This is a story about my 2,500 mile round-trip...

Two weeks ago, the local Community Mental Health Team (CMHT) was phoning me to see if they could potentially admit me to hospital. I had revealed to a psychiatrist that I was having suicidal thoughts, opting to be fully honest - as advised by my doctor friend who was accompanying me - as opposed to saying what I needed to in order get what I wanted. Perhaps it's good that I was honest, because therapy's not quick, and the only pills that work have a tendency to send me a little hypomanic.

So, I'm still unmedicated. It's been 6 months.

The danger was that I'd become so depressed that I'd commit suicide. My hunch was that my suicidal thoughts were being driven by the fact that my life was disintegrating and I had absolutely no control over it. Doctors can't act on hunches. I can though, and I was right - as soon as I started earning money and there was hope that I wasn't facing financial ruin, a lot of my suicidal thoughts disappeared.

Another danger is that I'll start getting delusions of grandeur. However, we should examine quite closely just how delusional I really am. Am I really delusional?

The phone rang. I answered it. A man told me he had a project. Could I do it? I replied that I could. How much money did I want? I told him. Could I start on Monday? I said I could. I didn't speak to him again, until I met him for the very first time, 1,200 miles from home.

If you think that my mental illness is about some kind of lifelong condition that I need to take tablets for, you're wrong. Every single thing in my life - my environment - predisposes me towards mood instability. If you think about the kind of feast and famine stressfest that my boom and bust financial situation has given me, then perhaps you can start to see that I harbour no delusions. My days were numbered. Only bankruptcy and a life of poverty lay ahead, quietly pill popping and watching daytime television, while collecting my meagre benefit cheques. Then, suddenly: an investment banking IT contract lands in my lap.

"Yes, but you're resting on your laurels; relying on your reputation" I hear you cry.

It's true that if it wasn't for friends who've vouched for my good character, I would have been screwed long ago. However it's a non sequitur to say that I'm able to hide my mental illness by burning bridges. How did I build my reputation in the first place, if I'm no use to anybody?

If you were to read through the two and a half years that I've been writing my story, you'll see that I have burnt some bridges. However, you'll also see that my actions are always quite deliberate. I often burn bridges to stop me going back to places. If you look at my whole working life in its entirety, you'll see that the big wads of cash that I get offered to do work that's utterly incompatible with my mental health, is always too much of a temptation. Even places where I've spectacularly burnt bridges, my name isn't total mud. It's been very hard to completely destroy my reputation and good standing, and make myself un[re]employable.

Are you getting the idea at all? Are you understanding the theme?

Perhaps my most astonishing rags-to-riches feat was when I went from homeless and bankrupt, to working on the number one project for the biggest bank in Europe. The exertion of it cost me my sanity. The exhaustion of living in a 14-bed dormitory and working 120-hour weeks; trying to keep my suit and shirts clean and crisply pressed hanging up on my bunk; trying to save up enough money to get myself a place to live... it was too much. I burnt out and plummeted into suicidal depression when I ran out of energy to keep up appearances. However, can you imagine how I felt, when I upgraded from a hostel bunk bed to my own 2-bedroom apartment on the banks of the River Thames, with glorious panoramic views over London. Do you think you'd be mentally 'well' enough to cope with that kind of life turnaround?

Stress and sleep deprivation will have fairly predictable effects on most people. To deprive a person of sleep and then declare that they are mentally unwell seems disingenuous. What about taking a person who believes they're a complete failure and parachuting them into a life of opulent wealth? Do you think that it would have an effect on somebody, if they miraculously avoided certain financial ruin, destitution and homelessness? What happens when the mentally ill junkie homeless bankrupt loser reinvents themself overnight?

Of course, we don't normally let people sort themselves out.

Criminals, the mentally ill, addicts and alcoholics are very keen to club together with their own kind. Like crabs in a bucket, any crab that tries to escape will be pulled back down by the others. I shan't be adding a link to this website on my CV anytime soon. Joining any kind of community where I'm encouraged to wallow in my shame and define myself by my shortcomings, seems like a terrible idea.

In defiance of those who tell me I have delusions of grandeur for expecting more than a pot to piss in, I continue to pursue a two-part strategy: I'm doing incredibly well remunerated work and I'm candidly sharing my story publicly.

"Who are you to tell your story? You're nobody. You're not famous" I hear you grumble.

"Who are you to earn so much? You've failed. You should earn peanuts" I hear you protest.

Don't you understand? The whole system is set up to make you feel inadequate; unworthy. Every exam you ever sat; every job interview you've ever attended - the whole sham was concocted to make you feel grateful for the pittance you receive. The fact that you feel like you're not allowed to write your autobiography or otherwise blow your own trumpet, is by design - you're supposed to feel like a nobody. You've been indoctrinated to feel worthless.

On my travels - and I don't mean geographically - I've encountered a lot of people who've been less fortunate than the investment banking types who I'd usually come into contact with. The only difference between me and my fellow hostel mates, is that they never believed they'd even get within 100 feet of the front doors of a massive investment bank, let alone land a job there. The difference is attitude: act like you're supposed to be there. Life's all a confidence trick.

Over the past couple of weeks, I've faced the horrendous realisation that I'm unexceptional. I mean, I'm on the right side of the bell curve, but I'm not an outlier. What special achievements set me apart? What proof have I got of my intellect? Of course, the answer is that I'm distinctly average; perhaps even a little below average in some areas, thanks to excessive consumption of drugs and alcohol. I should have been swinging towards hypomania, but instead I've been suffering from an almighty self-doubt crisis.

Imposter syndrome has driven me to try harder; to concentrate. Anxiety and the sheer terror that I'm incapable of doing the job I've been doing for 20 years, is being slowly replaced by the welcome return of some belief in my own abilities.

Of course, now comes the threat of overconfidence. Perhaps now I'll swing hypomanic? Perhaps soon I'll declare myself Jesus Christ re-incarnated? Perhaps those doctors were right all along, and only pills can prevent the inevitable mood swing upwards?

I don't think so.

I worked on a long project last year and I was stable. The role was incredibly boring, and it was very hard to stay motivated, but money got me out of bed in the morning and money kept me at my desk until the end of the working day. Last year was a triumph of money's ability to restore mental health, through wealth. It's no accident that the countries with the biggest rich-poor gap also have the worst depression and anxiety. Anybody who tells you that rich people get depressed too, or that poor Africans are really happy is just perpetuating anecdotal nonsense - being poor in a rich country is incredibly toxic to mental wellbeing.

It's true that I've sorted myself out financially a few times now, only to throw it all away, but that's dual-diagnosis not mental illness. Bipolar has allowed me to have a lovely life. I don't want to change from feast and famine; highs and lows. However, undoubtably I'll be tempted to take drugs again once my bank balance is replenished.

If you're wondering what's going to stop me from relapsing into addiction, once I've dug myself out of the hole, then I'm afraid you're going to have to wait. Recovery from an acute episode of dual-diagnosis - depression, hypomania and substance dependency - is well beyond what I'd planned to write in this single essay. I'm going to have to revisit this topic, because it's fascinating to me: my life depends on it.

My train from London to Wales fast approaches Swansea, completing my 2,500 mile roundtrip. Of course, it's been a much, much longer journey than that.

Tags: #bipolar #addiction #career

This is a story about time...

It was Saturday the 9th. I was behind that door, dying. I assumed that nobody knew where I lived. I assumed nobody cared. I was wrong.

I'm still pretty unclear how exactly the emergency services got to me so quickly.

The thing about activated charcoal and gastric lavage is that they only work during the first hour or so of an overdose. I knew this, so I'd set a timer on my phone to stop myself from being tempted to send any "goodbye cruel world" type messages, which could have triggered efforts to save my life before I reached the point of no return.

Saturday nights are pretty hectic for the emergency services. I'm surprised they got to me so quickly. I'm surprised they got me to hospital so swiftly. If they hadn't I wouldn't be writing this.

Maybe social media is addictive, it "isn't real life" and it's causing the collapse of normal healthy face-to-face relationships, but I'm pretty sure I'd have sunk without a trace if it wasn't for my digital connection to the world. It was kinda inevitable that the author of "the world's longest suicide note" was going to do the deed at some point. My suicide attempt wasn't a cry for help; it wasn't attention-seeking. I don't believe that my suicide attempt was avoidable either - circumstances were too hostile to allow my mental health to improve.

Back on that Saturday the 9th - and today - I found myself in a strange city, far from friends and family. I was isolated and alone. Stress, anxiety and depression all conspired to make life feel totally unliveable.

Tonight, I'm in a hotel room near an airport 1,200 miles from home. Language and cultural differences make it additionally obvious that I'm out of place here. I'm doing a rewarding but stressful job. My mental health has been pretty bad. There are lots of similar features to that previous Saturday the 9th. However, there's unlikely to be a "straw that broke the camel's back" type trigger tonight.

I'm mindful that I wrote a blog post called The Closest I've Come to Suicide back on Saturday 9th September, merely hours before I actually tried to kill myself. Things can change. I'm a little superstitious and unwilling to tempt fate... I don't want to jinx anything.

I sometimes feel like I'm trolling my friends - giving them a lot of stress and worry about me. I sometimes feel like it's bad behaviour, to talk about my suicidal feelings. What's the alternative though? Should I just bottle it all up and leave everybody wondering what the fuck happened to me and wondering if there was anything they could have done to help, once I'm dead?

Having written this provocative blog for over two years, I hear from a lot of people who've lost loved ones to suicide. The impact on those who lose a relative or a friend is devastating. People are left wondering "what could I have done differently?" and beat themselves up about it.

There are quite a few well-worn platitudes that are trotted out whenever a suicidal person is brave enough to share how they're feeling. Generally, the suicidal person is guilt-tripped into thinking about the consequences of their suicide. I imagine this is the reason why more people don't speak up when they're feeling suicidal, because the presumption is that they're selfish, cowardly and don't care about the pain they're going to cause for other people. These accusations are unhelpful and untrue - suicidal people know that they're going to cause pain and suffering, but life is so horrible for them that it's not enough to keep them alive. Guilting people is not the way to keep them alive.

I sometimes wonder if there's a difference between me and those who've succeeded in killing themselves. I'm afraid that it's pure blind luck. Even with 20,000 Twitter followers, I'm still subject to the same human physiology as anybody else - the massive overdose I took should have been fatal. You can have all the fame and wealth in the world, but you're just as mortal as the next man or woman.

I talk about the inevitability of my suicide attempt, and the worry that I'm trolling my friends. In a way, I'm embarrassed to have survived, because it makes it look like it was some half-arsed botched attempt where I didn't really want to die anyway. I'm embarrassed that I put my friends through the horror of thinking I might've succeeded, but I also know that I told hospital staff not to resuscitate me - I refused treatment, because I wanted to die. I can say with my hand on my heart, that I wasn't trolling anybody. It wasn't a cry for help. It wasn't attention seeking or a publicity stunt. My suicide attempt was premeditated and my method was extensively researched in preparation.

So what about all those deaths from suicide? Suicide kills more men under the age of 45 than cancer and other diseases, road traffic accidents, drugs, alcohol and everything else. Suicide is the biggest killer of them all. What is it about suicide?

Well, there are a lot of greedy, selfish, horrible men in the world, who just want to get rich at any cost - they don't care who they trample on. I emerged from hospital to find out that the wannabe Labour MP who I was working for, was sacking me for not turning up at work for a couple of days - it should be noted that those two days I was in a coma on an intensive care ward, with a machine breathing for me. This wannabe politician was completely unconcerned with the fact that I'd nearly died. This guy professes to be a Labour politician, no less - in theory, his values are all about protecting workers from unscrupulous bosses. What a liar. What an awful, awful person.

The world is a desperately competitive place. People will commit suicide because of pressure to attain good exam grades, to get ahead in their careers and generally because life relentlessly batters us with horrible uncertainty about financial and housing security. Of course people are going to commit suicide when life's so stressful. I attempted suicide and immediately lost my job and my apartment - isn't that awful? If that's what a wannabe Labour MP is prepared to do to a fellow human being, the problems in society clearly come right from the top. If our politicians are arseholes who don't value human life, of course we're going to see vast numbers of people committing suicide.

What happened after my suicide attempt is that things got worse. Things got a lot worse.

Then things got a bit better.

Friends who I haven't spoken to in years got in contact.

I made new friends. I got a new place to live. I got a new job.

Writing this blog has caused me to lose my job and my home, and has made me an easy target for discrimination. Writing this blog leaves me exposed to cyber-stalkers who want to find out what my weaknesses are, and exploit me. Writing this blog leaves me open to criticism from those who say that my message about suicide, mental health and homelessness is contrived - that I somehow pre-planned everything that happened to me, and that my opinion is therefore invalid; that my story is unrepresentative.

If you prick me, do I not bleed? Do I not feel lonely like other people? Do I not find the burden of debt and financial worries to be unbearable? Do I not need a roof over my head?

My blog begins two years ago, with me living in a hotel and working for a bank. That's exactly the situation I find myself in today. Was it necessary to have been hospitalised three times? Was it necessary to have become homeless? Was it necessary to nearly be bankrupted? Was it necessary to lose my job? All of the hardship I've been through might look avoidable, to a casual observer. A BBC journalist even accused me of having planned the whole thing.

I genuinely believe that if I hadn't lived my life in the public eye, I wouldn't be alive to tell the tale. Of course, some concerned friends saw my final Tweets on that Saturday night - the 9th - and they raised the alarm along with a bunch of other followers. Somehow, the emergency services were swiftly delivered to my door. A friend told me that my phone had been traced, but that's improbable, given that I lived in a dense urban area - signal triangulation is highly unlikely to have been accurate enough. It's a bit of a mystery, who gave the emergency services my address in time for them to save me.

I've written about a lot of this before, so I'm aware that I'm repeating myself, but it seems apt because it's Saturday the 9th. So much has happened in the intervening time, including a 3-week stay on a psych ward and me emigrating from England to Wales. So much has happened, in terms of having space and time to digest the traumatic events and trying to figure out what I'm living for. So much has happened, in terms of friends who've been kind enough to get back in contact and even offer practical help. So much has happened, with new friends and a new home, and healthy human relationships.

I'm still stressed and single and broke. My job is 1,200 miles from home. There is still a whole load of shit to go through before I have everything I need for a liveable life. You might be screaming "OTHER PEOPLE HAVE IT SO MUCH HARDER THAN YOU" at the top of your lungs, but fuck you. As my guardian angel once said: there's only one person on the whole planet who has it harder than anybody else. Are they the only person in the whole wide entire world who's allowed to feel depressed, stressed and anxious? If the "think about the starving African children" platitude had any value, we could just blast that message through megaphones and all depression and suicide would be cured overnight.

If you think I'm self-centred, self-pitying, selfish, self-absorbed or any other criticism you want to level at me, then perhaps it's you who completely lacks any empathy. Do you not care that suicide is the biggest killer of men under 45? Do you not care about this very real problem, that's only getting worse and worse? Do you not care about the epidemic of mental health issues?

I will vociferously defend my decision to blog about my mental health problems and suicide attempt(s) because I believe that my social media presence has been a major reason why my life hasn't been claimed by suicide. For sure, there have been lots of high-profile suicides. Fame and notoriety are not protective factors. However, in the face of a mental health epidemic, it's clear that pressure, guilt, shame and stigma are not working in anybody's favour. It's only through an honest and candid examination of how we're really feeling, that we might be able to save those who are on the brink of killing themselves, in the nick of time.

I think that even my harshest critic would be hard-pressed to deny that my navel-gazing suicide note blog played a major part in saving my life. Without my blog, how would I have made a new friend who offered to let me live with her and her family? How would I have reconnected with an old friend who helped me get another job? How would I have coped, through homelessness, hospitalisation and without any money? My blog is the consistent thread throughout all the traumatic experiences of the last few years.

It might sound like I'm giving my blog credit, when really credit belongs to those who took practical steps to help me - those who phoned the emergency services, those who phoned me when I was in hospital, those who helped re-house me and those friends who have made a concerted effort to re-enter my life. Of course, I'm incredibly grateful to those who've gone to great lengths to assist me, to reassure me that I am loved and that my life does matter.

There's a lot of pressure now to sort myself out. I have a pretty good opportunity to get back on my feet. I have support. I often wonder if it's time to change the name of my blog from "the world's longest suicide note" to something else. However, it was back on Saturday the 9th that I wrote about how close I was to suicide, before then being tipped over the edge later that same day. If I'm reluctant to declare myself safe, then tough titties - I know how fragile things are, so it would be foolish to prematurely take myself off the endangered species list.

Perhaps you - dear reader - feel a little led-on by the whole thing. Perhaps you feel a little cheated that I didn't die. Who knows. All I know is that it doesn't feel like it was very long ago that I was dying on Saturday the 9th.

Tags: #suicide

This is a story about life on the farm...

Yesterday, I was too depressed to get out of bed. Being awake was horrible - I tried to doze for as long as I could. I was irrationally afraid of having to get up for some reason; on edge that there might come a knock at the door. My friends make me feel incredibly welcome, and I would always have somebody to talk to if I was feeling lonely and desperate, but I also feel like I should demonstrate my willingness to help wherever I can.

Today, it's been sunny and mild; very good weather for the time of year. Hiding under the duvet doesn't feel so bad when it's grey skies and raining, but I feel guilty about wasting the day when it's nice outside. Nice weather can paradoxically make me feel even more depressed.

I'm naturally a restless, anxious and fidgety person. "Where am I going? What am I achieving?" I continuously ask myself when I'm not consumed by a task; fixated on a mission.

At the beginning of the week, I dragged myself out of bed to go to the seaside. It was a drizzly foggy day, so the picturesque beach wasn't going to yield any nice views, but still, it was an outing. Rain-drenched families trudged through puddles. "Why are all these children not in school?" I asked. Apparently, it's half-term school holiday time in England - not so in Wales.

This jarring disparity; this acute difference between what consumes my thoughts, and what most other people are concerned with, is being well highlighted in my current environ. I was cut off from the world in my London apartment. It was wonderful to have the space & time to think & write, but I was very far removed from the day-to-day reality that most of humanity experiences. In the past few weeks, I've been reminded about school-runs, commuting to work and long days in the office, car maintenance, housing, pets, children, cooking and cleaning, although I can claim absolutely zero personal involvement in the running of these affairs - I'm an idle observer; a tourist.

Of course I worry that I'm lazy; worry that I'm mooching; worry that I'm a leech; a parasite.

"Yes, we'd all like to be a thinker; a writer; an artist; an intellectual; a professional layabout" I imagine people saying. "Your art is just a hobby... get a job" is what I imagine people are thinking. I feel guilty for not producing anything more tangible than the words on this page.

I started to get a little stressed about November, when I plan to write my second novel. "How am I going to find the time to write?" I wondered to myself, which must sound a little ridiculous to you. Why am I even writing anyway, when I'm not overtly commercialising my creative output?

There's something more socially acceptable about saying "I'm sorry, I need to write my book" as opposed to just "I'm sorry, I need to lie in bed feeling incredibly anxious and depressed". I wonder if more people would have breakdowns and refuse to go to their stressful and boring jobs, if it wasn't so stigmatised. Wouldn't we all love to just spend all day with our children, and not get out of our pyjamas? Why can't we skip breakfast and have cereal instead of a cooked meal, and completely reject the demands of society?

I feel immense guilt for not having a proper job, spending hours of my life stuck in traffic, being bored to tears by a bullshit job. What's my contribution to society? Why am I allowed to pontificate, when I haven't done my 9 to 5 grind?

I'm not so naïve as to think that the good life doesn't have to be bought and paid for with human misery. For every beautiful countryside cottage set in manicured gardens, nestled in lush green countryside, there is also an immense amount of suffering that's gone into delivering that dream. The children who wait 5 minutes, staring at a single marshmallow on the table in front of them, will receive two marshmallows as a reward for their patience. Those same patient children will shed tears when they are packed off to boarding school, but it'll all be for a good reason one day.

Are we even supposed to be so patient; so tolerant of intolerable cruelty? Are we any happier for all that homework? Are we any happier when we get "A" grades and go on to get a fancy job, miles and miles away from our home and our family? Are two marshmallows sweeter than one?

I feel like the cuckoo in the nest: I'm no genetic relation of the lovely family who I'm living with. Why do I get to enjoy the comfort of a farmhouse straight from the pages of Country Living magazine? What's my contribution to the household? What's my contribution to humanity?

Extrapolating, I can easily imagine that I will have produced my second novel in a little over a month from now, but I will have very little else to show for my time, not to mention the food and energy that I will have consumed. To say that I have been working on restabilising my mental health and attempting to rediscover my reason(s) for living, feels a little untrue given the trajectory of my mood. To turn a blind eye to my very real concerns about the difficulty of obtaining paid employment during the Christmas & New Year period, seems short-sighted - November will be over in the blink of an eye.

Throwing a ball for the dog in the garden, sucking in lungfuls of clean fresh air that's blown inland straight from the Atlantic Ocean, my physical health is undoubtedly improving. I'm seeing an aspect of existence that I'd long forgotten, trapped in a polluted concrete jungle, and surrounded by the seething masses in densely overpopulated cities. This life is so much healthier and happier than the rat race, but I can't afford it - it feels as if I'm enjoying a retirement I haven't paid for.

Perhaps you imagine that my time is free for the pursuit of leisure. Perhaps it is. If so, why am I so damn stressed?

Tags: #family #depression #writing

This is a story about medical notes...

My ex-wife - a biochemist by way of undergraduate degree - once screamed at me in an incoherent rage because I had innocently asked her "how big is a protein?" having wondered how many nanometers across, the average protein molecule measured. The sheer audacity of me asking such a question enraged her, perhaps because free thinking is expressly forbidden in an academic world which promotes rote-learning of facts and examinations graded to a marking scheme, ahead of learning.

(The answer, by the way, is roughly 3 nanometres in radius).

When I attempt to answer a difficult question, I sometimes pause and chuckle. "What is consciousness?" came one question. Although I was desperate to talk about weakly interacting subatomic particles, General Relativity and nuclear fusion, I somehow managed to constrain myself to a meaningless analogy, while keeping quiet about my "mind's eye" which could picture every piece of information that captured my entire existence, smeared out in a infinitely thin sphere at the event horizon of a singularity, across all meaningful spacetime for the entire universe that I will ever perceive, which would have been rather a mouthful to express.

Just as one may cram for an exam the night before, I've attempted to only ever amass the prerequisite knowledge that may be considered the minimum viable to navigate whatever situations I have had to endure to reach my goals. Education has never seemed like an end in and of itself, given that our understanding of the fundmental nature of reality is evolving, and the Standard Model of particle physics is rather long in the tooth. Although I find it quite delightful that there are quarks named strange, charm and beauty in the particle zoo, I would find it rather frustrating to dedicate years of my life, obtaining a degree and writing a thesis using tools which may soon look as clunky and outdated as Newton's inverse-square law of gravity.

The mathematicians will mock physics as simply being applied mathematics. The physicists will mock chemistry as simply being applied physics. The chemists will mock biology as simply being applied chemistry, and so on.

Computers are now capable of solving equations and modelling real-world phenomena, potentially making algebra and calculus into dying arts, along with handwriting and long-division. The Fractal Geometry of Nature has revealed that cold rational calculating machines can produce simulations that imitate reality, through repeating patterns. Massive computational power does not only aid human discovery of hidden algebraic equations.

Amid much fanfare, computer software is touted as potentiating new drug discovery by simulating molecular binding, protein folding, rapid gene sequencing and personalised medicine. However, we seem to have forgotten that half the planet is impoverished & hungry, and vast numbers of those who are fortunate enough to live in advanced, wealthy & technologically advanced societies, are suffering from an epidemic of anxiety, depression and other mental health issues that is bad enough to drive vast numbers of men in the prime of their life to commit suicide: the biggest killer of males under the age of 45 in the UK - more than road traffic accidents, drug-related deaths, physical disease, murder, accidents and all the other causes of death.

One should consider that I took leave of my senses in 2008, but since that time I have only managed to attract two clinical diagnoses - convenient medical short-hand - although I have acquired a third which is perhaps the bluntest instrument of the three, and much more of a pejorative than a diagnosis.

"Substance abuse" is a catch-all term which serves me well when I haven't the time & energy to go into detail. Given humanity's long history of self-intoxication, some physicians would consider themselves to be well-versed in the matter. Even the most insulated amongst us, will have struggled to escape contact with a drunk in our lives. We quickly forget, of course, that psychiatry is an extremely young discipline. The isolation, refinement and synthesis of molecules which can short-circuit brain mechanisms, is something that dates back only 70 or 80 years, along with the branch of medicine chiefly concerned with treatment of matters of the mind.

The brain: the most complicated organ in the human body - estimated to have up to a quadrillion neuronal synapses - is often considered only in terms of its vital function as central nervous system, insofar as the same fatty grey matter helps other species to fuck, fight, flee and feed. This does not, however, tell us much about human consciousness, and even less still about pathological thought.

I once sat down and hand-wrote 12 pages of notes, from memory, of every General Practice doctor, psychiatrist and hospital, which I had attended during a 7 year period. Although I kept things as brief as I could, with names, dates and locations, as well as diagnoses and medications, there was a great deal to write. I'm not a complete hypochondriac - there were important notes about my episodes of depression and hypomania, where my mental health had caused me to become significantly dysfunctional.

Perhaps your mind is now skipping ahead - as mine often does - and you're attempting to finish my sentences. Presumably, you're trying to guess the punchline of the joke. I assume you've already got more than enough information to diagnose and treat me.

I'm second-guessing myself here, and I'm struck by the egotism and "navel gazing" of the very act of being sufficiently appraised of my own medical history that I should remember such a level of detail. Who the hell am I to take an interest in my own diagnosis and treatment? Where's my certificate, framed on the wall? Where's the photo of me wearing a mortar board & gown, and clutching a scroll of parchment with a red ribbon tied around it?

When I think about where I should spend my precious time and effort, I'm not motivated by the prospect of being an understudy to a failure. While psychiatry continues to produce dismal outcomes for humanity, in terms of the epidemic of mental health problems, addiction and general societal collapse under the weight of stress and burnout, I'm reluctant to follow in the path of those who are not succeeding in improving the human condition. It should however be noted that I do not for a single moment, criticise the well-meaning intent of those in the healthcare professions, nor do I mean to discredit the lifesaving work that takes place every single day.

The idea of using myself as a case study seems quite ridiculous, but one must consider that it would be unethical to - for example - risk a person's life when there is a treatment available that has been proven to be more effective than placebo.

With a sample size of one, perhaps nothing useful can be gleaned from my first-hand experiences, but I have attempted to corroborate my findings with other evidence wherever possible. I have deliberately avoided areas where another data point would make no difference: what use would it be if I too experienced anorgasmia as a result of SSRI medication, for example?

A great deal of our knowledge regarding the anatomy of the human brain has been gleaned from unethical experiments on unconsenting psychiatric patients - lobotomies, testing of medications and induced seizures. Animal studies have been gratuitously gruesome, with a great deal of unnecessary suffering inflicted upon primates. I'm not an anti-vivisection nutcase, but there must be very tangible goals to justify the means of obtaining the results.

To bathe a brain in psychoactive molecules that will cross the blood-brain barrier, is barbaric when we consider that the theoretical reasons why drugs have the effect that they do - the theories have so often been disproven. The 'chemical imbalance' theory that said that depressed brains had lower levels of serotonin, and that SSRIs would increase levels of synaptic serotonin, has been conclusively disproven, yet it is still a widely-circulated myth.

The much-vaunted sequencing of the human genome looks like a ridiculous white elephant of a project, when we consider that epigenetic gene expression had been discovered to allow genetically identical animals to exhibit completely different physical characteristics, depending on the environment that they have been exposed to.

In a collapsing global economy, education is one of the few sectors that's not feeling the pinch, and good solid science is getting drowned out in a sea of noise: pointless research. There are already excellent animal models which demonstrate that overpopulation and otherwise horrible living conditions, will produce a "behavioural sink" and addiction, in individuals who would otherwise lead happy healthy lives.

It has seemed fairly obvious to me from the start, that my mental health problems have stemmed from the ethical objections I had to the conduct of financial services organisations, and the role of global capitalism in ruining billions of human lives, in pursuit of unrestrained, unregulated and immoral profits, to the exclusion of any and all consideration of long-term consequences. In short: my problems should not be medicalised. I'm having a sane reaction to an insane world.

While this essay goes well beyond the "answer A, B or C" multiple-choice options on the prescriptive menu that is on offer, I feel that this does not invalidate the points I am making.

To have invested heavily in a mainstream education, would be to risk becoming incoherent with rage whenever somebody was so impertinent as to ask a thoughtful question - questions that spring into a mind that's unconstrained by the narrow status quo viewpoint, rote-learned while kowtowing to those with the necessary credentials to approve clones of themselves.

This is not "my ignorance is as good as your knowledge" anti-intellectualism, but instead a suggestion that we don't need so many people who've all read exactly the same books and sat more-or-less exactly the same tests. Moving towards intellectual homogeny is as dangerous as book burning, in my opinion.

In conclusion: this is a convoluted way of saying that you're unqualified to judge me, although you're possibly technically correct if you say that my problems are mostly of my own making.

Tags: #mentalhealth #suicide #addiction

This is a story about justification...

What do you suppose this stack of laundry baskets and boxes full of clothes is? Perhaps this is a new modern art installation at the Saachi Gallery?

200 days ago - April Fools' Day - I was so paranoid that I believed that somebody was going to break into my ensuite bathroom on the 4th floor, and invade my bedroom. I was also so unwell that I believed I could secure my bedroom by tying my dirty laundry baskets to the door handle.

Paranoia does not generally trouble me during my day-to-day life: nothing to hide, nothing to fear.

I'm about to make a factual declaration that might shock and disgust you.

Men's libido will drive them to relieve themselves - through sex or masturbation - on a relatively frequent basis, depending on each individual. You might consider a man who masturbates every day to be a twisted pervert. You might consider a monk who has taken a vow of celibacy having undesired nocturnal emissions - he ejaculates in his sleep - to be the finest example of a man that is biologically possible, without castration.

Let's just re-iterate this for emphasis: biologically, the human race has evolved a reproductive imperative that is as strong as breathing, sleeping, shitting, pissing, drinking and eating. If you can stop doing all of the latter for a few years, then you're welcome to then argue the point with me.

If you consider the unpleasant combination of being so horny that you need to masturbate, with the belief that you're being watched at all times, then you might understand that it's an impossible situation, assuming that you value your dignity and your privacy. At present there are at least 3 webcams watching me and 2 microphones listening to me. Of course, I presume that no ransomware is recording me without my permission, but such software exists in the wild. How much do you trust the manufacturer of your phone and your laptop, to not co-operate with your government, giving them the ability to spy on you?

Nothing to hide, nothing to fear?

I'm guessing that you wouldn't want your family, friends and work colleagues, or even complete strangers, to see you tugging your todger; yanking your chain; bashing your bishop, or whatever your preferred euphemism is for masturbating to orgasm. I'm guessing that you'd find such voyeurism to be unacceptably compromising and distressing enough to destroy your mental wellbeing.

Do you note that I'm leaving aside any discussion of anything 'kinky' or not otherwise in accordance with plain vanilla biological imperatives?

Of course, we could all just have sex, and then we've got a partner in crime - we have safety in numbers; at least there's somebody else who's looking ridiculous with us, as we make the beast with two backs. However, this is not always practicable. Natural urges do not always align with the competing demands of the world around us. Sometimes, we are horny and single.

If you're thinking "eeeewww" or otherwise troubled by an undesirable mental image, you understand perfectly that the vast majority of us wish to maintain some privacy around this particular activity. I cannot relate to men who take a thrill from masturbating at somebody, flashing their genitals or sending unsolicited dick pics. I am not writing about the exceptional cases, where men act in an antisocial or illegal way - these matters are excluded from the discussion, because they are unusual and those men do not think and behave like I do.

In short, the only way that my behaviour seems at all unusual, is the exceptional lengths that I will occasionally go to in order to not be spied upon while masturbating. If we consider our desire for privacy, it doesn't seem odd. If we think about the fear of the indignity and shame of having explicit images and videos of us masturbating, shown to other people, that fear is not irrational - it would be extremely distressing, for almost everybody.

Just over 6 months ago my mind was shattered. Today I'm barely troubled by paranoia.

My paranoia doesn't come from nowhere - of course it needs a seed. The internal source of my paranoia is sleep deprivation, hunger, thirst and mind-altering substances: I have a choice over whether I disturb my mind with these things or not. The external source of my paranoia could be explained simply in this way: do you imagine that men in psychiatric hospitals no longer need to masturbate?

Ask yourself where it would be appropriate to masturbate, when you're being checked on regularly by nurses and support workers. Ask yourself whether you think you could quietly do the deed in a dormitory with other men. Presumably, you'd go to the toilet or the shower, wouldn't you? If you're masturbating in an institutional environment, with the noise of staff and patients all around you, does that make you a twisted pervert?

This topic is the most sensitive that I could write about. Nothing could shame me more than you knowing these deeply troubling things, which is why I write about them - I'm grasping the nettle.

If you care to read back through what I've written, you'll see that I stop short of painting an explicit picture - the images in your head are entirely from your own imagination. I'm not attempting to upset anybody, nor am I discussing matters that have no place outside of a basic human biology lesson.

I believe that honesty is the best policy, and I'm taking that to its extreme conclusion, despite the detrimental effect it seems to be having on me and my life. I started the questionable experiment, to publish my inner monologue, and I'm compelled to continue, even though it causes me a great deal of anxiety.

Why do I need to live in fear of people learning who I am and how I feel? Why would I need to wear a mask? Why do I need privacy, when so many are determined to sneak a peek behind the curtain anyway?

What happens when a person lays themselves bare, instead of letting paranoia destroy them?

Tags: #paranoia #writing

This is a story about comfort...

Halley's Comet will next be visible in our skies on the 28th of July 2061. If I live that long, I'll be 82 years old, which is not inconceivable given that the current life expectancy of a man in the United Kingdom is 81.6 years old. As a lifelong non-smoker, I've also enjoyed a highly nutritious diet and not done a lot of manual labour or worked with particularly toxic chemicals - in theory, I can reasonably expect to live longer than the current national average, which increases quite steadily. In fact, on average, most men my age can expect to live into their 90s.

Edmund Halley was able to calculate how regularly the comet that now bears his name, would be visible in our skies, in 1705 - just 18 years after Isaac Newton published Principia Mathematica which famously contained the inverse-square law of gravity.

Today, we are lucky enough to have telescopes capable of tracking celestial objects with incredible accuracy. We are also blessed with Albert Einstein's General Relativity which allows us to calculate the movement of the heavenly bodies, in agreement with our observations. Before Einstein's GR superseded Newton's law, the orbit of Mercury had not matched up with the predictions of the prevailing theory.

The question that we are left with is this: were the scientific community to discover a huge space rock hurtling towards Earth on collision course, would it be ethical for them to tell the general public?

I'll rephrase and repeat that question again for emphasis: if it were to be discovered that we're all going to die when a massive asteroid smashes into the planet at 38,000 miles per hour, then should we know about it?

Ignorance is bliss.

There will be a certain proportion of society - those who believe all the plants, animals and the Earth were created by a sky monster in just 6 days - who would be resistant to anything that challenges their dogma, no matter how incontrovertible the evidence. There are people who are ridiculously wilfully ignorant, despite the facts, scientific consensus and oversimplifications that spell things out in words of four letters or fewer, complete with cartoon picture-books.

However, one would have to assume that a large proportion of society would accept that they're going to die in an incinerating fireball, earthquake, tsunami, shockwave or some other catastrophic consequence of a huge rock vaporising at millions of degrees, as it collides with the globe.

We could know the specific day that almost everybody is going to be wiped out. Any survivors are likely to die soon after the asteroid impact, due to a cloud of dust and ash that will block out all the heat from the sun. If we were to burn all the coal, oil, gas, trees and use every other energy reserve we have on the planet, we'd only be able to keep ourselves alive for a matter of hours.

Leaving the planet to go and live on the Moon or Mars is a ridiculous idea - only a handful of people would be able to go, and they'd soon die without shuttles from Earth to restock them with everything that moons and planets lack to support life.

The choices are: stay and die, or leave and die.

Given that most of us are going to die in a horrible catastrophe here on Earth, do you think we're just going to sit back and calmly let the billionaires leave and watch our death from space, like some kind of firework show?

Knowing that we're going to die on or around a certain date, along with our family, friends and virtually everybody else on the planet, do you think we're going to act like normal until it happens?

Obviously, there would be anarchy, chaos, looting, barbarism.

If the general public were to learn of the impending doom, wouldn't they plunge civilisation into such chaos that any efforts to save the planet would be derailed - it would become a self-fulfilling prophecy, because the scientists and engineers who might be able to save the entire Earth and its residents, would be ripped limb-from-limb by a crazed mob.

The public might not mean to shoot themselves in the foot, but they surely would. Some people who've seen too many Hollywood movies would endlessly insist that we fire off our entire nuclear arsenal to vaporise the asteroid in space, which would in fact cause masses of fragments of highly radioactive rock to be rained down on half the globe, in a far more destructive bombardment than anything we'd suffer in a single impact.

Deflecting an asteroid could never be done on its impact orbit - the object would be too heavy and travelling too fast - so we simply wouldn't have enough time once we'd discovered the huge rock on collision course to kill us all.

We would be rabidly demanding the impossible, or simply wanting to live a few hours, days or possibly months longer, at the expense of 7.6 billion other souls - diverting our precious resources into lifeboats that would carry us into the hostile vacuum of space: out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Those who grasped the hopelessness of the situation would resign themselves to their fate. Knowing that it would be unethical to bring children into a doomed world, would we kill ourselves, live with the melancholy or become hedonists in our remaining time on Earth? Why bother going to work? Why bother paying your rent or your mortgage or otherwise attempting to lead any kind of life like your ancestors, when an extinction event is inevitable?

If the general public learned of their imminent demise, the collapse of civilised society would be inevitable. So, is it ethical to tell people? In some ways, I'm glad that the world is full of climate change deniers and people who believe that the Earth is flat. It seems plausible that we may have already reached the point of no return, and there are individuals who know beyond all reasonable doubt that we're all going to die, but they are comforted to know that the general public are sufficiently stupid to not realise until mere moments before their death.

Don't scare the horses.

Tags: #physics

This is a story about how nothing really mattress...

This is the last double bed I slept in, 27 days ago. That's my brand new bedding with brand new pillows and a brand new duvet. I moved to Manchester with nothing more than my laptop and a bag of clothes. New life - clean slate. This is the apartment where I tried to kill myself. It was a miserable place and I'm glad I never slept there again.

I woke up on Saturday 9th September, and I was miserable. I wrote a blog post in this bed, about how miserable I was and how close I was to committing suicide. It was prescient.

The next bed I lay upon was owned by a guy who I had become friends with through my girlfriend. My girlfriend at the time was of no fixed abode - sofa surfing with a guy who she met on a dating website. I'd travelled to this friend's apartment to see my girlfriend. We lay kissing and cuddling on our friend's bed. Then, we broke up.

Coming home to my miserable apartment, I didn't get into bed - I took a massive overdose and lay on the bathroom floor in the dark, waiting to die. The next bed I laid upon was in the Accident & Emergency department of the nearest hospital.

I'm presuming - because I was unconscious - that I stayed on the same hospital bed, as I was transferred from A&E resus to the Intensive Treatment Unit (ITU) and then to a High Dependency ward. I was on life support. I was having seizures. I don't remember any of this.

I vaguely remember having to scramble across onto a different bed, to move me out of the High Dependency ward and onto a general ward. I remember this because there was a bag of my piss sloshing around that had to be moved too, and there was a tube coming out of my penis, which I had to be careful not to entangle with anything. The tube that was going up my dick yanked my male member around - it wasn't a comfortable experience.

From hospital I was thrown in a police cell. There was a 'bed' made of concrete painted with light blue paint - the same glossy paint that adorned the floor and walls of the cell. To slightly soften the hard concrete, there was a thin blue foam mat, which was wipe-clean. I did not sleep.

Driven home by the two police who had interviewed me - at 2am in the morning - I finally got back home at 3:30am. My sleep medication was nowhere to be found and I'd had a traumatic day - sleep was impossible. I lay awake on my bed, waiting until the earliest possible moment I could go to the office and try to find a work colleague - I was in a desperate situation and I needed help from somebody friendly and sympathetic to my plight: alone in a strange city with no friends or family; no smartphone, laptop, debit card, credit cards, cash or driving license.

After a second dreadful day I was pretty fucked up, as one might expect of somebody abandoned in such shitty circumstances. As sleep deprivation reached the 40+ hour mark, I ended up back at the same hospital's Accident & Emergency department that I had been in 5 days earlier.

Another day, another hospital bed. This one I came round face down on, with my wrists handcuffed behind my back, after having received an intramuscular injection of 4mg of lorazepam. It was approximately 3am in the morning - now 6 days after my original hospital admission.

Sectioned first under a 136 (up to 72 hours) and then upgraded to a section 2 (up to 28 days) I was then taken to a secure psychiatric facility with airlock-type doors, to stop anybody escaping. I was given a private room that was quite nicely appointed, with a writing desk and an ensuite wet-room.

Having blearily come round in the early hours of the Tuesday morning, it was now Thursday night. I finally had a single bed in a comparatively peaceful environment in which to collapse and sleep, mercifully with the assistance of some zopiclone to calm my jangled nerves and soothe me into my slumbers.

Gone were the bleeps and hisses of the machines that were keeping people alive, on the Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU), replaced with the sound of alarms, slamming doors, shouting and running in corridors, as my fellow patients were restrained by staff. I found it somewhat comforting, to know that my crisis was no longer at its peak.

After 8 days on the PICU, I was transferred to an acute psych ward. It was terrifying.

With me in hospital I had two Apple iPhones, two Apple Macbooks, a Nintendo Switch and £1,150 in £50 notes. It's not really recommended to have that amount of valuables on your person, in amongst some very poor and deprived people. The wealth disparity was vulgar.

My guardian angel facilitated the return of my surplus iPhone and Macbook - Apple were excellent and refunded me with no quibbles.

I begun life on the new ward in a private bedroom, but I didn't have an ensuite shower and the TV blasted right next door for 19 hours a day, at full volume. At first, I was too tired to care and I could sleep through the dawn chorus of utter bullshit television a million decibels, but then it started to keep me awake, leaving me less than 5 hours of shut-eye per night.

Then, the dreaded dormitory. Dorms are a mixed bag - very dependent on the luck of the draw, in terms of your fellow occupants. Security is a massive concern, as nothing more than a privacy curtain separated my personal possessions from anybody who'd care to have a look through my bags. Snoring can be a pain in the arse, with one person able to keep everybody else awake listening to their noisy slumbers. Thankfully, my dorm buddies weren't too bad.

This morning I woke up to "second; minute; hour; power; shower" repeated over and over, as a poetic dorm buddy wrote a new rap. That was 5:15am. It was still dark. He was pretty loud. He's sleeping now - snoring.

Today, I'm bustin' out of the psych ward. Watch out, general public of the United Kingdom - I'm going to be moving among you again as a free man.

This is my current bed. I'm lying on it as I type this. I don't know what the bed or the room I'm sleeping in tonight looks like - I've never set foot in the house I'm going to travel to this afternoon. It's a leap in the dark, as is my wont.

Some of my few remaining worldly possessions are here with me in Manchester and some are in London. I'm surprised that I haven't lost more of my valuables. I can't quite bring myself to do the maths, to figure how much money I've lost on this crazy jaunt to the North of England. What does it matter? I'm alive and about to be accepted into the fold of a kind family who are taking me in - the IT consultant who lost his mind in a city where he didn't have any friends or family. It's unlikely that I'd have ended up homeless, but I wasn't relishing the prospect of being chucked off the psych ward and into a dreadful bed & breakfast, in some shitty suburb.

The very definition of "my" home and "my" bed has been smashed to smithereens. Tonight will be the tenth bed I've lain upon in less than 28 days, including several hospital beds and the concrete slab that passes for a bed in a police cell.

Distress flares were fired off and a good samaritan is coming to rescue me from a fairly dire situation.

Tonight, I sleep in a normal house for the first time in what feels like a very long time.

Tags: #hospital #mentalhealth #nhs

This is a story about being inspected...

Today the psych ward is being inspected by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) and the staff are so nervous that some of them feel physically sick. I try to reassure one nurse that they're doing their best, despite staff shortages and rampant drug use - the synthetic cannabinoid called Spice is ubiquitous throughout prisons and psych wards.

There's always somebody peering over your shoulder, sneeringly judging you. Is it any wonder that paranoia takes hold in a mind, destroying it? The United Kingdom has an exceptional ability to track the movement of its citizens, using simple conventional CCTV - no spy satellites even needed.

In the free West, we deride the Stasi and the KGB. We talk about China's vast number of people employed to snoop on their own citizens, but we don't acknowledge the work of GCHQ and the NSA. Have we forgotten Edward Snowden's revelations so quickly? The Government read your fucking emails and the police - the regular ordinary police - have a backdoor into Facebook to read all your private messages.

Nothing to hide, nothing to fear. If you believe that, why do you feel stressed if a police car is following you when you're driving, and a sense of relief when the police overtake you and disappear over the horizon? You have insurance; you've had your car's roadworthiness tested; you've paid your road tax... nothing to worry about, right?

It was only a short time ago that I was deeply indoctrinated by my schooling, that had shaped me into a meek conformist - I was fearful of defying any of society's rules and regulations. A family friend wanted to go fishing with me, and I said we needed to obtain a permit. "Our prisons are full of people who got caught fishing without a license" this friend laughed. "What are you in here for? Murder. What are you in here for? Fishing without a license" he continued jovially.

The city centre is crammed with 50,000 protestors preparing to march. I walk past a police cordon and I can hear a police officer yelling at me that I can't go the way I'm going, but I know that he'll be busy dealing with my obedient friend who will have stopped per the instructions. I keep walking, pretending to be unable to hear the entreaties to return. The policeman lets my friend go and we walk to the head of the march.

I'm sure that anarchy would be a disaster for sick and vulnerable people. I have no desire to see civilised society crumble. We can't all do whatever the fuck we want, whenever the fuck we want. Perhaps if everybody acted like I did, it would be the end of the world as we know it.

"Don't walk" says the sign in the United States. I jaywalk with gay abandon. Even in Manchester people look at me like I'm mad and suicidal, for the way I cross the road. However, it's done with such confident aplomb that nobody challenges me. I notice that people who are surrounded by plenty of steel and glass and plastic, such that they would suffer no injury at all if they killed me to death with their motor vehicle, do not give a single fuck about whether I live or die. In London, a motorist will slow down or even brake, to avoid killing a pedestrian, but these provincial plebs treat human lives with no such sanctity.

To live in a crowded city is to be humbled by humanity. To be detained against your will on an underfunded psych ward is to humbled, also. In the city, you are forced to confront your pathetic meaningless existence, as an ant crawling in its nest would be, if it had the faculties to perceive itself and its surroundings. But an ant's nest is akin to a row of gleaming skyscrapers, insofar as being a testament to what can be achieved by a society working together. On the psych ward, you are forced to confront your powerlessness over forces greater than yourself - society will exclude its troublemakers.

Perhaps you think I would endorse heroin being sold in supermarkets and that babies' pacifiers should be replaced with crack pipes?

As six police officers pinned me to the ground and my bum was injected with lorazepam, in the Accident & Emergency department of a hospital, I noticed a cleaner and a security guard nearby - some of the lowest paid people in society are often completely unacknowledged for the role they play in maintaining the division between the peasants and the aristocracy. My face was inches from the floor, but the policeman's trousered knee on my head was clean and so was the linoleum. Circles of red and green blinked at me - the police bodycams, videotaping the whole gruesome specatcle. I'd fallen from grace, but I hadn't slipped anywhere near the bottom - it's a long way down.

A friend whose judgement I trust and respect, tells me that I should drop the bad boy image of "the guy who got fucked up in Manchester". She knows that people are watching and I'm misrepresenting myself. She knows that people are lazy and won't look any deeper than the superficial image that I present.

Is my life - and the way I document it - by accident or by design? Do you imagine that when I'm writing, I don't think at all about how things are going to be perceived? The joke's on you if you don't read what I write with the prerequisite pinch of salt.

If you just dip in at random - like a care quality inspector - then you will get a random impression. On a good day you'll get a good impression. On a bad day you'll get a bad impression.

Do you think the graph above shows that things are improving? No. No it does not. Things are getting worse. Much, much worse. The data above shows conclusively that during the period under examination, there was a fourfold increase in the very metric that was supposed to be cut by 80%.

Do you remember blue tablet man? Well, anyway, he assaulted a nurse for giving him a yellow tablet (5mg of diazepam) instead of a blue tablet (10mg of diazepam).

A drugs dog sweeps the ward. The patients believe the dog can sniff out cigarette lighters. I ask the handler if the dog can sniff Spice and he confirms that it can. There's Spice everywhere on the ward, despite its deleterious effect on the mental health of susceptible individuals - prodromal schizophrenia can turn into fully-blown psychosis under the influence of the powerful synthetic cannabis, making it all the more concerning that it's so widespread on an acute psychiatric ward.

The patients here are the lucky ones and they know it. Everybody agrees it's better to be here with a warm dry bed and three hot meals a day. Everybody agrees it's better to be here, where the chances of being beaten up and/or robbed are minimal. With winter on its way, months of unimaginable suffering lie ahead of Manchester's homeless population, which has increased 1,100% in just 7 years - and a huge number of them smoke Spice.

Abandon hope all ye who entered the world from the mid-1990s onwards. What are the prospects for the youth of today, and the glut of graduates who were promised that indebting themselves and spending three or four years at university would be a good move?

Does it not seem like an obvious reaction to a decline in living standards, to retreat into drugged-up oblivion?

We're sifted and sorted and dissected by tests. We're examined, inspected and measured in every conceivable way. We never have any respite from the world's desire to label us, grade us and monitor us. The pressure to meet the expectations placed upon us is relentless. Some of us will crumble and have nervous breakdowns or be paralysed by anxiety disorders. Some of us will rebel and kick back at the suffocating environment that's desperate to eject and marginalise anybody who doesn't neatly fit in a box. Lots of subcultures have sprung into existence, with members exchanging knowing looks - these people are so much happier now that they have rejected the stereotype they were supposed to embody.

It saddens me that the hard-working staff on the ward are anxious and on best behaviour, when the other 364 days a year I know that they try their very hardest. This is just one of many psych wards, where the macro problems are greater than anything that can be influenced in the microcosms.

If you're going to randomly dip in, be careful to not make a lazy judgement based on a small sample size.

Tags: #nhs #hospital #mentalhealth #addiction #politics

This is a story about being counter-productive...

95% of my fellow patients smoke cigarettes. There's nothing to do on the psych ward, so I can see why they would. Cigarettes are a way to pass the time; to deal with boredom; to relieve some of the stress of being locked up with a load of mentally ill people; to self-medicate for all manner of problems.

Nicotine is fiendishly addictive and a psych ward is not the right environment to kick the habit. As a non-smoker I'm well aware that I'm not involved in the activity that dominates the lives of my fellow patients - obtaining tobacco, rolling cigarettes and harassing the staff to be let outside to smoke.

There is a small outdoor area which can be accessed via some steps, enclosed in a cage so that nobody can jump and injure themselves, or attempt to escape. Every hour, the door to the steps is opened for 15 minutes, and the smokers all cluster around the top of the steps, getting their nicotine fix. Nobody goes down the steps into the outdoor area - they remain in the cage.

I challenge the staff - why don't they leave the door open the whole time? Nobody could escape from the outdoor area, because it's surrounded by high fences. The outdoor area is well covered by CCTV, and it's no harder to keep an eye on people than any other part of the ward.

The standard response from the staff is that it's "promoting health" to deny nicotine addicts access to the only place they're allowed to smoke. I call bullshit on this, because there's no data to support the hypothesis. "Look around - everybody smokes... nobody is smoking less because of this rule" I say. The staff argue that the NHS can't be seen to be "promoting" smoking. This is a completely ridiculous idea. The nurses and support workers hand out the cigarettes and cigarette lighters - the NHS is intimately involved in the whole process of smoking, far more than if the patients were given the choice as to how they dealt with their addiction.

I'm in a dorm with 3 other men. It's a lot quieter than the single room right next to the TV - the TV blasted out for 19 hours in every 24 at full volume. The noise was unbearable. My fellow patients in my dorm report that they're lulled off to sleep by the rhythmic tapping of my keyboard, as I pound out these words. I was concerned that I was being a noisy nuisance, but they reassure me that it's quite the opposite - it's a kind of white noise that's relaxing, like hearing raindrops falling on the roof or hitting the windows, driven by the wind.

A guy is coming out of my dorm, but he doesn't sleep in my dorm - he has his own room. What's he doing down at this end of the ward? Then, my nostrils are assaulted by the smell of smoke. I push the door to the bathroom open and it stinks - there isn't even a decent extractor fan to get rid of the smell. I write a note and secretly pass it to a nurse, pretending to pass her my laptop to be charged in the office. I scurry away down the corridor but she yells after me "tell XXXXX about the smoking in the toilet" waving the note, right in front of the guy I'm dobbing in. I cringe - does she not know that snitches get stitches?

Another nurse comes to our dorm and she starts accusing one of my dorm mates of smoking in the toilet. I leap to his defence. "Who was it?" she asks, and then bellows out his name when I whisper the answer. The fact that many of my fellow patients have a criminal past and have been in prison, does not seem to concern the staff members. Perhaps there aren't fights in here. Perhaps they never see any violence. Perhaps my fears are unfounded. Am I being paranoid?

The fire escape is padlocked shut, there are no fire extinguishers or sprinklers, the break-glass buttons are enclosed in plastic boxes that prevent the fire alarms from being set off - a fire in here would be catastrophic. Yet, I am certain that there are at least 2 cigarette lighters that are being used in my dorm. The patients smoke openly when the staff are doing their handover between shifts, when there's absolutely nobody around.

I make subtle enquiries with my fellow patients - how do they feel about the restrictions on smoking? Everybody agrees that the restriction on access to the outdoor area is more about control than it is about "promoting health" - they feel that the staff have created a system that allows them to exercise dominion over their inmates. "Smoke time!" demands one of the more aggressive patients, banging on the window of the office. "Calm down! Stop shouting!" yells back a staff member. This is an artificial and avoidable situation - why does it exist, when it's creating conflict between staff and patients, and making people stressed and unhappy?

When I was confined to the ward I would have made use of the outdoor area to walk around, get some fresh air and get some natural light. However, I couldn't get past the gaggle of smokers clustered around the top of the steps. To leave the door open all the time wouldn't create this ridiculous situation, where all the patients are fixated on this controlling aspect of their lives.

It's saddening, to see 19 men all hanging around waiting to be given a lighter and be let out, like they're animals; pets.

In defiance of the pointless draconian controlling bullshit, a handful of patients have smuggled cigarette lighters and tobacco into the ward - it's not hard when some patients are allowed unaccompanied leave from the ward. "Have you got any bottles or lighters on you?" a nurse asks me when I get back from an outing - I'm not breathalyzed or searched, even though I'm carrying a bulging bag.

I suppose the privilege of being allowed to leave the ward could be revoked, as a punishment for misbehaviour. The chance of being discharged early and allowed home is also under threat, for any patient who's troublesome. Most patients are here for a 6-month stay. It's up to 6 months, but it's more often longer, not shorter. The reaction to not being allowed to go home is rarely handled well - can you imagine that people who are unwell are able to remain calm and represent themselves clearly and articulately, when their liberty is at stake?

In terms of mental health, nothing could be more stressful, adversarial and paranoia-inducing, than having doctors and nurses discuss you behind your back, having been peeked at through the curtains every 15 minutes - patients are literally spied on and judged. Life, liberty and free-will are all interfered with in an institutional environment that's a cross between a prison and a school. Notices on the wall tell us they promote "independence and well-being" while also telling patients the very strict times that they need to be at the dispensary hatch to get their medications. At 8:54am I'm harassed by a nurse to go for my 9am meds... I'm well aware what the time is and also well aware that to be early is to be turned away empty handed. At 11:54am I'm harassed to go and stand in line for some food which is not even being served until 12 noon at the earliest, and is often delayed.

I'm aware that I'm lucky to have a sought-after psych bed - many people who are having a mental health crisis will have no access to inpatient care. To bite the hand that feeds me seems churlish, but I do feel sorry for my fellow patients who can't articulate their frustrations effectively.

The only patient I know to have attempted to file a complaint is the guy who's relentlessly trying to get 8mg more Subutex out of the doctors... unwilling to go along with the treatment that will wean him off his opiate addiction and quite determined to sabotage his recovery, perhaps.

Nobody's stopping smoking because of the "health promoting" rules around access to the outdoor area, but I'm certainly missing out on exercise and fresh air because of it.

It all looks rather counter-productive to me.

Tags: #addiction #hospital #mentalhealth #nhs

This is a story about subservience...

It's grim up North. I didn't think it would be but it is. Here's Coronation Street. Beautiful, isn't it? Presently, that discarded sofa would be where I'd sleep if I discharged myself from hospital.

Without the crutches of alcohol, benzodiazepines and sleeping pills, I feel overwhelmed by stress and anxiety, because of the precarity of my position. Without a home; without a job; without financial security - there's plenty of rational reasons to be distressed.

People implore me to sit back and relax, but they don't realise that I've got loan payments to make; credit card payments to make; overdraft interest to be paid. To have to spell this out multiple times is frustrating.

"Why don't you just go bankrupt?"

Yeah, nice one, Einstein. Did you know that I do a lot of consultancy for financial services organisations? It's imperative that I have a clean credit record - prospective employers will do credit checks on me. You might as well suggest that I go out and commit a crime and add a criminal record to my list of woes.

"It's too soon to be thinking about going back to work"

Well, unless I'm accepting that I'm abandoning all hope of ever repaying my creditors and suffering a life of poverty at the mercy of the state, then no, it's not too soon. There's a concept called runway that I talked about at length during the first half of this year. I was unwell, but during my convalescence I was running out of runway. What happens when a plane runs out of runway?

In short, I'm driven to seek income, to prop up my depleted finances and keep servicing my debts.

If you're really wanting to poke your nose into the darkest recesses of my life, then you should know that I can easily earn enough to replenish my savings and get onto an even keel, with just 5 or 6 months of contract work in London. That I ever left London seems like a mistake, but I had few options - what I did was the right thing in the circumstances.

Today, I'm detoxed from alcohol and benzodiazepines - the physical dependency has been treated - but it quite literally nearly killed me. In addition to the massive deliberate tramadol overdose, my hospitalisation meant I abruptly stopped drinking and taking benzos, which caused me to have loads of seizures - in short, you should never suddenly stop heavy drinking or taking large doses of benzos, because you could die.

So, one might argue that I'm in a better place than when I attempted suicide. Yeah, I guess the biggest threat to my life has gone - my physical dependency on medications and alcohol.

Now, the biggest threat to my life is me - the desire to be dead is an insistent nagging thought that won't go away. It makes so much sense to commit suicide: all I have ahead of me is stress.

The rebound anxiety - having ceased taking medications and drinking alcohol - is causing me to suffer an intolerable amount of unpleasant feelings. It feels like I'm going to feel awful forever, and who would want that?

Of course, my perceptions are probably warped - nothing lasts forever. However, should I really be living my life just hoping to die of natural causes?

I could be writing about how pleased and happy I am to have a second chance - I survived a very large overdose and other medical complications that really should have killed me: the team at the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) were very surprised that I survived. Shouldn't I embody every trite contrived platitude you've ever heard? Shouldn't I be carpe diem'ing? Shouldn't I be counting my blessings? Shouldn't I be thanking my lucky stars?

Without stopping to consider all the reasons I tried to kill myself, my problems are not going to go away on their own, are they?

If my suicide attempt was an impulsive thing that I had any regrets about, then perhaps surviving would give me some long-lost appreciation for life. However, I'm spine-chillingly cold and rational about the biggest decision that anybody can ever make: the decision to die. Having been stuck in a never-ending cycle of attempts to get my life back together again, I was exhausted and unable to face rebuilding everything again. I'm still exhausted.

There was a fleeting chance that my suicide attempt could have been a minor setback, but I was completely shafted by the company I was working for. The mistreatment I suffered was inhumane; monstrous. I'm almost speechless that I could have been treated so badly.

I'm stuck between three things:

1. To act positively, and go and earn some more money
2. To act negatively, and pursue my legal rights
3. To simply attempt to kill myself again

To follow the first option is to repeat the behaviours I mastered a very long time ago. It was 20 years ago I got my first full-time job; rented my first apartment. It was 20 years ago that I learned about office politics and how to get ahead in life - a life of corporate conformity.

Instinctively, I reject the bullshit that made me unwell. For 20 years I've observed the rats in the rat race, and for 20 years I've observed the world become a shitter place - an exploding population is on collision course with mass starvation; unrestrained fossil fuel burning has led to runaway climate change, which is causing parts of the world to become uninhabitable, killing and displacing billions of people; deregulated free-market capitalism has raped the globe's finite resources and created a culture of wealth-worship where nobody gives a fuck about anything.

To be a principled, ethical man, is a kind of disadvantage - my political philosophies about social justice and a more fair and equal world, are exploited. I find myself screwed over by people who are willing to trample on anybody and everybody, in a desperate and disgusting scramble up the slippery sides of a mountain of dead bodies.

I've proven that I can play by the rules, but the whole game is bullshit and most people are cheating. I don't have anything to prove to anybody anymore; I've shown that I can wear the corporate mask and fit in with the herd; I've shown that I can live a life of subservient conformity, but it drove me to point of taking my own life.

I don't wanna play anymore, and the only way I can see to call time on this bullshit is to kill myself.

I think to myself that I've suffered and that I must turn that suffering into a piece of art - a monument to the stupidity of humanity. It's grandiose and ridiculous to think that a piece of writing could have any useful effect on the world, but this is my only legacy. Do you deny me the facts? To think that I would no longer live & breathe was a shock to many who've stuck with me and followed my story.

Of course, I'm sick and I've got "insight" into my illness - that is to say that I can consider an objective point of view. It's natural that I'd be feeling terrible, only 24 days after I very nearly managed to kill myself. It's natural that I'd be feeling terrible, given the clusterfuck of issues I've got to sort out if I want to go on living. I can see that I may very well be feeling unnaturally anxious, because my brain is re-adjusting to life without booze and benzos to soothe the stresses that are ever-present in the world.

A doctor suggests that I avoid the news, political protests and other things that I might get worked up about. Is this akin to a lobotomy? I think I would very much like a lobotomy... that's how I arrived at the brain-numbing chemical lobotomy that I swallowed every single day. Unfortunately, my brain is very much intact.

Why am I still so painfully conscious?

Tags: #suicide