This is a story about selling eyeballs...

You ever wonder why your email is free, Facebook is free, YouTube is free, most of the stuff you can find on the internet is free?

Most companies need to have either a freemium or an ad-supported business model now. Most businesses must endure an army of freetards, who demand the highest possible product standards, but aren't prepared to pay a penny. They will spend their precious time criticising you and your product, but they won't spend a single cent.

In the fierce race to capitalise a market, to monopolise, to acquire the biggest number of users, companies must invest so much in their products, and not hamper growth by introducing advertising too intrusively, or by making people pay.

There's really only one place that things can end up: the biggest players dominate everything, and have to fight over a finite amount of ad revenue and market insight data. Eventually, one tech company can do it all, own it all, dominate the entire market.

At the moment Facebook is the clear favourite for me. I spend far more time looking at curated content on Facebook, than I do searching for new content via Google or on YouTube. I'm interested in what my friends are interested in. My Facebook feed contains far more things that I'm interested in than I can possibly read and watch during my waking hours. There simply isn't enough time left for me to do my own content discovery.

Facebook has also started to take over from my use of email and instant messaging services. It's a kinda convenient one-stop-shop for staying in touch with my network of friends and family. It's all nicely bundled together in one place. You can cancel your account any time you want, but you can never leave.

Google's arse is being well and truly kicked at the moment, in terms of growth. Facebook knows so much about us, the advertising can be super targeted. Facebook knows where I've been, who I've been there with, when I went there, how often I go there. It knows where I went to school, what I studied. It knows who my family are. It knows who I stay most in contact with. It knows what I 'like' and what links I click on. It knows what videos I watch, and what content I scroll right past.

Ok, so I'm an early adopter. I sometimes queue up to get Apple products on the day they launch. Apple are presently the world's biggest company, by market capitalisation (number of shares in issue, multiplied by the share price) but they're far more anti-competitive than Microsoft ever were. Safari comes pre-installed on my Macbook and I never get asked if I would like a different browser.

Apple are trying to dominate the ad space by forcing app developers to go through their iAds platform and blocking any other advertising. They're trying to leverage their strong position as a software and hardware platform, to gain the biggest share of the lucrative advertising revenue. Eventually, they're going to land up in legal hot water.

Facebook is far better placed to become the dominant platform for advertisers and companies looking to gain market insight. It's entirely fair that when I use a free website, that the terms and conditions state that they can show me adverts and use my data. It's not fair that when I buy a £600 smartphone, it somehow limits what I can see on the internet. It's not fair if Apple start selling my private location data, my phone usage habits etc.

In the bizarre world of the battles between the world's largest tech companies, you might be surprised to learn that for every Google Android phone sold, Microsoft make the most profit. That's because Google have to pay patent royalties to Microsoft. The important silicon chips inside your smartphone, make a healthy profit for a company that didn't even manufacture them. That company is ARM, who license the chip designs to manufacturers, and take a royalty payment for every chip that gets made.

The legal battles that are brewing will eclipse everything ever seen before. The amount of money that is at stake is unprecedented.

But what happens if you extrapolate? Well, basically, you will probably get given a free phone, the whole concept of paying for software or subscription services will completely disappear, but your privacy, your data will be completely up for grabs to the highest bidder, along with your eyeballs, which will be continually bombarded by targeted ads.

Ancillary industries, like music and film production, and writing, will be consumed into this dominant giant, and high quality content will only exist as the bait for your eyeballs. You won't be able to read another book without there being some kind of product placement having been woven into the plot. Authors have to eat too.

The fact is, that the era of the busker or the indie musician is over. People think that the number of Facebook fans that you have or the number of Twitter followers is somehow directly monetisable, so the idea of chucking 50 pence into a hat or paying for music is unthinkable to the freetard army.

Naturally, with all the advertising money washing around, people who are creating content, simply because they are creative individuals with time and talent on their hands, are simply drowned out in a sea of noise created by the paid content creators. You have no money to market your content, so nobody will even find it or consume it. There's no reason for it to exist, if it's not pushing some product or service.

In fact, traditional goods & services are having their revenues squeezed. Why would you buy a travel guidebook when you have TripAdvisor and a load of ad-supported websites that you can browse on your smartphone, virtually anywhere in the world? The fact that the travel guidebook at least maintains a degree of commercial impartiality is missed by many people, who will end up eating in restaurants or staying in hotels that have paid to be written about.

We don't tend to pay at all, or pay very little, for our news sources. That means that those news outlets are getting the lions share of their revenue from advertising, which exercises at least a kind of censorship over unfavourable news coverage, if not outright direction over how real life events are reported. How can you trust news sources with such commercial interests behind them?

You might think that because I've hacked away at some bit of software, making an app or a website, in some trendy co-working space in the heart of Tech City, that's the reason why it's trending on Twitter, that's the reason it's 'going viral'. Actually, most social media campaigns - even the viral ones - are planned and executed by a sophisticated service industry that caters to those who wish to market themselves using the modern mediums.

I often wonder what the point of Twitter is. I have a bot that follows somebody, and their bot messages me back to say thanks for following them. Are there any real people on Twitter, or is it all bots, releasing content at strategically timed intervals, and doing their robotic interactions in a way that's been designed to appear humanlike?

We have loads of stats & data that tell us about content engagement. How much do we mould ourselves, and how we act, in order to increase that engagement? How often do we think about how many 'likes' we're going to get on a Facebook comment, just before we hit the 'post' button.

Frankly, I've tried to detach myself. I'm just writing relatively blindly. I can see how many Facebook likes I get and I can see how many link clicks I get on Twitter, but broadly speaking, I have no idea how many people read what I write, when they read it, where they're based in the world. If I did have those stats, that data, it could start to corrupt the integrity of what I'm trying to do.

That's the most interesting thing of all to me. That I've been able to write the equivalent of two novels of content, and publish it into the public domain, with barely anybody noticing. That shows just how much noise there is out there. That shows just how much content everybody is churning out, into the ether. I could have whispered all my secrets into the hollow of an ancient tree that was about to be felled, for all the difference it would have made to the world.

It felt daring at first, churning this stuff out. But now there's just this dawning realisation that everybody's doing the same thing. There's so many "me too!" folks and wannabe authors, musicians and filmmakers out there in the big wide world, that you can really say or do anything you want, safe in the anonymity of noise.

Welcome to the global silent disco. Headphones on, zoned out

Tags: #computing #privacy #frankie #socialmedia

This is a story about taboos and titillation...

That's a photo of a big black cock. It has been quite hard to pair some photos with this blog post, given its provocative title, but I think I've nailed it with this one.

I'm aware that my writing has reached a level of honesty that pretty much makes it unreadable. It's just too unflinchingly brutally open. It's too gut-wrenchingly, stomach squirming and churningly letting all the skeletons out of the closet. People aren't supposed to say these kinds of things. People aren't supposed to talk about this kind of stuff.

It's an absolutely ludicrous experiment, to write down everything that's in your head, in a public journal. However, it's my belief that the age of privacy is over. We are now too wedded to technology to step back to a previous era, but many people are unaware just how insecure their data is. We are almost living in the age of open data.

My laptop is infected with a keylogger, with the attacker hoping to skim credit card details, passwords and obviously able to see every single word that I type. I have also been the victim of a ransomware style attack, when I was using some Google products (phone, smartwatch) which saw me bullied into doing something against my will, when my privacy was massively compromised. I have even conducted a spot of phishing of my own... only in the interests of computer science, of course.

I imagine that my webcam has, at times, become compromised. I dread to think what that electronic eye has witnessed, but we are all watched over by machines of loving grace, at all times. On my bedside table I have my smartwatch and my phone - 2 microphones and 2 cameras - which are pretty much recording around the clock. Next to my bed is my infected laptop, with its microphone and webcam. Whether the data is persisted or not, I wouldn't be qualified to speculate.

Getting to the heart of the matter, human beings are known to pleasure themselves from time to time, even when they are getting enough sex. It's pretty much a fact of life. There's no sense in denying it, or just pretending it doesn't happen. I'm talking about it. This is happening. I'm breaching the taboo.

Let's talk about pornography. Have you watched any music videos lately? They're basically soft porn. Pornographic content has entered mainstream media. Whether it's more and more explicit sex scenes in movies, or the use of pornographic imagery to sell products, it's there on open display, all around us.

Around 2001 I moved into my first flat with a girlfriend. I also, briefly, had a bit of a problem with the amount of 'video-based art' that I was downloading from peer-to-peer networks. It was unhealthy for my relationship, which subsequently ended. I moved back into a shared house. You could say that it was a brief addiction, given the damage to a relationship and my living status.

Porn is probably the most easily accessible of all the addictions. You can stream all you want via your broadband internet connection, for free. Even a gambling addiction costs money. Even a food addiction requires you to go to the supermarket.

The phallic column in the background is The Monument to the Great Fire of London. There are now an impressive array of tall buildings that have been erected in London, in recent years.

We all know that London's seedier side is openly on display in Soho, but actually, there's a lot of willy-waving that goes on throughout the metropolis. On-the-spot fines are having to be issued to the super-rich playboys who cruise around Kensington and Chelsea in their sportscars, with their long bonnets, revving their engines aggressively.

Too embarrassed to go to a strip club? Don't worry, there are now bars in the City that bring the dancing girls into a respectable setting, for you to oggle.

This is my [female] agent's idea of corporate hospitality. Tipping cocktails down the client's neck while scantily clad women shake their booty. This is an acceptable night out to put down as an expense claim, when trying to get your client to renew your contract.

The porn industry might be losing money to piracy, copyright infringement and amateurs who seem to want to share their most private frissons with the world, but sex is very much mainstream and an accepted part of daily life. TV shows now get great ratings if they are filled with buxom wenches and nudity. It worked for Game of Thrones.

Personally, chemsex links horribly with an addiction mess that includes porn and masturbation. As I've written before, my libido has started to become my enemy. A natural survival of the species instinct prompts me to now seek out drugs, and with drugs in my system that libido gets twisted into something very shameful indeed.

Obviously, drugs don't change who you are fundamentally. They can only amplify and exacerbate. However, we all like boobs, ass, pussy and/or cock. We are all programmed to try and achieve some degree of sexual satisfaction. We can't shut down and deny that side of our nature.

Why on earth would I write about this stuff? Well, that tightly wound ball of shame needs to unwind. At its core is a seed that dwells within all of us. I might have corrupted myself, twisted myself, become unrecognisable from an innocent starting position, but given the same conditions it could happen to anybody. I took the risks, and it happened to me, so they're my consequences to own. It's my burden to carry. Only got myself to blame, eh? It just so happens that I'm going to write about it all and see what happens.

Writing about this stuff seems more rational than tearing my own genitals off my body, although the life of a eunuch looks enviable to me in some ways.

Do you like flowers? You do know that a flower is the sexual organ of a plant, don't you?

Tags: #sex

This is a story about challenging your reasons for doing things...

If somebody said to me that Bipolar was an excuse to do whatever you want, whenever you want, I would find my position a little hard to defend. However, to fall into line, to fly straight, to conform, to bend my mood by sheer weight of will... that's not possible.

I'm a fairly liberated character. Since living with daily threat to my life and livelihood, my risk profile has rather altered from that of a normal rational individual. I tend to leap before I look, and certainly with very little premeditation.

To an outside observer, things look erratic, out of control, recklessly dangerous. To me, things look pretty much the same, but my actions do fit onto some kind of macro plan. Even when I backslide into something or somewhere I really don't want to go, it's a bit of a calculated gamble. It happens when there appears to be little else going on of importance, little other opportunity.

So, have I deliberately sabotaged my own life, at times? Yes, I probably have. But you might be surprised to learn that the motives are not always clear cut. I have become quite an uncompromising character, who finds it near impossible to live in a situation where my values, ethics and professional standards are being infringed.

When you have pushed yourself to the limit and beyond to deliver projects, to create cashflow positive businesses, you know the upper bound of what is possible, both personally and for a software team, and what the reward feels like. You start to get a sense of whether it's worth pushing yourself that hard, or not.

When you have sunk to unimaginable depths, in despair and abandonment of everything, you know the lower bounds of what is survivable. You know how low you can go before you will either shuffle off your mortal coil, or some shred of self-preservation instinct is finally activated. You know what it feels like to literally make a life or death decision. You start to get a sense of whether you really want to die, or not.

Above is a picture of me, 24 hours after having been discharged from the psychiatric ward of a hospital. I had been body surfing in Cornwall. Those powerful waves and strong currents. That thrashing violent cold winter sea.

There's little doubt that this extreme environment activated my self-preservation instincts far more effectively than a week-long stay in a locked Mental Health ward, where nurses checked on me every 30 minutes to make sure I hadn't topped myself. That's not to say I'm not extremely grateful to everybody in the NHS who helped me.

Teaching my friend Klaus to surf in Bude, I drifted into the river mouth, where a deeper channel has been cut into the sea bed. The water flowed faster there and I started to be pulled by a strong current, well out of my depth and into the path of breaking waves. I knew that it was going to take time, a load of stamina, and a certain amount of calmness, to swim out of that channel and back into safer waters, and body surf my way back into the shallows where I could stand on the sea floor again. I had no floatation aid, no surfboard of my own.

Drowning in the sea would be a much more unpleasant way to end your days than, say, clattering into the hard ground at 125mph from an aeroplane or a tall building, or slowly losing consciousness as your blood leaked away out of ruptured blood vessels. However, I still find it interesting that I was making game plans to save my own life. Was I going to try and attract the attention of the lifeguards, who would see that I was out of the safe swimming area and come and pick me up? Was I going to try the riskiest but less energy-consuming tactic of swimming for nearby rocks that waves were breaking onto?

It's weird how you can find yourself messing around with Sir Clive Sinclair's latest invention in Cambridge one minute, so full of passion and energy, optimism and enthusiasm. Then your mood seems to suck all the life out of you and you're not sure where or when it's going to bottom out. You're not sure if you're on a ride all the way to oblivion, or whether you'll pull up out of the nosedive at the last possible moment.

That's my true reaction to my moods, to pressure, to risk, to addiction, to unhappiness, to discomfort, to instability: I will do something extreme. I will actively seek out something that will challenge me to my very limits. I will push myself until I find the true edge of the abyss.

Sometimes you feel like you've tried your hardest, that you can't go on, that something's not possible. You've reached the limits. I'm regularly surprised by what reserves we seem to store up, as human organisms. The disparity between perception and reality is most pronounced, when it comes to strength, stamina and depression. When you come close to those limits, you realise that your fear is giving you a safety margin, a buffer, that keeps you a safe distance from the true edge.

However, my brain has been somewhat corrupted, warped, miscalibrated. I had little hesitation in attempting to climb up on a ledge on the 48th floor of a tower block, where there is a little outdoor area. It's only that my colleagues pulled me back that prevented me from standing there, on the ledge, eyeing up the drop.

As you can see, the ledge is quite wide, but there's still something that isn't quite wired up quite right in the head of somebody who would climb onto it, 48 floors above the pavement.

None of this quite compares with riding through central London, on a black bike, dressed from head to toe in black clothes. No lights, no helmet. Frankly, drivers quite often don't spot the cyclists who are wearing high-vis vests and covered in lights anyway, especially in the wet when London's many lights, and the reflection in puddles, make it virtually impossible for a driver to see what's going on around them.

I took an almighty tumble when a taxi driver who was indicating left and pulling over changed his mind in a fraction of a second, and decided to do a U-turn right in front of me. My rear brake was loose because of a buckled back wheel, and I was so quick and hard on the front brake that I went over my handlebars and busted my ribs, hip, ankle. The taxi driver didn't even see me. I jumped up and back on the bike, and carried on, and then this huge surge of pain hit me.

That could be a metaphor for my life, since losing my grip on stability in 2008. I take massive risks, but I jump up and carry on cycling after being completely obliterated. I push through the pain, knowing that stopping will only make it worse.

Tags: #bipolar #depression #suicide #mentalhealth #nhs

This is a story about maintaining a degree of freedom...

Which one of these faces represents your mood? What if there was a pill, powder, liquid or a gas that could take you from a face on the right, to a face on the left? Would you use it?

Apparently 90% of adult Americans drink coffee. That's a pretty amazing statistic, isn't it? Officially, there are 350 million Chinese smokers. That's more than the entire population of the USA. Every weekend, town centres across the United Kingdom are turned into warzones, with huge numbers of binge drinkers, taking themselves to the brink of alcohol poisoning, and even beyond.

That's just the stuff you can buy in shops, over the counter. You can walk down the road, 7 days a week, and purchase coffee, cigarettes and alcohol.

Now let's talk about prescription medications. In Tower Hamlets, the borough of London where I currently live, Prozac (Fluoxetine) prescriptions are rising at 8% per year. London issued 5.21 million Prozac prescriptions last year. Over 20% more Londoners are taking antidepressants than 3 years ago.

So, in all probability, somebody somewhere has got their hooks into you. Either you drink coffee, you smoke, you drink alcoholic drinks, or you take mind-altering prescription medication. You are owned by somebody. A proportion of your wealth and tax dollars are going on mind-bending substances.

The picture above is of a blade that I have managed to remove from a Gillette Fusion razor, and crudely bend into a cutting implement. It's actually pretty tiny, hence why I never noticed that it was still lying on the bathroom floor. However, it's easily big and sharp enough to slice open veins and arteries.

Wouldn't I be better off taking antidepressants, so that my mood doesn't sink so low that I attempt suicide? Wouldn't I be better off in a chemical straightjacket?

Given that I have no fear of homelessness and destitution, why do I need something that artificially props up my mood and allows me to function, when my natural mood is telling me that something is wrong?

What goes up must come down, and for every desired effect of a medication, there are one or more side effects. Often times, people will take a medication for one ailment, and then have to take another medication to compensate for the side effects, and perhaps even some more for further side effects. It's much like the old lady who swallowed the fly, who ends up swallowing a horse.

Ok, so my mood episodes are pretty brutal, but at least I have a clear clinical picture, in medical parlance. It's fairly easy for me and any clinicians to see what my mood is doing, as the water is relatively unmuddied by mind-altering substances.

So what is my mood doing? Well, it's yo-yoing up and down like an insane elevator operator. However, it pretty much follows the instability of my life. 7 or 8 months ago I was homeless, then I was living in a hostel, then I was living with an alcoholic and his unfaithful wife, then I was sofa surfing with a friend, then I was living in hotels during a time when just about every London hotel was booked out for the Rugby World Cup, and then I got a flat.

Jobwise, I had a 9 month contract, and then a 6 month contract. I'm working about 6 months in 12, with the chance to push that up to 9 in 12 if I can get my arse back in gear. It's not a very stable work environment though.

I spent about 15 weeks receiving inpatient treatment in 2014. That really was an annus horribilis. I was in hospital for about 8 days (2 admissions) in 2015. That's quite a big improvement. 2016 remains hospitalisation free, despite some fairly sketchy stuff that probably should have seen me admitted.

But you can't see the other data that I have in front of me. My alcohol consumption, my coffee consumption, my abuse of drugs & medications... all of this is going through a radical transformation too. From regular and massive binges on wine & beer, coffee to prop me up in the mornings, drugs and medication to while away the time inbetween jobs: I've knocked almost all of that on the head. Life is a lot more straightforward when you're not peering through a haze of mind-altering substances.

However, it's a little too straightforward. In terms of stress levels right now, I'd rather give up the responsibility of having a flat, bills to pay, a man to kowtow to. It might be cold and wet and s**tty weather outside right now, but I'd still rather be living in a tent and not looking at a stack of 8 box files full of paperwork I need to deal with.

Seems bizarre, right, to choose to be homeless, destitute? Well, I don't think it's any more insane than working your arse off to pay for your rail season ticket and pay for the mortgage and bills on a house you never get to spend any time in.

Personally, I just feel as though modern life is making me unwell, so I reject as much of it as I can. I do the bare minimum to keep the wheels turning, and otherwise I turn my back on the madness. I try not to be swept along by the current.

I know my mood will change, and I will feel differently about things during a different kind of mood episode. I'm not going to poke and prod at my mind though, and try and coerce it into taking on an altered perception of reality.

Tags: #bipolar #depression #suicide #mentalhealth #nhs

This is a story about protecting the fruit of your loins...

I wouldn't blame you for jumping to the wrong conclusions about whether I'm safe to be around your family. You're programmed to protect. You're programmed to be paranoid, and act irrationally. The chances are that there isn't a Sabre-Toothed Tiger lurking outside your front door, but your DNA doesn't change fast enough for you to not at least subconsciously check for vicious predators outside your cave.

The assumption must be that everywhere I go, I leave a trail of used hypodermic needles infected with HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis, even though I've never injected drugs and I don't have any infectious diseases.

Perhaps my bags and coat pockets are full of highly toxic drugs and medications, which are not in child-safe containers? Perhaps your inquisitive child may go through one of my unattended bags or pockets and discover something that looks like sweets, only to be fatally poisoned. No, I don't carry things like that around with me.

But what about my influence? Perhaps I'm 'soft on drugs' and my laissez-faire attitude to narcotics will somehow rub off on your tiny tots, and just being within earshot of me will lead them to later experimentation with powerful narcotics, addiction and death. Well, actually, one of the main reasons for writing this blog is as a warning klaxon, to those who might venture up the same dead-end alleyway where I unfortunately found myself stuck.

I hope that nobody thinks I'm glorifying or making light of my numerous brushes with irreversible health damage and death, that I have sustained over the last few years. In fact, it's only been because of the published memoirs of some other unfortunates, that I've not abandoned all hope on the assumption that my own fallibility is some indictment of my character.

Certainly, it's easier to divide the world into good and bad, light and dark, virtuous and evil. Certainly, it's easier to condemn a character. Certainly, it seems somehow safer, prudent, to keep bad apples away from the rest of the harvest, lest infection spread.

However, that's not how human nature works. If you make something taboo, then you make something more interesting to people, but they will hide their curiosity and feel guilty for feeling drawn into a forbidden world, even though it's totally natural to be inquisitive. For the outcasts, the misfits, the eccentric family member who has been excluded, is shaped by the imagination of those unhappy children, into some kind of folklore figure. The family freak, the black sheep, can end up being far more influential than you had ever intended, just by your very refusal to acknowledge their existence.

Anyway, I'm soon going to reject all the labels, which I have been urged by most Psychiatrists and Psychologists to not apply to myself anyway. I push more and more of the actions of the past into the annals of history. To judge my character on a few select moments from 36 years on the planet seems like the real madness. To condemn my entire future based on some ageing evidence that is entirely outweighed by a mostly normal healthy life, is not exactly very fair or very kind, is it?

You would be shocked to learn that the whole private psychiatric/psychological treatment setup is driven to protect your professional image. You are encouraged not to use clinical labels. You are encouraged to maintain medical secrecy, privacy. I can see why, but I'm enjoying playing with people's prejudice. I'm enjoying seeing how close to unemployable I can get, before I step back from the brink of reputational ruin.

So, if you're keeping me at arm's length, at a safe distance, I do understand. I forgive your instincts to protect your family. It's only natural.

You should know that I would never venture anywhere near you or your home if I was in a mess though. I have no fear of living on the streets again. I choose suicide and destitution ahead of putting any of my friends or my sister and niece in any danger.

I choose suicide. I choose destitution.

Tags: #suicide #mentalillness #depression #addiction #bipolar #drugs

This is a story about patience not being a virtue...

There used to be 3 bathrooms in my old house in Oxford. I once hid in the shower for over 3 hours, waiting to step out and give some guests a tour of the facilities. That's strange behaviour for a 9 year old boy.

I'm still teetotal, and it's been 107 days since I last had an alcoholic drink. That doesn't mean that I'm not still patiently waiting though, for something. Some imaginary finishing line, some trigger, some excuse.

I kinda screwed everything up around day 90 anyway. I took 3-FPM, Mexedrone, βk-2C-B and Flubromazolam in a massive crazy binge, trying to stave off a relapse onto MDPV (Supercrack). You can't fight fire with fire, and if you're testing your patience, your patience will eventually fail.

The problem with being very patient is that people can mistake it for self control, good behaviour. People start to think you're OK. People start to think you don't need their help, their support.

Since the advent of the Dark Web, it has been possible for a respectable middle class person who doesn't know any drug dealers to obtain absolutely anything they want, through the mail. You just have to pay your money and wait for the postman.

Waiting for the man is something that you will find lots of popular cultural references to. I once waited 3 weeks for a Quaalude (or 'lude' in common vernacular) to be delivered to me from some far-flung corner of the globe. Yes, I watched the film Wolf of Wall Street and decided that I needed to add Methaqualone to my list of drugs that I had experienced. I very patiently waited for my delivery. I waited a long time for the man. The mailman.

Given enough spare time with no mission, no project, no goal, I will eventually relapse. A relapse onto a ridiculously powerful stimulant drug will not be pretty. It will be quick and destructive. There's a good chance that it will result in death or hospitalisation.

This is how you get temporarily free. You hit it with 4 powerful benzos, to kill the psychosis and get to sleep. Then the next day you hit it with 3 powerful benzos, to slay the anxiety and restlessness. Then the next day you hit it with 2 powerful benzos, to taper off the 'downers' without having rebound insomnia and unmanageable panic attacks. Then, the next day, you take your 1 remaining benzo. You have an awful night of sleep. You have rising panic and butterflies in your tummy, but you're almost free. Then the final day you're drug free again, but you're all alone and you feel like you want to die.

Monday is the first time that I would be able to re-order something to restart the whole horrid cycle of self-destruction. Tuesday is the earliest that something could be in my nasty sweaty little palms, with me eagerly tearing the packaging apart.

It might not sound like it, but to a 'conventional' drug addict, that's an unthinkable amount of time. They're used to picking up the phone to a dealer and meeting them within hours. In fact, many addicts' lives are structured around such immediacy that they know their dealers' movements intimately, and can know within a window of 15-30 minutes when they are going to get their fix.

You might think that drug addiction is about willpower. What did I demonstrate, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month, if it was not this magical 'willpower' stuff? It's not the solution to anything. I just put myself into standby mode. I just put myself into hibernation. I was just waiting.

Drug addiction is about having a life that's not worth living. "The opposite of addiction is not sobriety, it is human connection".

Human connection is important.

Tags: #addiction #drugs

This is a story about self prescribing...

If you know what medication you want, you can cut out the middlemen and just buy it yourself direct from a country that doesn't have a rigid system of prescriptions, provided it's not a controlled substance, and therefore illegal to import.

I wrote about self medication through non-pharmacological mechanisms in a previous blog post entitled Self Medication (Part One) if you wish to refresh your memory.

Going GP -> Psychiatrist -> Pharmacist is actually quite a slow process when you're trying to find a medication that works for you. Also, many medications are only licensed to treat certain illnesses, but there is sometimes a strong body of research that proves they are effective on other illnesses. Because of concerns about medical malpractice lawsuits, it's quite hard to get an 'off label' prescription, even if there is good data to support the use of a particular medication in your individual case.

So it was that I came to be experimenting with medications like Pramipexole (Mirapex), Bupropion (Wellbutrin), Cabergoline (Dostinex), Aripiprazole (Abilify) and even crazy ones like Piribedil (Trivastal). Results were a mixed bag.

The bottom line is this: you probably don't want to f**k with medication. Aripiprazole left me uncontrollably dribbling, and unable to speak without an unintended spray of saliva. Piribedil would cause me to fall asleep randomly, like a narcoleptic.

But, Bupropion works. It's a very effective, fast-acting antidepressant. However, it raises your anxiety levels, causes insomnia, panic attacks and exacerbates hypomania. It's not a good medication for somebody with Bipolar, unopposed by a mood stabiliser.

Messing around with medications was very dangerous, and I may have even put myself at risk of early-onset Parkinson's disease. Certainly, my later messing around with L-DOPA was on a trajectory leading to complete disaster.

It's about harm reduction though. Tea and coffee are on a stimulant continuum that leads to amphetamines and even stronger stimulants. Alcohol is on a depressant continuum that leads to benzodiazepines and even stronger 'downers'. If you have been using coffee & alcohol to self-medicate for your mood fluctuations, you will be driven to seek out stronger alternatives, when those substances no longer work anymore, or face a breakdown.

Eventually, you'll find that heroin is really great to help you sleep, and crystal meth is really great when you need to be awake and get stuff done. You don't want to end up there. Don't go there.

There are modern sleep aids like Zopiclone & Zolpidem, and newer wakefulness and concentration promoting agents like Methylphenidate (Ritalin) and Modafinil. Naturally, I experimented with these.

Ritalin, I found to be very much like cocaine. You want to take more but you're not sure why. You don't really feel like you're getting anything out of it, but you strangely find yourself taking loads of it. Dangerous. Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote a book called More, Now, Again which is amongst the literature that inspires my writing. However, it's simply not possible to snort 60 Ritalin pills, like she claims. That volume of powder will simply not fit into your nasal sinuses. She's right about one thing though: Ritalin is addictive.

Modafinil simply makes you awake, not happy. More time awake, unhappy, is really the very last thing that you want if you're depressed, so I discontinued its use and find no function for this wakefulness promoting agent, personally.

Zolpidem doesn't keep you asleep for long enough to be of any use. Sure, you fall asleep, but then you wake up again and spend the whole night with your usual insomnia. Useless.

Zopiclone works but it's a little too brilliant. Again, for somebody with Bipolar, waking up feeling totally refreshed simply stokes your hypomania to dangerous levels. It delays an inevitable crash, when the drug ceases to be effective at acceptable dosages, and insomnia leads to exhaustion, which leads to depression.

It's all available, out there on both the public internet and the Dark Web. It's a few clicks away for a middle class person with a computer and a postal address.

My parting advice is this: don't go there. Don't even look. Don't tempt yourself. Don't give yourself false hope. Don't experiment. I've done the experiments, and found nothing good there. The side effects just aren't worth it. The downsides outweigh the upsides.

There are no medicinal cures. There are no medications that 'fix' Unipolar Depression and Bipolar. It's an avenue not worth pursuing.

Sorry about that.

Tags: #bipolar #depression #mentalhealth

This is a story about helping people...

Those are some kids from an extremely poor fishing village in Northern Brazil who I gave my surfboard to. Imagine one of them gets really good at surfing, like former Brazilian windsurfing World Champion, Ricardo Campbello. But then imagine if they get a lucrative sponsorship deal and then with their wealth and fame, they get into drugs and die of an overdose. Did I help or did I hinder?

Same dilemma when a friend or relative gets sick. If you help them back to health, they might then go on to do something that they wouldn't have been able to if you'd just let them die. You now feel responsible for their fate. If they do good things, you feel glad and proud of what you did to help them. If they do bad things, you question whether you should have helped them, and not just let them die.

Is that how it works? I don't know. I don't tend to look at people and actions as good and bad. I tend to assume that there is a set of circumstances, an environment, that drives a person's behaviour. I also can't stand by and let things play out. I don't want to play God either, and decide that I know the future, and sit in judgement over anybody. I feel it's my duty to help where I can.

And so it was, I came to be helping Frank, or trying at least, to escape alcoholism and homelessness. A hotel and a hostel that I stuck him in, to get him off the streets, were not exactly thrilled to have him as a guest. But unwittingly, they are part of a larger story that saw Frank go through treatment for alcohol dependency, go teetotal and get a place to live.

For all I know, I may have delayed or detracted from something that was inevitable anyway. I might have actually risked his recovery, for all I know. All I know is that when I met him, he was homeless and a polydrug abuser with an alcohol dependency, as well as numerous other health complaints that were being exacerbated by living on the streets.

Naturally, Frank wanted more than I could give. He wanted me to make all his problems go away. Nobody can do that for somebody else. We're all fighting our own fight at the end of the day, we just need some supporters in our corner. We just need somebody to hold the bucket while we spit blood into it.

So, what's the difference between a lapse, and a fully-blown relapse into drug and/or alcohol abuse? Well, somebody who's had a drink, sobered up and is now telling you "I won't do that again" but has a bottle of vodka in their bag is clearly not very committed to sobriety.

During my recent shenanigans, I hid my little bag of Supercrack. Then I took a load of legal benzos and went to sleep. When I woke up, I considered that I needed to end the binge completely, or risk total relapse, however it was too easy to just go and retrieve my little baggie from its hiding place and continue the whole horrid affair.

It wasn't until I chose to flush the chemicals down the plughole, by my own free will, that I had clearly delimited the episode as a lapse, not a relapse.

Anybody is capable of going on the Internet and following the steps that I did, and then tearing open the postal envelope and snorting the contents inside. Therefore, we share the same addictive potential, you & I. In fact, I'm less of a risk than you, because I have far greater first-hand knowledge and experience of what the negative consequences are. It might take you several months or years before you realise that you're in deep s**t.

So, I'm presently going through a chemical and digital detox. That means that I probably haven't read any blog comments, Facebook comments, Facebook messages, WhatsApp messages or anything that has been sent to me electronically. Sorry about that. I do need those messages and I will get round to reading them and responding. I am extremely grateful that you took the time to send me anything. Please keep reaching out.

I do need your help, and it will make a positive difference. You're not 'enabling' me to continue to do anything naughty/bad, and you're not guilty by association to some future as-yet uncommitted crime spree or whatever it is that holds back those who think they have God-like Minority Report style powers to preordain the future.

I've been a bit of a puppet on a string, but I've managed to sever the ties to those unseen hands, and now I'm just your friend, who is very sick and very tired and very alone and very sad and very vulnerable.

Tags: #frank #homeless #addiction #alcohol #drugs #addiction

This is a story about brain damage...

When George Ricaurte and his team vivisected Rhesus monkeys and dissected their brains, after having given them enormous intravenous doses of Methamphetamine, they found that their neurons had been damaged. The very cells of their cerebellum had withered and died.

It's very hard to objectively judge whether you have driven yourself irreversibly insane, or how stupid and brain-dead you have made yourself, through the abuse of drugs & alcohol. But both are freely and relatively cheaply available in massive quantities to almost anybody who wishes to avail themselves of such substances.

I have a rough measure for the strength of my sanity. I can tell you, in terms of number of nights of sleep lost, at what point I will become psychotic, and at what point I will lose consciousness. 10 seems to be the magic number.

I had to go back to my house in Bournemouth, leaving behind my new home, my new friends, my new girlfriend, my new startup and my newly incorporated company, in order to rummage in my attic and find some crap to sell in order to raise some money, because my parents had reneged on their promise to save me the stress and hassle.

For 9 nights, I was hopped up on Supercrack, just about managing to sell my car and gather a few high value things, but otherwise totally out of it. On the evening of the 10th night, just as it was getting dark, I was convinced that the house was surrounded by police, and climbed into the attic without the ladder and tried to close the hatch behind myself.

I blacked out, and when I came round I didn't know what I was. I literally couldn't understand my blurry vision or what any of my senses or thoughts were telling me. Then I didn't know who or where I was. Was I in a rustic farm building? Was I a farmer? Then it became clear to me that I was in an attic, and I remembered who I was, but I had no idea how or why I would be there. Then it became clear that I was perilously close to the edge of an open hatch, with an 11 foot drop onto steep stairs, which descended another 10 or so feet onto a hard wooden floor.

A previously absent sense of self preservation caused me to cautiously lower the ladder and descend from the attic, whereupon I noticed that it was late afternoon. At least 18 hours had elapsed. I surely could not have slept, for I'm sure that movement in my sleep would have sent me tumbling through the hatch.

Remembering then, why I had entered the attic, I was surprised to not see any police. As a precaution, I then went and hid in my shed for another day or two, before I phoned a friend and asked if he could drive me back to London with the couple of valuable items I was going to sell.

It must be re-iterated that these items were not going to be sold for drink & drugs. Supercrack costs just 18p per day, remember? I'm not really built to sell junk from attics and sheds. I find it stressful. My Dad's 'job' since getting my Mum pregnant with me had been to buy & sell junk. My job, for almost my entire professional career, has been to write computer code in an air conditioned office.

Anyway, you can see that my window of opportunity had closed, and my life had become rather dysfunctional.

As soon as I got my share of the house sale money I put myself through 8 weeks of rehab, before remembering that there was some Supercrack hidden inside a golf brochure sent to me from Canada, in my stack of unopened post from 2 months prior. Given how much I hated my parents for tossing me to the wolves, I saw no reason not to pay them a visit and have a massive relapse in their home.

My left leg was destroyed as I tried to leave, in an unnecessary tussle with my Dad. I then tried to O.D. in some terrible flat in Kentish Town. As the amount of blood in my urine grew and grew, as my organs slowly shut down, I phoned an ex-girlfriend for help, when I felt sure that I only had about 24 hours left to live. The hospital gave me about a 30% chance of survival, and treated me for about 3 weeks, 6 intensive days of which were very touch-and-go.

Camden Council were most uncooperative in helping me, despite letters begging them to support me, from my GP and Psychiatrist. Finally, with no state support, I ended up in a hostel in Bayswater, and then living in a bush in Kensington Park Gardens.

Obviously, life was rather unstructured and dysfunctional, and again after the magic 9 nights of madness, I believed I was being pursued by police, ran across a rooftop, fell through a glass window, and then went and hid 80ft up a massive tree with a huge shard of glass sticking out of my 'good' leg.

The scar on my leg is about 5 inches long and nearly an inch wide. I lay in my bush in Kensington Park Gardens, in agony, until it healed enough for me to hobble to Paddington Station, where there is a public shower. I got cleaned up enough to get myself a hotel room.

A friend invited me to come and stay at her flat in Notting Hill, but I was so mad by this point that I tried to hide under a mop bucket in her basement. A fully grown naked man cannot be concealed by a mop bucket on his head.

She coaxed me out of the basement, whereupon I then tried to hide in a fortress of pillows and sofa cushions, and then decided to hide in her shed. I then took offence to my own penis and tried to rip it off my body. Having made quite a mess of it, and clearly sanity having escaped my grip for far too many weeks, I decided to try St. Mary's Hospital and Westminster Council.

Westminster Council beat up Camden Council for being so beastly towards one of their residents, and UCLH Androgyny were quite helpful in repairing my male member. One of the mental health Crisis Houses took me in for a couple of weeks while a search party for my marbles was despatched.

Fundamentally, I still believed that the state would keep its word in helping somebody who became addicted to a legal high, which the government then made illegal. My social worker had promised imminent admission to treatment services. There was also the promise of supported accommodation, post-treatment. This was salvation.

However, it all got botched. One social worker lost all my paperwork and had to restart the process entirely, and the next one decided to keep deferring my case, because she believed I could recover without state support.

It was me who blinked first, after 6 months of this hell. I used my credit card in order to get myself a hostel bed and no longer be sleeping rough on Hampstead Heath. In a way my social worker was right, I had been sufficiently scared, shellshocked and traumatised. It helped that when I once got arrested, the police doctor was very surprised that I didn't die in custody when she saw how low my blood pressure was. Being in a cell, dying, is not a very nice experience.

Anyway, I went cold turkey in a 14 bed hostel dorm, in full public view, on street bail with the police.

After a couple of months, I got a job and things appeared to be going swimmingly. However, the lifestyle of a completely insane, drug addicted homeless person, is somewhat incompatible with the life of a middle-class IT consultant working for a global bank. There was a certain amount of friction between old life and new.

Somewhere between losing all my friends, losing my job, the contract ending on a room that I had let and the general disintegration of my life, the whole horrible cycle started again. Recovery is fragile.

By May 2015, I believed that my mobile phone was talking to me and giving me instructions. Under its direction, I then embarked on a half-marathon, with a fully loaded backpack with all of my most valuable possessions in it.

This is your brain on Supercrack. Pre-existing mental health problems + drugs + gentle external encouragement = completely bat shit insane behaviour. Somebody doesn't just run like this just because they're on drugs, but it doesn't take much to get them going.

Don't worry though, because by June I had a job working for HSBC on the number one project: Customer Due Diligence, which is naturally where you would expect a homeless, insane, drug addict known to the police to find themselves. The global bank is clearly an expert in doing due diligence background checks on people.

Anyway, I might have made all this stuff up just to embarrass HSBC and the CIO in charge of the number one project, plus the rest of the management team, who are making a bit of a botch job of things. You'd need to do the due diligence to find out, which presumably HSBC did?

So, I leave it to you, dear reader, to judge. How do you find me? Completely bat shit insane on a permanent and irreversible basis that means I should be 'committed' immediately to an institution, where I will shuffle around for the rest of my heavily-medicated days, no longer a menace to society... or is there a question mark hanging over the whole infernal affair?

This very document, this entire blog, seeks to challenge your presumptions about addiction and mental health. Has it succeeded yet?

Tags: #nhs #mentalhealth #addiction #bipolar #depression #suicide #career #banking #london #homeless #injury

This is a story about dangerous combinations...

When people started dying of AIDS, everybody thought it was a disease limited to homosexual men. Everybody knows that hetros get HIV too, but what about high levels of promiscuity and apps like Grindr? Well, hetros have Tinder now etc.

Silendafil (Viagra) started to be commercialised globally during the 90's, and this also changed the public consciousness, to make the use of drugs during romantic interludes, more widely accepted.

Performance enhancing drugs get everywhere. EPO & Anabolic Steroids in sport. Modafinil and Methylphendiate in academia. Cocaine on the banks' trading floors. Dexedrine for the fighter pilots and soldiers.

Sex now has Cabergoline, which allows men to have multiple orgasms, as well as the erectile dysfunction medications. Also, stimulants like Crystal Meth give people unhuman sexual appetites and stamina.

The problem with combining an addictive drug with a compulsive behaviour, is that you are linking hardwired survival circuitry into the learning & reward mechanisms, which creates a feedback loop. Every time you get horny, you're going to want drugs. You can't stop getting horny... it's evolved into your DNA. You've misprogrammed your mesolimbic pathway.

I ordered some alloy wheel cleaner from BASF in Germany, which a few drops of used to accidentally fall into a gulp of orange juice for my ex-wife and me. "Should we do some more?" she used to say, and can you believe that I used to have to be the sensible one and say "no, we'd better stop there. Know our limits. Keep a handle on this thing".

So, my divorce was more than the loss of a life partner. It was the loss of a shared drug & sex addiction too. It wasn't healthy. It was co-dependent. It needed to end. It's just that whoever was weaker at the time was going to get destroyed. That was me.

If you feel like a freak, don't worry, in London you'll blend right in. You can get a f**k on Craigslist in about 30 minutes, on on Tinder in about an hour. I once met a chap in the park who asked me to be his eyes to get him to hospital because he had gone literally cross-eyed after eating 16 Viagra.

Too Much Information (TMI)? Well, actually, if you read more carefully there's no actual confession there. I'm just giving you the scope and the scale of the problem. The parameters that I'm working with.

Thankfully, you can't just walk to a stall on Camden Market, or a sex shop in Soho and buy Legal Highs now. You can't do it on a whim. You can't just happen to be passing by.

You can't even sell Legal Highs now. You have to call them Research Chemicals, and mark them as toxic. Not for human consumption. That's right. Accidents happen though.

None of this stuff is in my life, but it's 24 hours waiting for the postman away.

I've been dreaming about having a meal, having something to eat, but every time I wake up I feel too overwhelmed. I've lost my appetite. It can't possibly be a lack of blood in my drugstream, because there isn't anything alien in my system. I'm as clean as a whistle.

There's a mountain of things I need to deal with, including drinking & eating enough. Most of it is very mundane and practical. I know we've all shoved post in a drawer and tried not to think about it at some stage in our life. Imagine doing that with everything you need to do, including the consumption of enough calories to sustain life.

I'm sorry it all sounds a bit pathetic and needy. I'm sorry it's all so sordid and grubby. I'm sorry it's all so personal and embarrassing and shameful and private. You know, it's exhausting, hiding an alter ego that you're terrified of anybody discovering.

Oh well, f**k it. Cat's out of the bag now. I'm so exhausted. I'm going back to sleep. Maybe I'll have a lovely dream about Greggs the Baker again.

Tags: #addiction #alcohol #drugs #sex #divorce