“I knew something was going wrong inside my body,” says Horatio Clare. “I felt like I was running too fast, really.”

Clare is a BBC radio producer and writer, whose work often explores his own life and experience. Behind the public identity, he was living with cyclothymia, a mild form of bipolar disorder, alongside alcohol and drug problems, and a relationship falling apart.

At the time, he was trying to expand his life in every direction: launch two new books, a new course, a new job, a decent father and partner. It looks successful and productive from the outside, but from inside, it is accelerating without control.

“I must crack on, I must take all the responsibilities,” he recalls.

Sleep shrank to four hours everyday, sometimes none at all, and his thoughts kept leaping, never stopping.

“I can’t stop,even though I’m already aware it’s too much. There are sounds constantly talking in my head,” he said. 

This was the manic phase of bipolar disorder—a condition often defined by two extremes: periods of intense energy and activity, and periods of deep depression. At first, the energy can feel almost functional, even productive, but it comes at a cost: sleepless nights, racing thoughts, and delusions that blur reality. 

“My delusion involved spies and aliens and secret services,” he said.

He later entered a period of intense psychological distress, during which he developed delusional beliefs and began to act on them in increasingly extreme ways, including attempts to reimagine his surroundings as a space for “peace and international understanding.”

“I guess it was the illusion of planetary significance which was exciting and demanding and a feeling that you really must not stop,” he said.

“You’re on a kind of mission,” he says. “To do good.”

Eventually, the momentum reached a point where intervention became unavoidable. It is easy to imagine that moment as forceful: police, restraint, a loss of control. Clare denied it with his own sense of humour.

“I wasn’t dragged in,” he says. “I walked in.”

By then, he knew something was wrong. But that knowledge existed alongside a belief that he could still manage it alone.

“I thought I could deal with it by myself,” he says. “I didn’t think I needed treatment.”

Under the Mental Health Act, being sectioned depends not only on risk, but on what 

clinicians call “insight”, the ability to understand one’s own condition. Clare did not believe he posed a danger to others. But, as he now recognises, he was at risk to himself.

On the third morning in hospital, he looked out of the window. There were people in the car park.

“I assumed they were watching and listening to me,” he says. “But then I realised they were just builders fixing windows.”

He describes that period as being “drenched in delusion”, building up a “bank of evidence” 

that reinforced a reality that felt entirely true.

“It didn’t feel like I was mad,” he says. “It felt like something huge was still happening.”

Recovery began, unexpectedly, with a single grounding thought.

“How do you gain firm ground?” he remembers asking himself. “And I said out loud: ‘You’re in a mental hospital.”

From that point, something shifted. Within days, the intensity of delusions began to recede.

“You get a great draining feeling in the middle of you,” he says. “When you look back over the last months and think ,Christ, I’ve been mad as a fish.”

And then, slowly, a way forward.

“My initial reaction was to start writing a diary,” he says.

In a place where reality had fractured, writing became a way to hold on to it.

“I’m in a mental hospital. My job here is to write down what that is like,” he says. “Most people don’t know. And there are thousands of people in mental hospitals who need us to know.”

The diary later became his first book about mental health: Heavy light:A Journey Through Madness, Mania and Healing.

“There was a window seat on the ward,” he recalls. “I could see across the fields and watch the sunrise. I spent most of my time there writing.”

“I could feel myself going back together, because you’re doing your job.”

When asked whether he ever felt reduced from writer to patient, he is careful with the language.

“I think the term they use is ‘service user’,” he says, avoiding the label of “patient”.

The delusions once told him he was working towards world peace. Now, the purpose is smaller, but real.

“You are right to help people and tell the truth,” he says. “That’s my purpose. I’m a reporter.”

Writing, for him, remains both craft and structure. 

“It’s a way of ordering experience,” he says. “A place to be honest, which is intensely therapeutic.”

For a writer whose mind had once constructed entire worlds, real creativity, he says, begins with looking out of the window in the real world.

“A beautiful, rainy spring afternoon and look out of the window… that’s where you find it.Creativity comes from my engagement with the real world.”

After leaving the hospital, Horatio Clare turned his words into action. He published Heavy Light, recounting psychosis from the inside, and created two radio series for BBC Sounds asking, Is psychiatry working? He wrote widely for newspapers and worked directly with NHS teams, social workers, and section doctors, giving workshops and talks that distilled lessons from his lived experience.

“Anybody who lived my life for those three months would have been as crazy as me,” he reflects. Heavy Light was never meant to label him forever. “Will I always be the mad guy? But the answer is no. Quite the opposite.”

For Horatio, depression is a message from the psyche: a signal that change and help are needed. “Go deep down into your thoughts. Without them, we wouldn’t perhaps understand the richness and the beauty of ordinary days. You need to believe it will end one day.”

His second book, Your Journey Your Way, is a recovery guide, full of advice on how mental health is best treated. “Through this book, I want to tell them there is nothing wrong with mental illness… a journey is an exciting one. Sometimes the wheels fall off the Land Cruiser or the hippo bikes, the canoe in half. Things go wrong, but it is still a journey.”

Writing Heavy Light allowed him to witness what happens inside a mind as it loses its grip and regains it. Most readers are sufferers themselves, or their relatives. “It’s quite positive to be able to share experiences and to give comfort and reassurance. When I heard them saying it really helped, it made me feel wonderful.”

He emphasizes that his journey into madness was never wanted. “All those things happened are just one journey… Given that I did, it is a huge blessing to have been able to turn it to some benefit to others. Readers’ gain is a real gift for me.”

“I wrote it in praise of the people who have been affected, and to try to help them. From my family to my carers, doctors and psychologists. I wrote it to expose psychiatric ignorance and damage, and to praise and thank the people who work so hard on behalf of sufferers themselves.”

After the interview, he returned to his window seat, watching the rain, the light on the clouds, and the wind dancing with the sun. In that simple moment, creativity felt real again: alive in the present. 

“We’re in constant flux, building, falling apart, and remaking ourselves all the time. I’m still learning. I’m still an internal student.”

Sidebar: Understanding Bipolar Disorders and Cyclothymia
 Professor Oluwafemi (Femi) Oyebode is an Honorary Professor of Psychiatry and Consultant Psychiatrist, specialising in clinical psychopathology. This sidebar explains bipolar and related symptoms from a clinical perspective using his expert insights.

Q: What are the features of mania?
A: “You can have a very high mood, sometimes euphoric. In some people, it can be irritability, attention, hostility. They may have difficult sleeping, excessive energy, disturbed concentration, and restlessness. In severe cases, they may also have delusions or hallucinations, like believing they are God or the Prime Minister.”

Q: And the features of depression?
A: “Mood is disturbed, sleep is affected — often early morning waking. Poor appetite, reduced energy, concentration affected, loss of interest in usual hobbies. Severe cases may include delusions, such as believing they are ill or that others wish them harm.”

Q: What about cyclothymia?
A: “Some people would argue cyclothymia is a personality trait. It implies periods when a person is slightly more energetic or more low-spirited than usual, but these fluctuations are short and relatively mild compared to bipolar episodes.”

Q: How do these symptoms impact daily life, work, or writing?
A: “The disruption is to do with episodes of illness, not the illness per se. If a person is manic — restless, unable to concentrate, believing things that aren’t true — or depressed, with low energy and concentration — their ability to function, work, or write is impaired.”

Q: What kinds of support are important?
A: “Early recognition and early intervention are very important. Psychological support, social support, and psychotherapy are key. Psychoeducation helps people recognize symptoms and early signs to prevent recurrence. These are treatable conditions, and between episodes, people can fully recover.”