Spike pictured in a documentry about his depression

The world is a sadder place to have lost you. Thanks for allowing us to see the inner child in all of us grown ups.

Spike Milligan was the zaniest, wackiest comic genius of his generation. But like the classic clown, his life was beset by manic depression, and he suffered at least 10 complete mental breakdowns.There was more to Spike Milligan than comedy - indeed that was probably the area of his life he cared for the least. He was an accomplished poet, an author with several volumes of war memoirs which, though riotously funny, contained the bitter after-taste of brutal conflict. He was also a better than average jazz cornet and trumpet player, with a penchant for Bix Beiderbecke and Louis Armstrong.

A SHORT LOOK AT DEPRESSIVE ILLNESS

Many times I have nearly relinquished my hold on this world. I came closer than ever last week, on more than a couple of occasions. One landed me in hospital overnight. Other times had me talked out of it by well-meaning friends so many miles away...

The isolation that this illness brings with it is possibly the most terrible of all. We become socially isolated from friends, family...all the things that make life worthwhile. I have not worked at a job in months.

And finally, I have even become isolated from my online friends because my behaviour was deemed too disturbing by the administrators of the website. Which all makes it feel like this hell is more and more of my own creation. It's inside my mind, isn't it?

So therefore it should be inside my control. But the rationale for this goes wrong somewhere, I'm not sure where... I am lost in confusion and frightening mood swings, terrifying thoughts that will not leave me alone, a maelstrom that takes me into the abyss of despair and inaction, then will buoy my battered spirit upwards once more with occasional periods of hope and frenetic activity...

But I cannot live like this... no-one can. The extremes have become too much. I feel a little like a computer, whose shonky programming more than 25 years ago has gradually caused it to run slower and slower over the years (with the occasional application which runs as it should, or perhaps even faster) until finally, this year... system overload. Shutdown in progress.

Total software crash and many files just deleted or unable to be found. But I can't find the Restart button, and it scares me.

The pain is too much
A thousand grim winters grow  in my head
In my ears the sound of the coming dead
All seasons
All sane
All living
All pain.
No opiate to lock still my senses
Only left, the body locked tenses
 
St. Luke's Hospital Psychiatric Wing 1953/4

Me
 
Born screaming small into this world-
Living I am.
Occupational therapy twixt birth and death-
What was I before?
What will I be next?
What am I now?
Cruel answer carried in the jesting mind
of a careless God
I will not bend and grovel
When I die. If He says my sins are myriad
I will ask why He made me so imperfect
And he will say 'My chisels were blunt'
I will say 'Then why did you make so
many of me'.
 
Bethlehem Hospital Highgate 1966

Oberon
 
The flowers in my garden
grow  down
Their colour is pain
Their fragrance sorrow.
Into my eyes grow  their roots
feeling for ears
To nourish the black
hopeless rose
within me.
 
Nervous breakdown Bournemouth
February 1967

The Soldiers at Lauro
 
Young are our dead
Like babies they lie
The wombs they blest once
Not healed dry
And yet - too soon
Into each space
A cold earth falls
On colder face.
Quite still they lie
These fresh-cut reeds
Clutched in earth
Like winter seeds
But they will not bloom
When called by spring
To burst with leaf
And blossoming
They sleep on
In silent dust
As crosses rot
And helmets rust.

The Dog Lovers
 
So they bought you
And kept you in a
Very good home
Central heating
TV
A deep freeze
A very good home-
No one to take you
For that lovely long run-
But otherwise
'A very good home'
They fed you Pal and Chum
But not that lovely long run,
Until, mad with energy and boredom
You escaped - and ran and ran and ran
Under a car.
Today they will cry for you -
Tomorrow  they will buy another dog
1970

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Spike was interviewed by the BBC about his depression. He was talking frankly to psychiatrist Anthony Clare - This was for the show In The Psychiatrist's Chair and was aired in 1982.

Anthony Clare was so overwhelmed by Milligan's account of his depressive experiences that he knew he had found the person to help him illuminate and explore the mysterious and sometimes terrifying illness that is clinical depression. Depression And How To Survive It was a result of this collaboration.

Spike Milligan: I was abnormal; I was very strange, I was very strange indeed. I was mentally ill, no two ways about it, I shouldn't have been working, but I had to hang on to this job, which was a very good job. And I went in and out of mental homes about once every six months.

Anthony Clare: But at this time when you say you were ill, you were turning out classic comedy material.

Spike Milligan: It's amazing, yes. It was amazing.

Anthony Clare: Could you have done it if you hadn't been ill?

Spike Milligan: It's a strange thing you should say this Tony. The best scripts I wrote were when I was ill. I've just recalled the ones that I wrote best were when I was ill. It was a mad desire to be better than anybody else at comedy, and if I couldn't do it in the given time of eight hours a day, I used to work 12, 13 or 14. I did, I was determined. There were times when I was positively manic.

Anthony Clare: What about other symptoms?

Spike Milligan: I was four foot above the ground at times, talking twice as fast as normal people, like this, I had great fervour to write this stuff and to hear them do it every Sunday, I couldn't wait for them to do it to hear how it sounded, because it acclaimed, when it went down I thought, 'I've done it, I've done it', and then I had to go and start all over again, that was the awful part of it.

Anthony Clare: But there was a sensation of being high.

Spike Milligan: Oh yes.

Anthony Clare: Were you ever violent?

Spike Milligan: I want to be violent, but somehow I felt inhibited by doing it. I thought that would be the last straw if I turned violent.

Spike Milligan: Perhaps I might be difficult at times, but not as a difficult person. I would only have my proportional amount of difficulty that you might have in you. I'm not an exceptionally difficult person.

Anthony Clare: You're not?

Spike Milligan: Not really, no, I don't think so. If they find me difficult they must be an awful pain in the arse to themselves.

Anthony Clare: Why are you so frightened of being thought of as bloody difficult?

Spike Milligan: That's a very good question. I suppose because I want to be a decent person. I don't want to make life painful for people, because a lot of people made life painful for me. I know how bloody awful it can be to have that painful life, and I try to avoid that and the essence as I said, I never struck my children.

Anthony Clare: Linked to that is a view you have of life, a vision of life, as essentially a betrayal, it lets you down.

Spike Milligan: That's very good Tony, 100 marks for that. You're dead right, I'm just trying to really - you're dead right, life does get you down, doesn't it? I mean there's no rehearsal for it, there's only one performance and you never have a rehearsal. So you can never give a good performance.

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