the US at the time, I’d likely be dead. I struggled hugely against those trying to subdue me when I was sectioned – it took six police officers to hold me down. One false move by me or any of them could have ended my life. Although I was hospitalised twice in quick succession, I only recovered my sanity at home with my caring, nurturing mother. I had been feeling isolated since leaving drama school. I’d arrived at Rada with a Brummie accent, but as I grew to love the vowel sounds contained in classic texts, my pronunciation shifted. Some say that by losing your accent, you dilute your authenticity, but I purposefully ironed out mine in order to adapt. People have since accused me of selling out, claiming that having good diction was almost equivalent to being a “coconut”: Black on the outside but white on the inside. This was another arrow that would lead to my unravelling as I tried to carve out an identity that kept me in work. As wonderful as my time at drama school was, the experience had given me a false sense of the real world. I was in such a creative space, colour wasn’t mentioned, and I felt anything was possible. But since I’d left, I’d found it wasn’t true. There still weren’t many Black actors working regularly on British television and there really wasn’t anybody of my own generation I could look to emulate. At Rada, I’d just been an actor. Now my colour was the defining factor in reviews and articles. When I played Romeo in a Black theatre company’s production of Romeo and Juliet a review after the London show said I “looked more like Mike Tyson than Romeo”. The more I read, the more I understood that white culture, the white space, was dismissing me. That was one of the last reviews I read before my breakdown – within a year, I would find myself on a psychiatric ward. Another time, I was in play that attempted to wrap up all the issues about Black Sections (the Black group within the Labour party) in a lighthearted way. On reading it seemed like an interesting piece, but something deep down in me wasn’t convinced. I should never have done it. It was a disaster. I don’t want to go into all of the details, but it fell apart very quickly. My insecurities started playing up, and going on stage became difficult. For the first time ever, I was beginning to lose my nerve. It felt as if the Black space was rejecting me, too. The bullying and game-playing I suffered went from bad to worse, and uncomfortably close got uncomfortably closer. I’ve never made a secret of my former mental health troubles. Delving into the causes of my breakdown has involved reconnecting with my struggle to forge a sense of identity and belonging as a Black British man. The many conflicts I had experienced around race, nationality and acceptance took me right to the moment my uncertainty began: my first direct experience of racist abuse. A single encounter shattered my perception of myself, splitting my identity in two. One of my earliest memories is of when I was three, wandering out of the back door of our house in Arthur Street, Birmingham. I’d no sooner set foot into the yard than I was struck in the head with a rock as big as a tennis ball. I don’t remember feeling any pain, but I do remember wailing in shock and calling for my brother. I was still so young that I couldn’t pronounce my Rs or Gs so I cried out for “Woyer, Woyer!” Roger was nowhere to be seen, but my screams attracted the attention of my mother, who was nearby chopping wood. She instantly had a good idea of who was responsible. It wasn’t the first time our troublesome white neighbours had caused her concern, and she led me inside, cleaned up the blood and told us all not to leave the house. Then she marched off to the local police station. Upon arrival, my mother approached the officer on duty behind his desk and said with calm, suppressed Bajan rage: “Excuse me. My youngest child has just been hit in the head with a rock by one of our neighbours. Officer, when I heard my child scream I was chopping wood for a fire. So help me God, if I’d have caught the person responsible for chucking it, I would have buried that chopper in their skull. I ask you to please come round and talk to these people or, by Christ, you’ll be over later taking them to the morgue and me off to prison!” She meant every word. The policeman took down some details and later that day knocked on our neighbours’ door and had a word. Not that it stopped the trouble. A couple of weeks later, early on a Saturday, my mother called us down for a full English breakfast. But, just as we got to the table, a brick came crashing through the window, bouncing off the table and landing on the floor in front of us. I’ll never forget the sight, my favourite breakfast, cooked and ready to eat, covered in glass. “Go back upstairs… I’ll call you when I’ve cooked something fresh,” Mum said. We moved shortly afterwards and in the spring of 1973 took up residence in nearby Small Heath, a tough working-class neighbourhood that was respectable and tidy, with identical little houses and tiny front gardens. Although I was still quite young, I had the impression we’d moved up in the world. As far as I was aware, we were the only Black family on our end of the street. There were a couple of Indian and Pakistani families towards the other end of the road, but apart from that, the street was filled with white English and Irish families. We lived next door to the Davidsons and, at first, they weren’t too pleased about their new dark-skinned neighbours. However, they mellowed and actually became rather friendly. But then just as we were hitting our stride in the new house, somebody put an envelope full of shit through our letter box, which is something that to this day still puzzles me. I mean, why go to the trouble of collecting your own shit, carrying it down the street and posting it? It was the very idea of doing it that really disgusted me, not particularly the racial aggravation. Mum and Dad cleaned up the mess with a bemused shrug and continued on with their day. I was probably about five and I had definitely picked up that some people in the area were none too pleased to see Black faces around. I remember being a little afraid to go outside my house. I can remember starting to watch white people when I walked past them in the street. Some would smile and nod as they passed with open, friendly faces, while others carried on without so much as a glance. But every now and again there’d be a look in the eye that chilled me. I couldn’t explain it, it was just something I felt in my bones, and every time I saw someone like that, I looked away and quickened my step. When I was seven, matters became clear. It was an incident I’ll never forget, creating a rupture that has lasted until today. Playing alone outside my house one day, I noticed an older, white gentleman walking towards me. He wasn’t charging at me so I didn’t feel danger, but I could tell it was a purposeful walk. I stopped what I was doing and watched as he got closer. When he was finally within arm’s length, his face a picture of hatred and anger, he leaned in towards me and said: “Get the fuck out of my country, you little Black bastard!” I was shocked and rooted to the spot. He glared at me, before slowly turning and walking away. I watched as he strode off, working out what he had just said to me. “His” country? Was it not mine, too? Perhaps it wasn’t? I was piecing it together, my imaginary game now over, replaced by more serious thought. Maybe I don’t belong here? And that’s when it happened, the two halves of me split. There was now a Black half and an English half and I could feel myself slowly coming apart. At times in my life I’ve been able to fuse these two halves together, but occasionally the gap between them is just too big. How can I be English when much of England refuses to accept my Blackness and makes it clear that I am not welcome? It’s almost as if my identity feels it’s under attack, just like it was on the streets of Birmingham all those years earlier. Britain in the late 1960s and 70s was a place where Black kids like me were often subject to random and unforeseen racist attacks. Racism has become part of the fabric of my life in the UK. It’s as familiar to me as the start of the football season or the theme tune of News At Ten. I’ve grown up with it. I know what it looks like. So you can imagine my astonishment when the government produced a race report in 2021, the Sewell report, which totally diminished my lived experience and told me that the things I knew to be true were just a myth. This dismissal of my experience erodes trust. I never spoke to my father about the anxieties I faced on the street. I don’t remember ever asking him how to deal with racism, or what I should do to combat the feelings it stirred in me. I sometimes tried to ask him about his early days in the country, almost hoping he’d mention his own encounters with racism so we could discuss it, but he would never talk about it. He would just shrug it off and change the subject. I must have been wrapped up in my own world then, because I wasn’t very aware of my father’s breakdown. When I had my own, it was out in the open, but when my dad was struggling, I guess everyone in the family did a good job of protecting me from the worst of it. Although I do remember seeing him in the psychiatric ward and he looked different, unhappy, and as if he was being kept against his will. He was a proud man and I think he found it humiliating to be hospitalised for his mental health. Coming from the Caribbean in 1957 and arriving in England must have also been a shock to my father’s system. In my teens, I was hardly ever home for dinner as I’d be out playing sport. Perhaps that’s why I missed the first signs of what was happening with my father, but I began to sense that all wasn’t well. For a couple of mornings I didn’t hear his keys jingle jangle down the stairs. Mum told me not to go into the kitchen when I went downstairs. She said I should get ready and head straight out of the door to school. I started to suspect that something wasn’t quite right. Everybody loved my father, but maybe we didn’t understand the strain he was putting himself under with all his work. One evening I came home late and walked in to find all the lights on but nobody downstairs. I figured someone had forgotten to turn them off so I sat for a minute, taking in the living room, pondering whether or not to turn on the TV, when my eyes fell on my father’s typewriter. It had a single piece of paper in it and for some reason something just looked off. I walked up to it. It was like a scene straight out of The Shining. There was only one word typed on a whole sheet of A4 paper and it said: “Illness”. It was then that I understood. My father wasn’t well – something had happened; something in his mind had cracked. My sister tells me that the family had decided to shield me because I was the youngest. Eventually, my father was sectioned. He was in the hospital for quite some time and he hated every damn minute of it. We went to see him once, with the whole family travelling up to sit with him one evening while he spoke quietly with my mother. I could tell he really wasn’t happy, because he was grouchy and snapped at my mother from time to time. I sat watching him, not really understanding what was going on, but knowing that he had been “detained”, and that he had to stay there until the doctors thought he was better. When he got out of the psychiatric ward, my father was a very different man. Mental illness can have a profound effect on a person’s life and personality, and many people experience a big change after going through a breakdown. My father was bitter, angry at the system – in particular the doctors and nurses for thinking he was crazy – and he was angry at those who didn’t see things the way he’d seen them. In the months and years following, my parents argued more than they ever had before. The house wasn’t filled with much laughter. Dad threw himself into his darts and activities down the pub, drinking heavily and often becoming a little belligerent. He wasn’t the same dad that I remembered, and after a while everyone in the house felt the same way. It was as if he’d replaced the man he used to be with the man he’d decided to be and that person was different. He was diagnosed with hypermania – whatever that meant, I wasn’t sure. Nobody really gave us any explanations. He was told to take lithium tablets, which would help keep him on an even keel, but he decided he didn’t need them. I was 15 and my world had completely changed. How had it come to this? Just three or four years earlier, I’d been sitting with my father watching the cricket. My father, who died in 2016, became yet another Black man who had malfunctioned in England, short-circuited, and was in need of repair. It was something that I hadn’t foreseen, but then I guess this kind of trauma never is. Looking back, I can recognise that there may have been some alcohol abuse and stress with the darts league, but my father was a strong man. I’m not sure what made him step off the deep end. Perhaps I should have taken more notice that if this could happen to someone in the family and someone who seemed so strong, it might also happen to me. Maybe I should have paid more attention. While it is impossible for me to ever truly understand what made my father snap, if I follow my own journey into madness, I can shed some light on his struggles. My father had left what he knew, then had a breakdown. I had left the life I knew to become an actor and also suffered a breakdown. The white space had taken its toll on both of us. Since that fateful day when the man on the street told me to get the fuck out of his country, I have felt homeless in a sense. I have the feeling that I don’t quite belong to the ground beneath my feet and it still makes me feel unsettled. Psychosis will most likely change you, but it doesn’t have to be the end of you. I’m thankful I came through it and I’m aware of how it helped me overcome my inhibitions and fear of failure. Maybe if I’d come to this state of awareness years ago, my life would have been different.