This is a story of a culture that is destroying people's mental health and lives...

Management by balance-sheet, bean counters, spreadsheet jockeys and "yes" men and women are joining a set of executives who do everything in their power to abstain from any of the hard work and responsibility that is necessary in the world.

We have all heard horror stories of people being sacked by text message. In fact, skilled workers, professionals, have been steadily robbed of their worth and self-esteem since powerful rich men, behind closed doors in gentleman's clubs were allowed to asset strip British industry. The practice continues today, as companies are allowed to be headquartered in the UK, but are offshoring all the jobs for cost reasons, and are draining the wealth of the nation.

Europe is fast becoming little more than a tax haven for global businesses, with billions, if not trillions of dollars of profits being pushed through legal entities that have little reason for existence other than to evade the taxes that these companies rightfully should pay to the countries that they have extracted the profits from.

Luxembourg is the most obvious example, but Ireland has recently jumped on the bandwagon. The amount of tax that is paid by Vodafone (group HQ is Luxembourg... funny that, considering that Newbury, UK is where I thought they were founded?) or Apple and Amazon (taxed via Irish legal entity... I know Apple Maps is rubbish but it's a long way from Silicon Valley?) is a pittance. The amount of profits that these companies make is disgusting, versus what they pay as percentage of their gross profits.

However, maybe there is a good reason for all of this?

When I became unwell, and asked good old UK government for support - as somebody who has always paid my full taxes, has no offshore bank accounts, has never tried to evade or avoid taxes - I found that there was worryingly little of a safety net there.

I went to my doctor (General Practitioner, or GP for short, here in the UK) and had a 30 second conversation about what was going on in my life.

"Have you heard of Fluoxetine"

Well, yes, I have heard of Fluoxetine. It's the generic name for Prozac, which is an antidepressant from the 1980s. What the hell is my doctor doing dishing out 25 year old pills to somebody who they have taken 30 seconds to get to know? Well, we know that the NHS is extremely cost pressured, given that we have to give such large tax breaks to profitable billion dollar companies and make sure that we don't take too much inheritance tax from dead multi-millionaires. Oh, and we need nuclear atomic bombs too. Yes, we need to make sure we can always annihilate every person on earth at the flick of a switch.

Luckily for me, I walked away from a course of powerful psychoactive medication, that has been proven in long-term studies to be less effective than placebo. It also takes 6 weeks to take effect. My episodes of depression tend to be about this long anyway. Also, SSRIs make you fat and destroy your sex life, as well as blunting your emotions and generally making your sh1t life even more sh1t, but you'll be too doped up to even realise, unless you ever emerge from the chemical haze.

I'm pretty upset about this, if you hadn't picked up on that.

Another thing that is very annoying is that, as anybody who takes a few more minutes to get to know me will tell you, I'm certainly not what you might term unipolar. My life is littered with examples of radical mood swings. Catch me at a certain time, and you will see my racing thoughts, pressured speech, lack of sleep, intolerance of dimwitted twits, and evidence of my wacky projects.

One day I whimsically decided to knock down my shed, order a load of wood from a sawmill and build a giant beach hut summer house thing in my back garden. Somebody suffering from unipolar depression does not normally do such a thing, according to the DSM-IV/V.

I had to learn all about Google Sketchup, so that I could design the thing, learn about different types of timber, wooden building construction techniques, roofing techniques, planning laws governing outbuildings, estimate how much I would need in terms of materials, locate a sawmill, find a roofing supplier, get a chop saw, nail gun and roofing blow torch (the most fun tool of all).

At no point did any of this seems slightly strange or beyond my capabilities, as a spotty IT nerd who did little more than turn coffee into software for a living, by pressing buttons on a computer, in a comfortable air-conditioned office.

Working around-the-clock seemed perfectly normal too. I remember one neighbour pointed out that the sound of nails being hammered at 9pm was not helping him to study for an English exam... but how are you supposed to hammer quietly? I did try and hammer more considerately, but it seemed more considerate to simply get the project done as fast as possible (I think I took 3 days to complete the structure) given that I didn't know the sleep patterns of everybody within earshot.

So "Mega Shed" as she was affectionately known, appeared at the bottom of my garden in under a week, at a cost of £700. An ordinary week in anybody's life? Well it's hard to judge from an internal point of view, as you can't step out of your own mind and view yourself as others would.

Naturally, friends, colleagues and family are always impressed by a person's industriousness and ingenuity, so I saw no real reason to back off the gas. When the world rewards you for efforts, this reinforces your belief that what you are doing is sustainable.

I then decided to sit in my garden and read a huge stack of books on Quantum Mechanics. This then progressed to me reading every paper that looked interesting in Cornell University's online archives. Naturally, I then started emailling a bunch of the authors, and getting engaged in particularly interesting email based discussions with people around the world about De Broglie's Matter Waves (Pilot Wave theory) which looked a hell of a lot more elegant than all that Standard Model crap that couldn't be unified with General Relativity.

Instead of being discouraged, I found academics to be kind, indulgent and generous with their time. I took things too far, of course, and wrote a paper on the measurement of collapsing Quantum States in an entangled system, spread over a physical space larger than the light-cones of the particles being measured. Standard Quantum Eraser type stuff. I even tried to get it published. Lolz.

At no point did anybody actually directly say to me "you seem to be as mad as a box of frogs on acid with lasers coming out of their nostrils" so I kept digging myself into a deeper and deeper thought hole until I sank into another depression, with no idea what had just happened to me.

The thing is, it's fairly entertaining, enthralling, to watch somebody who is hypomanic. In our age of Big Brother and myriad reality TV shows, we seem to think that it's OK to be a spectator in somebody's spectacular life.

We seem to think it's OK to sit back and watch somebody go absolutely bezerk. It's that person's fault, right? Or maybe it's not their fault, but it's not your responsibility... that would be somebody else? Maybe doctors? Maybe the police? Maybe the council? I don't know... I'm just going to watch - because this is just too horrible to miss a minute of - and I can't tear my eyes away this is just so awful, somebody should do something about it, but not me, and not yet because I'm really getting into this. Brilliant. Who needs TV anyway?

I don't think that I'm not personally responsible for getting unwell, but I don't think that people know how to help, really. I don't think that people are particularly incentivised to help either. We have a very isolated existence. We don't know our neighbours, we don't trust strangers, we ring the police to deal with things that we used to work out between ourselves, we expect our doctors to give us magic beans to cure all society's ills.

So, today is World Mental Health day and World Homeless Day. I can tell you, from personal experience, that mental health issues can lead to homelessness. When I was discharged from hospital after a suicide attempt, I was given 2 weeks accommodation, and I was expected to use that time to arrange my own accommodation. I went to the council offices with a letter from my doctors, explaining that I was extremely vulnerable and that I should receive urgent assistance. The person I spoke to then went on holiday and that was the last I heard of it.

I don't blame the system or the people. People are trying to do the best that they can, but there are so many people in need of assistance, and so little money, because we are fixated on helping the rich to get richer, rather than supporting the most vulnerable members of society. I'm not even angry about it. Living in the Royal Parks and on Hampstead Heath was an eye-opening education for an extremely highly qualified and well educated guy who fell on hard times. If you think I chose to become homeless, then f**k you, you ignoramus.

Yes, I could have sold my camera, but I wanted to document what happened to me and I already sold all my other possessions to support myself. When will you be satisfied? Sell my clothes? Locking me up for being naked will be expensive (June 2014)

Tags: #mentalhealth #bipolar #depression #homeless #sex #banking #career #london #culture

This is a story of a night where I fell asleep and didn't know if I was going to wake up...

God bless the NHS. This is the view that I couldn't really appreciate, from my hospital bed, where I was quite surprised to wake up. I wasn't surprised that I was in hospital, as I remember going there, but I don't remember caring whether I lived or died. I certainly was not afraid of death. I was surprised to still be alive. Was I grateful to be alive? No. Was I grateful for the hard working people of the Royal Free Hospital? Yes.

On another occasion, I had sliced my wrist open, which was a fairly calculated cry for help, and as my distress grew, I posted a picture on Facebook of some Potassium Cyanide which I had obtained through the Dark Web, which was perhaps a final warning. The responses to both were rather confusing and disturbing. People reacted angrily. I became the bad guy somehow. I'm not sure how or why that happened.

It was World Suicide Prevention day on September 10th, but I was too consumed with work to notice that day had passed. That means I survived, for now. However, I am scared that the darkness may return one day.

That's why I decided to build something that I thought would have been useful to me, when I was going through tough times. I didn't even stop to think that somebody else might have built something similar. I just threw something together (areyougone.org) in the matter of a few hours.

If it only takes me a few hours to build a suicide prevention / missing persons service, but it only takes you a few moments to dismiss somebody as a "Melodramatic Emo" or some kind of "Lost Cause" then F**k You, buddy.

None of my friends came to visit me in hospital. None of my family. That's a pretty poor show.

Do you really want to pick over the details? Who made you God? Why should you sit in judgement over those lives you want to care for and nurture and protect, and those who you deem unworthy? When is it OK to label a person as a lost cause, and just leave it to the Police, Nurses, Doctors and Coroners to pick up the pieces?

We are kicking human lives into the gutter, and I'm upset about that.

I had to ring an ex-girlfriend to bring me some clothes. Weeks in hospital with no physical support from partner, parents or friends is pretty shitty (May 2014)

Tags: #suicide #mentalhealth #depression #NHS #london

This is a story of the darkness that drives away the light...

I once wrote my own obituary, believing I wanted to die. When a kind and loving person told me that they supported an accurate portrayal of my life, and I felt I no longer had to plead and beg to be given a chance to not have my history rewritten by my perceived persecutors, I had a reason for living again.

During my descent to this point, I realised that there must be other people, going through what I was going through. I decided to try and found a startup to try and help them.

Did you know that the Apple Watch has a feature where you can send your pulse to another person's watch, and they can feel your heart beating too? This is essentially the idea I had, while I was dying. I don't claim that it is an original idea, nor that I had prior art, but only that I think it's a brilliant use case for modern technology.

One of my best friends, who had taken me in, during my descent into melancholy and infinite sadness, confessed to me that he was kept awake at night, and was stressed at work, not knowing whether he was going to come home to a corpse. Secretly I had resolved to try and end my life away from his house, as I wouldn't leave that legacy in somebody's home.

That was how I arrived at the idea. The idea that you could just touch base with somebody... to see if their pulse still beats. And if that person knew that somebody cared whether blood still coursed through their veins, they would feel a little bit less alone in the world, feel a little reminder that people still care whether they live or die.

You think this sounds melodramatic? F**k you.

I have just registered the domain name areyougone.org and the Twitter handle @RUg0ne ("Are You Gone?" with a zero for an 'o') which will tweet the name of the person and a message, when you email. For example: email nickgrant@areyougone.org with the subject line "answer your bloody phone, we love you" then message and the name as a hashtag (which would be #nickgrant in this example) will get Tweeted out to the world.

I have also registered the Twitter handle @NotGone1, and any information relating to that missing person can be tweeted back with the relevant person's hashtag (e.g. #nickgrant) and this will be emailed back to those people who emailed the address.

At the moment, it's only in Beta testing, but I have started to link together the software that can fully automate this. If it's a useful application, I will automate more and more of it, so that it can stay on top of demand. If there is no demand, that's good, because it means that nobody else feels like I did on that day.

People sometimes push loved ones away. We need to understand why (April 2015)

Tags: #suicide #depression #mentalhealth #startup #friends

This is a story of a career spent in anonymity as a small cog in a big machine...

Any entrepreneur will tell you that overnight success takes many days, weeks, months, years or lifetimes. I can tell you exactly how long some of my successes took to build, and what the cost was: in terms of personal sacrifice.

Let's talk about my first startup, Bournesoft. I had needed to quit my job due to ill health, and as I recovered from the depression that followed, in July 2008, I taught myself to program games for the iPhone. I had 3 number one hits in the Apple App Store, in late August and early September.

The price I paid for this, was mood instability, which had been kept in check by the routine of office hours. With only a limited window of opportunity to make big cash in the App Store before every Indie Dev saw the opportunity, and then the big corporates moved in. I worked 18 hour days, and paid with my relationship with my partner, family, friends.

I also paid with my love of programming. I hated programming after having to learn Objective-C and the Apple platform under such pressure, which I put on myself. It was supposed to be a fun and confidence building excercise, that I had set for myself, having had an abrupt halt to a successful 11 year career as a software developer.

And so my next startup - www.bournemouthelectrician.co.uk - required significant retraining, but gave me the opportunity to work with my hands in a non-corporate environment, which I decided were my two priorities at the time. Unsurprisingly, there is not really an established training route for wealthy and successful IT professionals and Mobile App Indie Devs, into the building trade.

Undetterred, I incorporated a company (Bournemouth Technology Ltd) funded it myself with a director's loan, signed up for the training courses and got myself an IT contract to "fill the time" and keep the cashflow positive. As soon as I had passed the 17th Edition of the Wiring Regulations, C&G Periodic Inspection & Testing exams and had been inspected by the NICEIC, I bought a van and started trading.

In terms of sacrifice, I invested about 30% of what my lowest earning App had returned me. I also gave up an IT contract that was worth "a lot of money". But I hated programming and working in an office, remember, so I didn't view it as any kind of sacrifice at the time.

Until you have stood in a puddle of water in your customer's kitchen, when you have burst the cold water pipe into the house, or had to find the emergency cutoff as fast as you can when you have drilled through a gas pipe... you do not appreciate your desk, your swivel chair, your computer screen and your photocopier.

Anybody who says "stud finder" has not done any building work on older houses, which are full of the DIY-enthusiast's bodge-jobs, which are a daily risk to the life and livelihood of those in the building trade, who have to lift your horrible laminate flooring, crawl through your fibreglass filled loft, drill through your crumbling brickwork, and discover the creative plumbing you have plastered into your walls. "Why the f**k did they do it like that?" you find yourself asking far too many times. There is never a good answer. Regulations and professional standards exist for good reason.

When I was up to my elbows crawling around in shredded newspaper (creative insulation) dodging the exposed 230v A.C. live terminals of junction boxes that didn't have their lids any more, I got a phonecall asking if could I do a 2 week IT contract that would pay the same as rewiring two whole houses. I realised that I had finally learnt the value of the career I had left behind.

I managed to clear 2 weeks in my full diary of customer's jobs, but I avoided the unpleasant job that I really needed to grasp the nettle of. The right thing to do would have to been phone and cancel those jobs completely. Instead, I was exhausted from building my business from nothing to being a profitable company, and the shame of failing my customers drove me into a second lengthy depression. I did not fail gracefully. I don't feel too bad, because many members of the public I met tried to take advantage of hard-working and skillful tradesmen.

So, I started to retrace my steps. As my depression lifted, I built another Mobile Apps startup. This time selling to enterprise. I drove to one of the UK's largest insurers in my electrician's van, for a sales meeting. It started as Roam Solutions, and then became mEpublish.com and eventually, after the springboard(); TechStars program in Cambridge, it finally became hubflow.com.

Pushing myself so hard took me to the limits of human survival, costing me countless friends, my wife, all my money, my house, my boat, my cars, my hot tub, my summer house, all my tools of the trade. I would gladly pay double that, because it led me home, to London, reconnected me with my friends, and reignited my desire to continue living, liberated from fear of losing material possesions and unhealty relationships.

I'm the one taking the photograph. Camden Town, London, UK (October 2013)

Tags: #leadership #startup #entrepreneur #computing #mentalhealth #suicide #depression