ACTOR and mental health campaigner Ruby Wax is in Southampton this week for the university’s graduation ceremonies.
Ms Wax, the University of Southampton’s Chancellor, presided over today’s [Wednesday 26 July] graduation ceremony in the O2 Guildhall Southampton.
She offered her congratulations to this year’s graduates: “Congratulations to the COVID cohort. The fact that students are graduating, and they had to tolerate staying inside and not meeting their cohorts during COVID, is just remarkable.”
Ms Wax has been Chancellor of the university – where her son Max studied physics – since 2019. “I love being the Chancellor,” she said. “I’m always excited to wear the robe and to hand out the degrees so I can see what everybody’s wearing footwear-wise! My son had a great time here, he lived like an animal and lived on crusts of pizza, but he did get a great job from it. I was really proud.”
In recent years, Ms Wax has embarked on extreme challenges to push and test her own mental health resilience. She outlined: “I want to see what happens when you pull yourself out of your comfort zone. I think it makes more neural connections. I am more flexible – things don’t frighten me the way they used to.”
Sharing her experiences of taking part in the Ruby Wax: Cast Away TV series earlier this year, where she was left on a desert island for 10 days, she said: “I’m really interested in mental resilience. I learned things from being in nature – which is ‘get real and understand things die, things are born’. I was in a cyclone but I wasn’t scared – it’s just nature. I think to really face nature strengthens you. But having a mental disorder, I didn’t fear what’s going on outside because I fear what’s going on inside more.”
