Joe Tracini calls the voice in his head Mick, after Jagger. “I see it as the Rolling Stones lips. Just a massive mouth screaming all of the time.” Is he a fan of the Stones? “I know nothing about them, but I respect them because they’re not dead. And, like me, they definitely should be.”
The actor, TV presenter, comedian and former magician is becoming known as a radical voice in mental health at a time when the nation’s mental wellbeing has taken a hammering from the pandemic. Over the past year, particularly through lockdown, he has become the public face of borderline personality disorder (BPD), a destabilising condition that can make life really hard for people.
Tracini, the son of the popular entertainer Joe Pasquale, was a child prodigy. In 2003, he was the British junior magical champion and was named the most promising comedy act by Ken Dodd. He was only 15 years old; endless opportunities lay ahead. He attended the Italia Conti Academy of Theatre Arts in London and learned how to sing, dance and act, before starring on TV in My Spy Family, Coming of Age and Hollyoaks. But, for a long while, drugs, alcohol, BPD and despair got the better of him.
Now he makes short films on Twitter about living with BPD – and they are brilliant. Rather than campaigning, this is mental health as comedy. Sometimes the comedy has the feel of children’s TV; sometimes it is scabrous and dark. Alongside wacky dance tutorials delivered in outlandish skimpies, the videos focus on Tracini’s main challenge in life – how not to kill himself. His BPD makes him feel suicidal, but he is determined to stay alive. In the videos, he explains that being suicidal is a mindset, not an event – and it is a mindset he is constantly trying to understand.
Although initially the videos were primarily for his benefit, he thought lockdown would be a particularly difficult time for a lot of people. “I made a couple of videos about how I cope with thinking about killing myself. I assumed there were a lot more people thinking about it than there had been. And it turns out that I am an expert in not killing myself, because I’m not dead.” He grins.
He also wanted to open up because the condition is so stigmatised. “The only place BPD comes up is when somebody killed somebody in a crime documentary. People don’t talk about personality disorders, because if you do that calls into question who you are as a human being. That is really scary. A close friend said to me they didn’t want to think about the fact I had a personality disorder, because my personality was the bit they knew and if that wasn’t in order maybe they were wrong about me.”
Tracini, 32, has a sweet baby face (Joe 90 meets Alan Carr) and a life-affirming smile that belies everything he is talking about. He is supremely polite, slightly geeky and wears T-shirts that show off his elaborately tattooed arms (and disguise his self-harm scars). He lives in Hackney, east London, but is staying at his mother’s S-shaped bungalow in Rochester, Kent, when we speak on Zoom.
In his videos, we often see two Tracinis on a split screen. The one on the left is straight Joe, trying to explain his condition to the world, while the bloke on the right wearing the BPD T-shirt goads him, taunts him and obsesses about the fact that Dick Van Dyke is trending on Twitter (“Dead or racist? It’s normally one of those two things these days”). While serious Joe worries that “tomorrow is not a given”, BPD Joe retorts: “What d’you mean tomorrow is not a gibbon?” and asks why he is always going on about monkeys. Sometimes there is no split screen, just Tracini explaining that talking about killing himself in front of so many people is a form of insurance – the more people he tells he won’t do it, the less likely he is to do so. His videos have been viewed more than 40m times.
In one video, Tracini sings a song about the erectile dysfunction caused by his BPD; in another, he wears a snorkel and a thong to protect himself from Covid-19; elsewhere, he chats to Miriam Margolyes while she is chomping on a raw onion to ensure he keeps his social distance. Tracini is fascinated with language and wordplay. Why are bees’ knees so special, he asks; he has never even seen a pair. On another occasion, he breaks down the word hopeless – it does not mean he has no hope, just that he has less hope than others. At one point, he says he always feels empty – as hollow as a chocolate Father Christmas.
When Tracini was finally diagnosed with BPD in his late 20s, it was life-changing. “I felt such relief knowing that what I had was a thing, because my immediate thought process on it was: if it’s a thing, you can fix a thing. I thought I was beyond repair. I thought that I was utterly done for ever.” He was told that long-term, regular therapy might make it slightly better. It was good enough for him. It gave him hope.
Tracini tells me about the condition’s nine traits, as outlined by the American Psychiatric Association. All of these affect him, many at the same time. “Fear of abandonment, unstable relationships, chronic feelings of emptiness, impulsive self-destructive behaviours, explosive anger, self-harm, paranoia and disassociation, extreme emotional mood swings and an unclear, unstable self-image.” He pauses. “It’s a very human thing to lessen your own struggle by going: ‘Yeah, but everybody has this stuff.’ But I’m not going to do that, because I do know that mine’s worse.”
He made his first short video in January, because he had spent his life telling lies and he just wanted to tell the truth, unadorned, however painful it was. “The only reason that I’m able to be so honest is because I’m doing it to the back of an iPhone,” he says. “I’m not gonna go into Sainsbury’s and go: ‘Hi, how are you, I suffer with erectile dysfunction.’”
Tracini says he has never quite been sure who he is. He was born Joe Pasquale, like his father. His mother, Debbie, played bass guitar for a band called Family Affair. (His parents split up in 2008.) He remembers making his first joke on stage at the age of 18 months, when Pasquale brought him on. “I pulled at my hair and said: ‘This is a trick Paul Daniels can’t do.’” Was he really only 18 months old, I ask in disbelief. He nods.
Despite having four sisters (three from his father’s first marriage), he did not much engage with other children or childhood. “I was a real novelty, because I spoke and thought like an adult. I wrote my own stuff and would do five to 10 minutes at the end of my dad’s act when I was seven years old.” He adored his father and wanted to be his double. “I’ve got hundreds of hours of me on film. And it is essentially me, this tiny little boy, being my dad.”
As soon as he was old enough, he changed his name. He chose Tracini because his grandfather, wrongly, told him it was the original family surname. “My adult career has been trying to undo everything that I taught myself growing up about how to be like my dad.” He still adored his father; he just wanted to be his own person – whoever that was.
By the age of 12, he was done with traditional school. He was sick of being bullied – one boy tried to strangle him with his own scarf, while another locked him in a skip for three hours. His cousin, who had flunked university, taught him in the shed at the bottom of the family’s garden in Kent. He dedicated himself to magic and was soon good enough to make a living from it. “My first gig was a children’s party aged 12, for a 13-year-old’s birthday.” Did he earn much? “Yeah, I think I earned more in cash than I ever have done since. But I used to put it back into the act. So I’d just buy more magic.”
In hindsight, he says he did magic only because he did not have friends. “I didn’t know how to talk to another person without getting a deck of cards out or without entertaining. I physically could not function around other human beings if I wasn’t working.”
He quit magic after he turned his hand to acting. Success came easily, but he did not know what to do with himself in his spare time, so he started using cocaine. “All of the money I had went on drugs. I was spending about two and a half grand a week on cocaine.” When he gave up drugs, he became an alcoholic. (He has been drug-free for eight years and sober for five). As he got older, his behaviour became more and more extreme. He does not remember much of that time. He attempted suicide multiple times, although he counts only one attempt as genuine. His friends and family stuck by him. Tracini says he hates to think of the agonies he put his parents through. He begins to weep.
Life is just so exhausting, he says, that there is not a moment when he is unaware of himself. Has he never felt inner calm? Actually, yes, there was one day, recently.
“It was my 32nd birthday,” he says. “And I stopped thinking. It’s like I had a day off from being me. I was happy. And I only realised that I was happy when I quite quickly became unhappy again. So, yes, it does stop. And I can try and live for those moments.”
Despite his poor mental health, Tracini has had a stable professional life – he has rarely been without work. He left Hollyoaks in 2014 after a three-year stint, thinking he would go on to something bigger and better. But there was nothing bigger than trying to quell the voices in his head. He briefly returned to Hollyoaks in 2018, after his diagnosis, but acting gigs were increasingly hard to come by. Since 2017, he has presented the children’s TV show The Dengineers (“Basically Grand Designs for kids”) with Meryl Fernandes. In December, it won a Children’s Bafta for best factual entertainment show.
Despite all his pain, he seems to want to make people happy, I say. “Well, there’s that Robin Williams quote, where he says the saddest people like to make people happy because they know how it feels to feel utterly worthless and they don’t want anybody else to feel like that,” he says.
When he started posting his videos, thousands of people wrote to him, checking how he was and telling him he had made a difference to their lives. Some asked him for advice, which astonished him. “People thinking about killing themselves should not ask for advice from me. It’s like a chicken asking Colonel Sanders for advice. It’s not gonna happen and, no, I can’t help you.” He sounds fierce, but he is laughing.
Tracini can’t stand most of what is said in the media about mental health – he says so much of it is po-faced or exploited by celebrities to promote a product. “I used to be watching, thinking: ‘Yeah, great, when’s your album out?’” So many mental health narratives are sugar-coated, he says. “It’s empty and fluffy, like: it will get better. I’m a lot of things, but I’m not fluffy and what goes on up there isn’t fluffy. It’s not a nice little gif with a hug.”
I mention his girlfriend, Holly Houseman, a professional dancer who helps with his routines. Suddenly, I hear her voice in the background, all light and laughter. Tracini says he worries that he does not give enough back in the relationship. “That’s ridiculous, because otherwise I wouldn’t be with Joe,” she says. Does she find him as exhausting as he does? “No!” She looks at him. “Even on your worst days, you still make me laugh.”
How has the relationship changed him? “It’s given me something to live for more. Having Holly in my life has made me feel more capable of some sort of future, though I can’t think long term.”
“Well, we talked about getting a rabbit and that’s quite long term, because we haven’t got a garden yet!” says Houseman.
Tracini is developing a BPD standup routine, which he hopes to take on the road. “It’s called Ten Things That I Hate About Me. It’s basically a Ted Talk gone wrong,” he says.
He knows that nobody will turn up to see him; they will be there for Mick, the abusive loudmouth in the BPD T-shirt. I ask if he has a name for the quiet, contemplative Tracini. “Funnily enough, I have a T-shirt with ‘Me’ printed on it. But I don’t wear that one.” He does not really know that fella well, he says. Perhaps he will start wearing it when he gets to find out a bit more about him, I say. “Yeah, not half,” he says with a rush of enthusiasm. “It cost 24 quid!”
In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or by emailing jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. You can contact the mental health charity Mind by calling 0300 123 3393 or visiting mind.org.uk
In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
