Patsy Kensit

Patsy Kensit

Patsy Kensit on a PTSD diagnosis that finally explained the sadness

Content note — this story covers a subject some people would rather choose when to read.

Patsy Kensit was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder about three and a half years before this interview. She also lives with depression — something she finds hard to square with being, as she puts it, a very joyful person who is grateful for the life she has had. The sadness is there anyway. For years she assumed she knew where it came from. She put it down to relationships that had not worked out, and to not having built the family she wanted. What was put to her instead was that it went back much further — to her childhood. She was six when she was told her mother was going to die. By the time she was eleven or twelve she had been to the hospital perhaps a dozen times to say goodbye, and each time her mother came through it. She describes her mother as an extraordinary woman who stayed relentlessly positive through cancer, and who died when Patsy was in her early twenties, around her first son's first birthday. She says she misses her every day. At seven or eight she had a phrase she used to repeat — that she was having a bad thought. Her mother would tell her to cancel it and not to worry. She also remembers deciding, as a child, that if she worked and earned money she might be able to buy her mother's health back. What she says about the diagnosis itself is the part worth reading twice. It was a relief. She had wondered whether she was bipolar, or had ADHD, and finally having a name for it explained everything — that what she had carried was not about those relationships at all, but about things that happened when she was very small. Therapy over the years has helped, though she is not in it at the moment. She says she has been dealing with this all her life, and that it is good people can talk about it now without being written off as unable to work. Nothing here is medical advice. If you think you may have PTSD, or treatment you are having is not working, the NHS advice is to see your GP.

• Depression
• Post-traumatic stress disorder