How this A Place In The Sun presenter had to be talked down from a building ... trends now
Crying silent tears and trembling, Leah Charles-King queued at her GP surgery, clutching a handwritten message in her hand.
It read: ‘If you send me home, I’m going to kill myself. I’m suicidal and I need help now.’
‘It was that blunt,’ recalls the TV presenter, best known for Channel 4’s A Place In The Sun.
Just two days earlier Leah, then aged 30, had put on a bubbly performance on a live ITV show, but it masked a mental health crisis that had been brewing for some years. She had experienced periods of manic highs, when she became impulsive and barely stopped to rest, followed by crushing lows since her early 20s.
Leah Charles-King's GP diagnosed depression and put her on antidepressants, but they didn’t seem to help - because she didn't have depression
Place in the Sun presenter Leah Charles-King masked her anguish on TV
‘I would not sleep for days, not eat, but I was full of energy, rapid thoughts, very impulsive,’ recalls Leah.
‘I would also have periods where I would feel suicidal and depressed.
‘I could see something wasn’t right because I was very erratic.’
Her GP diagnosed depression and put her on antidepressants, but they didn’t seem to help, and there was a reason for that — she didn’t have depression.
The day she handed her desperate note to staff at her GP surgery, an ambulance was called to take her to hospital, where a specialist diagnosed Leah with bipolar disorder. What’s more, she was told the antidepressants she had been taking for years may have been making her symptoms worse.
While depression typically leads to intense sadness, pessimism and low energy, bipolar can lead to periods of those symptoms, but alternating with episodes of mania when people become intensely energetic.
Those affected may also engage in impulsive and potentially harmful behaviour, such as spending irrational amounts of money.
Despite the two conditions being ‘very different’ and requiring different treatment, ‘nearly 70 per cent of people with bipolar tell us they’d had a previous diagnosis of depression’, Simon Kitchen, chief executive of the charity Bipolar UK, told Good Health.
Diagnosis for bipolar disorder relies on an assessment by a clinician; the problem is that if someone with bipolar is misdiagnosed with depression, they could be put on medication that can exacerbate their mood changes.
‘Antidepressants have been found to be useful for some bipolar patients, but for the majority antidepressants are ineffective and may induce mood instability,’ says Guy Goodwin, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Oxford University.
They do this by ‘activating brain networks that are predisposed to switching beyond normal mood into hypomania [a less extreme form of mania, which does not cause psychosis but can cause risky and reckless behaviour] — the drug causes the switch’, he explains.
Yet in a survey for Bipolar UK in 2022, 55 per cent of 2,458 people with bipolar disorder who were questioned reported being given antidepressants.
The charity also knows of cases where patients have been wrongly diagnosed with treatment-resistant depression when antidepressants fail to have an effect, in some cases leading them to be put on stronger medication.
The presenter had experienced periods of manic highs, when she became impulsive and barely stopped to rest, followed by crushing lows since her early 20s
Bipolar UK is now campaigning for GPs to ‘think bipolar before ever prescribing antidepressants for the first time,’ says spokesperson Mark Hayward.
The charity says it takes almost ten years on average to receive a correct bipolar diagnosis after symptoms first appear, despite it being very common, with more than a million people in the UK living with the condition.
‘GPs [are] pushed for time and assessing patients’ experiences and backgrounds takes time,’ says Professor Goodwin.
‘Patients with bipolar disorder don’t get
