Just over five years ago, actress Kimberley Nixon was living the sort of life she had never dared dream of. Her career had kicked off with a role in the BBC period drama Cranford, where she starred in a bonnet opposite Dame Judi Dench, no less.
She was happily married to a lovely man she’d met at school and – the icing on the cake – she was a mum, finally.
After the pain of infertility, and a difficult IVF journey, she had given birth to a beautiful baby boy.
So why, in 2021, when her son was just three months old, was she standing in a forest, picking out the tree where she was going to kill herself and mentally making a list of everything she had to do that week beforehand?
It’s odd to look back on this moment, she tells me. It feels at once as if it happened to someone else, and yet at the same time, it is incredibly vivid. ‘I was completely in organised mum and wife mode,’ she says. I’d planned the date. In my head I was sorting out the utilities, the bills, how I’d lay a week’s worth of clothes out for the baby. It was very practical. I felt incredibly calm, because I’d found the solution.
‘I remember going for a walk with my husband and I kept looking at him, being strange. He knew something was up, but I was taking him in, saying goodbye. In my mind it was a great thing for him. Come Monday, he could start afresh.’
She shakes her head, thinking of all the women who have been in her shoes, and who have not pulled back, or been pulled back, from the brink.
‘There will be women out there right now who think they are monsters, who think it would be better for their families if they weren’t here. I never thought I’d be one of them. We’d tried for years to have a baby. I had a healthy, stable relationship. And yet I was one of those women.
‘One in four women will develop a perinatal mental health condition. The leading cause of maternal deaths in this country is not complications after birth, or something like sepsis. It’s suicide.’
She didn’t know that ‘before’, she says.
Just over five years ago, Kimberley Nixon’s career was taking off, she was happily married to a lovely man she’d met at school and – the icing on the cake – she was a mum, finally
Kimberley with Simon Woods in the BBC period drama Cranford, which also starred Dame Judi Dench
This week Kimberley, 40, publishes her memoir She Seems Fine To Me, during maternal mental health awareness week.
It’s the sort of book you’d want to hide from any pregnant woman, and yet it would be kinder to press it into their hands, just in case.
‘We all need to be aware of weird things the brain can do,’ she says. ‘Otherwise women feel like they are the only ones in the world to feel like this.’
The book takes the reader through Kimberley’s terrifying – and near fatal – experience of perinatal obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).
It’s a horror story, but darkly comic in places, with her natural humour shining through. Kimberley puts you in her shoes as her new-mother brain played tricks on her, torturing her with obsessive and sadistic thoughts, sending her into a spiral of despair.
Kimberley is the sweetest, funniest, most down-to-earth woman you could meet. Yet, in the grip of OCD (‘which is basically the worst game of “what if” you can imagine’) her mind not only played out all possible scenarios for her son’s death, but eventually – ‘when there was nowhere left to go’ – it imagined that she would be his killer.
She reached the point of suicide after being plagued by violent and sexual thoughts about her baby boy. Taboo thoughts. Thoughts so dark that ‘no one in the history of human existence has ever had them, and because I had, it must make me a monster’.
‘The fear that I was some paedophilic, serial-killing, blood-thirsty monster underpinned my every thought and action,’ she says.
Of course, she was never going to act on them. Intrusive thoughts of this nature are common among OCD sufferers.
Kimberley had a terrifying – and near fatal – experience with perinatal obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). In the grip of OCD she imagined that she would be her son’s killer
While intrusive thoughts are pretty common with new parents – to the point where 95 per cent of us will have them at some point – in cases of OCD they become all-consuming
To be so open about this today, to write it all down, is pretty extraordinary. She admits she’s had ‘many sleepless nights’ about how much candour the world can cope with, particularly from an actress in the public eye for being successful and fabulous.
After Cranford, she went on to have roles in the TV shows Fresh Meat and New Blood, while never having had to move away from the small village near Pontypridd in the Welsh Valleys where she had grown up.
During the process of writing the book, did she worry for her career, fear she’d never work with Judi Dench again?
‘Absolutely,’ she says. ‘There have been a lot of sleepless nights. Will I be ostracised, shunned? Maybe I’ll never work again. But ultimately, I feel that if a woman out there reads it and feels less alone, it will have been worthwhile.’
OCD is a complex condition of which there are many subtypes. It’s believed to affect 3 per cent of the population but can worsen or appear during pregnancy or after birth.
While intrusive thoughts are pretty common with new parents – to the point where 95 per cent of us will have them at some point – in cases of OCD they become all-consuming.
Kimberley talks of it as ‘the brain sending false emergency flares all the time, as if there is a problem you need to solve, and there is a gun to your head, making you do so’.
Kimberley’s little boy (she made the decision not to name him or her husband) is now five and a half, into superheroes and ‘the light of my life’. Yet she has spent pretty much his whole life – and all her savings – on trying to not just stay alive, but understand her condition. The lack of help she received is one of the most troubling aspects of her story. While the more common postnatal depression can descend seemingly from nowhere, Kimberley believes that her OCD was always there. Indeed, in June last year she finally received a formal diagnosis of ADHD and autism.
She explains that, growing up as the only girl in a family with six brothers, she’d always been your classic over-thinker, mind constantly whirring away. She put it down to being creative.
‘Maybe because of my job, but I see things quite “filmatically”’, she says. ‘When I was in the grip of this I could literally see the camera pan into the baby’s cot. And when you think about it, a lot of TV drama you see about motherhood feeds into everyone’s worst fears. Babies are abducted, murdered, abused.’
She has since written a play called Baby Brain, based on her story. ‘Although had I put some of the elements in a sitcom, a producer would have told me, “you can’t put that in”, because it’s not realistic.’
Mental health conditions that manifest during or after pregnancy can exist – unknown – beforehand, and Kimberley feels this was the case with her.
When she was a drama student, she had sought help and been diagnosed (wrongly, she now feels) with generalised anxiety disorder. During a theatre job, she had been assailed by troubling sexual thoughts, involving a relative.
She was horrified, thinking herself ‘a freak’ or deviant, and had three sessions of therapy.
‘What I know now is that we have 70,000 thoughts a day. Some of them are going to be wild or errant.
‘You might think of your parents having sex or imagine your brother naked. Eugh!
‘But most people just move on. You can’t control the thoughts in your head. I liken it to driving on a motorway and having a fleeting thought about swerving your car into oncoming traffic. You aren’t going to do it, of course you aren’t. But the OCD brain doesn’t let it stop there. You start to obsess about why you are having this thought. Does it make you a bad person?’
In 2020, during the Covid lockdown, Kimberley’s life was finally on track. It had been a turbulent few years: she and her husband had been trying for a baby for four years, and embarked on IVF.
There had been a lot of hormones, great stress and worry. She found the process discombobulating enough, but expecting a baby during a pandemic added a layer of stress.
Looking back, there were signs all was not right with her mental health. ‘I remember not dealing very well with the bright lights and noises of the hospital when I was giving birth. There are a lot of overwhelming physical stimuli associated with hospitals which autistic women can struggle with.’
Your whole raison d’etre is keeping your child safe. I kept imagining that some Government SWAT team was going to burst in and take him away, says Kimberley
At the time, she just felt ‘at sea’. When her much-wanted son arrived, she was swept away not just with love, but by feelings of utter panic.
‘My one job was to keep him safe,’ she recalls. ‘But how?’
All new mums experience a level of anxiety. Kimberley acknowledges that her husband shared many of her concerns.
‘We talk about being handed this human Tamagotchi,’ she smiles. ‘We were sleep deprived, in this new world, questioning whether the bath water was too hot, too cold, whether we’d sterilised everything.’
Her ruminating went ‘haywire’ though. She would lie awake at night, the horror stories in her brain ‘running on a loop’. ‘I turned into a fiasco of a female,’ she admits. ‘I hated my brain. I remember thinking, “Why are you doing this to me? This should be the best time of my life?”.
‘There was this sliding scale, from worrying about the bathwater, you worry about someone doing something terrible to your baby, playing it out in your mind. From there – when there is nowhere else to go – it’s you doing the terrible things, which is crazy because you are the last person in the world who wants to harm this tiny baby.
‘Your whole raison d’etre is keeping them safe. I kept imagining that some Government SWAT team was going to burst in and take him away.’ It’s not the case that Kimberley suffered in silence. She did share her experiences – to a point – with her midwife, and certainly with her husband. ‘He’s been my absolute rock,’ she says. ‘At the lowest point he believed in me when I didn’t believe in myself.’
He never thought she was a danger to her child. ‘Actually, no one else did – except me.’
Help was there, to a degree. She was referred to the perinatal mental health team and there were various consultations – but all remote, this being peak lockdown. ‘It was so hard because you’d never be speaking to the same person.’
Antidepressants were prescribed, but as her baby grew and thrived, her brain became darker and darker. Then there seemed to be a glimmer of hope – a ‘holy grail’ consultation with a ‘top psychiatrist’.
‘I’d been told that there was no way I’d ever get a consultation with him because he only got involved in “top tier” cases. Then, my case was escalated and I had a consultation booked.’
Sleep-deprived, not thinking straight, and ‘OCD-addled’, she asked her husband to listen in on the call, not trusting herself to recall anything this expert said.
Read More
I was fit and healthy after losing 5 stone and starting HRT. Then I had a stroke at 44: NICOLA SHAW
‘The first thing he asked was, “So how pregnant are you?”’ she says. ‘My heart fell. My baby was four months old.
‘He was supposed to know every detail of my case.’
Things went from bad to worse. She was told she should ‘go away and bake a cake and read a self-help book’.
‘I saw my husband’s shoulders slump. I remember thinking, “There is no help here. Nothing can be done”. I thought that if the top man thought there was nothing wrong with me, then this must just be my personality. ‘Maybe I was a monster to be having these thoughts.’
Thankfully, her GP intervened, and someone from the mental health team was dispatched ‘to actually see me in person’.
There was more medication. She actually believes that the calm planning of her suicide, setting a date the following week, may have been down to an adjustment in her drugs (she believes that she had ‘responded adversely to a change in medication’).
By the date of her planned departure from the world, her mind had ‘settled down’ and she was back to ‘thinking straight again’.
‘I remember having a whoosh of “Woah! That was not me at all. I don’t want to do it. I want to live. I want to be here. I want to watch my son grow up.” But the clarity of it all was frightening, actually.’
It was only the following week that she confessed to her husband how close they had all come. Understandably, he was devastated. But this was their new ‘normal’, to a point.
Kimberley reckons she was in the grip of the OCD for a good 18 months. There was no magic ‘cure’ but she believes that paying for private cognitive behavioural therapy (the gold standard treatment for OCD) was key to managing her condition.
It was £100 a session, so we are talking thousands here. She says she raided her savings to pay for it.
‘I’d put money aside to pay tax, but you can’t pay tax if you are dead, can you? It was expensive but I got in front of the right person and quickly – and those were two things the NHS couldn’t do for me.’
Another part of her recovery came in the form of an Instagram account, where she opened up about her struggles rather than trying to present herself as a ‘perfect mum who pings back’. The response from other women has been ‘overwhelming’. ‘So many people are going through similar and we just don’t talk about it.’
What next for Kimberley? Professionally, as well as launching her book, she’s taking her play Baby Brain on a national tour.
Flare-ups nowadays are managed by medication and techniques learned during therapy – and talking openly, ‘taking back the power’ from her OCD.
And personally? Will there be more children? That is the big question. There was another embryo fertilised and frozen during her IVF treatment, but the thought of going there is just too much at the moment.
‘If you’d asked me ten years ago I’d have said I’d see myself with a couple of kids,’ says Kimberley. ‘It would be lovely to think I could have a baby without the OCD, or at least to be better equipped, but…
‘If it happened naturally that would be one thing, but in our case it would probably have to be IVF, which involves deciding to go there. You know, I barely survived this. It would feel a little like tempting fate.’
She Seems Fine to Me by Kimberley Nixon (Gallery UK, £20) is out now.
For confidential support call the Samaritans on 116123 or visit a local Samaritans branch, see samaritans.org for details
