Simon Reeve’s mental health battle: The tell-all memoir and his other top titles to read

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Touted as the next David Attenborough, Simon Reeve’s latest four-part documentary series Incredible Journeys – the first episode of which aired on BBC Two on Sunday 24 January – highlights the BBC presenter’s most memorable adventures around the globe from the past 15 years. 

The series opens with a focus on the people he’s met along the way, from a moving encounter with a 10-year-old boy working under dangerous conditions in a glass recycling factory in Bangladesh to the Burmese human rights campaigner who led him undercover into the country in 2010. 

But, despite his adventurous career, his life beforehand might not be as some expect. Ahead of the series airing, the presenter shared stories of his battle with his own mental health, telling The Mirror that he was a “whisker away” from suicide. 

Having not gone to university, he didn’t have any qualifications and faced long term unemployment, and at the age of 17 he said he “spiralled down into quite a dark place”. It was the words of a job centre worker that became his lifelong mantra, urging him to “take things step by step", which allowed him to find hope in the simple act of walking. 

It was when he was given the chance to work in the post department at a national newspaper that his life turned around. His career then went from strength to strength when he began conducting investigations into arms dealing, terrorism and organised crime. The research and conclusions he came to formed the basis of his first book The New Jackals, which warned of al Qaeda and preempted terrorist attacks. 

In recent years, Reeve has travelled around little known regions of the world for BBC documentaries and has had a near-death experience after contracting malaria in Gabon, been detained by the KGB (the primary security agency for the Soviet Union) and dodged bullets on frontlines. 

What Reeve wants to highlight in his new series, Incredible Journeys, is that “you can still make a go of life if you’ve had a tricky start” and his success is thanks to luck, hard work and his troubled past. Having written about his upbringing and his travelling adventures, we take a look at the titles that turned him into a Sunday Times best-seller.   

From his honest tell-all autobiography that traces his own inspiring and moving personal mental health experiences to his travelogue of a 23,000 miles trek through the tropics, these tomes may just provide some welcome wanderlust and hope during these trying times.  

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