Glorious Rock Bottom: 'A shocking story told with heart and hope. You won't be able to put it down.' Dolly Alderton

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I think that sharing stories of mental illness is really, really important because the thing that all mental illnesses have in common is that they lie to you. They tell you you are a freak. I always say that if mental illness was a politician, it will be Nigel Farage. It wouldn’t be nice to you. It tells you you’re a freak, and it tells you you are weird, and it tells you nobody else feels the same way that you do. And… that’s just bullshit. But it is about heartbreak, obsession… the place that we women are ashamed to go to. When it comes to the end of relationships, it can get a bit obsessive and she is not afraid to go there and write it for what it is. I do remember as teenager reading it, that description of what it feels like to be depressed, which is probably the first time I’d read something and thought, oh, hang on. Obviously I wasn’t in a mental institution, having electroconvulsive therapy, but it was around that time I started having any kind of awareness that perhaps something wasn’t quite right. And an awareness that perhaps this was something other people went through as well.

Gordon married Harry Wilson, a financial journalist, on 5 July 2013. They have a daughter and live in Clapham in London. [8] Gordon ran in the London Marathon on 23 April 2017 to support mental health charities. [13]

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You haven’t touched alcohol for 16 months, after an addict ion to it. How has day-to-day life changed?

But sometimes, if your body needs to rest. I don’t think we should beat ourselves for those lost days, as I call them: days where you can’t remember. Because it layers one thing over another. You feel bad during them, firstly, and then you feel bad for feeling bad. I think it is really important to be able to put your hand up and say: ‘I’m not feeling well today. I need this day at home. I need to be cared for by my family.’ Or, ‘I need you to say lovely things to me.’ That is really important. But sometimes things have to get worse before they get better. It was all coming out in the wash. Jess was forensic about pinpointing what had happened in the days leading up to a binge. Had I taken too much on, had I had an argument with someone, was I about to get my period? Once we could see what emotions were driving the bingeing, she could put tactics in place to prevent me from using food as a coping mechanism. I had needs and, as much as I cringed at the therapy speak, I had to meet them in a healthy way. I wanted to write a practical book that collected all the things that I have learnt about being mentally well, that I could only have learnt from being very, very ill. No Such Thing as Normal became a labour of love, a way for me to cut through the wellness psychobabble that has come to dominate the mental-health conversation on social media. I remember a friend at a sleepover telling us all, in a terribly serious tone, that if you die in a dream, you die in real life. Perhaps that was why I woke up in a cliché of cold sweat, convinced that it was all over, my nightmare not a fevered dream caused by watching an advert but a terrible premonition of things to come. I had read in a newspaper that people with HIV didn’t know they had it until it was too late and the virus had developed into AIDS. Perhaps this explained why in my dream I had been given a death sentence while outwardly appearing well. Yes, that was it – it made perfect sense. I was dying of AIDS, and I wasn’t even a teenager yet.You know the type… we’ve all had one, usually in our student days, or house-share days: the kind of boiler you can’t really be bothered to call your landlord about, because it sort of still works if you fiddle around with it a bit, and the landlord will probably blame you for whatever’s wrong with it, and take away your deposit to pay for fixing it. That kind of boiler. I realised I really wanted to write a letter to the 12-year-old me. A lot of the time when I went into rehab, the counsellors would ask me how old I felt, and I would say “Oh, 11 or 12.” I wish that the things I’m learning now, people could have told me about when I was 12.

Matt’s book came out in 2015, and I was just starting to write about my own mental illness at the time, and I felt that the book gave me the courage to talk about my own stuff. I keep it on my bedside table. You know how they have the Bible in all hotel room drawers? Well they should have Matt Haig’s Reasons to Stay Alive. Hundreds and hundreds of Telegraph readers wrote to me with their well wishes, but most importantly their stories. All of them were putting their hands up and saying “me too!” – if not OCD, then some other form of mental illness. I realised then how completely and utterly normal it was to feel weird. I wanted to find a way within visual images of not hiding people’s thoughts,” says Clift, who collaborated with illustrator Kate Forrester in a dynamic creative practice that saw interviewees divulging their inner demons. Forrester transferred their most salient words on to her human canvases and then Clift took their portrait. “Painting on someone’s face is a very intimate act,” says Forrester, “made more so by the sensitive content. But the creation of these images was a surprisingly joyful experience.Is scrolling mindlessly through social media going to help my pilot light? Might calling my boss and explaining that I am feeling overwhelmed because I have a mental-health issue help to keep my pilot light on? My husband and I had to eat together, at the table. We had to spend time together that did not involve looking at our phones or the television. I had to stop overwhelming myself with work I didn’t need to do. I had to prioritise the things that gave value to my life – running with my friend Emma, reading, baking and cooking with my daughter. Strangely, the more I cooked, the less I binged. It was almost as if I was trying to take care of myself again. Christmas was coming and joy was everywhere but I couldn’t share in it. I helped to decorate the tree in the solemn belief that it was probably the last time I would ever do so. The smiling carol singers and the laughing Father Christmasses on the television seemed to make my misery more acute. Everyone’s happiness seemed obscene given what was going on in my head. I simply could not comprehend how normal life could continue when I felt so abnormal.