Romesh Ranganathan opens up about mental health struggle on Desert Island Discs

Romesh Ranganathan has said he is in “one of the best places I’ve ever been in my life”, after years of struggling with his mental health.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, the comedian described how he had used running, reading and breathing exercises to help centre himself, after previously having suicidal thoughts.

“Recognising it is half the battle,” he told host Lauren Laverne. “So sometimes I just go through a dark period and I know that I’ve got to do something about it.”

The broadcaster also said he often felt conflicted about how much of his own mental health journey to share publicly, noting: “You’ve got to be careful because it’s triggering [for other people].

“The way that I try and tackle that is to talk about it, I’m trying to normalise feeling like that, not that it is normal, but I’m trying to destigmatise it to make the conversation normal,” he said.

“You would talk about physical illness openly, ideally you would talk about [mental health] openly, and you’d express all those things, but you do also have to be mindful of the fact that people may have been affected by that.

“And then if I suddenly say I had thoughts about taking my own life and somebody’s lost someone through that or they’ve had those moments themselves, you have to be sensitive to that.

“You don’t always get it right,” he reflected, “but I think the rewards outweigh the risks.”

The 47-year-old also said he had learned it was important to make time for activities which he knew would make him feel better.

“One of the things I’ve noticed when it comes to mental health, is you do stuff that works, and it’s proven to work for you personally, and then for some reason you just stop doing it,” he said.

“You go, ‘Oh, it’s really good if I spend some time reflecting, or if I run, or do a bit of reading, or some breathing exercises, that makes me feel better’.

“‘Oh, I’ve done that every day for a week, I’m really feeling better, shall I just stop? Yeah!'” he laughed. “And then a few weeks later, wonder why I feel much worse than I did.”

The presenter, who first got into comedy in the early 2010s, picked tracks from the likes of Kanye West, Eminem and Huey Lewis and the News for Desert Island Discs, which is broadcast on Sunday.

Ranganathan, who hosts a weekend show on BBC Radio 2, also spoke about how his family had moved to the UK from Sri Lanka in 1970, before he was born eight years later.

“My dad was a bit of a tornado, he came over to England and he’d been so used to the Sri Lankan way of life,” he recalled. “He was like a kid in a candy store, people were drinking and going out and he just threw himself into British life, wholly and completely.

“And there’s a strong argument he should’ve implemented more boundaries than he did,” Ranganathan laughed. “He was the life and soul of the party.”

The comedian said one of his biggest regrets “is not having enough empathy or understanding” of the situation his mother, Shanthi, faced when she moved to the UK aged 19.

“The difference between her experience and my dad’s,” Ranganathan said, “is my dad was going off to work, where you’re immediately thrust into social connections and situations and you’re making friends just by dint of that being your lifestyle.”

In contrast, he said: “My mum is at home and going to the shops and doing whatever, but thinking about it now, that’s a 19-year-old girl who had kids in a foreign country. I don’t say this lightly, my mum is one of my heroes.”

He recalled that, when he was 12, his father “had fallen into financial trouble, he’d lost his job and he was trying to make money in his sort of Sri Lankan Del Boy way, and it wasn’t working out and couldn’t keep up the mortgage repayments on their house”.

His father was later arrested and imprisoned for two years for fraud, when Romesh was still a teenager.

Ranganathan said he has always struggled with his mental health, but had a particularly challenging time as a teenager, when he was doing his A-levels and his dad was in prison. His father died in 2011.

“I’ve been through in my life a number of periods of suicide ideation,” Ranganathan said, but added: “As I speak now, this is running close to one of the best places I’ve ever been in my life mentally.”

Desert Island Discs is broadcast on BBC Sounds and Radio 4 at 10:00 BST on Sunday.