Sophie White’s bad trip at Electric Picnic: ‘I thought I was going to die’

“I thought I was going to die.”

“I genuinely thought: how much anguish can your brain tolerate?” says cook and author Sophie White, about the bad ecstasy trip at Electric Picnic in 2007 that caused her mental breakdown.

“I was hallucinating, talking to my parents, explaining that I was going to die,” she told Róisín Ingle, presenter of the Róisín Meets podcast.

It was not the first time the then 23-year-old had taken ecstasy but her reaction to it was like nothing she had experienced before.

Her mental health deteriorated over the three traumatic months that followed and pushed her to the brink of suicide.

“It was like my waking reality had switched places with that all-pervading dread that you feel in a nightmare. I’d gotten to this really bad place where suicide seemed like a relief from everything that I was experiencing,” she said.

Thankfully, after a chance encounter with someone who had gone through a similar breakdown and come out the other side, she finally, “got the bus to John of Gods”, where she got the treatment she needed.

In the intervening years, White trained as a cook and worked in kitchens in New Zealand, France and Dublin. She also writes a column in the Sunday Independent Life magazine called The Domestic and has just published her first book.

‘Recipes for a Nervous Breakdown’ is not your average cookbook, it is also part memoir and part self-help manual.

In it, she shares stories from her life including her mental breakdown, her surprise first pregnancy and her father’s debilitating Alzheimer’s disease, with frankness and humour, while prescribing the foods she recommends to get you through the bad days.

To listen to Sophie talk about mental health, eating your way through the bad times, being OK with bad parenting, and more, go to Soundcloud, iTunes, Stitcher or irishtimes.com.

Recipes for a Nervous Breakdown, published by Gill Books, is out now.