Sarah Howden: Salvage the wreckage of Kerry's Katona's car crash TV

Published on Thursday 30 October 2008 08:49

LIKE Britney's infamous head shaving episode last year, everyone is talking about Kerry Katona and that performance on ITV1's This Morning last week.

It was, in a word, hideous.

The reality TV star and former Atomic Kitten slurred her way through the cringeworthy interview with Phillip Schofield and Fern Britton, struggling to put one cogent sentence together. Forget car crash TV – this was a multiple pile-up across four lanes, probably fatally injured whatever remnants of a career Kerry had.

While the red tops have vilified Kerry, and her ex-hubby Brian McFadden is now reportedly vying for custody of their two daughters and hoping to take them to live with him and his fiance in Australia, I can't help but feel really sorry for Kerry.

It's okay for Fern Britton to reveal her "bloody miserable" and "suicidal" feelings in her past in her newly released autobiography. It's okay for her to talk in great detail about her errant father, Tony Britton, her control freak of a step-father, how she was raped at 21 and her depression. Anguish, pain and years of hurt – it's all there in black and white. So why was it okay for her to continue to question Kerry Katona in such a manner on the This Morning sofa when it was patently obvious this young woman is unwell, damaged and unfit? Ending the interview would have been so much kinder, especially from a woman who's lamented the devastating effects of depression.

And then there's mental illness itself. I can clearly see that Kerry looks as if she has a mental illness – just like Britney did – but, once again, there's no sympathy, just ignorance. Maybe she had been drinking, maybe she had been taking drugs, but the bigger picture is a young tortured woman in the grip of a mental illness. Why can't this illness be given the respect it deserves instead of using it as another reason to ridicule?

The harsh reality is that rates of depression in young people have doubled in the past 12 years. A remarkable 25 per cent of Scots now experience some form of mental illness in the course of a year, while 62 per cent of the Scottish population know someone with a diagnosis of mental illness. NHS Scotland prescribes 40 per cent more anti-depressant drugs than the rest of the UK – three times the level of anti-depressants prescribed 13 years ago.

These figures are shocking, and they also mean it's highly unlikely that any of us will make it through life without, in some way, being affected by depression.

This Morning, which purports to be a caring chat show, should practice what it preaches. Maybe it is true that Kerry turned up so late for the live interview that producers could not assess what state she was in – but they should have cut it short.

However, the real person to blame is the person who took her to the studio, escorted her to the sofa and watched the TV meltdown from behind the scenes. That person was her husband – ironically the person who should be there to love and protect her.

Fast forward a year and, chances are, the publications who have torn her apart will be the ones offering hefty cheques when she finally pulls herself together.

And I'll put money on it that her so-called husband won't be around any more when she finally does.