‘It’s part of who I am’: Heston Blumenthal on the bipolar diagnosis that saved his life, his journey of self-discovery – and how he finally emerged from his family’s shadow

In a searingly honest interview, the star chef talks about the pressure of success, dealing with grief and how being sectioned by his wife changed everything

Heston Blumenthal, one of Britain’s greatest chefs, lives in a small village in Provence. When we meet, on a weekday morning in February, he is in the Hind’s Head in Bray, a stone’s throw from his very famous restaurant, the Fat Duck, which turns 30 this August. Blumenthal is in England to test dishes he hopes to recall to an anniversary menu – a kind of Greatest Hits of the Duck. “But it’s a backbreaker,” he says. “You start off with the old recipes and you realise they’re not up to scratch – we’ve moved on. So we’re tasting, tasting, tasting.” Yesterday, Blumenthal cooked four pieces of turbot, each at a minimally different temperature, to nail the dish. “At this level, those incremental differences make a massive difference,” he goes on, looking briefly bemused. “It’s been hard.”

Much else has been hard for Blumenthal recently. In November 2023, he was sectioned in France following a week-long manic episode and given a diagnosis of bipolar II disorder. He spent 20 days on a psychiatric ward and a further 40 days at a clinic. Blumenthal describes the ward as “a bit like a prison”. For many days prior to hospitalisation he had been unable to sit still and his mind raced. He had begun talking for hours at a time, often through the night, and he would become irritable when his wife, Melanie, whom he married earlier that year, could not find a way to respond. “He locked himself within his own universe,” Melanie told me later. “And to get in? Good luck.” Melanie eventually left for respite at her parents’ home, a two-hour drive away, and Blumenthal remained in Provence alone, experiencing symptoms of psychosis. In a phone message sent after Melanie left, Blumenthal told her he was in possession of a gun, and he began to suggest arrangements for his funeral. Of the gun he says, “It felt real, but there was nothing there, I was hallucinating… And then I started talking about death.”