The Deteriorating Mental Health of Gordon Ramsay

We live in a world in which Gordon Ramsay is a respected chef with 12 Michelin Stars and a variety of reality TV shows that consist of him swearing at people. This world is reality. Gordon Ramsay, however, lives in a world where he has been a fantastically famous and talented footballer and a world in which, among other bizarre habits, Chef is a title which can be applied before a persons name, in the same way that you would call someone 'Doctor' or 'Professor'. This world is fabricated by Gordon Ramsay's deranged mind.

It is virtually impossible to ascertain whether Gordon Ramsay's clinical insanity began before he was famous or afterwards, because he himself is so unsure of his own past. His life has been written and re-written in numerous interviews to suit Ramsay's mood, but I can no lon

ger stand by while a great man suffers alone. This is a man who is struggling to accept reality as it appears and has been forced by mental illness to adjust the parameters of the Universe around him in order to survive. Unable to assimilate with society, Ramsay constantly lashes out at under-qualified restaurant staff over seemingly petty and meaningless everyday occurrences, like the consistency of gravy or the speed at which someone cooks broccoli.

Traumatically , Ramsay has been forced by the monsters at Channel 4 to play out his tragic life in front of millions every week on the fly-on-the-wall documentary, Kitchen Nightmares USA. In this serious expose of mental health in the work place, Ramsay is convinced by the shows producers that he is responsible for the well being of another person's restaurant, and as a result of his declining state, he works tirelessly in order to improve the fortunes of two-bit restaurants across the United States.

Ramsay is forced to live out the same distressing experiences week-after-week, heart-breakingly rehashing the same routine each time. It quickly becomes obvious that Ramsay only has a handful of memories from working as a restaurateur and is regurgitating them as a desperate survival technique. Each time, he marches into a restaurant he has never seen before in his life, wrapped in the chef's coat that he wears both in and outdoors-his knowledge of hygiene apparently wiped from his troubled mind-he then orders a meal that he knows he will not like from a menu produced by someone who is obviously ill-equipped to handle food.

When the meal arrives, Ramsay invariably loses his temper. Frustrated with himself and the world around him, he insults everyone in sight and spits out his half-chewed food. Possibly because of damaged motor-functions; maybe an eating disorder, we just don't know.

Whipped into a frenzy by the staff and customers, Ramsay begins to frantically storm through the building, not unlike a contestant on Supermarket Sweep. Eventually, having upturned the entire restaurant-store-rooms, office and all-Ramsay begins to scream at its proprietors. Demanding that they not only change their menu entirely, but that they surrender custody of their business for several days. Presumably terrified, the owners agree, and when they return a number of days later, Ramsay has been working unrelentingly throughout the night, altering the decor of the establishment and implementing a new till system.

Ramsay then insists that the restaurant open that very evening, ordering that, regardless of the restaurants pre-existing theme, they start serving 'hamburger sliders'-a deranged miniature version beefburgers on a narrow, rectangular plate.

As a result of Ramsay's undeniable cooking skills, the transformation proves a great success every time. Ramsay then addresses the staff of the restaurant, credits them for their hard work, before scuttling out of the front door and down the street under cover of darkness-still wearing his white, double-breasted chef's jacket-and begins muttering to himself in bold language.

Cold and alone, wreaking of self-doubt and self-hatred, Gordon Ramsay has regressed to a child-like state, insisting that his boyhood fantasy of playing for his 'local' football team, Glasgow Rangers, was a reality, despite the fact that Glasgow is not local to his childhood home in Stratford. Dissatisfied with having won cooking's most prestigious prize 12 times, and having a fortune stretching into the tens of millions, Ramsay has felt the need to imagine a glorious sporting career in which he ranked among the game's greatest. But again, Ramsay's tortured feelings of low-self worth have forced him to imagine a disastrous end to his own dreams.

Ramsay has made various false and contradictory claims about his Rangers career, the most noticeable being that he had one. Cruelly cornered by the media, Ramsay warped his original story out of all recognition. Having originally stuttered out the following: "I got my first team games. I was with the first team squad. I played three first team games.' Ramsay amended his history, claiming that he had merely played in a single friendly-match. Unfortunately, this too was a miss-truth.

Presumably frightened by his lack of self-control, Ramsay began to contort time and history. Speaking on a radio show in 2002, he explained how his career was cut short, when Rangers manager Jock Wallace and first team coach Archie Knox released him after he tore his liga

ment. However at the time, Knox, was the manager of Dundee. Knox told a Sunday newspaper: "The first time I ever saw Gordon Ramsay was in 1996 when he launched his first book. But he didn't know me from Adam because we've never met." Ramsay then became more erratic about his football 'career', claiming unprecedented levels of fame in his 2006 autobiography, Humble Pie: "Outside the stadium, you'd be signing things like pillow cases and the side of prams, and families would turn up with their kids to have their trainers signed."

It was at this stage that the world became aware of Ramsay's problems. Unable to prop-up his inconsistencies, Ramsay's legal team stepped in. A spokesman said that the television star had always "down-played" his career in football and added: "Any inaccuracies regarding the details of this period can be explained by the fact that all this occurred nearly 25 years ago."

Ramsay made several humiliating appearances in televised charity football matches, which revealed his lack of ability. Now no one was convinced, as much as they tried. It was at this point that Gordon Ramsay's senility became a sport for the international press. Lurching from one catastrophe to the next, Ramsay's condition worsened. A Gordon's Gin television advert tormented a defenceless Ramsay, showering him with straight Gin, stoning him with ice-cubes

and torturing him with acidic limes. The public humiliation began to take it's toll on the down-trodden Ramsay as he publicly insulted a prominent Australian TV personality on her own television show, revealing a blown-up image of a nude woman on all fours with a pig's face, before drawing comparis

on to the Aussie TV host, Tracey Grimshaw.

Perhaps most troubling is the way in which his personal relationship problems have suffered. Recently it was revealed that Ramsay could no longer differentiate between an average woman and his own wife, after the Daily Mail uncovered that he had been sleeping with other women since 2001.

Whatever happens now is anyone's guess, but thankfully Ramsay is beginning to come to terms with his problem. But with tragic celebrity deaths happening more frequently with each passing year, one can only pray that Gordon Ramsay doesn't follow that pattern of talented stars who burnt out too soon. However, with the rising popularity of other Channel 4 chefs, such as Heston, Jamie and Hugh, one cannot help but fear how Gordon will take the prospect of further decline.