She duly signed herself out of the unit shortly after her 16th birthday.

They didn’t want to help us,” the comedian recalls. “It was odd because it felt like we were being treated like we were bad, when we hadn’t done anything bad. Diagnosed with OCD and depression and put on Prozac, soon after that, Brady was sent to a teen psychiatric unit. “They were so noisy, I had to calm myself down in the evenings by punching my bedroom wall repeatedly or spending hours in my rocking chair.”Īt eight, she contemplated suicide, she remembers, spent her school years mirroring the popular school bully with whom she had nothing in common, just for safety, and by 15 was self-harming. They just thought, why is she doing this?”Īt one time she hated her parents, she recalls. They thought, we’re not having problems with the other two. “I’d have meltdowns at an airport as a kid – because of the lights and the noise and the smell of the perfume. Her overwhelming anxiety had long been mistaken for anger when she was growing up in Bathgate, West Lothian, as her parents and teachers considered her to be very clever but very difficult. She wears noise-cancelling headphones on public transport to cut out the sensory overstimulation around her. Some of the therapy involves Brady learning scripted lines to help her navigate her way through situations which can be stress-inducing to her, from social engagements to hair and make-up sessions for TV. “I reduced them a lot with some really good therapy and amazing coaching and over the years I’ve managed to reduce the meltdowns more and more, but it will never go away. Today, at 36, she says the meltdowns are less prevalent.

Big hearted taxi firm is getting OAPs on the road with free trips.Council tax in West Lothian rises by an eye watering 5.8 per cent.A woman in the audience approached her afterwards and told her it sounded like a description of autism. She pursued an assessment following a gig in Berlin in 2017, where Brady joked onstage that she didn’t fit in with other women.

“I’ll always have a sensory system that is wired differently where a light touch makes me want to scratch my skin off, sudden noises cause me pain and fluorescent light feels like it’s sucking the life out of me,” the stand-up comedian and TV’s Taskmaster contestant writes in her new book, Strong Female Character, in which she charts living with autism.īrady was only diagnosed in 2021. A Bathgate comedian and star of Dave hit show Taskmaster has been talking about about her new book and why more understanding is needed about autism.įern Brady says she still has the meltdowns which have plagued her life – overwhelming anxiety which she masks until she gets behind closed doors, kicking furniture, smashing ornaments, punching walls.

Fern brady strong female character