Wax & Wane

I CAN hardly hear myself think, while Wax, a fearsomely mouthy and audacious interviewer, who's skewered everyone from Pamela Anderson to Imelda Marcos with her caustic wit, keeps asking anxiously: "Is this too noisy for you?" Since she appears to be a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, I lie and tell her it's fine.

Her PR perches on a nearby stool alongside Wax's landscape gardener friend Claudia, with whom I'm told she has an appointment later, although I think she's there more for moral support than to discuss pansies and pergolas for Wax's home and garden, which is just around the corner.

After reading the cuttings and fondly remembering classic TV moments such as the diminutive Wax ruthlessly rooting through the Duchess of York's immaculately filed and colour-coded knicker drawer, attacking OJ Simpson with a banana and sharing a bath with Roseanne Barr, it is difficult not to approach the wisecracking Wax with preconceived ideas.

In the interviews I've read she was either moody and monosyllabic, downright rude and sarcastic, or utterly charming. "Impossible to like," wrote one interviewer; another said she was "cold and uncommunicative".

Certainly, I expect her to be many things – a brash, bolshie broad, maybe a bit of a ball-breaker as an interviewee. She's none of these. Instead she's quiet and shy; subdued even, and seemingly very nervous.

She looks lost, standing forlornly at the counter ordering a large latte, her manicured hands trembling a little, not speaking, not looking me in the eye.

Where is the raucous, sardonic woman who shoots from the lip, I wonder? But after we've been talking for about 20 minutes her guard drops and she reveals what's troubling her. Her son, Max, who is 19, has just left for his gap year in South Africa – Wax and her husband, the television director Ed Bye, also have two daughters, Madeleine (16) and Marina (14) at home. Her son's departure explains the distracted air of melancholy, the shadows in her watchful grey eyes.

"He went at 11 o'clock this morning," she announces, staring into her coffee cup and looking quite distraught. Clearly, it's a difficult time for her and I sympathise, then she suddenly tells me that two weeks ago, her mother died. "Of old age – she was very, very old."

How old? "I have no idea, she would never tell us her age," says the American-born Wax, who has long refused to tell interviewers her own age. "I'm in my thirties," she insists; then she winks at me. She's 55 – Who's Who gives her birthday as 19 April, 1953 – although she certainly doesn't look it.

I tell her how sorry I am about her mother and that I'd read in How Do You Want Me? that Berta had succumbed to dementia. "No, no, no, she was mentally fine, just old," she shrugs, dismissing the subject.

As well she might, for Wax had the most bizarre childhood, growing up in a household "toxic with fury and revenge". In the 1980s she even made a television documentary about her dysfunctional family that was positively jaw-dropping.

Her late father, Edward Wachs, was an Austrian Jew. Her parents fled the Nazis in 1938 to live in Chicago where he became the sausage-skin king, driving around in a wagon that was a giant phallic hot dog, while Berta was a beauty, decked out in haute couture by Yves Saint Laurent. A hysterical domestic banshee, she was a compulsive tidier, who swathed all the furniture in plastic in her battle with dust.

Wax says: "My grandmother once fell down the stairs – my mother ran over and made her parallel to the wall." And: "I always thought the film Mommie Dearest was a sitcom. I thought the expression 'No more wire hangers' was a normal salutation, like 'Have a nice day'."

Which witticisms bring us to the reason Wax and I are meeting. We're here to talk about her return to Edinburgh next month, her first appearance here for a very long time since her alternative comedy stand-up days on the Fringe. "I can't remember how long," she says.

She's bringing a half-hour stand-up set with Headroom, the BBC's new online campaign to help the mentally ill. She's just made a series of short films for them, on subjects such as exam stress and depression, in her regular seven-minute slot, Ruby's Room. It's her latest Wax works, you might say, although she would really like to become a sort of online agony aunt – she has the CV for that, too, since she's shared a newspaper advice column with Graham Norton.

Although Ruby's Room went online only recently, she has already received thousands of e-mails, many from people seeking help and advice – the team has a clinical psychologist on stand-by.

The BBC says it launched Headroom because one in four people suffers from mental illness in their lifetime. And more than two-thirds of those who have mild depression don't tend to seek help, Wax points out.

She's certainly well qualified to discuss such problems since she's had several crippling bouts of depression. The first was diagnosed when she was only ten, which is hardly surprising given her parents' behaviour. A typical evening at home had her father glued (literally) to his plastic-covered chair listening to opera at full volume, while her mother railed: "His Highness is a misogynist and wife torturer – always running with the animals and perverts, he makes me vomit." Then she would scream at Ruby: "Mother murderer" before sinking to her knees and crying: "Cut my heart out, with a scissor."

The really scary bit, according to Wax, would come when she would yell: "Toscaninikok!" at the top of her lungs. Then Mr Wachs would scream: "Shut up!" and drag her off to their bedroom to beat her. Wax, an only child, once walked into her parents' bedroom while her father was beating her mother and they both looked up and said, "Mommy and Daddy are playing, ha ha, we're having fun! Close the door!" So she did.

But they also abused their daughter, who was dyslexic and told repeatedly by her mother that she would never amount to anything.

It would therefore be a monumental understatement to describe her childhood as unhappy. "Miserable," she says. You can't help but feel that Freud would have had a field day with the Waxes. She's written that her relationship with her parents gnawed away at her life, until, in 1999, her father had a stroke: "When he lost control of his power I became liberated. It's that simple. And the more he lost control, the less crippled I became and more fully human ... As his rage went, so did my mother's, it just seeped away, leaving her with the charm she had probably had as a child, a long time ago, before I met her."

FOURTEEN YEARS AGO, WAX had severe post-natal depression, following the birth of her younger daughter when, she reveals, "the minutiae of life started eating me alive". She checked herself into the Priory clinic in south-west London and was treated for a nervous breakdown.

The mind has a mind of its own, she concedes. Her spells of depression are cyclical – "usually every eight years or so, but are getting fewer". The last serious one was several years ago, as she revealed in her 2000 one-woman show, Stressed, a sort of group therapy session with hundreds of people.

However, she's a therapist, too, since, like fellow funny women Pamela Stephenson Connolly and Connie Booth of Fawlty Towers fame, she has trained as a psychotherapist and is now studying for an MA in neuroscience at London University.

As a teenager, she studied psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, dropping out after a year to become an actress and training at Glasgow's Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. She then joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, where she specialised in "sluts and wenches" and became friends with Alan Rickman, who has since directed her one-woman shows.

"Today, it's as if I've gone back to pick up where I left that other life," she explains. "I always knew I would go back to psychology, although it's also been really strange to be in that environment after being away from it for so long – it's about 500 years since I was at Berkeley. Sure, studying messes with your head, but I'm really enjoying the challenge, especially now I'm doing my MA.

"Everything's so difficult when you're depressed," she says, twirling her cup around the table, deep in thought. "When you have a mental disorder, in other words are sick in the head, the big double whammy is you can't tell you're ill, because when the very brain that makes these assessments is affected, it can't give a correct reading.

"If you had a spare brain it would tell you you've gone nuts, but you don't; here's the bitch: you are what's wrong with you. You can't make decisions about anything – what to eat, what to wear, whether to turn left or right at a street crossing. You just can't make a choice at all."

She pauses, then says quietly: "Everything's hard because you are living as someone else. For instance, when I had post-natal depression I became obsessed with colour schemes. When you choose a paint, there's no such thing as beige. There were infinite strips of off-white samples that all look exactly the same to the naked eye. So I covered my house and my husband in colour swatches – Dusky Tijuana Marshmallow, Burnt Desert Sunrise, Peachy Devon Creme – but they all looked beige.

"I wanted the perfect colour for my bathroom, so I'd keep showing up at the paint shop and the staff would pretend to be statues when they saw me coming in yet again."

This, she continues, is a sure sign of a nervous breakdown, when the mind can only focus on hairline borders of beige. She would often wake up in a sweat, clutching samples. When she finally entered the Priory she found "others, striped with paint swatches across their bewildered faces, asking questions like: 'What's the difference between Tawny Bronzed Beige and a Magnolia Dewdrop Off White?' " she writes in How Do You Want Me? She repeats these words to me almost verbatim.

"I'd lost the big picture," she admits. Patently, she's her mother's daughter. Berta was an obsessive compulsive. Apart from the plastic protecting the furniture, she demanded that everyone open the doors only by holding the bottom so that the handles should not get finger smudges.

And Wax's own breakdown followed a period of obsessive decorating and re-ordering at home. "I suppose my belief was that if I could just get the outer landscape right, the inner would not be far behind.

"So, yeah, when it comes to depression I've been there, done that," she sighs. "I'm doing Headroom because it's about taking the stigma out of mental illness, which I advocate. It's about people talking freely about their problems. It could be anyone in here," she says, looking around the crowded café.

"The big problem is, nobody ever wants to talk about it. I hope it'll be kind of refreshing for people to tune in and then say, 'Hey, wait a minute, that's me', to find they can express themselves. Whatever the manifestation of a sickness – for instance, I've just done a film on bulimia – the coping just gets harder."

In her Edinburgh show, she'll talk about her own experiences, "but in a very amusing way, which I've already done. I toured it in Australia and New Zealand. I am not going to be doing deep, dark stuff. It'll be funny. I'll be telling how it happens. It's innocuous little events that trigger it; then suddenly, you are skidding towards an abyss."

She recalls that her breakdown began during a sports day, when she wandered among picnicking families sitting on their blankets, feeling lonely. It was the same lost feeling she had had as a child, gazing through the living room window at the park outside, her dog Lumpi at her side, both noses pressed to the glass – "that same sense of sadness – that outside lay an oasis of security and happiness and ... barbecuing, and I would never be able to crack it".

When she checked into the Priory, she met other people like herself. "We had so much fun, just laughing and discussing how crazy we all were from living our lives. The consolation is you can't be stupid and have depression. If you're really shallow, you're not going to get it. You gotta be a heavyweight, I think. You gotta have a brain."

The drugs helped, too, she admits. However, her depression was to return. "It bit me in the ass. People say you should pull yourself together, get a grip, but it's impossible. We have to encourage people to take depression seriously. If you've had it more than three times, as I have, you're going to have episodic experiences, so you have to take it in your own hands and speak out."

So, can mental health be the stuff of comedy?

"Well, I'm ambiguous about that. I feel it's maybe self-indulgent to talk about my problems. I'm quite secretive about myself. But we must talk about these things, that's why I try to do it with wit.

"It used to be the c-word – cancer – that people wouldn't discuss. Now it's the m-word. I hope that pretty soon it'll be OK for everyone to talk openly about their mental health.

"I really do hope that, because otherwise it's a lonely road," she says, quietly fingering the silver, heart-shaped pendant she wears that is engraved with one word: Hope. sm

n BBC Headroom with Ruby Wax and Friends, Assembly @ George Street, Edinburgh, 21-22 August, 10:15pm, £5. For tickets, tel: [phone].