THE A GAME

This weekend, one in six New Zealanders will be putting on their game face and grinding through anxiety. It’s something Robyn Malcolm did for years. She opens up to Naomi Arnold about struggling with the crippling condition and why she’s bringing awareness to the issue in a new documentary You, Me & Anxiety.

Robyn Malcolm had her first big panic attack a few years ago at her niece’s birthday party. A tidal wave of emotional claustrophobia hit her, and she began crying and struggling to breathe.

“I don’t know why,” she says. “I just triggered, and I just disappeared. I could not cope. Everything just collapsed, and I couldn’t breathe, and I couldn’t stop crying. I snapped. I blew a gasket. And there was nowhere to go.”

She made a dash for the only safe place she could find: a cupboard full of toys and assorted kiddie crap. Panicking, she pushed her way in “like some kind of weird dog that was trying to hide”, crouching on toys as she tried to get her galloping anxiety under control.

At the same time, she felt her niece’s little pink tutu brushing the top of her head, and was able to register through her gasps that this was going to be a funny story one day.

Now, she can laugh. But it’s taken some years to get her mental illness under control. Why anxiety? Malcolm blames a runaway Protestant work ethic of being permanently busy, for a start; a friend had already cautioned her about running on cortisol as she rushed between work and solo parenting her two teenage sons.

“I now look at most women my age, and I think, a high percentage of us are,” she says. “It’s basically about surviving. If you’re not a solo mum like me, then you’re holding down a job and looking after kids and parents. Women still carry so much of the weight of the family.”

It was the endocrine meltdown of menopause that really brought things to a head. It all resulted in such severe anxiety that she spent her days absolutely terrified. She reckons she went through three years of crying every day – and she’s someone who doesn’t mind crying.

She spent her work days searching for the truest epicentre of emotion, after all, so she wasn’t one to suppress things. She “arrogantly” thought she’d always be fine when it came to her emotional health.

“I’m used to living in a fairly emotionally volatile state a lot of the time because of the work I do,” she says. “So I wasn’t frightened of emotion. I felt very emotionally fit. And then suddenly I wasn’t.”

Malcolm is 57 now, through it all and out the other side. Recently, she made a documentary with TVNZ called You, Me, & Anxiety, part of new series Documentary New Zealand. The series is eight one-off docos exploring contemporary New Zealand stories, which, TVNZ says, reflect the challenges we face as we navigate our lives.

You, Me & Anxiety sidesteps the cause of Malcolm’s panic attacks; it doesn’t delve into menopause because the network felt that would alienate men. She wants to specifically examine menopause in a future show but agreed it was worth making a documentary on anxiety more generally. An estimated 850,000 New Zealanders experience the condition, so Malcolm felt it was important to examine in public.

Malcolm’s face and voice are as familiar to us as those of our own family members. Her work as an actor has become part of seminal New Zealand television and, as a self-confessed “sometimes shitstirrer”, her values have driven her to speak out for the environment as well as for fair pay during the infamous Hobbit Law dispute, which resulted in then Prime Minister John Key passing a new labour law overnight to suit Peter Jackson’s films.

Recently, she was cast in Apple TV’s six-part true crime series Black Bird, playing Sammy Keene, wife to the late Ray Liotta’s character Big Jim Keene. She was “over the moon” and “delighted” to win the part.

But she has never had anxiety affect her work, apart from a panic attack during those five years she was suffering, while filming hit New Zealand drama The Brokenwood Mysteries. She discusses it briefly in the documentary: the words she was saying stopped meaning anything, her mind twisted into a maelstrom of self-doubt, and she had to go to the bathroom to try to compose herself. Compounding that was “the terror of exposure, of actually really being seen”.

However, she says work is and always has been her “happy, calm space”.

“Weirdly, often the work would actually help,” she says. “Getting inside someone else’s skin and mind was always great medicine; Dr Theatre we’d call it.

“I imagine many actors would relate to this. Whatever is going on in your real life becomes submerged beneath the created life of another character. It’s actually brilliant in that way and speaks loads to how so much of it really is in your head.”

She is a perfect fit to lead the documentary; her natural warmth and impishness make it an enjoyable, compelling watch.

Standout moments are when she sits with Holly Aitchinson, who is taking part in an Otago University clinical trial of ketamine for treatment-resistant anxiety and extreme PTSD, and shows the power of TV to tell a gripping story.

Another captivating segment is when Malcolm meets former National Party leader and Bay of Plenty MP Todd Muller, in a candid and affecting segment that works brilliantly because of Muller’s honesty. It is brutal watching archived clips of him fronting the media and the public in which you can see and feel the panic pouring from his darting eyes and mottled skin. Actually, it’s the stuff of nightmares.

It takes a hell of a lot of balls to be open about a time when you were that vulnerable, especially when your hopes of being prime minister were being dashed in front of the entire country – Muller describes the crucifying panic attacks that began hitting him on day five of his leadership. You get the sense Muller has been to hell and back and has nothing left to hide. Malcolm salutes him for stepping forward, despite their differences on the political spectrum (she has been active in the Green Party).

“What I found really interesting was that the number of men who really struggle with anxiety but also there weren’t that many men who were particularly comfortable talking about it. Which is why what Todd does is so extraordinary.”

She values that segment for the fact that it might encourage men, and men in power, to drop the macho straitjacket and stop seeing mental illness as a weakness or character flaw. (She would also like to point her planned menopause documentary at them, too – she says they’re the ones who need to be educated on what half of the population go through.)

So the doco is out: Robyn Malcolm has anxiety. What has helped? Medication, for a start.

“Medication saved my arse.”

At first, she was terrified of taking it. As an actor, she needed her feelings to work, to be able to quickly access emotion.

“What if I can’t cry? What if I can’t feel things?” she says. “I was really anti them. I was like, ‘I can’t go on these’. I’d been reading articles called ‘Why do we medicate women’s feelings?’ And so I was quite politicised about the whole thing: ‘Don’t tell me I can’t be a mess. Don’t tell me I can’t cry in front of strangers. Don’t tell me I can’t get enraged about something. Don’t tell me that. Don’t medicate me.’”

But, she says, it got to the point where she couldn’t function.

“I was losing the plot.”

Her GP told her she needed a break. Her sister Suze Malcolm is a clinical psychologist, and she told Malcolm that she was stuck at the bottom of a well; medication could give her a leg up, getting her to the first rung of the ladder so she could get herself out.

“And then you do the rest of the work,” she says. “But sometimes you need that lift. And what I’ve noticed, thankfully, is that it has had no impact on my ability to work. It just means that I don’t take my work home with me.”

In the end, she tried several different types of meds, in different combinations, and had a run of awful side effects. But when she got the combination right, she was able to finally get her head above water.

“All the stuff that had been overwhelming me... It wasn’t that it

I could not cope. Everything just collapsed, and I couldn’t breathe, and I couldn’t stop crying. I snapped. I blew a gasket. And there was nowhere to go.

disappeared, but suddenly it was in another room,” she says.

“So I actually had the space to breathe out and look at it. And go, OK, now I can unpack this – what’s going on? What can you do? And it’s when you start to unpack that you start to really sort your shit out.”

Suze Malcolm, who also appears in Me, You, & Anxiety, recalls her sister’s bravery in dealing with anxiety and also in speaking out about it. Both hope that will encourage others.

“What I witnessed with Rob is the courage she brought to her own journey,” Suze Malcolm says. “Rob has always been the authentic version of herself, and when we are struggling it’s often really hard to reveal our authentic self because we feel like we have to put on this coping face. Rob was just real – in that there is real vulnerability but there is real courage. And that’s the first place people need to get to in order to heal. It takes courage to say ‘I’m struggling’ and it takes courage to ask for help. “She struggled and she overcame.” Also important for Malcolm have been the podcasts of American psychologist, meditation teacher, author and Buddhist meditation proponent Tara Brach. She listened to Brach’s podcasts non-stop in her worst hours. Back then, she couldn’t go for a walk or have a bath without terror. Now, she is able to enlist the power of “the sacred pause”.

“It’s really just the notion of counting to 10,” she says. “But between the stimulus and the response is a space, and in that space is your freedom. And to me it’s all about that; it’s about not reacting to whatever is going on, whether it’s a thought in your head or somebody saying something or life coming at you.

“If you can just stop – and this is what I do – you stop and you think about nothing. You don’t try to solve it, you just let it be for a minute. And just slow the world down. And usually, you get perspective really quickly. I do a lot of that.”

Another small but mighty preventative she has employed is making sure she consciously engages with her surroundings.

“When I go outside and I go walking, sometimes I do that terrible thing where I’m checking my phone. But these days, I much more consciously put my phone away or I turn it off. And I look at what I’m walking through. I notice things.”

Malcolm hopes that viewers of the doco who have anxiety will find fellowship with her and the people she meets. She says that if we can just get rid of the judgment around it, we’re 50% there.

“It comes from an ancient place in your brain that has kept you, kept us as a species, alive,” she says. “And there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s doing what it’s always done. But we live in a different world now. So don’t judge it; it’s not about you.”

She especially wants to emphasise that anxiety doesn’t mean you’re a bad person, or a phoney, or weak. With one in four New Zealanders affected by an anxiety disorder at some point in their lives and 15% at any one time, it’s a sure bet that this weekend, all around the country, more than a few people will experience dizzy overwhelm at a children’s birthday party and desperately seek a dark and private cupboard in which to have their own personal meltdowns, like Malcolm once did. And it’ll be a funny story for them one day, too.

She recalls a good friend telling her once that she will know she’s coming right when she starts to notice nature again. And sure enough, there was a day when she was going for a walk and passed a massive pōhutukawa just coming into flower.

“And I stood and I stared at this tree for ages because I just love that time of year when the pōhutukawa comes out,” she says. “It’s like the whole world’s just been sprayed with red spray paint.

“I stopped and looked at it, and then I remember going, ‘Oh my god, I’ve noticed it. I must be better. I must be better!’ And I was.”