This is a story about interpretation...

Anybody who has studied physics to an advanced level will tell you that at a certain point you have to suspend the search for the tangible, the intuitive, and start to make some leaps of faith. The Newtonian Universe, with action and reaction, starts to struggle to explain real-world observations.

I'm not in a survivable situation. I shouldn't have even been able to get this far, to climb this high. The odds are stacked against me in every way. There's not a chance that I could have been through what I've been through, and emerge relatively unscathed. People just don't recover from the trauma that I've put my mind and body through.

On examination, I have a facial tic and two hefty scars on my legs. My facial tic appears to have improved somewhat, since the summer. It's made worse by tiredness and stress, but I feel like it's not as pronounced as it was.

But what does this evidence tell us? Well, it's the tip of the iceberg. My mind and body have been to hell and back, quite a few times. For example, having functioning kidneys is a big surprise. You can't see the damage from the outside, but I suffered near-catastrophic levels of muscle loss, with accompanying damage to my kidneys, as the breakdown products from my body eating itself were going to ultimately prove fatal.

Would you believe that I have induced within my mind, all the symptoms of schizophrenia? I have, at times, believed that 'they' are out to get me (I have no idea who 'they' are... that's the point... it's mental illness) and been hearing and seeing things in a distorted way, misinterpreting what my senses have been telling me. These psychoses should be permanent. I should have been left permanently paranoid, psychotic.

The fact of the matter is that sanity is quite delicate. Anybody will start to have strange thoughts, if you skip enough nights of sleep and meals. Sleep deprivation and hypoglycaemia will mean that your brain will struggle to function. You can't really predict how badly each individual will react to these unusual stresses, but you can be sure that every human needs sleep & glucose.

I guess when you total up all the time that I've been in a psychotic state, it adds up to quite a worrying amount. Certainly enough to give me that facial tic. I used to have really bad full-body spasms, but I figured out which neurotransmitters needed topping up, as a form of prophylaxis to protect against early-onset parkinsons.

If you wonder why I eat so much protein, and take so many amino acids, it's because those things are providing my body with the building blocks to repair and protect itself. It's a thin line between temporary and permanent insanity.

If you were a psychiatrist or a psychologist, just looking at my clinical picture on paper, you would have to assume that I'd be a gibbering wreck. The path that has torturously wended its way through a few different counties NHS mental health services, through the private sector, and then back into NHS with rather a lot of chaos and the involvement of emergency services, across the midlands and several boroughs of London. Well, it's not a story that sits easily alongside a person who appears - to all outward observers - to have their s**t together.

The fact that I'm coping without medication, without the help of the mental health crisis team, without outpatient services, obviously not an inpatient... it's not something that very often crops up, given my case history.

I'm a bit of a statistical anomaly. I don't fit the data very neatly. If we're talking probabilities, I'm dead & buried several times over.

But what's going on inside my cranium? How much crazy am I just bottling up? Well, it's not pretty but it's not that bad either. I'm certainly not battling any psychosis. I don't hear voices, I don't see things, I don't think that I can read thoughts or control people with my mind. In fact, I have never experienced psychosis like that. My sanity has, thus far, been fairly solid in its foundations.

However, I have poked and prodded at questions, which are to all intents and purposes, unanswerable. I have plumbed the depths of what is knowable in an Earthly realm. I have considered things which are really not advisable to consider, lest you drive yourself insane.

Once you start to consider the full implications of something like the Many-Minds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics you start to question the very meaning of what it is to be conscious. When you start to do some basic maths, regarding the chances that you are alive and conscious at this very moment in time, with 7 billion other souls on the planet, then you can get rather overwhelmed by the statistical significance of it.

These thoughts come back to haunt me time and time again. When I'm unwell, I can even believe that I can perhaps model some of the Universe from base principles. I can perhaps come up with some great unifying theory of everything. Clearly this is a delusion of grandeur.

However, I'm no less able than anybody else to conduct thought experiments. In fact, I'm blessed with a very rational, logical mind. I have even done 'game of life' simulations and models in the past, with some success. But the fact remains, we're talking about hard problems, where hard doesn't even come close to cutting the mustard as an adjective.

So what's all this rambling all about? Well, in one sense my fate is sealed. If we were to consider the evidence, the clinical picture, the pattern of behaviour... I'm doomed! Either insanity, suicide or slow suicide by addiction should surely claim my life soon. It's a miracle that those fates have not already consumed me, and I'm here, stringing a sentence together.

Indeed, many people in my life have chosen to act as if there is a known outcome, as if they have a working crystal ball. Perhaps they have simply computed the odds based on the raw statistical data, and are playing the numbers. According to the numbers, I don't actually exist. According to the numbers, I died a long time ago.

I used to be very upset that people were writing me off before I had even had a chance to make an attempt at life. I used to get very frustrated that I was always a few days or a week or two behind those who wished to frustrate and undermine me. However, the tide has turned now and I finally have a fair wind behind me, and the gradient of the ground in my favour.

It must be upsetting to have somebody who just refuses to die and conform to your prophecies. It must be frustrating when somebody won't fit in the pigeon hole that you have assigned to them. It must be frustrating when somebody refuses to act in the way that you preordained, based on a supposed character flaw or some gift for knowing the future that you believe you have been blessed with.

I'm quite a fly in the ointment, refusing to shuffle off my mortal coil, or be driven irreversibly insane. People are a lot easier to handle when they fit nicely somewhere on the curve.

But I'm an outlier. I'm a stubborn son of a gun who refuses to just lie down and be neatly categorised. I'm very hard to manipulate. I'm very hard to discredit. I'm very hard to marginalise. I'm very hard to silence.

People have tried various underhand techniques to tame me, such as bullying, shaming, assaulting and the gathering of 'evidence' that they believe will show a 'smoking gun' unequivocally pointing to some easy conclusion that can be drawn. I'm sorry, but I'm just not that simple.

If I had one bit of advice for you, it would be to stop jumping ahead. Stop thinking that you can extrapolate from the few data points that you have. Stop thinking that you can predict the future, my future. I'm writing my future, and it very much seems as though my fate is not yet sealed, from what I can see. The grand finalé is as yet unwritten, despite your impatience to flip to the last page of the book and see how it all ends.

People come and go from my life, and I'm very grateful to those who have loyally stuck by my side. You have hopefully been rewarded with seeing a few different aspects of my character, and you can see that understanding and knowing a person is not as simple as making a rash judgement based on what you see, the moment you walk in on a person's life.

People are full of surprises, and even if you've known somebody their entire life, you still don't know what makes them tick, or what they're going to do next.

Tags: #mentalhealth

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 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 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 three types of people...

There are only 3 types of people in the world. That's it. The whole of humanity can be divided into just 3 buckets. If you want to label people, you can use one of these 3 handy labels, to judge people.

But 3 doesn't sound like very many? Aren't people way more complicated than that? Aren't there 12 buckets that people are put in, like signs of the zodiac? Yes, isn't your star sign all you need to know about a person to figure out everything you need to know about a person? If you know somebody's star sign, you just have to look at their horoscope for the day, and you can predict their future, right?

Well, maybe all that horoscope stuff is bunkum. Maybe it's New Age hippy crap that doesn't mean anything. I mean, it's not very scientific, is it? Everybody knows that horoscope writers just put generic stuff that could apply to anybody. That's the skill in writing horoscopes: writing statements that are ambiguous enough that they could apply to anybody.

So what about Myers-Briggs? Isn't 16 types of people rather than 12 the solution? Having 16 buckets to put 7 billion people into is surely the solution to the madness of believing in horoscopes. Yes, those extra 4 buckets make all the difference.

I do take some pride from the fact that I come out as an ENTJ - Field Marshal - personality type, when I'm tested, which is only 1 to 3% of the population. However, I have a way of simplifying things and making them very black & white. I'm a computer programmer, so I like binary. There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.

So, the best I can do is to categorise people into 3 buckets, so that they can be judged and mistreated accordingly. We seem to love prejudice and presumption, and bullying people, so I've developed a really simple test and a form of categorising people into just 3 categories.

Here it is...

Type I - Potential Addicts

The potential addict is somebody who has not yet tried addictive substances. An addictive substance is anything psychoactive that alters your perception of reality, with examples being:

• Alcohol
• Caffeine (as found in tea, coffee and cola)
• Nicotine (as found in cigarettes, cigars, shisha and vape)
• Medication for depression & anxiety
• Pain medication
• Legal highs
• Narcotics (illegal drugs)

The potential addict has not yet tried any of these things, so we do not yet know if this person is an addict. These people are normally children, because most adults have been exposed to one of the above substances.

Only if you have never tried any of the above substances, can you be considered to be a potential addict.

You need to be really honest when you are answering the single question that identifies you as a potential addict.

Here's the only question you need to answer:

Have you ever taken any of the substances listed above?

The next part is really easy. If the answer is no, then you are a potential addict and your capacity for addiction is as yet unknown. You should be regarded with fear and mistrust. You are a ticking time bomb of addiction. You are a potential monster. You are a menace to society.

Type II - Addicts

The addict is somebody who, at least once every 3 to 6 months, takes an addictive substance. An addictive substance is anything psychoactive that alters your perception of reality, with examples being:

• Alcohol
• Caffeine (as found in tea, coffee and cola)
• Nicotine (as found in cigarettes, cigars, shisha and vape)
• Medication for depression & anxiety
• Pain medication
• Legal highs
• Narcotics (illegal drugs)

The addict takes these substances on a regular basis. Whether that's every 3 to 6 months, or daily dosages of the demonic plant alkaloid known as caffeine. Addicts who drink steaming hot cups of addiction are littered throughout society, flagrantly parading their lack of willpower and devil-may-care attitude to the damage they're doing to themselves and others.

Addicts who smoke or vape are smelly and are setting fire to money on a regular basis and inhaling toxic combustion products, and toxic chemicals. This insanity is further evidence that they have been possessed by a demon. That demon is addiction. These people are monsters. They should be shot at dawn. Their heads should be put on a spike.

Medically sanctioned addiction is no better. Just because your doctor (a.k.a. drug dealer) gave you medication for pain, that's no different from scoring heroin on a street corner. There is zero difference between obtaining medication for depression, or injecting heroin to treat your crushing emotional damage. Zero. Nada. Exactly the same thing.

You need to be really honest when you are answering the single question that identifies you as an addict.

Here's the only question you need to answer:

Do you take any of the substances listed above (every 3 to 6 months or more regularly)?

The next part is really easy. If the answer is yes, then you are an addict and you need help. Why are you wasting money and damaging your health taking substances? There's no excuse.

Because you can't stop taking these substances, you have proven to the world that you have no self-control. You have proven to the world that you have no willpower. You have proven to the world that you're weak. You selfish monster. I hate you. Pooh you! You shitting pooh-pooh head! Stinky bum head!

You lose, addict.

Type III - Non-Addicts

The non-addict is somebody who has tried addictive substances but has not become addicted. The definition of not being addicted is having tried something, but choosing not to take addictive substance. The very process of not taking an addictive substance is what defines a non-addict.

The non-addict is aware of the effects of addictive substances, but chooses not to use them. The non-addict is somebody who demonstrates willpower and self-control. The non-addict, is by their very omission, proving that they are not addicted. They have tried, and they resist the temptations of the addictive substances.

Not taking addictive substances, having tried them, is the only way to prove that you're not a potential addict. If you haven't tried addictive substances, you simply don't know whether you're an addict or not. A non-addict can conclusively show that they are not an addict. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Non-addicts are completely abstinent from all of the following substances:

• Alcohol
• Caffeine (as found in tea, coffee and cola)
• Nicotine (as found in cigarettes, cigars, shisha and vape)
• Medication for depression & anxiety
• Pain medication
• Legal highs
• Narcotics (illegal drugs)

The non-addict has tried one or more of these substances, and proven that they are not an addict, by not taking them. If you take any of the above substances, you are an addict, not a non-addict.

It's a really easy test to see if you're an addict or not. If you drink tea, coffee or cola, you're probably an addict who is in denial. Denial is not a river in Africa. Denial is when you deliberately ignore the evidence.

Non-addicts have collected evidence that they are not addicts. Non-addicts are laughing at you when you accuse them of being addicts, in between sips from your coffee cup.

There's a simple test to see if you're a non-addict or not. You have to go for more than 6 months without having any of the addictive substances you've tried. Yes that's right: any of the substances. Because addictions can be transferred, you can't just stop taking heroin and take up drinking coffee. You can't just stop smoking cigarettes and start having cups of tea. That's just transferring your addiction.

Here's the only question you need to answer:

Do you take any of the substances listed above (every 3 to 6 months or more regularly)?

The next part is really easy. If the answer is no, then you are a non-addict and you can laugh at anybody who talks to you about addiction in between cups of coffee and puffs on cigarettes, while swallowing loads of medications etc. etc.

If you break your abstinence by taking any of the listed substances, then you are an addict. There's no cheating. There are no excuses. You are self-medicating for your untreated addiction if you take anything from the list above. You might be in denial if you're saying things like "yes, but" or fooling yourself about how regularly you are taking addictive substances.

Only a non-addict is able to go for over 6 months without any of the substances listed above. And only a non-addict can stick two fingers up at you and laugh and call you a c**t. Yes, non-addicts are allowed to be all high and mighty, and look down their nose sneeringly at you. Only a non-addict is allowed to be pious and critical of your lifestyle. Only a non-addict is allowed to act all holier-than-thou and pretend they're whiter than white.

It's an established fact that non-addicts are allowed to be as horrible as they like to Type I and Type II people, because they're inferior. The Type I and Type II people are weak and worthless, and can be treated with disdain, contempt and disrespect. Type I and Type II people are literally pieces of s**t that shouldn't be p**sed on if they're on fire.

I think you'll find that this logic is completely watertight. I think you will find that there is not a single flaw in this reasoning. I'm sure that you'll agree wholeheartedly with this new system of classification, given that it is reasoned from unquestionable base principles.

My own mother used to take heroin, but then stopped. She believes that this proves she isn't a heroin addict. Her reasoning is pretty sound. Seems to make sense to me, at least. Well done her.

Only my Mum still smokes and she's a total alcoholic. Oh, and she drinks loads of tea and coffee. So I guess she's still an addict. Oh, oops. So her stopping taking heroin really didn't prove anything, did it? No. Especially as she was still taking other illegal drugs. Yes, there seems to be a flaw in her logic.

I like my Mum, even if she's a total alcoholic junkie. She decided to have a baby (me) with another alcoholic junkie, which is a shame, but at least they never judged me, because they're aware of their own addictions.

Oh no, hang on a second. There was that time when they walked into my house and stopped me from emailing psychiatrists about a hospital admission to treat my Bipolar Disorder, and instead accused me of being a drug addict and dragged me outside where some work colleagues saw me and wondered why I wasn't at work.

Yes, it seems rather odd that a couple of drug addicts would enter the private home of a person with a mental illness, and drag him through the streets, accusing him of having a drug addiction. That would seem to be rather hypocritical to me.

I wonder what the psychological effects of such action would be. To shame your son for the guilt that you yourself carry. To blame your son for your own lack of willpower and addiction. That would be pretty shitty, wouldn't it?

Yes, my parents kinda like to pass the buck. They think they're so smart, but they're just out to cover their own guilt. They're pretty paranoid and psychotic after so many years of extensive drug and alcohol abuse. Years and years and years. It takes its toll on the body and the mind. They have lost the plot. They're fucking senile.

Oh, what about me?

Well, I've not been drinking for 82 days, but I've been abstinent from all the other substances for 6 months. I'm well on my way to non-addict status. I'm a lot more of a non-addict than anybody else I know. That's why I find it so insulting and offensive when people want to talk to me about alcohol, drugs etc.

If you want to know about being a non-addict you should be asking me, not telling me things. I can tell you about how hard it is to flush all psychoactive substances from your life. They are ubiquitous. They put caffeine in all sorts of things, so that you get hooked on those products.

I have started to hear people saying "sugar is a drug" and that's given me an idea.

When you eat food, your body will break it down and convert the carbohydrates into glucose, because glucose is what powers every cell in your body. Your human body runs on glucose and oxygen. Your body runs on sugar.

However, I accept the challenge.

I've decided that as my final challenge I will go without sugar. Given that sugar is glucose, and all food is converted to glucose, I will have to go without food. Yes, if I'm going to quit sugar, I will have to quit food.

So, I've decided to go on hunger strike. Yes, when you're all stuffing yourselves with your Christmas dinner, I think I will go and stay in a tent (houses are a drug?) and just live on fresh air. I'm going to quit food for Xmas. How's about that?

I'm just taking things to their logical conclusion. The only way to prove that you're a non-addict is to give up on food.

If you give up on food, pretty soon you give up on oxygen. Oxygen is a drug. You keep taking breath after breath, you oxygen addict!

I'm going to quit food, because food contains sugar, and sugar is a drug. By quitting food, I get to quit oxygen too.

Yes, when I'm dead from starvation, suffocation, you will be able to see just how brilliant not being addicted to anything is. Make sure you have a warm cup of tea or coffee with some sugar in it to sip at my funeral. The glucose from the sugar will help to keep you warm, and the caffeine will help you concentrate on whatever bullshit the preacher is spouting.

Hurrah for me. I'm a fucking genius. I've figured out how to not be addicted to ANYTHING.

Yes, I'm going to sit in my tent, with no food, no sex, no internet, no gambling and certainly no tea or coffee. I've never smoked and I don't take drugs, so it should be fairly easy. I just need to beat a few hunger pangs and then the pain will be over.

I'm looking forward to an eternity as a non-addict. The dead aren't addicted to anything. Hurrah for the dead. I aspire to be dead. I'm mostly there.

Have a little think about what type of person you are. Be honest. How long have you honestly done, without a single drop of any of the substances I listed? You're going to have to be super duper honest because addiction makes you lie to yourself and others

Tags: #addiction #alcohol #drugs #bipolar #mentalhealth #childhood #parents #notanonymous

This is a story about demon drink...

Drinking champagne, meant for a wedding. A toast to the bride, a fairytale ending. Those are some of my favourite song lyrics.

I'm not alcoholic because alcoholics go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and they can't stop drinking. Alcoholism, by its very definition, is the inability to curtail your consumption despite the damage to your health, wealth and relationships. I don't abuse alcohol and I can stop drinking for long periods whenever I want, so I'm not an alcoholic. Quod erat demonstrandum.

I can go lengthy periods without alcohol. Currently, I've not been drinking for the last 76 days, and I'm going to do 101 days, just because I can. Yes, you might have the odd 6 days off drinking, but I bet you've never done 8 days. I bet you've never done 28 days. I bet you've never done 90 days. The chances are, if you tried to quit, you'd find that your 'willpower' is very weak indeed.

Alcohol is brilliant for treating anxiety. It calms the nerves. It's like Diazepam (Valium) in a bottle from the supermarket, with a hangover. The two drugs - alcohol and Diazepam - have exactly the same effect on the Central Nervous System (CNS)... the brain. They both cause the release of a neurotransmitter called GABA, which calms the brain. Alcohol is a GABA agonist which means it causes GABA to be released in the brain.

If you flood your brain with GABA, you will be more relaxed and somewhat disinhibited. People incorrectly say that alcohol is a depressant but it's actually a CNS suppressant. That is to say, it suppresses a certain amount of brain activity. It makes you chilled out and stupid. It does not make you depressed, but if you are depressed, those feelings may come to the forefront of your mind, because you are disinhibited.

You can get happy drunks, angry drunks and sad drunks. All that is happening, is that the person's mask is slipping and you're seeing what they're really like behind their public persona. Alcohol is almost a truth serum. In vino veritas, means "in wine, truth". The Romans knew a lot about wine.

Why do I keep quoting latin at you? Well, it's because I'm challenging your shorthand notation for a person's life. I think I overheard somebody describe my reason for not drinking the other day as "because he's a recovering alcoholic"... that's outrageous! I have elected not to drink through choice. If I was an alcoholic, I would be alcohol dependent, and therefore unable to choose to stop drinking despite my desire to save my liver and bank balance from being decimated.

In actual fact, stopping drinking has cost me staggering sums of money. I was working on HSBC's number one project - Customer Due Diligence - which was an incredibly stressful project requiring very long hours of sustained high pressure. The only way to cope was with alcohol. When I quit drinking, I could no longer cope with the madness of that failing project.

I had decided to quit drinking for the Go Sober for October charity event, which would give me an excuse to resist the relentless peer pressure to get drunk with my colleagues. I lived and breathed the project I was working on, and I live and breathe banking, which means I lived and breathed drinking culture. It's very hard to be a sober banker, especially on the number one projects.

Alcohol carried me through JPMorgan's DTCC project (their number one project that year) and we delivered it on time and on budget with a green offshore team of Accenture developers. I was the Development Manager. Just about the only way to cope with the pressure and stress of that project was with copious amounts of alcohol... oh and some very cool bosses who just let me get on with my job.

I've had the good fortune of working with some very brilliant people. Most of whom have been massive drinkers. I've started to lose friends to liver damage though. Alcohol abuse catches up with you eventually.

Is it some health scare that caused me to stop drinking? Well, so far as I know my liver is OK. I had an ultrasound a couple of years ago, and my liver was torn from blunt trauma and damaged by hyperthermia, but it wasn't cirrhotic. Alcohol didn't cause the damage because I wasn't drinking at the time (or eating, but that's another story). My liver has been fully recovered for quite a while now. It's one of the few organs in the body that can repair itself, if you give it a chance.

So, what's the short answer? What's the shorthand? What's the soundbite? Well I'm afraid there is no shorthand. You can't label me as an alcoholic because I don't abuse alcohol. I don't even drink. Q.E.D.

Did alcohol abuse cause me to go homeless? Did alcohol abuse put me in hospital? Are those events connected to alcohol? No.

No, sorry to disappoint you. I wasn't drinking at any of the times when I have been hospitalised. I know you're hunting for something to point your finger at. I know that victim blaming is convenient. We like to label people. We like to pigeon hole people. Sadly, I don't really fit inside a neat little box. Nobody does, despite how much easier and less scary life appears to be when we imagine that we can pre-judge everybody.

Nothing good ever came from prejudice.

That's a photo of the last alcohol that I consumed, on the 25th of September 2015. A glass of port with some shrooms. Not magic mushrooms, containing the psychedelic chemical Psilocybin, because that's a Class "A" drug. Nope, those shrooms contain ice cream. Those glasses contain port wine.

Since then, I've had a fall-out with one of my oldest friends who's now not talking to me, I lost my job and I've been in hospital for a week. I also nearly threw myself off the Golden Gate Bridge, due to suicidal thoughts. All in all, not a great case for sobriety. My wealth and mental health have been severely impacted by my 101 day experiment, but I've started so I'll finish.

Conducting this in-vivo experiment has been extremely unethical. To risk your life and livelihood in order to discover the link between alcohol, anxiety and depression, is not something that any medical professional could sanction, condone. I've had to ignore the advice of healthcare professionals in order to uphold my commitment to discovering what happens when you quit drinking.

I'm not completely reckless. I know that for dangerous levels of alcohol dependency, quitting drinking abruptly can kill people. Having a seizure due to the sudden drop in the alcohol levels in your bloodstream can kill you. In a treatment centre for alcoholism, they would give you Librium and taper your dose down gently, to prevent you from having a fit.

Despite not having a physical alcohol dependency, it has still been exceedingly unpleasant to quit drinking. The elevated levels of anxiety that you experience, due to the conditioning of your body to expect alcohol as a coping mechanism for high stress levels, makes life fairly unmanageable. You have absolutely no idea how much of a crutch alcohol is in your life, because you've never quit boozin' for months on end. You just haven't done it. Period.

I really don't give a toss whether you want to carry on drinking or not. I won't judge you. I'm not preaching to the world about the few benefits of being a non-drinker. I'm not expecting people to go teetotal like me. In fact, I really don't think you can do it. It's too hard for most people. Most people are addicts. They say "I can quit anytime I want" because they can not drink for 6 days and not have tea/coffee/coke for 2 days. Those are not long enough periods of time to make any pronouncement about your addiction. Those short periods of time prove nothing, except that you can fool yourself into thinking you're not substance dependent.

It takes time for cravings and withdrawal to kick in. The headaches and cognitive impairment associated with stopping caffeine use takes at least 3 days to kick in. You will have terrible cravings after a week or so. You don't know this stuff, because you never go for long enough without a cup of tea or coffee, or a can of Coca-Cola.

The anxiety associated with alcohol withdrawal is something that creeps up more gradually. Your body is conditioned to know that there's always a bottle or a glass handy when you need it. Just knowing that alcohol is readily available actually makes you less anxious. Just knowing that stress relief is available on tap actually makes you less stressed. You will feel relief from your anxiety, flooding your body from the very first sip of an alcoholic drink. That's not possible. The alcohol can't enter your bloodstream that quickly. Your brain has simply learnt to release the GABA, in response to the smell of wine, beer & spirits. It's a conditioned response.

I'm sorry to report that you're no different than Pavlov's Dog. Yes, you respond to the ringing of the bell for last orders at the bar, by salivating for more alcohol, with just the same conditioned response as a dog slobbering for its meat chow, when the mealtime bell is sounded.

You might think you're high & mighty, because you can use your higher brain functions in order to pass judgement over other people. But under your pseudo-intellectual skin, you're the same animal as anybody else. You simply aren't well educated or well informed enough to be aware of your own ignorance, when you pass judgement over people.

So am I a functional alcoholic? Well that's a contradiction in terms. Killing yourself, damaging your health and wealth... surely that's dysfunctional behaviour, by its very definition? The fact that I can start and stop drinking at will, whenever I want, for however long I want... surely that undermines the whole concept of any kind of alcoholic, functional or otherwise?

I will probably start drinking again, after 101 days. For my next trick, I'm going to have a glass of red wine every day, and no more than that. I'm going to show that I can exercise self-control even with the disinhibition of the intoxication from a dose of ethanol. Yes, it's obvious that impaired judgement associated with ethanol intoxication is a reason why people drink more than they planned, but the rational brain never gets put to sleep entirely. We can still exercise a degree of self control.

None of this is very hard for me... because I'm no longer homeless. I have the threat of homelessness hanging over me, because I lost my job (because I stopped drinking). When you're homeless and you have no hope of a better life, drinking helps to anaesthetise you from the cold. The cold of the weather, and the cold shoulder that friends, family and society shows to you. You become untouchable. You are considered a tramp, a bum, a loser... you are shunned.

There is a vicious cycle associated with homelessness and alcohol abuse. People never consider chicken and egg. They never consider the reasons why somebody started to abuse alcohol, and whether those reasons are still present. Alcohol abuse is a symptom, not a cause of somebody's problems. People don't drink to excess unless they're very unhappy about something.

Alcohol abuse is a form of self medication. Alcohol is not inherently the problem. It's a symptom of a problem. Treat the root cause of the issue, and the alcoholism goes away. Plenty of people drink to excess, but they're not homeless and destitute. We applaud Hooray Henrys who throw wild parties and drink with gay abandon. Those glittering socialites are heros.

Drinking £700 of sparkling wine that was meant for my wedding should have been a warning sign, but I was too intoxicated to see what was really going on. Self medication numbed me to the fact that I was trapped in an abusive relationship, and had taken to the bottle to be able to cope with it, and a super stressful job. It was more than any human is capable of handling, without chemical assistance. My medication of choice was alcohol, for a long time.

Am I confessing that I was an alcoholic? Let's repeat this once more: alcoholics are people who are unable to stop drinking despite detrimental effects on their life, and the lives of those around them. I can stop drinking at will, whenever I want. I'm an expert on not drinking. I know far more about not drinking than you do.

Perhaps I should do 9 months of not drinking, or however long it is that good mothers don't drink for. But we already know that stress, anxiety and depression in pregnant women and new mums is a huge problem. So there's already a good data set to prove that quitting alcohol is hard on the minds of women, despite the elevated oxytocin levels associated with childrearing. That's pretty damning evidence about the long-term psychological/brain damage that alcohol abuse does.

It's very controversial to be writing this stuff, but there is heaps of data and anecdotal evidence around to support it. We just need to be good scientists, and observe what we see in the world around us. Conducting in-vivo experiments is dangerous and unethical, but it's yielding interesting findings.

Roll on 101 days!

You've structured your life around addictive substances like alcohol and caffeine more than you will ever possibly know unless you do a lengthy period of abstinence (September 2015)

Tags: #alcohol #addiction #notanonymous

This is a story about clinging on for dear life...

When you are hounded to the edge of the abyss, you will fall to your death if you allow yourself to be pushed one single step more. You shouldn't push people that hard. You shouldn't be so harsh, critical, judgemental, presumptuous. You don't know how close somebody is to the edge, until they're gone.

I don't want to go on about this, but I'm dealing with suicidal thoughts on a daily basis. If you think that's because I'm mentally ill, you're wrong. My brain has correctly judged the circumstances, and it's telling me that I have very few options. My brain is correctly informing me that I'm on the edge of a precipice, and the other side is a jeering snarling crowd who don't care whether I live or die.

People accuse suicidal people of being attention seeking, or selfish. It's actually neither. You have all the time in the world to hurl those accusations at a gravestone when they're gone. They won't be receiving any attention or anything for themself when they're gone. They won't even be stealing a single precious breath of your oxygen anymore, so how can it be selfish?

I've got a life insurance policy that covers suicide. My family are literally better off if I'm dead. That's cold hard cash in their pockets, rather than the rather draining task of repeatedly telling me I'm not good enough and I'm selfish. Yes, it's hard work to have to keep telling somebody to keep taking steps towards their demise, to keep hounding them until they're dead.

In Oxford, I'm pretty sure I came up with the term pushy parents. It kind of stuck with my friends, and their parents, and the phrase entered the popular vernacular. There were a lot of high-achieving kids at my schools in Oxford, and living nearby. My parents had big plans for their only son. They were going to make me achieve everything that they had failed to ever achieve, by force.

We all want our kids to do well, to get ahead, to achieve their greatest potential, but you have got to realise that they're still children. If you push them hard their whole childhood they won't thank you for it, if you push them beyond their limits and make them sick. You will struggle to judge how hard they can work, and how much stress and pressure they can handle, because you are a mature adult, and they are a developing child.

A child's attention span is different from yours. A child's knowledge and experience is different from yours. A child's ability to express distress and protect themself is different from yours. A child's capacity to experience daily stress and pressure and bullying and coercion is different from yours.

You might think that you are bringing up baby Einstein, but in fact you might be twisting that child's personality into somebody who's very bitter and resentful about being kept in from seeing their friends in order to study more. You might not be aware just how deeply etched childhood experiences are in that child's memory. You have no idea what is important to that individual child, especially if you don't listen.

Why am I bitching and whining about this stuff? Well, let me remind you: I'm living with the desire to commit suicide. I can only act on this once, and then I have no further opportunity to tell you who I really am, to tell you what makes me tick. This is a time capsule. It tells you everything you didn't want to know about me when I was alive.

This is the inconvenient truth. This is the smoking gun. This is the postmortem analysis.

I read a few books that were posthumously published after the author's death. The anguish, the distress, the emotion of the authors, thinly concealed behind passive agression and satire, oozes out from those works of literature. The words are soaked with emotion. Every sentence packs a punch, swung wildly at an unseen enemy.

I was systematically re-programmed to believe that my life was worthless, which is why I take huge risks. It's not selfishness if the self has no value. The more that you tell a person that they're shit and they're a burden and they're not good enough, the less risk-averse they become. They will go to great lengths to prove themself or to feel some connection to life.

I don't care what anybody says. Extreme sports are not stupid... they're brave. I can barely express to you just how cold, hard & rational you have to be to step into an extreme environment. You are literally weighing life & death with your every action. You are making decisions that can barely be comprehended by somebody who hasn't willingly laid their life on the line.

My Dad's a real coward. He's abusive to me and my Mum, and he won't admit he's in the wrong. He's such a coward that he hid behind his front door and got the police to deal with me when I went to confront him. He won't even face his own son, on the level, like an adult. He's never done anything brave in his life. He's a real disappointment to me.

I'm actually very calm and rational. I realise my Dad's an old man, and he's good to my sister and my niece, so I wasn't going to risk his life by pulverising him. I just wanted him to stand and face his own son, and confront the issue of him abusing me and my mum. I wanted him to admit he was wrong, to my face. I didn't demand it, but I felt that only a coward would shy away from an honest face to face conversation about his wrongdoing. I was right. He's a coward.

My Mum gave me life, and actually helped save my life and give me hope when I had my back against the wall, but my Dad is poisonous. He actually talks my Mum out of helping me. He probably thinks he's being a protector, a hero, but he's wrong. He's protecting nobody. My Mum will be hurt when I'm dead, and his son will be dead. My sister won't have a brother, and my niece won't have an uncle, and he won't accept any responsibility.

Yes, responsibility. Let's talk about responsibility.

On a daily basis, I'm responsible for my own life. I need to eat, sleep and not throw myself off a tall building. Yup, that's pretty much my entire existence at the moment. I'm trapped at the edge, and the route back to safety is blocked by my Dad, the 'protector' so I'm desperately trying to find another route back to safety, while my Dad is busily telling everybody not to help me.

I have no idea why somebody would step in and tell a caring person not to help a desperate person. I have no idea why a Dad would tell a Mum not to help their child. It's really upsetting. It's upsetting for me, and it's upsetting for my Mum, to have my Dad driving wedges in-between family members. Why can't we all just get along?

I'm not a defective toy, and you can't just return me to the store. I'm not broken, you just have to accept that I'm a human and I have my own identity, and I have identical needs to any other human. I need glucose, water, oxygen, salt, protein, fat, fibre and emotional sustenance. Cutting me off from my own mother by trying to poison her opinion of her own son, to compensate for your own shortcomings, that's patently disgusting.

I can have a lovely conversation with my Mum. Then, the next time we speak, her views will have been completely tainted by my Dad. I have no idea what his big problem is, but I suppose I should try harder to get to the bottom of it. It's no longer the case that I should assume that his 30+ years more on the planet means that he should be the more mature one.

Yes, I've always wanted to look up to my Dad. I've always wanted him to be a role model for me. I've always wanted him to lead by example.

My Dad doesn't really follow through though. He's a quitter. He's never had a career like I have. He's never achieved anything academically like I have. He's never been able to provide enough for his family. He's a real failure. A drunk and a drug addict, he's a bit of a loser, and I guess he feels pretty bad about himself.

Yes, he took his parents money and squandered it. His parents were wealthy and sent their kids to private school, and he messed up his chances of achieving anything of note. He mucked about with drugs and decided that was his priority in life... to take drugs. Even after the arrival of his son, he decided that the pursuit of drugs was still the most important thing in his life.

One of my best friends was a drug addict. When his son arrived, he cleaned up his act. He got himself a mortgage and a steady job. He quit drugs and smoking and keeps himself fit and healthy for his son. He's my role model. I look up to him. I admire what he's done. He's the gold standard that I aspire to emulate.

Men need father figures in their lives. They need masculine identity, which is about strength, leadership, trust, providing for loved ones, consistency, resourcefulness, reliability, dependability. You can't depend on a drug addict. The only thing they love is drugs.

My Dad actually destroyed his health with drugs, and had to go to hospital for a series of operations at around the time that my niece was born. I'm not sure whether fear of death or the arrival of a grandchild was the reason why he cleaned up his act, but he did finally quit drugs, in his sixties.

Nobody preaches louder than a convert, and I imagine that my Dad is very pious now that he's no longer abusing drugs. I don't drink or take drugs, but my Dad is pretty insufferable about many aspects of my lifestyle. He assumes that because I live in London I'm high on cocaine all the time. He assumes that because I have high earning potential, I spend it all on drugs. He's completely wrong.

Because he's a fuckup, he assumes I'm a fuckup too, but he's wrong. Because he's made mistakes in his life, he assumes I've made the same mistakes. Because he let people down, he assumes I'm going to let people down too. He applies his own guilt to me. He makes me carry the guilt for his wrongdoing.

I've got a brilliant title for a blog post lined up for December 26th, so I can't tell too much of my story at the moment without spoiling the surprise. There aren't actually any surprises. Everything is here, somewhere, but I'm going to spell things out for the world. It's extremely frustrating that I have to pace myself, to tell things little by little, but patience is a virtue.

I'm currently writing 2,000 words a day, and it's already swamping people. Hardly anybody is still engaged with my writing. It's gotten a bit unbalanced, and there are themes that are beginning to be a bit like a broken record. I'm actually dragging things out a little now, because I picked some milestones, and I'm making sure I don't give away enough to allow people to think that they can extrapolate and guess how the story ends.

I'll tell you how and when the story currently ends, according to my plan: I kill myself on New Year's Day, having told my tale but without the energy, support or resources to be able to continue living. It's exhausting being beaten for your 'sins' which are actually a result of taking abuse for somebody else's guilty conscience.

I'm going to tell you how somebody gets driven to extremism. Extreme risk taking. Extreme behaviour. Extreme moods. Death, which is at the other extremity from birth.

When a child is born, you write their future, based on the opportunities that you offer them. Choice is an illusion. Free will is an illusion. We can only play the cards that we are dealt.

Tags: #childhood #suicide #parents #depression

This is a story about being down and out on the streets of Camden Town...

Performing your greatest hits over and over again drives you insane. However, the public and society expect you to keep repeating what you do best, again and again and again, like a dancing bear or a dog trained to do tricks.

Whoever pays the piper calls the tune, but I'm not a CD player. If you want to listen to the same song over and over again, just press the repeat button on your iPod. Making an artist compromise on their creativity, in order to simply be a human machine, a robot, can destroy them.

The anxiety associated with knowing you have to do something that you've done so much that it's a complete paint by numbers, starts to become an unbearable burden on your ability to be able to function. Pretty much the only way to remain functioning is to drink yourself into such oblivion that you just don't care anymore.

Alcohol is a GABA agonist. What that means is that it suppresses a certain amount of your brain activity. It's effectively making you chilled out and dumb. Yes, if you're chilled out and dumb, you don't mind doing the same stupid shit over and over and over again. If you're intelligent and creative it destroys your soul, your desire to continue living.

Is it arrogant to say "fuck this" and stop doing what your talent and experience qualifies you to do, because it's destroying you? Should I just shut the hell up and "get a job" as I've been told to do by some ignorant twats? Well, it would literally kill me.

There are 2 ways I could die right at the moment. I could kill myself or I could drink myself to death. These are both sane responses to an insane world. I'm not a robot. Sorry about that.

My whole job is to automate human tasks. My whole job is to get mechanical robots, machines, to perform repetitive tasks instead of having human slaves or human robots doing them. We have reached a point with the development of technology, computing, software, where we don't need to do stupid repetitive shit anymore. Even creating software doesn't have to mean re-inventing the wheel anymore.

So, if you ask me to do something that's just plain wrong, I won't do it anymore. If you ask me to write code that's just going to go into the dustbin, I won't do it. I've stopped writing bugs. I've stopped supporting failures and idiots who don't have a software background. If you don't know your arse from your elbow, I won't show you the respect that you don't deserve.

If you want to know how to build software that can process $1.16 quadrillion ($1,160,000,000,000,000) per year, you can pay me for my professional opinion and I'll show you how it's done. That's the most money that's ever been processed by a banking software system, so that means I know what I'm talking about. If you don't want to listen, we can part company and I'll wish you the very best of luck.

1% of 1 quadrillion is 10 trillion. 1% of 10 trillion is 100 billion. 1% of 100 billion is 1 billion. 1% of 1 billion is 10 million. Any questions?

Ignore what people tell you. Money really does grow on trees, for those who can be bothered to climb. Yes, geese that lay golden eggs really do exist. You just have to climb the beanstalk and risk the wrath of an angry giant.

Magic beans are not a waste of money. They can help you to climb the beanstalk. They won't help you climb back down again though. What goes up must come down, but you might take a tumble. More on this in a future post entitled: Self Medication (Part Two).

You've heard about doping in sport. Why would you think that the athletes of the corporate world would be any different from those who compete in the Olympic Games? The pressure to perform at the very top of your game is just the same, if not greater. The competition is fierce, and anything that gives you a competitive edge is needed unless you want to be trampled underfoot by the thundering herd.

Did you ever wonder why London drinks so much coffee? Did you ever wonder why people are prepared to pay the best part of £3 or £4 for some bitter black sludge? Well, it's because of a plant alkali called Caffeine. Yes, that's a performance enhancing drug. It helps you to concentrate, and allows you to work with more energy, stamina, than would ordinarily be permitted by your body & mind. It increases your output potential.

Limitless? No, not limitless. There is a cost involved, and that cost is insomnia and anxiety. But don't worry about that, because there's always alcohol to take the edge off the anxiety and put you into an alcohol-induced coma that is a substitute for sleep.

You are never more than a few tens of metres from an outlet for caffeine or alcohol in London. They even have bars at bus stops. Well, they don't really, but me and my friends made one. It was very popular. It was the ultimate London pop-up.

What can I get you, sir? Would you like uppers or would you like downers? Uppers in the morning, and throughout the day. Downers after work and throughout the whole weekend. Uppers again on Monday morning to get you going again. Heaps of downers on a Friday to try and calm down from the working week, to 'rest' and recuperate. Oh yes, London is a very high performance place.

So if it's not limitless, what happens when you reach the limits? What happens when you're working on the number one projects for the number one companies, dealing with the biggest amounts of money that have ever been processed in the history of humanity? What happens when you have completely saturated yourself with alcohol and caffeine?

Well, you need crutches. You need a wheelchair. You need something to keep you rolling. You become somewhat disabled, but you need to keep moving, so you get wheeled around or you have to hobble along. Why do you think your office chair has wheels on it? It's because you're probably so f**ked that you can barely stand.

Yes, globalisation and corporate culture will f**k you up. You're only playing by the rules. You're only trying to compete and stay up with the herd, but it's f**king everybody up. Setting everybody up to compete with one another is causing people to be trampled to death.

Adversarial culture is wrecking lives. Us vs. Them and the zero sum game is in the spirit of competition, not co-operation. For somebody to win, somebody else has to lose. The system is designed to have losers as well as winners, and because there can only be one winner, that means everybody else is a loser.

Ultimately, somebody is going to win. Yes, that's right. One person is going to have it all, and everybody else will be dead and buried. An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind, apart from the one-eyed man, who is king of the world. Everybody else just starves to death. Great system!

But we're all in this together, right? There's safety in numbers, surely? Well, you shouldn't put the Lions in charge of the herd of Zebra. That's pure madness. The conflict of interest between the Lions and the Zebra means that the Lions are not best placed to be in charge of the herd, even if they are at the top of the food chain.

Being an apex predator does not mean that you are best qualified to judge what the greater good is. It means that you're incentivised to be selfish. You don't want to tumble from your position at the top of the pyramid. Being one of the struggling masses is shit beyond belief.

Counter-culture does not mean sitting around smoking dope. That's just totally dumb. You might as well just hurl yourself into the Lion's mouth. Making yourself slow and stupid is just about the dumbest possible thing you could do. It's playing into the hands of the oppressive ruling class.

You think this is a bit paranoid and conspiracy-theory-esque? Well, do you feel lucky, punk? 2.7 billion people live on less than $2 a day. Would you and your family like to join them? Would you like to get to the back of the queue? Would you like to swap your decadent western life for the life of somebody in the developing world? No, I didn't think so. You'd much rather prop up the adversarial system where you're lucky enough to be near the top of tottering tree.

Yes, luck is the decisive factor here, not skill or hard work. You don't think people in Asia and Africa work hard? You don't think people in the developing world are smart and resourceful? You're wrong. You're arrogant. You're deluded.

So, why do I reject the system that I profit from? Why do I prefer to live on the street in a cardboard box? Well, it actually pains me to know that I'm part of a system that's causing so much human misery. It's actually physically and mentally damaging to me to help to perpetrate deeds that cause death and destruction. I can't bury my head in the sand like you can.

I know you'll say or do anything to defend your family. More fool you though for not keeping your cock in your trousers. There are plenty of orphans who need parents. Why the f**k didn't you adopt? Are you literally the most selfish c**t in the whole wide world? Yes, the evidence would suggest that you are. You prop up the adversarial system and you create more mouths to feed in the decadent west and do nothing to give a hand up to the already starving mouths in the developing world.

There's no pride in having made a screaming, shitting, vomiting midget. Your body is evolved to do that. You had sex because you enjoyed having sex. You had a baby because your body is programmed to make babies. You did what snakes and scorpions do. You did what sharks and wasps do. You did what spiders and mosquitos do.

If I could give you one bit of advice, it would be to have a lobotomy. Ignorance is bliss. Being stupid is brilliant. Having higher brain functions is a curse. Being conscious and able to absorb information from the world and process it using rational thoughts is a f**king nightmare.

If you're wondering why I liked living with homeless people, it's because our footprint was much smaller. We lived small. We only consumed what we needed, and nothing more. We weren't making more arrogant ignorant greedy clones of ourselves to fill the void in our meaningless lives. We were just surviving and self-medicating for the agony of the f**ked up world.

We were very cheap, in terms of our economic, social and environmental impact. When a white middle class rich person goes haywire, they normally hurt the world a great deal. That's why it's such a great shame that the west is run by such criminal psychopaths. They'll drop bombs and starve people in order to remain quaffing champagne in their palaces. I include relatively modest homes when I say 'palaces'. Yes take a look around at your home and remember that $2 a day to keep a person alive for a year is probably the price of one of your many flat screen TVs.

So am I a hypocrite? Well, calling me one from your palatial surroundings makes you a hypocrite. You can't hypocritically accuse somebody of hypocrisy. That's ridiculous. Have you been homeless? Have you lived on less than $2 a day? No, I didn't think so. Shut the hell up and go and buy your kids an iPad.

So, what's going to happen to me? Well, my current thinking is that I'm going to finish my story and then take the final exit. I can't really see any more point in existing beyond telling this story, this cautionary tale. I'm literally wasting oxygen.

I loved being homeless in Camden Town. At least it was an honest existence. At least it was true to my values (September 2014)

Tags: #homeless #suicide #frank #capitalism #drugs #depression #alcohol #london #career #banking

This is a story about three amigos...

You need some fire in your belly if you're going to achieve great things. The three handsome gentlemen above have all bucked the trend and excelled at what they do, in their own unique ways.

It's not my place to share other people's stories, but we all had events in our lives that have had an influence on the passions we have pursued. You never know what somebody else has been through, so it's always the best policy to be non-judgemental.

I'm not saying that we had it harder than anybody else. It's not a pissing contest. It's not a competition. And this isn't going to be a tear-jerking tale of woe is me. In fact, I'm not even going to tell you anything more than what I have already stated: behind every driven ambitious person, there is usually an unseen reason.

So, have we got chips on our shoulders? No, we have each others arms on our shoulders. We stand in solidarity, brotherhood. We are positive can-do people who act with energy and enthusiasm, not negativity and bitterness. If we have a reason to put more effort into things, to try harder than Average Joe, then it's because we are channelling our feelings in positive ways.

My friends aren't always immune from gossip, rumour and prejudice. However, they have been good enough to reserve judgement of my character. Yes, I have been pleasantly surprised that my friends have been good enough to listen to my story, now that I'm becoming well enough to tell it.

Writing somebody off, writing off a life, declaring somebody a 'lost cause' is never good. It's a death sentence. You never know just how close somebody is to the edge of the abyss.

Something happened yesterday that really struck a chord. Somebody was pushed in front of a tube train, at Kentish Town station, where I used to live, until very recently. I would travel every day from that very station platform. That's what is happening in our society. People don't jump, they're pushed.

Nobody chooses to jump off a building or in front of a train. Nobody chooses to slash their wrists or eat poison. Nobody chooses to suffocate themself or slit their own throat. Nobody chooses to blow their brains out or electrocute themself. Nobody chooses to hang themself or overdose.

Yes, it's more obvious when you can physically see somebody else pushing the person to their death, but it also happens in unseen ways too.

Every ignorant comment, every bit of gossip you pass on, every time you pass judgement and assume that you even have the faintest idea of what's going on beneath the surface of a person's life, you are slowly killing that person. You are driving them inwards, you are isolating them, you are killing them.

Yes, talking about somebody behind their back might feel like helping. Wringing your hands and saying to each other "what can we do?" while you exchange your guesswork, your ignorant speculation... it's not getting to the heart of the problem. It might be making things worse, by making that person feel alone and not understood.

It's hard, I know, trying to help somebody who has stopped communicating, clammed up. But I have no words that can possibly express the difficulty of trying to communicate with a far greater number of people who are talking to each other about you. The numbers just don't stack up. There's only one of me, so there's no way I can keep everybody informed, especially when I'm very sick.

Please don't think this is a criticism of my friends. The fact that they have reserved some judgement and they're slowly coming back into my life is spurring me on in recovery. You have to have hope and optimism to fight back from the brink of suicide, and you need friends. You need to feel like there's some chance of escaping depressed isolation, which is a death-spiral downwards.

People might think I'm pedantic. I am, but only on things that matter. If I correct you on the difference between mania and hypomania, it's because it's an important distinction that allows me to maintain hope of having some kind of quality of life. If I point out the research that shows better long term outcomes for unmedicated patients, in my situation, then it's important to know that I've had many discussions with many doctors and you telling me to follow doctors orders is not helpful, because you have no idea which doctor you're talking about.

Oh snap it sounds like I'm ticking people off. I'm really not. I just want friends in my life, not amateur psychologists, amateur psychiatrists, amateur doctors. It's really sweet of you if you've done any reading about Unipolar Depression, Type II Bipolar and other issues affecting my life, but it's really not necessary. I've done all the reading and the best possible thing would be to just judge my character and trust me... I'm working on the illness thing.

The thing that I'd like to reassure people about is, insofar as me and the docs can tell, the illness is acute not chronic. That means there's a chance I can get better if I'm given a window of opportunity.

Looking backwards to move forwards is 'wrong' apparently, but I tend to ignore the advice of anybody who hasn't been to hell and back. I've tried doing things the way that ignorant people have suggested, and I can tell you first hand that your oversimplified version of reality doesn't work.

There are no short cuts and you have to use stepping stones. Sometimes the path might double back on itself, but as long as it's the right path, you have to keep following it. I went up a cul-de-sac and I could have raged and stormed and sulked and generally allowed myself to be trapped in a dead end - indeed many people wanted to trap me in the dead end - but in the end I had to just ignore all the haters, travel back down the one-way street from the dead end and find the correct path.

Everybody boos and jeers you when you have taken a wrong turn. Nobody congratulates you on having figured out you have made a mistake, and pats you on the back for being strong enough to retrace your steps, rather than just kill yourself. Nobody says, hey, you've had to travel twice as far as everybody else, let me give you a hand. Nope, people will expect you to work three times as hard, because you made a mistake. You already have to work twice as hard, but that's not good enough for people. They want to put the boot in and make you work three times as hard, because having to work twice as hard is not enough punishment as it is.

Yes, it's easy to end up hating the world, because the world is looking to scapegoat you. The world is looking for easy answers. The world is looking for convenient members of society to isolate and blame. Adults are not really very grown up. Adults have never really left the playground, where they liked to pick on children who were different. Bullying is rife in society.

When somebody gets weak, they're such an easy target. And the best part of all is that they get weaker and weaker until they die. Yup, it's great fun being an adult bully, because you get to kill people and then deny all knowledge, because you're smart now. You can cover your arse with plausible deniability. You can point the finger at all kinds of things that were symptoms of that victim's distress.

If it looks like I'm stuck in the past, it's because I've waited 10 years for the opportunity to be able to move on from a fateful mistake. It's a messy story, and it's not like I can point to a single error, but there was a significant life priority change in 2005 that threw my world into chaos.

I left London to live by the beach, but that wasn't a mistake necessarily. However, it put me in a precarious position. New town, new friends. I was rebuilding my life fairly quickly, but things were still fragile. Plus my circle of friends were all starting to leave London anyway. Lots of people came to visit. It could have worked.

I played for the title. I took a shot at the top. I tried to have it all. I thought I had found the girl of my dreams and I had it all. Turns out, I wasn't as mature as I thought I was. I made the mistake that nearly every adult must surely make at least once or twice. I picked the wrong girl.

Because I was in a fragile place, I had one or two attempts at correcting my mistake. I tried to break up with her, when I could see that my quality of life was being destroyed. It was my mistake. It was my lack of strength. It was my neediness and insecurity, being relatively young and inexperienced and in a strange new town and in a new job... I couldn't just walk away so easily. I don't blame her for not letting me go. It was my fault for getting trapped.

If you love them, let them go. I loved her. She didn't love me. You live, you learn. My parents taught me to never give up on a relationship, so I didn't. I kept going. I don't give up on things. It's not in my nature to give up on things. I'm the guy who fixes things. I'm the guy who makes things work.

Yes, I've read Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus and I know that women aren't after a Mr Fix-it, but it's more romantic than that. I'm a soppy loved-up kind caring sort of guy who just wants to make things work, patch things up, move forward together. I'm a diplomat, I'm a pacifist, I'm a lover not a fighter.

Did I deserve to have my face beaten to a pulp for the way I felt? Did I deserve to be driven to the brink of suicide? There has to be some shared responsibility somewhere, but I'm over it now. I know that I'll never get an apology. I know that she'll always think she was justified for battering both sides of my face when I turned the other cheek. I didn't lift a finger in self defence or retaliation, because I'm an open hearted person.

Three strikes though. Three strikes and you're out. Nobody has hit me in my adult life except for my ex-wife. Probably because they can see that there is anger just waiting to be unleashed if you mistreat me. Yes, it's really not advisable to hit me. You can try, and you might get away with it a couple of times, but I really wouldn't advise you to test the three strike rule. You might get a knuckle sandwich.

Why would you hit somebody who is kind and caring and open hearted anyway? What's it going to achieve? I'm a lover not a fighter. Just be nice and kind and caring and then we'll get along just fine. If you abuse me, my response is going to be predictable. Yes, abuse has predictable results. Bullying has predictable results.

My Dad raised me as a pacifist. I was raised to ignore bullying. I was raised to not rat people out. I was raised not to complain about abuse. I'm very good at calming myself down. I'm very good at absorbing blow after blow that is rained down on my head. I'm like a giant abuse sponge. I soak up all that abuse.

However, there is a saturation point. When the abuse sponge has become completely soaked with your rage and agression that you have taken out on me, you'd better be a little worried. When the punching bag can't take any more, you'd better not take another cheap shot.

I can tell you a lot about de-escalating situations. I can tell you a lot about anger management. I can tell you a lot about dissipating negative feelings. I can tell you a lot about de-fusing a ticking time bomb. Blaming me - the abuse victim - is not a successful strategy for helping somebody to get over their mistreatment.

Am I hamming myself up too much as this big victim? Am I too self pitying? Poor me, poor me, pour me another drink? Well, people have to find a way to cope somehow. Presently, that's this blog for me.

Yes, you can follow my progress right here, as I work through a bunch of stuff, in public. I'm not holding back. I'm staying true to my values of honesty and openness. I'm baring my soul as I'm working through this stuff. It's weird that I'm still carrying this stuff around, right? But where's it supposed to have gone? How do you get rid of all the crap you've taken, all the abuse you've absorbed? How do you dump it?

People have got a zillion and one techniques, suggestions. I've got a suggestion for you. Fuck off unless you want to be my friend. I need friends not therapists, carers.

I want friends. I need friends. I miss friends.

Before everything went to hell in a hand-cart (April 2005)

Tags: #friends #divorce #mentalhealth #bipolar #suicide #depression