Who knows when being mentally unwell starts? I don't remember a time when I didn't think I controlled everything. Perhaps I was born highly strung – one of the many delightful euphemisms given to us odd children when experts can't quite work out what's wrong.
Anxiety is a pernicious, shapeshifting affliction. It finds things it can latch on to and multiplies the threat. In my case it was everything from zoonotic diseases to poisonous plants (I didn't eat a mushroom for 13 years just in case someone accidentally put a death cap in my chicken pie) and current affairs. From the age of seven I watched the news so avidly I believed I could control world events.
During the IRA's 1981 bombing campaign, I encouraged my primary school contemporaries to make a collage of the hunger striker Bobby Sands from pencil sharpenings. I thought if we sent them some supportive art they'd probably leave south Lincolnshire alone. And they did. I put this down to my efforts rather than the fact there were bigger targets in the UK than the Spalding Flower Parade.
Unsurprisingly, living with the constant management of total world catastrophe led to physical symptoms. My stomach pains were as mysterious as they were agonising. Specialists drifted into my life with well-meaning uselessness. Only one (and to this day I thank him) agreed that the prospect of global nuclear war was terrifying. This was further clarification that my mother's refusal to whitewash our house to protect us from radiation was entirely unreasonable. Especially because our council house was slap bang in the middle of four US air bases. Our nearest McDonald's was the only branch in the entire UK to serve root beer for homesick troops. Surely the Russians would be after us first. I could see that we would be unable to withstand even a one-megaton burst above the North Sea without sizeable damage to my mum's collection of porcelain birds (the chaffinch in particular was very delicate). Other adults seemed to be in denial of the appalling terror around me. They said I was quirky, and it was just a phase that I would grow out of.
Of course I should have grown out of it. But the older I got, the higher the stakes. I didn't want to die. I didn't want my family to die. I didn't want the world to end. Most of all I didn't want to die a virgin before the entire universe exploded.
Then Richard Burton came into my life.
One afternoon when I was off school with some imagined affliction, a TV channel, in its infinite wisdom, decided to show The Medusa Touch – a thriller starring Richard Burton as a man who could make things happen with the power of his thoughts. He did terrible things, such as crashing passenger planes into high buildings. But some of his acts had a deeply moral edge, such as the rebuilding of a cathedral because he thought money shouldn't be spent on vanity projects while people on Earth were starving. He had a very seductive argument. Then it hit me. What if I was actually on the wrong side? What if I was the devil? Not so much the main man, Lucifer, but an ineffectual Beelzebub?
This terrifying thought was the clincher. A very loud voice in my head suggested that by performing rituals such as opening and closing the front door 36 times, I could avoid being a necromancer. Don't ask me why 36 – maths was never my strong point and I wasn't exactly thinking logically.
Unsurprisingly, the combined effect of thinking I was either Jesus or Satan, of being in control of the entire world for more than a decade, and of having to write essays on Cardinal Wolsey's foreign policy sent me over the edge. After months of complaining about abdominal pains, and my increasingly strange and desperate behaviour, one afternoon I found myself on an adult psychiatric ward with, among others, a schizophrenic biker, a battered pensioner and a woman who kept yelling about how rough her skirt felt.
The most inappropriate place for a young person with anxiety issues is an adult psychiatric ward. It was terrifying. Hearing a six-foot, 18-stone man being restrained by despairing nurses as he screamed about his childhood isn't something I'll forget in a long time. This, combined with my cheap, knock-off walkman running out of batteries on the first night, made me realise I had to get out.
After a couple of days I told them I felt better. They warned me that if I behaved badly again I'd be back. The message to me was clear – I had to find my own way to deal with the demons in my head.
And I did. School, friends, music and more secret rituals (praying, constant counting, repeatedly checking appliances) played their part. Some were healthy distractions from what was going on in my head. Some were not. Only in my 20s was I brave enough to share exactly what I was feeling with a therapist and realise that I was far more ready for adult life than I had previously imagined.
The truth is that with the right therapy, us odd kids have so much to give. At 41, running a company, doing a marathon or public speaking to thousands all comes relatively easily to me. Yet to this day, those of us that have been diagnosed and treated for a mental illness face unbelievable discrimination. Under current legislation, becoming an MP, serving on a jury or being a company director are all things that people who have suffered a psychiatric condition may not be eligible for.
The fact is that a childhood or adolescence assailed by even the worst sort of brain pain can set you up wonderfully (with the right therapy) for adult life, where dark shadows, real or imagined, can be managed. Oh, and my stomach pains? A bowel polyp the size of a granny smith. My anxiety hadn't found a face – it had found an actual growth in my arse. Mental health patients get physical illnesses too, you know. Current research even suggests that my extreme OCD is partially caused by genetically reduced serotonin levels. So perhaps Richard Burton is finally off the hook.
• My Mad Fat Diary is on E4 on Mondays at 10pm or online at 4od.com. My Mad Fat Diary by Rae Earl is published by Hodder in paperback and eBook, £7.99 – buy it for £6.39 from guardianbookshop.co.uk.
