After his monkey-themed biopic “Better Man” failed at the box office, you’d think Robbie Williams’ year would begin to turn around. Unfortunately, he ended up getting scurvy instead. In a recent interview, Williams admitted he had been suffering from a severe bout of depression but couldn’t seem to nail down the cause.
“The year started with some ill mental health, which I haven’t had for a very, very long time,” he told The Mirror “I was sad, I was anxious, I was depressed.” Despite him and wife Ayda both dealing with ailing parents, that didn’t seem to account for how dark things were getting.
That’s when his partner helped him narrow it down. “My wife would say, ‘if your depression could talk, what would it say?” Williams explains. “It wasn’t saying, ‘it’s my mum, or dad or your mum.’
“It wasn’t saying ‘it’s life, or tickets or the tour or the pressure or whatever.’ None of that. It just is. It’s just a pervasive feeling.”
Williams has never made a secret of struggles with his mental health. Being diagnosed with depression in his 20s, he’s been open about struggles with addiction, anxiety, and agoraphobia.
“It’s been about ten years…I thought I was at the other end of the arc,” he said. “I thought this was the end of my story, and that I would just go walking into this marvelous wonderland. So for it to return was just confusing.”
It Was Scurvy All Along
That’s when he began to suspect his diet may be the culprit. Williams had started taking an unnamed appetite-suppressant drug for weight loss and shed 2 stone (28 lbs). “I’d stopped eating and I wasn’t getting nutrients,” he explains.
This malnutrition caused a serious deficit in vitamin C leading him to develop scurvy. “A 17th century pirate disease,” as Willams calls it.
While his loved ones did notice his dramatic weight loss, mental illness completely re-framed those concerns. “With body dysmorphia, when people say they’re worried about how you’re looking, you’re like: ‘I’ve achieved it.’ When people say: ‘we’re worried you’re too thin’ that goes into my head as ‘jackpot. I’ve reached the promised land.’”
Now that Williams has changed his diet his depression has started to clear up as well.
Please remember that malnutrition knows no weight or body type. Someone who is thin can suffer from poor eating habits in the same way that a heavier person can. Because of this things like scurvy and gout are surprisingly common outside of the 17th century.
