Ruby Wax discovers that she is not alone at experiencing mental illness and that other members of her family have had their own struggles.
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Ruby Wax's parents fled Vienna for America in 1938. 'They took the war with them and brought it to our kitchen,' says the comedian and mental-health campaigner at the start of this remarkable episode. They raised their only daughter in a dramatically dysfunctional household - Ruby's father was volatile and her mother 'hysterical... screaming in the street.' Ruby wonders if her own mental illness had its origins in her upbringing and the trauma her parents went through, or whether it is in her family's genes.
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Actor, comedian and mental health campaigner Ruby Wax traced the tragic roots of her family's history of mental illness in the Holocaust
In the 1990s, comedian and actor Ruby Wax found a new role. Following a diagnosis of depression, she trained in cognitive behavioural therapy and mindfulness, and has since worked tirelessly to promote better understanding of mental health issues.
“I think I have lived most of my life in a high anxiety state and so I want to know where that came from,” she says. “And I keep blaming my parents. It would be interesting to know who they’re blaming.”
It’s a story centred on Austria because, although Ruby was raised in Chicago, her parents, Edmund Wachs and Berta Goldmann, were Jewish émigrés who fled the Nazis before the start of the Second World War. “They took the war with them and brought it to our table,” says Ruby.
It’s a remark that reflects a dysfunctional childhood. Her mother had a condition dubbed “hysteria”, while her father was volatile - “a ‘torturer’” in Ruby’s mother’s estimation.
Neither talked much about the past, but Berta left a suitcase full of photographs, documents and letters that, with limited German, Ruby is unable to read. These mementoes prove crucial to Ruby reaching a new understanding of her parents and her wider family.