Nick Grant

This is a story about ups & downs...

I used to quite enjoy my hypomanic episodes. I haven't had one for over 8 months though, and I'm beginning to miss the energy, focus, enthusiasm, fast-paced thinking, creativity and passion for something, anything.

When I average out the amount of time that I would spend hypomanic versus the amount of time I would spend depressed, you'd think that it's something you wouldn't want, because my episodes of depression were always far longer than my episodes of hypomania. However, I never wanted to give up those hypomanic highs, even though my episodes of depression have been brutal and I've nearly taken my own life.

Some people ask me "aren't you just experiencing what every human experiences? Joy and sadness?". Here is a graph that kinda explains the difference between Bipolar and 'normal':

Do you see much difference?

The first thing I should draw your attention to is the range. The red line never reaches the dotted line that signifies hypomania and depression. In any given moment, you might be happy that your sports team just won a game, or you might be sad because somebody ate all the cakes, but this is a normal range of moods. In normal life, you're not spending every cent in your bank balance, taking crazy risks and undertaking insane projects at breakneck speed. In normal life, you're not unable to work or socialise, and on the brink of suicide.

The second thing that I should draw your attention to is the irregularity of it. It's unpredictable, because it's dictated by external events. Who knows when a friend is unexpectedly going to drop by and say "Hi!" which will lift your mood. Who knows when your boss is going to say something's wrong with your work, which will make you upset. These events are unpredictable, because they come from the world at large, which is also unpredictable. This is normal life. Normal life is unpredictable and exciting.

With my Bipolar II, I know that every episode of hypomania is going to be followed by a crash. I know that my hypomania is going to last a few weeks, maybe a month and a bit. I know that my depression is going to last anywhere between 6 weeks and 6 months. These episodes are monotonous. Sure, good stuff and bad stuff happens during those episodes, but it does little to affect my prevailing mood.

This year I seem to have had the longest depression of my life. It's given me somewhat of an appreciation for what it must be like for people with Unipolar Depression. Here is a graph of what my life looks like at the moment:

Looks pretty bleak, doesn't it? Unrelenting depression, and only very brief moments where I feel OK. Look how sharp those spikes are. Surely my life can't be that bad?

Well, look at it in these terms: we are now in July. That means that in 2016, I have had 7 months of this shitty feeling. January to April, it was understandable that I was depressed, right, because it was shitty winter, I was unemployed and I was stressed about running out of money and being evicted out of my apartment onto the streets. You can surely empathise with that situation, and agree that it would be pretty depressing?

So what about May, June and July? Well, I've been working a job that I took out of desperation. My mental health really does not permit me to be working a shit job full time, because I'm exhausted and demotivated, due to the aforementioned depression. But what about all that cash I'm earning? Shouldn't I be happy - glad - to have a job again?

Well, I'm working to replenish my savings. I'm working to pay off debts that I ran up when I was unable to work. I'm working to literally stand still.

But what about fun time?

Well, look at it this way. There are 120 hours in the working week. Let's look at my lunch hour: that's about 4% of the time. So, 96% of the working week is not lunch hour. Another way of looking at it is Saturdays. Saturday is the only day of the week where I'm not working or anxious about going back to work. That means that only 1/7th of the week is somewhat free of anxiety. What about holidays? Well, 7 months have elapsed this year without a holiday. Let's say that I take a 1-week holiday. Leaving aside the fact that for the whole week I'll be dreading going back to work, we are only talking about 1 week in 30. That's right... I'm only on holiday 1/30th of the time.

Things will improve when I have money in the bank and I can afford to take more time off (I don't get paid holiday and I also have loss of earnings while I'm away) but predominantly, my life this year has been monotonous depression.

I'm dying for my mood to swing to the other 'pole' and to enter a hypomanic episode. Depression is literally killing me.

Tags: #mentalhealth #depression #suicide #bipolar

This is a story about Tower Hamlets...

Where I live, Muslims aren't 0.9% of the population like in the USA. Where I live, Muslims aren't 5% of the population, like in the whole of England. Where I live, the Muslim population is 46%. What do you think that's like?

Tower Hamlets is a place of huge socioeconomic divide. The council that governs this particular part of the UK, houses some of the poorest members of society, yet it is also the home to the headquarters of HSBC: the biggest bank in Europe, along with massive tower blocks for the likes of Citigroup, JPMorgan, Barclays, Fitch & Moody's, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse and giant accountancy & legal firms like KPMG and Clifford Chance.

While I sit on the banks of the River Thames penning essays like this one, slightly inland there are deprived council estates that are the modern equivalent of the Victorian slums. This is London. While I go to the dry cleaners to collect my freshly laundered shirts for the working week, or do some food shopping in Waitrose, my neighbours - certainly those who you would recognise as 'English' - are in the betting shops or buying lottery tickets at the convenience store.

If you think I've wandered into snobbery, you're wrong. I'm simply an observer. It's true that I occupy a priviledged position, but anybody is capable of making similar observations.

You know, I don't feel at all safe, boarding an underground train in a sea of white faces at 6pm on a weekday evening. Canary Wharf is crawling with rich middle-class people, and the station is packed to the rafters. Often times, the escalator is carrying so many office workers down to the packed concourse that people start to pile up at the bottom, in a rather comic way.

But when I head away from the glistening tower blocks filled with middle and back office drones, I start to feel safe again. London never feels like real London when it divides itself. The private estate of Canary Wharf, and the protected enclave of the City of London, with its 'Ring of Steel' are just crying out to be attacked, because they are sending out a message of "no poor people welcome here".

It feels like no atrocity is ever going to be committed in the markets of Brick Lane, where hipsters flock because of East London's famous Asian community. It feels like no atrocity is ever going to be committed on the Commercial Road or on Petticoat Lane, where large courtyards are filled with people praying towards Mecca.

London's great advantage is not integration, but tolerance. Everybody knows that the Edgware Road is somewhere to go and drink tea and smoke shisha. Everybody knows that all the Aussies and Kiwis have colonised Hammersmith and Shepherd's Bush. Everybody knows that Clapham and North London are the places that young wealthy white professionals frequent, whilst Camden is for dope smokers and tourists. Curry on Brick Lane. Chinatown. Little Venice. The cultural divisions are manifest.

London is not in the least bit integrated, but that's its great strength. Rather than relegating the poor entirely into the undesirable suburbs, like with Paris, social housing has brought otherwise 'undesirable' people into the very heart of the city.

The scariest places are Canary Wharf and the City because they have no residential housing, so therefore, they are almost 100% white middle class, filled with guffawing hooray Henries who have absolutely zero idea about the life of an underpriviledged person.

I used to live a stone's throw from the UK's Foreign Secretary - Boris Johnson - but not in a multimillion pound Georgian town house. My landlady was illegally subletting her council flat while she lived a life of idle luxury in Spain. On the towpath of the canal that the back of my apartment used to overlook, I would be verbally abused by Islington and Hackney's less fortunate residents, for being a yuppie. That sort of shit keeps you humble.

Now, 'right to buy' has gifted wealth to a few social housing tenants, but the gentrification of London is a terrible thing.

There are 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, so it's right that I should live in a community where nearly 50% subscribe to the Islamic doctrine. My life is certainly none the poorer for being mindful of important religious events, like Ramadan.

Britain and London's great victory was in diplomacy and tolerance. Our American-style anti-immigration and anti-Islamic rhetoric is only going to fuel tensions that were entirely imperceptible, until the USA decided to involve itself in Gulf conflicts in the early 1990s. We are paying a greater and greater price for the 'special relationship' with the US that affects our long-standing good relations with our Middle Eastern friends and allies.

Citizens of the United Kingdom would be well advised to remind themselves that Iraq, Iran and Syria had a thriving middle class, before their countries were torn apart by war, sanctions and CIA destabilisation.

You reap what you sow, and this anti-Islamic sentiment is completely undermining everything that I stand for as a diplomatic British Londoner.

Tags: #politics #london

This is a story about obvious solutions...

Hallelujah! Praise the Lord! The solution has been found. Blessed is this wonderful day, for now the ailment that has blighted so many lives - depression - has finally met its match with one simple trick, that nobody ever thought to try before.

In the history of humanity, nobody ever thought to say these magic curative words to a depressed person:

"Other people have it so much harder than you"

Upon hearing these words, the depression sufferer is reminded that there are children starving in Africa, that there are political prisoners in China, that there are people who live in low-lying countries like Bangladesh, where there is a constant threat of natural disaster from floodwaters, that there are massive slums in Mexico and Brazil and that 2.8 billion people in the world live on less than $2 a day. The depression sufferer had simply forgotten!

You would have thought that the poverty and injustice of the world could almost be considered an additional cause of the sadness and depression that the person was feeling, but no, they were simply wallowing in self-pity.

It had previously been thought that depressed people were sensitive and aware of global issues, and empathised very much with the plight of those living in poverty, warzones and struggling to survive. It had previously been thought that the depressed people were having a sane response to an insane world, but no, they just needed reminding to count their blessings.

It had been previously thought that depressed people were well aware of all the things that they could be glad about, grateful for. I mean, they're not dead with red hot pokers shoved up their bum and all their skin peeled off and raw flesh dipped in salt and lemon juice, while their finger and toe nails are pulled out one by one, are they? I mean, for fucks sake, unless that is happening to you right fucking now your life is just one big fucking rainbow cotton candy parade of fucking joy, right?

In fact, there'd probably be somebody who's not only having the poker, lemon juice and nail pulling, but is also being burnt alive while watching their entire family get chopped up and fed to wild animals, so even people who are undergoing the aforementioned torture should be whistling a little jolly fucking tune and thinking about how lucky they are to not be undergoing the additional torments.

Some rather convincing sounding fools had put across compelling arguments that depression is absolute not relative. It seemed logical when it was explained that somebody who is suicidal either follows through with it, in which case they're dead, or else they hit some limit where they cannot be any more depressed without actually dying. It also did not seem unreasonable that somebody could be depressed for a number of reasons, even including those not directly related to hot pokers and other tortures.

However, as soon as the cure was revealed to the public, it turned out that people had just been making up this depression stuff all along.

The UK's most popular suicide spot - Beachy Head - quickly erected a large sign saying "other people have got it so much worse than you" and immediately all self-murder at the famous cliffs dropped to zero.

The popular daytime television program Jeremy Kyle was watched by millions of people who were previously unable to work due to depression. The program aired a special 30-second segment, where pictures of starving African children were shown to viewers, with subtitles that read "just be glad your situation isn't as bad as this". A modern miracle was declared, when people cast aside their antidepressants and returned to their minimum wage zero hours contracts with a beaming smile from ear to ear and a spring in their step.

There are factories where most people in the UK work. At the factories, pigs' anuses, insects and slugs are boiled for 72 hours to make children's sweets. People work 23.8 hour shifts stirring giant vats of bubbling filth that has an unspeakably foul smell that no amount of soap can remove. The stench and the heat is almost overpowering, but break times are forbidden, and any hesitation in stirring the revolting brew for even a second is punished by being locked in stocks and pelted with rotten vegetables.

People used to say that the job was pretty rubbish, but now that they realise that there's a factory in India where the workers have a 23.9 hour shift, and they're pelted with frozen vegetables, all the workers are now overjoyed to have such a wonderful job and cannot shower their employers with enough praise.

Praise be to the bringers of joy to the world, who so kindly pointed out the motherfucking obvious: there's always some poor cunt whose life is worse than yours.

Tags: #depression #suicide #mentalhealth #capitalism

This is a story about perspectives...

Relativity. The difference between different observers, for a given frame of reference. Who can say that the reality that I experience is more 'real' than that which you experience?

As if by chance, a friend of mine who I used to be homeless with - sleeping rough - in the London parks, visited me this evening. Now, instead of living destitute in a bush, I was able to entertain him in a luxury Thameside apartment.

Do you think that this disparity, this clear 'upswing' in my social status and prospects, makes me think "ooh! how terribly fortunate I am!"?

In actual fact, when the Government had ignored my doctor and psychiatrist's imploring letters to support me during a particularly vulnerable period in my life, and I had been denied welfare and housing, I felt liberated. I lived within a stone's throw of a Royal Palace and was relinquished of the responsibilities of attending demeaning ATOS assessments, completing form upon form of personal information, and digging through vast archives of paperwork to find bullshit documents to satisfy some blank-faced bureaucratic drone.

Do you think I'm glad not to be homeless? Don't be so ridiculous. Everything comes with a cost.

I'm really in no position to be working at the moment. I feel like I'm going through one of the most prolonged periods of depression that I have ever experienced, and the stress and anxiety of my situation is so unbearable that I am closer to taking my own life than I have ever been before.

The fact that I am working is very different from being able to work. The cost to me is virtually immeasurable. If this brief period of stuffing cash in a mattress appears to be a success for those who believe that work will set us free at bayonet point, they are probably ignoring the historical precedent and likely long-term outcomes.

I note that those who criticise me for being ungrateful for my position may be doing so whilst on holiday in Barcelona, or perhaps on a yacht in La Rochelle. This seems to be the ultimate in ignorant hypocrisy, when these people have probably never known the hardships of homelessness and destitution.

If you imagine that a homeless person should be grateful when they are finally off the streets and into a stable housing situation, you are a buffoon. Housing, food, hygiene and an opportunity to put your skills to productive use, are the bare minimum for human dignity. These are human rights.

Instead, I feel like a prostitute. I have sold my mind to the highest bidder. My analogy is probably insulting to those who are genuinely compelled to sell sex, but in this way, you might understand the lack of empathy that my wealthy friends have shown towards my own situation.

Get rich or die trying. It's not even that simple. There are so few ways to dig yourself out of a desperate situation. Prostitution of the body or prostitution of the mind. If somebody wishes to shoot me down for such a melodramatic analogy, go right ahead, I probably deserve it and I'm an easy target, but this is how I feel.

I have made a bitter choice: work for three times as long, and have a somewhat easier time of it, but know the whole time that I'm being underpaid for my skills. Or, to be highly paid but accept the very worst work. The most soul-destroying and de-skilling work that is wholly unsatisfying and only the hardest, meanest, most desperate mercenaries would tolerate in the interests of getting rich quick.

My days are a completely calculated gamble. I put my mental health on the chopping block, hoping that I can struggle by for long enough to put a few dollars in the bank before I explode with stress, frustration, depression and having been completely exploited by a ruthless industry intent on burning people out in pursuit of pure profit.

It's hard to express how hard it is to do something that you mastered nearly 20 years ago, and has now become excruciating mental agony, but also an extremely well paid profession. I'm paid to be professionally bored, stressed, anxious and unfulfilled. I'm paid to put up with stuff that would have most sane people running out of the office saying "fuck this shit".

Yes, the majority of people hate their jobs. Yes, the majority of us would not work given the choice. This is different. I can compare and contrast. I can tell you what the difference is being an electrician from being the manager of an IT project. I can tell you which one destroys your soul and your mind more.

You know the best job I've ever had? Delivering newspapers on Monday to Saturday for £10 a week.

Tags: #homeless #depression #suicide #mentalhealth #career

This is a story about what people do when they think nobody is watching...

Integrity. What does it mean to have integrity? Let's explore a hypothetical example.

The year is 2011. I'm running a profitable tech startup called Hubflow, and we have just been through a 13-week TechStars network technology accelerator program in Cambridge, run by Jon Bradford and Jess Williamson. We have a bunch of investors who are ready to help us raise a seed round. Mike Butcher has written about us in TechCrunch. We are kicking arse.

The sticking point that is stressing me out is that my partner won't support me. My company needs to relocate to London, Cambridge or somewhere on the M4 corridor so that I can hire the talent I need and get to my customers and investors whenever I need to see them. My partner is a teacher. She can literally work anywhere in the country.

***

I financially supported my partner through her retraining to be a teacher. She had a huge income drop, when she left the investment bank where we both worked, but I made sure that she still enjoyed the 5-star luxury lifestyle that she had gotten used to with me.

Even when I quit my salaried job so that I could build my startup, I had substantial savings and profits, to allow us to maintain the same standard of living. I had bankrolled her when she wanted to make a career change, and she'd never had to tighten her belt or compromise.

This was now my turn to shine. I had done it. I had built a profitable company with a good valuation that was ready for investment to take it to the next stage. It was now time to leave the sleepy little seaside town where we lived and move things closer to the action.

My co-founder had left his pregnant partner behind in his home town, to come and live with me in Cambridge for several months, while we built our business together and got ourselves ready for investment. He had made sacrifices and compromises with his growing family. Now it was the turn of my partner to step up and make a small compromise herself.

However, she wouldn't budge an inch.

I could have left her. And perhaps - in hindsight - that's what I should have done. She had never been very kind or supportive. In fact, she was pretty mean spirited and selfish. I don't know why I stayed loyal to her. I'd had opportunities to fool around while I was working away from home, in Boulder, Colorado, in London or in Cambridge, but I stayed faithful. I stayed faithful because I have integrity.

I then got very depressed. She had refused any kind of compromise. I had to leave her, or my business was screwed. There was no way that me and my co-founder could make it work over such a geographical hurdle. We needed to be together, on the ground, raising money and winning more customers. And we were so close. It was heartbreaking.

By the time Christmas rolled around that year, I had gotten so depressed and suicidal that I was hospitalised. My unsupportive mean ex had instructed my parents to come and take me away, and had involved my doctor, all against my wishes. This was an incredible betrayal. Now she wanted me removed from my own home, that I had bought and paid for. This was a horrible act of selfishness.

Before I was literally dragged away by my Dad, I decided to install a keystroke logger on my personal laptop, which was running my personal account & password. This was clearly an act of paranoia, due to the fact that I was extremely mentally unwell, having recently been released from a mental hospital. Clearly I was out of my mind.

I was driven away from my home, my business, my friends, my possessions, to a village where I had never lived since the age of 4, where I have no friends. Miles away from any cities where I had business contacts, investors, customers. I had just been totally fucked over. This was not in my best interests. I didn't even have a doctor or a psychiatrist nearby.

So then, was my partner interested in my wellbeing? Did she call to see how I was? Was she concerned about me getting better?

I thought it rather strange that she wasn't at all involved in trying to 'help' me, now that I was out of the way. In fact, it was rather strange that all the 'help' was simply to tell people to remove me from my own home. Must have been more paranoia though, right? I was mentally ill, remember?

I levelled my accusations about being dumped like this, and dragged away from everything I held dear. My partner and parents conspired to keep me trapped in this shitty village in the middle of nowhere. They even involved the police "for my welfare".

Anyway, after about a week of this shit, I decided to see if anybody had been using my laptop with my username and password. Strangely enough, and totally co-incidentally, they had been.

On examination of the logs, it looked like somebody had used my laptop and username to set themselves up an online dating profile and start messaging men. How strange. How curious.

Surely this could not have been my partner, for if she was using a computer at all, I'm sure it would have been to research the best possible treatment available for me, or to better understand what had happened to me, so that she could be as loving and supportive as possible, no?

My partner continued to treat me like utter shit and told me that any suggestion I made that she was not acting in my best interests, was purely in my imagination and fuelled by mental illness, paranoia.

Finally, I showed my hand, and she back-pedalled rapidly, begging my forgiveness and swearing that it was all a misguided mistake. She suddenly became nice as pie and started treating me with a tiny fraction of the respect and decency that I deserved.

I then had a brief taste of how I should have been treated all along, and it was nice. My stupid mistake was to then marry the evil *****. A leopard never changes its spots.

Be careful if you get mentally ill with a vindictive, selfish, mean-spirited little **** of a partner, because they might just try to chuck you out of your own house and replace you.

Tags: #divorce #mentalillness #startups #career #suicide #computing

This is a story about brainwashing...

How do you think that somebody who has worked for the best part of 20 years in the investment banking technology sector, mostly as an IT consultant, would re-adjust to being under lock and key in a psychiatric hospital? The answer is: very easily.

Hospitals and the NHS are a home from home for anybody who's worked for an organisation with hundreds of thousands of employees. The ways that large organisations function are largely the same. The way that systems and processes are supposed to control large numbers of people, are nearly identical.

Being in the loony bin was welcome relief from the bullshit day job, but it's not like I had absented myself from all responsibilities. I still had to have my wits about me to avoid being medicated against my will and put under a 'section' - involuntary commitment to a secure facility, by rule of law - which could have seen my 2 week voluntary stay extended anywhere from 28 days to 6 months.

How did I manage it so easily? Perhaps it's because I knew I could leave any time I wanted to, but perhaps it could be because nearly 20 years of going to a shit office to do a shit job, has kinda prepared me for the monotony, rhythm and routine of spending weeks on end trapped somewhere I don't want to be.

There was a danger that just the very act of asking to leave could have triggered the doctors to decide to force me to stay longer. I knew that I had to remain calm, and give the medical team  enough of a peek at my psyche to be able to make a judgement that I was safe to release back into the wilderness.

The psychiatrist who took me under his care was in two minds, after 6 days, whether he was going to insist on 'committing' me, so that he'd get 28 or so days to poke around inside my head. Naturally, most people would freak out, if they found out that their liberty was about to be taken away from them. It's a game of brinksmanship: who's going to blink first.

Obviously, we don't 'commit' people any more to asylums. Instead we detain them under a section of the Mental Health Act, and put them in secure psychiatric facilities. You're no longer a loony in the loony bin. You're a "service user" in a "care facility". Of course, I'm not saying that the function is not useful or should not be trusted. I'm just pointing out that the names of things have been changed.

Bizarrely, if you say "I'm going to kill myself, I need to be locked up" you are very unlikely to be locked up. If you walk up to the hospital reception desk and use their phone to contact the switchboard, ask to be connected to the bleep holder for Psychiatric Liaison, and explain frankly your situation, you will have an amusing conversation with the poor Psychiatrist who has to follow official channels, but you're not going to get anywhere. The times that I have been admitted as an inpatient to a psychiatric facility, it has just taken time & patience. Only the truly desperate will sit in Accident & Emergency for 13 hours just patiently waiting for help.

Conversely, if you say "I'm not mad, I'm fine" once you're in the system, or in any way try to rush the process along, you're going to end up held down on the floor with somebody injecting Risperidone and Haloperidol in you, and you might wake up 40 years later, shuffling around the corridors of some institution, with the marked side effects of powerful psychiatric drugs causing you to make involuntary facial movements.

You can't fight the system. You can't fight the frustrating fact that you'll never get ahead in life and must instead sit at a desk keeping a seat warm, just so that your boss can appoint somebody from outside the company to come in and be incompetent at the job you were hoping to be promoted into, even though you were experienced and qualified to do it. You can't fight the frustrating fact that your miserable boring existence, helping the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, is making you pretty depressed, and you really want to fuck everything off and watch everything burn down.

Who is mad and who is sane? That doctor who just declared you to be mentally ill probably talks to their imaginary friend called Dob or Gob or Dog or Dod (or is it God?) who really knows? There's no proof that their imaginary friend exists, just like the doctor has no proof that the voices you hear aren't real and you aren't actually the Son of Dob, resurrected on Earth.

The invisible line between sane and insane is very blurry, when billions of people genuinely believe in magic, invisible entities that don't exist, and have absolute faith that some children's fairy tales are actually instructions that should be devoutly and literally followed to the letter as some kind of prescription for life.

It seems highly irreverent to say it, but people need to speak up, because the loonies are actually in charge of the asylum, when we elect and hand over power to people who believe in their invisible friends, fairy tales and magic.

By the way, for the record, I don't hear voices and I don't think I'm Jesus. But then, saying that kinda makes me sound a bit mad, doesn't it?

Tags: #mentalhealth #nhs #hospital #suicide #depression #religion #politics

This is a story about ingratitude...

Why do I attack the industry that has suckled me? Why am I so angry and upset with the profession that has nurtured me? Why am I so ungrateful for my whopping big salary and cushy benefits?

Administration: the unnecessary bureaucratic headache that creates unwelcome red tape, adds no value to the real economy and is an overhead that limits the productivity, innovation and creativity of those who are truly useful. I don't work in the Information Technology business. I work in the business of administration.

The two most productive things that I do in any given week are filling in my timesheet and submitting my invoice for payment. The most important thing that I do each quarter is to pay my Value-Added Tax (VAT) down to the precise penny that I owe. If I'm not perfectly on top of my bureaucratic administration, the Government will stop me doing my 'real' job, which is creating software.

But what does the software I create do anyway? Most of it is just keeping score. It's bean-counting software. It's software that creates jobs for zillions of IT professionals like me, so that companies can get rid of zillions of administrators, that they immediately re-employ to make sure their IT professionals are filling in their timesheets correctly.

For every person who I put out of a job, by automating the processes they perform, the company will then invent some other pointless position. Our whole economy is based on bullshit jobs.

Should I be happy to have a job, and to count my blessings? Well, no. It's immoral to not consider whether you are having a positive or a negative impact on society, and on the planet. To count my blessings is an incitement to be wilfully ignorant of global issues, and the betterment of humanity.

So what am I doing instead, to align my values? How do I reconcile the rhetoric of what I preach with the obvious fact that I am enabling massive corporations to continue to ride roughshod over the human race and the fragile planet?

Well, I take the money, and with it I pay my rent & bills. And then, I spend 90% of my time thinking about issues and writing this blog. I'm not paid to create software - so little of my time is actually spent doing that - instead, I'm paid to bite the hand that feeds me. It's an inside job. I'm disruptive and cynical. I'm disillusioned and critical.

Does that mean my colleagues have to work harder to make up for me slacking? No. It doesn't work like that. If my boss asks me to do something, I won't do it. I'll wait to see if they ask me again. My boss isn't going to ask somebody else to do it, because they've already asked me to do it. 9 times out of 10, I'll never be asked again. The tenth time, I'll realise that whatever was asked of me actually was important, so I'll apologise and do the work.

So, am I idle? Absolutely not. With the time I could have spent doing those 9 things that were clearly unnecessary, I will conduct a kind of audit. I will go around, looking to see if there's anything more useful I could be doing. Invariably, there isn't. Everybody is just so locked into a hierarchical system of managers, administrators & clerks, that nobody has looked at the bigger picture and realised that what they're doing is absolute bullshit. Or if anybody has realised that their job is utter bullshit, they're not talking about it.

Now, I'm not talking about nurses, garbage collectors, train drivers, firemen. It's pretty obvious what the useful function of many front-line workers is. However, these people are working all hours for some of the lowest wages. No manager needs to tell a nurse to help a patient who is in pain & discomfort. No administrative drone needs to make sure that a garbage collector is hitting their Key Performance Indicators and is going to achieve their annual objectives at their appraisal. Either the important job is done, or it isn't.

There are functions that literally nobody would miss, except maybe not being harassed by an army of micromanagers and bureaucrats. Isn't it the case that you're propping up a sick and twisted system, by continuing to count your blessings and not rock the boat?

I frankly find it disgusting that I'm paid so many more times more than what a nurse gets paid. If I was to simply sit back and "think positive" and try to enjoy my ill-gotten gains, doesn't that make me a terrible, terrible person?

It's probably true that the world doesn't need any more bloggers, but what am I supposed to do? Impoverish myself and retrain as yet another disrespected front-line worker? It's hardly like they're being heard today, is it? How are the social wrongs ever going to be righted?

It seems to me that the right thing to do is to speak up. Yes, I jeopardise my lucrative career in doing so, but it's the right thing to do. People are more likely to listen to an IT consultant from the banking world, who is critical of the sector that pays me handsomely, than they are to somebody who could easily be dismissed as simply "jealous" or "not smart enough" to land themselves a similar job.

Truly, I do not think that front line workers are not smart enough to do my job. In actual fact, you have to be pretty dumb to be able to turn a blind eye to the social injustice of being highly paid to be an idle manager of hardworking people who do the real jobs.

I currently have no cash to put my money where my mouth is. Quitting my job would literally see me homeless and destitute again. However, I do anticipate a time when I will be faced with a true test of my morality: when I am able, will I quit the rat race and try to do something that is more in line with my values?

I have massively impoverished myself, trying to take an ethical stance, and I would do it again. It's the right thing to do.

Tags: #politics #banking #capitalism #career #computing

This is a story about having too much of a good thing...

Pills, pills, pills. A pill for every ill. We have so much faith in modern medicine at the moment, that we have medicalised boredom, depression, stress, when clearly these are as much a product of our environment, as they are a sign of anything pathological.

The very process of going to your doctor and getting sent away with some unnecessary pills, is well known to have a placebo effect. With the Internet and the possibility of self-diagnosis, we have turned into a society of hypochondriacs, who attribute every tiny discomfort to symptoms that require medical attention.

We have now overprescribed to the point that we have super-resistant strains of bacteria that can't be killed even with our last-line-of-defence antibiotics. Going running to your doctor because you've got a cough or a cold, and being fobbed off with magic beans that you believe can cure your viral infection, is just downright stupid, and now it's biting our arse.

It's the same thing with antidepressants. Because over 60% of us hate our boring stupid stressful crap jobs, we've been dishing our psychiatric medications like they're sweets. Over 60 million antidepressant prescriptions got written last year in the UK. That's enough for every man, woman and child in the whole country.

The number of people taking antidepressant medication for their clinical depression has doubled in a decade. There is a mental health epidemic that is driving so many other antisocial trends: alcoholism, drug abuse, isolation and loneliness, insecurity and anxiety, loss of productivity, loss of motivation, loss of drive to exercise and socialise.

What are you going to do if you work some dreadful zero hours contract for rock bottom wages and can barely make ends meet? What are you going to do if there's no hope of you getting on the housing ladder, or escaping from the financial situation you find yourself trapped in?

Of course people are going to turn to drink & drugs, to try to numb themselves from the painful monotony of working as hard as you can but never getting ahead. There is no light at the end of the tunnel for so many people. You just work, and then you die. None of your dreams will ever come to fruition. None of your hopes will ever be realised.

There's a disrespect for addicts and alcoholics, like they're taking the easy way out. Because there is supposed to be instant gratification in a pill, powder or liquid that contains psychoactive substances - uppers & downers - then it doesn't seem as worthy as those who physically toil for their fix of endorphins. However, how many 'legitimate' routes to happiness are there in the world, really?

There used to be a formula: get married, buy a house, have some kids, die. The first 3 you can't really do anymore, without cash handouts from the bank of Mum & Dad and/or the state. Who can really afford the lavish wedding that society expects us to have? Who can afford the deposit on some crappy tiny little flat, and afford the mortgage repayments, when you earn barely enough to survive? Who can afford childcare and all the other associated costs of childrearing, when you already don't have any disposable income?

All the hard work, industriousness, austerity, careful financial planning, saving, budgeting and diligent application of yourself to furthering your career, is likely to result in what? Maybe a few percentage points of a pay rise, if you're really lucky. Are you going to get promoted? Are you fuck. They're going to promote somebody incompetent and lazy, because they're older and they've been with the company for longer. Merit and hard work will get you nowhere.

So, pretty soon, you're going to get tired & depressed about it all. You tried hard at school. You turned up for your exams and gave it your best shot. You stressed yourself out and went to those interviews and got that job, and you worked your hardest, day after day, even though you could sense it was all utter bullshit by now. And for what? Where are you? What have you achieved? What are you ever going to achieve?

The enormity of it all hits you: you were sold a lie. You can't be anything you want to be. You're not special. You're not unique. You're not different. We're all just so much meat in the mincer. Turn the handle and out comes yet another drone just like you; prepared to do the shittest, most mind-numbingly boring and pointless work imaginable, for a salary that doesn't even buy you the basic essentials in life.

Why wouldn't you go running to the doctor, and ask them to dope you up to the eyeballs, so you don't have to live with the crushing realisation of the pointlessness of it all anymore? Why wouldn't you need happy pills, when you realise that the only way you're ever going to get the things that you were promised that hard work would bring, is by being given a council house or a cash lump sum from your parents. The only way you're going to ever be self sufficient is if Mum & Dad or the state top up your income... like you're some sort of fucking charity case... going around with your begging bowl.

How undignified. What an affront to human dignity it all is. Our parents and grandparents proudly tell us that they're "self made". They make loud proclamations that "nobody ever gave me a handout. I worked hard and I earned my keep". How shameful it is that we're twice as smart and work twice as hard, but we have nothing to show for it, except for a sneering generation telling us that exams are getting easier and that we're lazy and stupid.

Crippling debt and the crippling shame of not being able to live independently, not being able to be self sufficient and feel like we too are earning our money and contributing to the growth and wealth of the nation. It's all so crippling, so debilitating. Of course we need to turn to medications, drink and drugs.

You think it's about having a good time? Happy pills, and lashings of beer & wine? You think people wouldn't rather be happy by natural means, because they're fulfilled by normal things in their life: walking the dog, kissing their kids goodnight and paying the mortgage on their own home?

Antidepressants are a sticking plaster over a gaping wound. We have attempted to cover up the steady decline in the standard of living of young people, and mask the problem using happy pills, but the soaring suicide rates are just the tip of the iceberg.

Unless we face up to the reality that those who are suffering from many mental illnesses are the canary in the coal mine, we will reach a crisis point where most of the population are unable or unwilling to continue to maintain the status quo.

The mental health epidemic is the true breaking point, not immigration.

Tags: #mentalhealth #suicide #depression #politics #capitalism

This is a story about the debt spiral...

When the burden of debt in society is too great, and lenders are unwilling to forgive - to take a debt haircut or even write off debts - then there will be popular uprisings.

It's not that people don't want to repay their debts. In fact, most people accept that debt is a necessary evil in order to get the things they need when they need them, rather than towards the end of their life, in senile old age and infirmity.

And so, we become burdened with a mortgage, in order to give our family a stable roof over their heads. We become burdened with a car on hire purchase, so that we have a reliable and safe modern vehicle to be able to take the kids to school, and to get us to work without breaking down. We put our holidays and special occasions on credit cards, and pay back the debt when we get back, or after the festivities are over.

Most people diligently repay their debts.

In free-market economics, prices are able to fluctuate to find the point where affordability meets maximum profit. Do you think the cost price to the producer or supplier of the goods and services that you purchase, bears any relation to the retail price that you pay? Of course not. That's why a designer brand T-shirt costs at least 10 times as much as an unbranded garment, even though they come from the same sweatshop in the developing world.

In our consumer society, you are 'free' to select the goods and services that you want. However, in order to fit in with your buddies who are in a similar socioeconomic group to you, you will select the brands that they do. If you're rich, you'll do your supermarket shopping at Waitrose. If you're poor, you'll do your shopping at Asda/Walmart. However, the food you buy will have similar calorific content.

The brands become better and better at pricing their products so that you are just about able to buy everything you need, but won't have much spare cash left over. The brands know the income bracket that they're targeting, so they know the level where their consumers will become price insensitive. I literally don't care whether my coffee costs £2 or £4. If my coffee cost £5, then I'd think "blimey! that was expensive, I'm not going to go there again" but the £2 coffee shop could literally increase their prices 100% and I wouldn't even notice.

Once everybody has maxed out their budget, on the mortgage, the car finance, the credit cards, the overdraft, the store cards and some personal loans, where do you really go from there?

We demand that our corporations make increasing profits, but yet in order to do so they must hold down wage inflation and the cost of raw materials. We demand that our economy grows, but in order to do so, people must use increasing amounts of their limited pot of disposable income to drive consumption. What happens when everybody is just maxed out?

We're living in the age of low growth, high borrowing and low wage inflation. In order to sustain corporate profits, the cost of goods & services continues to increase. In order to prop up the capital growth of the pension funds, asset prices - such as house prices - have continued to be overvalued. However, the only way that the general population have been able to maintain their standard of living is through borrowing.

Ordinary people have not been profligate and stupid. People were promised pay rises and promotions, and instead they've been given job insecurity and wage cuts in real terms. If your wage increases just a few percent, but the cost of your housing, bills, food and transportation all increase in double-digit terms, then you're actually getting poorer.

If the headline rate of inflation - which is pretty much just concerned with wages - is low, then the value of your loans & mortgages is not getting inflated away. The baby boomers might complain about interest rates reaching over 15% in the late 1970s, but they forget that their wages were also increasing too. By the time the 1980s came around, people's mortgages were a tiny fraction of what they were earning.

What we see today is people's cost of living skyrocketing, but their wages are the same, which means they're earning less and less in real terms. If your wages stay the same, and your cost of living is increasing, that means you have less and less money to service your debts. So, you tighten your belt and cut back on your consumer spending, which in turn hurts an economy that is so dependent on spend, spend, spend!

What we see today is far worse than the Japanese stagflation that meant that the price of goods and services was getting cheaper, which encouraged people to become thrifty because they could buy things more cheaply if they waited. Instead, what we are seeing is people who have been promised growth, completely screwed over by a system that robs them of their wealth with no opportunity to do anything about it.

In a zero growth world, debts need to be forgiven or else ordinary people will become so unhappy that they will overthrow their idle creditors.

Tags: #banking #capitalism #politics

This is a story about self healing...

Does brain damage mean game over? Is it right to write off somebody who has suffered brain lesions, neurotoxicity, a stroke etc. etc.?

At one time, my left eyelid had started to droop and I had a pretty bad facial tic. My body jerked and shook with pseudo-Parkinsonian symptoms. My speech was slow and slurred. No wonder I was treated as if I was as good as dead, right?

But you know what? With good diet & sleep, you can quickly recover your heath, depending on the severity of your situation.

Bizarrely, I was able to get a job and get through an eventful and highly stressful re-entry into the working world, while my poor brain was busily trying to repair itself. How is that even possible?

I've done the same job for the best part of 20 years. In fact, my friend Ben taught me how to program a computer when we were 12 years old, and I'd been messing around with computers since my first forays onto my friend Joe's Dad's Apple Mac, in 1985.

With repetition, your brain lays down pathways that become more permanent with age. Neural pruning - the loss of less used connections between brain cells - makes your brain into something that has become well adapted for the common tasks you perform. Some people call this "muscle memory" but of course it's your brain, not your muscles, that has the memories. Practice makes permanent, as they say. Just like riding a bike.

So, I relied on instincts and techniques, knowledge and experience that has been unchanging for my whole working life. I still use the same job search technique, the same interview technique, and the job of developing software is unchanged, despite the constant creation of new acronyms and jargon for things that do exactly the same job in exactly the same way.

Just like riding a bike, I was able to navigate the corporate landscape and just about get away with a day job that involved my damaged brain pulling the levers to operate the battered mince-puppet that was my body, in a vaguely convincing way, to cover up the fact that I was basically at death's door.

With physiotherapy for the body, your recovery can be improved, and I'm sure that brain training exercises would be useful for those with brain injuries, but the stimulation of trying to get myself off the streets and escape bankruptcy and destitution was challenging and stimulating enough.

Fundamentally, time is the great healer. The brain is a homeostatic organ that will try to restore itself to a stable base state, once external forces are no longer pulling it hither and thither. I was able to have nearly 6 months abstinent from stimulants and over 3 months abstinent from alcohol, in order to give my brain a fighting chance of finding equilibrium again.

But, just as important as cessation of putting powerful narcotics into my body, was stopping drinking tea & coffee, as well as other caffeinated beverages. Even though my brain screamed out for stimulants, because it was going through withdrawal, they are terrible things when your brain needs to adapt and heal.

Caffeine is very bad for your neuroplasticity. That is to say, the ability of the remaining undamaged neurons in your brain to try to compensate for whatever trauma it has suffered, and repair itself. Caffeine impairs your ability to recover.

If you have some boring repetitive task to perform again & again, then caffeine is your drug. Once you've mastered the simple steps that most jobs require, the boredom becomes unbearable. Caffeine solves this problem, and allows us to maintain concentration on the most mind-numbing dumbarsery that ever disgraced the working world.

Most of the world is just doing stupid shit, time & again, because they're in a trance-like state performing repetitive actions and making the same old mistakes over & over, because they've medicated themselves up to the eyeballs with the powerful stimulant called caffeine.

By stopping my caffeine intake, I was able to recover from the symptoms of fairly harrowing neurological damage, spot patterns in my behaviour and even re-learn new healthy behaviour. I genuinely believe that this would not have been possible, with caffeine in my life.

I did supplement my diet heavily with amino acid building blocks:

• 5-HTP to help my serotonergic system
• L-Tyrosine to help my dopaminergic system
• Phenylalanine to help my adrenal / epinephrine system

I ate vast quantities of biltong (dried beef) and other protein supplements, to give my body everything it could possibly need to repair itself, and replenish its stores.

In theory, I should have been left in a permanently psychotic state, with delusions, paranoia, inability to emotionally regulate, facial tics, poor concentration, poor memory, nerve damage on one side of my face etc. etc.

However, I put out the fire before it consumed me. When somebody is sick, you don't write them off and watch them wither and die. That's immoral!

I was watching a Louis Theroux documentary, and one hospital patient they followed was declared brain dead after he asphyxiated from a heroin overdose. The doctors were absolutely certain there was no hope, and that the life support systems should be switched off. I agreed, and I thought it was madness that the family were holding out any hope at all. After 37 days, the young man in a coma woke up. His family saved him from a premature and unnecessary death, by refusing to cut off his life support.

My life support has come in the form of kind strangers, policemen, nurses, doctors and indeed unwitting work colleagues, who have been willing to overlook the immediate situation and imagine that things can and will get better, given time and opportunity.

I'm physically, neurologically, a completely different beast to who and what I was a little over a year ago, when I was totally fucked.

Tags: #drugs #addiction #recovery #mentalhealth #bipolar #career