This is a story about engaging your mouth before your brain...

Most of what I write is not stuff that is ordinarily shared by people. We bottle a lot of stuff up, and perhaps with good reason, but what happens if your general demeanour means you're a fairly open book?

Sure, it's true that some of my life experiences - mental health problems, drug abuse, homelessness, being arrested by the police - are not things that your ordinary middle-class professional will hopefully ever experience. It is therefore logical that I should keep all these things hush-hush. Pretend they never happened.

I don't think that privacy and anonymity is necessarily helpful, judging by the direction that life is headed for many people who I speak to. We know there is a mental health epidemic, with millions of people laid low with depression, anxiety and a huge spectrum of illnesses affecting the mind. If we don't talk about this, and share our experiences, we suffer in silence.

It seems to me as if Psychiatry has failed. Pills, powders and potions have failed to cure the ailments of our very souls. Something is wrong, broken, with society, and medicine hasn't yet come up with the cures... probably because we are treating symptoms, not root causes.

It's been a theory of mine that we were never evolved as a species to live in such close quarters with one another. Open plan offices and tiny cramped apartments in overcrowded cities certainly make me feel like a lemming: compelled to throw myself off a cliff. It really doesn't help that so many service sector jobs are so soul destroying. Moving paper or electronic money around for the mega wealthy is most of what we do in the rich nations. It's not growing carrots or building houses.

Sure, some of us are tortured artists and entertainers. Some of us create organic artisan jam, or dog's milk yoghurt, or run a creative digital agency where we wear unfashionable clothes and stupid facial hair and ride fixed-speed bicycles to work. These, most surely, are the last days of a dying civilisation.

They say you should never get too close to an iceberg, because they can flip over unexpectedly. You might be rather pleased to be part of the top 1% or even 5%, but while you're sticking up at the top, there's a huge mass under the water beneath. Sooner or later, the massive body of ice that's been held underwater rises up, and the top of the iceberg is plunged into the freezing sea.

The motto of Über is "everyone's private driver" but how can we all have a jet-set A-list celebrity lifestyle? There simply isn't enough landmass to create enough helipads for everybody to be flying around by private helicopter, chauffeur driven around the place, pampered and flattered at every turn. Technology can't make us all rich, famous and able to have an impossibly high standard of living, despite its promises.

With our MacBook Pro and our high-quality digital camera etc. we all feel like a writer, a photographer, an artist. Facebook gives us the impression that people love looking at photos of us, so we must be glamour models. Twitter turns us all into bloggers, preachers, with our followers... our congregation.

There was a time when you could quit your job and probably make a good living selling cup cakes, setting up a trendy delicatessen or being a life coach. I'm not sure if those people who followed their dreams and quit the rat race are happy, but there's certainly not any opportunity to do it today. Things are so competitive. How many cup cakes have you got to sell, in order to have a salary comparable with somebody who shuffles paper around their desk and tries to look busy and important in the office, but is just a tiny cog in a big wasteful machine that doesn't actually produce anything of tangible value.

I'm mortgaging my privacy. I'm selling my soul. By making public every little tiny detail about my private life, including my massive f**kups, I'm potentially headed up a one-way street. If I achieve any kind of infamy, then I'm basically screwed, in terms of re-entering the world of the wage-slave drones.

So, I've got the best part of 6,000 Twitter followers in the space of 6 months. Do you think that translates to pounds in my pocket? Do you think that taking the unprecedented step of writing nearly 200,000 words about a fairly spectacular life implosion, would change my life significantly? Well, the ship has sailed for anybody hoping to get an easy ride, I'm afraid.

I like what I've written. I would defend it, to some extent. It serves as a permanent public record of not only what I've been through in the past, but more importantly, there is a subtle recording of what I was going through during the whole time I've been blogging. You can read my emotions, my moods, the challenges, the stresses... in-between the lines of what's written down.

I'm starting to be accused of being self-indulgent, self-absorbed, but why shouldn't I have this? Why shouldn't I be allowed to scream and wail and tantrum a bit, if I had to be the sensible grey-suited career guy, with the good job and an impressive CV, who had the mortgage and saved money for a rainy day and got married and did everything by the f**king book like I was supposed to. I deferred gratification like a son of a bitch, and there was no f**king pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The cake is a lie.

How many people are discontented? How many people are struggling? Not only struggling with stress and poverty and unpleasant things happening in their lives, but also struggling with the injustice of things, the pointlessness of some make-work wanky job that's completely useless to humanity. Or perhaps the work they can get is just so completely degrading and poorly paid it's not even worth working at all. You might as well just get off your head on drugs and alcohol and dribble while you play computer games or watch terrible trashy TV.

How many kids are getting smashed out of their skulls on cannabis, skunk and legal high smoking blends? How many kids are consuming dangerous amounts of cheap alcohol, simply to become highly intoxicated? What is it about life that these kids want to escape? Why aren't they sharing the anguish, the inner turmoil? Why do they retreat inwards, under the heavy sedation of intoxicating drugs and alcohol?

Now Microsoft and Facebook are hitting headlines, saying they're working on chat bots. The iPhone has Siri, which is supposed to be a kind of artificially intelligent digital assistant, that can understand what you ask it to do, and try and help you. People are delighted when it turns out that you can ask Siri to beatbox, and it will kinda do it, in a weird kind of way.

Why would we be wasting our time talking to computers, when we could be talking to each other? I wrote before about us sharing 21% less on Facebook, in the space of a year. Do we not keenly feel the loss of that connection with real people, who can get in contact and try to make us feel less alone with our problems and our existential crises?

No person is an island, and the isolating existence of interacting more with apps and websites and software in general, instead of with each other is a worrying trend. Ok, so I'm bucking that by providing a veritable brain dump of sharing, which is much akin to verbal diarrhoea, but at least it's putting stuff out there, where there's a chance I can get some help from my friends.

There's obviously a bystander effect, where nobody knows quite what to do when somebody starts having a public meltdown. People just aren't supposed to act like this. Where is my stoicism? Where is my stiff upper lip? Where is my shame? Where is my embarrassment and my intense desire for total privacy?

Nobody wants to be first, and people also worry that they're going to end up feeling responsible. Everybody feels they're already struggling so much to keep their own shit together, that anybody else bleating on about their own struggles should shut the hell up. Look after number one and keep yourself to yourself. Don't you think that could be the root cause of this horrible isolated existence that causes so much damage to our happiness, our sense of wellbeing, our mental health... leading to depression, stress, anxiety, breakdowns, self harm and suicides?

We're in such a hurry to label, to judge, to jump to conclusions. We like to bracket people and problems as quickly as we can. Somebody becomes known as a drama queen, or we tire of their depressed demeanour, the dark clouds that follow them around. We start to stop inviting the killjoy out, or generally interacting with them. Let them wallow in self-pity, right? I'm sure social services or somebody from a government service will step in before they do something stupid. It's somebody else's job. Not my problem. I've got enough going on with my own stressful, meaningless, empty, unfulfilling life that I hate and I'm depressed about.

I'm just typing now. The taps are open and the words are flooding out. I have relaxed my anal sphincter and a torrent of liquid brown verbal diarrhoea is jetting out of my arse and into the toilet bowl of the internet, and nobody gives a shit, because we are all sinking with shit up to our necks. There is a whole World Wide Web of shit out there, and we're all just pumping out this useless effluent into the cesspool of human emotional pain.

Do you think I'm going to look back on this frantic period of writing and recoil with horror when I read it back? I certainly expect that I will be cupping my face in my hands, saying to myself "what the fuck was I thinking?" but it must be about as close as it's possible to get to knowing what somebody's thinking, reading this shite.

I thought to myself that I won't hold back, I won't censor, edit or filter, because I can always tear this down with a click of the mouse. A stroke of the keyboard, and all this is gone and I can deny all knowledge that it ever existed. It's the digital photo that you deleted off your camera or smartphone... those shameful ones and zeros are gone forever.

But you know what? I've not felt the urge to take anything down. I've not felt the pangs of regret at sharing stuff that makes me look really bad. I've given the world everything it needs to pigeon-hole me, to categorise me, to bracket me, to judge me, to dismiss me with a label or an over-simplification of my entire existence.

That's what we want, isn't it? Computer credit scores, and computerised personality profiling, and a computer simulation of a real person, that responds in a predictable and easy to understand way. We don't want real lives, with all their messiness and unfathomable complexity. We don't want to get to know each other, but have to live with the fact that we still don't really know each other. We don't even know ourselves, even if you're an irritatingly self-absorbed little prick like I am, who self indulgently wallows in a world of introspection and deep self-examination.

Show me some more videos of funny cats. Distract me from the banality of my existence. Please don't remind me of the humanity that my fellow Earth residents possess or incite any kind of sympathetic or empathetic response in me. I'm quite wrapped up in my own world of pain and disappointment, boredom and stress. I want to pretend like technology and the advancement of civilisation is going to wave its magic wand and even though I'm fornicating with a person I'm nearly totally revulsed by the more I get to know them, in a filthy home in an overcrowded town, on a hopelessly poisoned planet, everything will be fucking rosy for the screaming brats that end up getting spawned.

What the hell is this anyway? This is what happens when the filter gets switched off. This is my life, with no filter.

I think I was born with no filter.

Look: I bought new socks. I'm sharing the private details of my socks life. Every time I have socks, I'm going to post it up on social media. Socks is supposed to be a taboo subject. Always practice safe socks.

Tags: #privacy #depression #mentalhealth #suicide #career #socialmedia

This is a story about getting things in perspective...

When you're climbing a mountain, you can't think about the summit too much. You have to take things one step at a time. If you are much too fixated on reaching the top, you will feel disappointed every time you reach a false summit. You will feel disheartened when you see how far there is left to climb.

I'm quite familiar with mountainous tasks. I started my full-time career at age 17, and I had my challenges with immaturity, but also with age prejudice. I sacrificed a huge portion of my teens to learning programming, so I was pretty ready to start work, unlike some of my peers who had done non-computing degrees at University. However, my youth held me back for many years.

Around the time I turned 30, I built a couple of cashflow positive businesses. Taking something from the idea stage to the point where you're taking customers' money is not something that should be underestimated. It's easy to do one deal, and just keep dealing in that same way, but it's quite something else to put together an established business, with multiple customers, suppliers, and create a trusted brand.

Then, as I've written about at length, my mental health started to be the mountainous task in front of me. Or rather, I was at the bottom of a deep dark pit and had to climb my way out. Facing a collapse in your sense of wellbeing, your ability to cope... that's a fairly big thing to tackle, when you've had nearly 30 years of steady stability.

Most recently, dealing with drug addiction is probably one of the hardest challenges a person is ever likely to face in their life. Addiction can consume a person so quickly. It's like a fire. If you don't put it out fast it will spread, and if you leave it to develop into a raging inferno, it will be virtually impossible to extinguish and it will just consume everything with its flames until there's nothing but charred remains.

It seems really stupid to me, how long we let people flounder and struggle for. We just turn our backs and pretend stuff isn't happening. We just hope for the best, hope that the person doesn't bother us, hope that some miracle happens, hope that the person who's in trouble sorts themself out, hope that somebody else will deal with it so we don't have to.

There's a really nasty streak of "look out for number one" going around more and more. People live their lives in an increasingly isolationist manner, critical of other people's choices, and only thinking about their own wellbeing. We are encouraged to trample on each other in order to get ahead. We hoard and do not share.

People can't see the wood for the trees. They fail to recognise that pushing their kids to get good grades at school just creates an arms race. Pushing your teen to think about 3 or 4 years University education when they're just a child. Pushing your young adult kids to get a good career, a profession, when they're just developing their own identity, deciding what they want to do with the next 40 or 50 years of their life. Can't people see that at every stage of this funnel, things are getting more pressured, more competitive?

I received an email today from somebody who is already struggling with the pressure of University. Think how much pressure that person already endured to get the exam grades to get that University place. Think about how many exams they have had to sit, in order to stay in the system, and be allowed to continue with some hope of getting a well paid job at the end of it all.

We're tested, and then we're tested some more, and then we're tested again and again until the end of our days, nowadays. Now that we have established this over-competitive bullshit arms race of a life. There are too many lawyers, too many doctors... too many of all the professions that are desirable. An exam might look like an ordered, disciplined, academic thing, but we might as well have our kids duking it out with pointy sticks in the middle of a jeering snarling crowd of bloodthirsty onlookers.

In the zero-sum game that we have invented, for every winner there's a loser. That means that whenever a kid gets a bunch of "A" grades and a place at an Oxbridge University, some other kid has to leave school without any qualifications and be considered unemployable. There are only a limited number of places for the elite: both in academia and professional life.

We're not building a longer table, we're building higher fences. The pressure on kids to not make a single slip up, from the moment we start pressuring them to beat their peers throughout a gruelling school, college, and University life. One black mark can derail your entire future. Screw up one set of exams, and you'll be tossed into the 'undesirable' bucket, and find it very hard to rise above your peers ever again. You'll be trampled underfoot.

Schools can only give out the same limited percentage of "A" grades each year. Universities can only give out the same limited percentage of firsts and 2:1 degrees each year. Companies can only afford to hire a small number of entry-level people - the very best - each year. We drive huge amounts of people into a funnel that's just way too narrow.

Opportunities just suck right now for young people. It was pretty sucky when I was a kid, and there was always hell to pay whenever my teachers spoke to my parents, even though I was always in the top sets and getting good grades. There were plenty of sharp-elbowed pushy parents who ruined plenty of childhoods back then... today it must be bloody miserable and awful. No wonder we are seeing a spike in teen suicides and self harm.

And for what? Do you think your kid is going to get a good job after they finish jumping through those academic hoops... doing all those exams and essays and dissertations? Do you think your kid is going to happily couple off with some lovely partner, buy a house and start raising a family of their own? How the hell could they afford to? Have you seen the disgracefully low wages and the sky-high house prices?

You can do a 180 degree turn and still take a step forward. You don't have to feel like it's a backwards step to admit you're wrong and start going the other way up the dead-end alleyway that you led your kids and grandkids down. OK, so school and work was OK for you growing up, but that doesn't mean it's working for your kids and grandkids.

What worked for a world of 2 or 3 billion people doesn't work for a world of over 7 billion. There are just too many people competing for a finite amount of bullshit qualifications and jobs. We've set our young people up to fail, and it's not because they're stupid or lazy. It must be incredibly stressful and hopeless, being young today, with so few prospects and such a hard struggle to get ahead of your peers.

At the moment, the human condition is not being advanced. The ship is being steered by a rudderless drunk of a captain, in selecting our political and commercial elite from the greying middle-aged nostalgic fools who've had it way too good for way too long.

The current set of elitists kowtow to the pensioners, because everything is owned by institutional funds: every company is majority owned by pension funds. The grey pound is the only pound. The kids don't have any money. The corporations worship those who are in God's waiting room, just hanging around for their time to die. It's a system that's leading the whole world to its death.

We should be looking down, to those little kids and their energy and optimism, and thinking about their future, not looking up to the heavens and thinking about our death. You might have a comfortable retirement, but you'll be riddled with disease and old age. Would you not be more comfortable knowing you left the world a better place for your kids and grandchildren?

Build no store of wealth on this Earth.

I feel sorry for working class people who have worked hard their entire life, and they've still been cheated out of a living pension, but their health is failing. Their voice is silenced by the deafening boom of the ones who've had a cushy life with a golden parachute final-salary pension at the end of it all. We can't see the wood for the trees

Tags: #politics #childhood #mentalhealth #capitalism

This is a story about warped perceptions...

The world in which I inhabit is vastly different, depending on the state of my broken brain. Mood fluctuations cause me to interpret things very differently than a supposedly 'normal' healthy individual would.

I've written a lot this year about drug abuse, but I'd like to talk about a time before drugs even entered the story and made the water muddy. I'd like to talk about what it was like from 2008 through to 2012, when my brain was just doing its own thing, without drugs or medication.

If you're a person of prejudice, it won't surprise you to learn that drugs mess you up, but you might be surprised to learn that my mental health problems predated any drug abuse. You might also be surprised to learn that people can recover too, and go back to ordinary life, with nobody any the wiser as to your dark past.

But this really isn't about drug abuse, remember? We're talking about a period of 4 years that predated any psychoactive substances making things all messy and confusing. We're talking about when I first went to my doctor, because I was struggling with my mental health.

I spent just over a minute of explaining to my doctor that I felt completely exhausted, overwhelmed and unable to face friends, family, work or anything... I had drawn the curtains and switched off my phone, and retreated under the duvet, and could barely make it to the doctor's surgery.

"Have you heard of Fluoxetine?" my doctor asked. I said that I had, and that I knew that the trademarked name that it was more commonly known as was Prozac. I said that I had read very bad things about emotional blunting and ruined sex lives of those people who were taking Prozac. I had read Elizabeth Wurtzel's biography, Prozac Nation, where she didn't exactly speak highly of the 25 year old medication.

How sad that the National Health Service (NHS) would be offering some cheap generic pills after only a minute of getting to understand a patient's problems. It takes 6 weeks before an anti-depressant SSRI medication like Prozac takes effect, and it's a fairly serious decision, to put somebody on long-term medication. I think it's a little ridiculous that we don't offer more talk therapy, as a first line of defence.

So, I was diagnosed as having Clinical Depression, within just a few minutes. Something I also knew, but didn't have the time to discuss with my doctor, was that SSRIs can be very bad for people with Bipolar Disorder. I knew my moods fluctuated up as well as down, so I had my suspicions that I was Bipolar, and that was another reason to avoid Prozac.

When you're depressed, everything seems hopeless. I had decided that I was useless at my job, that I hated working in offices, that I hated computers and software, and that I couldn't handle a career in IT anymore. I also lost interest in going out, sex, food... I pretty much just slept, or lay in my bed feeling anxious about the fact that I was off work sick.

After a couple of months feeling like this, I hit upon the idea that I was going to write a computer game for the first generation iPhone, to be ready in time for the launch of the App Store.

Although I had decided that my office-based IT career was over, the idea of programming on my laptop in my garden in the sunshine didn't sound too bad. I knew that the early limitations of the first iPhone meant that I could make a fairly basic game, and compete with other developers. I decided that if only a few people bought my game, it was still a fun experiment.

And so began a period of intense activity. I would work for 18 hours a day, 7 days a week, in order to capitalise on those precious early days of the App Store when there were hardly any apps on there. It seems incredible now, that there were only a few hundred or few thousand apps for the iPhone. There was no Android. There was no iPad. There was just one smartphone that created a billion dollar market, overnight.

When we look at that crazy period of my life, when I was churning out apps, it's pretty clear to see that my mood had swung to another extreme. I didn't have time to explain things to people. My thoughts were racing, speech seemed like a frustratingly slow way to communicate, eating and sleeping were an inconvenience, certainly I didn't want to do anything other than work on my apps. I was single-minded to the point of obsession.

In economic terms, things paid off. I got a couple of my apps to number one in the charts, briefly. One of my apps was downloaded 8,000 times in a day once, and another one racked up 500,000 downloads in a month. This was clearly a brilliant gold rush.

I knew that the quality of the apps being released was increasing steadily, and the opportunity for one fast burning out dude in his garden were rapidly diminishing. I started to really hate the work anyway. I had a whirlwind affair as an indie games developer, and it happened so fast that I started to hate it, just like you start to hate any job that you've mastered and has become easy.

Possibly this was a sign of my mood turning again. I had managed a period of several weeks, working at a ridiculous level, and what goes up inevitably must crash down. I hadn't been able to exert myself to such an extent since the school holidays in childhood. There's no way you'd ever be given 6 to 8 weeks to concentrate and just get on and hammer out a project, in a corporate environment.

My mood started to alternate between depression and hypomania (as described above) and I would turn each episode of frantic activity into a period of opportunism, to make money or produce something tangible.

Getting myself back into an office environment and doing some IT contracting re-stabilised me a little bit, and getting a boat so that me and my friends could go wakeboarding was something I was passionate about, and consumed my lunchtimes, after work in the summer, and weekends. My life got back to normal, for nearly 2 years.

During that first depression, I had set certain wheels in motion, however. One particular scheme was retraining as an electrician, while I was working as a programmer still. When I had finished my training, I quickly quit my job.

Going back to an unstructured form of making money, I started working too hard again. Building a business from nothing, to breakeven and hopefully to profitability is not quick and it's not easy. I managed to start getting good clients and increasing my turnover very quickly, through some shrewd partnerships and advertising choices. However, I was extremely inexperienced, and took on way more work than I could manage, sustainably.

I got my new business to the point where it was profitable, and had paid back the initial capital expenditure on training, van, tools etc. but I was burnt out again. I had lived and breathed my business, and only because it was hard physical work, had it lasted slightly longer before my brain was finally frazzled.

Depression reared its ugly head again in 2010, and I realised that I had made a mistake in cutting away from the easy money that a career in IT had to offer. I failed to recognise the importance of a stable working environment though: restricting your hours to 40 or 50 a week, giving yourself weekends off, having the occasional holiday, working with other people who share some of the responsibility and workload... those things are important.

My hypomania started to get a bit more extreme. After reading an enormous pile of books on Particle Physics and Quantum Mechanics and other theories & models of theoretical Physics, I started to read huge amounts of academic papers from Cornell University's online library.

Some of the academic papers that I read were extremely interesting to me, and I emailed the authors to ask them questions. To my surprise, most of them responded, and we started to correspond via email.

Spurred on by this, I started to believe I could author my own paper and get it published, and I developed a hare-brained idea of my own, around a thought experiment that was particularly hard to test in the real world. I eagerly sent my paper off to several academic journals. A couple of the journals even responded... unsurprisingly to say that they wouldn't publish something that hadn't been peer reviewed.

Obviously, it's on the border of a delusion of grandeur to imagine that you might have anything of merit to contribute to a field, after only a few months reading the literature and educating yourself about the deepest mysteries in the Universe.

These delusions are something that I've always been wary of, and I try to be self-aware, but it's fairly clear that there was a progression in the difficulties that I was having with Bipolar Disorder, and the regulation of my moods. I wasn't imagining that I was the next Einstein, but I was having to say to myself "be careful, you're not the next Einstein" and give myself regular reality checks.

I still cringe when I think about some of the emails I sent to very important academics, and how, even though they indulged me, it must have been with slight tongue-in-cheek, to respond to a complete layman such as myself.

After yet more time lost in a pit of despair and hopelessness, where I did very little except for mow the lawn and feed the cat, the iPhone App gold rush cropped up again. This time I decided to sell picks & shovels.

Depressions are very similar to one another. You sleep a lot, you don't do much, everything looks shitty and you hate yourself. My depressions were clearly getting worse, as I started to think about suicide more and more. I started to accumulate more and more paraphernalia with which I could kill myself: inert gas, razor blades, Barbiturates, Cyanide etc. etc.

Periods of hypomania are easier to tell apart, because I can tell you what I was obsessed about in each one: iPhone Apps, boat, megashed, electrical business, physics and then my picks and shovels for the iPhone App gold rush.

I formed another company - Roam Solutions - which was later to become MePublish.com and Hubflow.com. I talked a couple of friends into joining me on my mad escapade, and generally threw everything and the kitchen sink at this particular endeavour.

My new company put on an exhibition stand at London Olympia, Learning Technologies conference, only months after I first conceived the idea for the service we sold. Delivering eLearning was something I knew nothing about, but that wasn't going to stop me.

By the time the winter was over, I had managed to get the company involved with the TechStars network, and we relocated to Cambridge in order to do a 13-week technology accelerator program, where we would be introduced to billions of dollars worth of investors.

13 weeks is just longer than the sweet spot for one of my hypomanic periods, and I was really struggling by the end of the program. Suicidal thoughts were quite intrusive, and I was drinking like a fish. I hated myself, and what felt like lies that I was telling to potential investors. It was a struggle to keep going to the end of the program.

I feel bad that I let 2 co-founders and 11 investors down really badly, when I imploded in September 2011. I never got back on my feet, because of relationship problems and a number of things that eventually led to very bad life choices and a whole world of pain, destruction, devastation.

I don't feel too bad because I'm clearly unwell and because nobody risks their money and a stable job unless they want to try and get rich quick. I genuinely didn't pull the wool over anybody's eyes. There was a big opportunity there, and I'm only partly to blame for everything going tits up. The biggest part, perhaps, but still only partly.

Writing code for iPhone, iPad, Android and BlackBerry, as well as the back-end (serverside code in PHP, Linux administration, database etc. etc.) plus rebranding, raising money and everything that goes with a startup is a hell of a lot to fit into 13 weeks. A crash was inevitable for me: I was too close to the detail, too close to the coal face, too close to the customers, too honest with the potential investors.

At the end of the day, I got my arse handed to me. I was completely spent. I've never experienced such hard work and stress and pressure in my life, although there was a lot of fun too, and I had an incredible time meeting some of the most inspiring people I have ever had the good fortune to cross paths with.

The main lesson I learnt though, was that I really can't ignore my mental health. Even if I avoid clinical labels, like Bipolar Disorder, I definitely have a predisposition to mood instability if I make bad choices. I can't ignore the number of times I've swung between extreme depression and extreme 'highs' which are characterised by massive productivity, and increasingly delusional hopes of being rich and famous.

Things are obviously still very 'up and down' for me, but there is seemingly no end to things that spur on my hypomania. Most recently I ended up working on HSBC's number one project, and being made responsible for a really critical part of that project, by the CIO at the project townhall, in front of the entire team. The facts as they are presented to me, do little to discourage a kind of boom & bust lifestyle.

I guess I could reshape my life around working for 3 to 6 months, and then taking 3 to 6 months as a break to recover from my over-exertion, but I don't think it's very healthy. I'm now faced with the challenge of how to manage my own mental health in a more sustainable way, before I really run out of luck and tread on some toes that get me in super big trouble.

Wish me luck. I'm going to need it.

I really didn't sleep very much while I was at HSBC. Naturally, this started to be detrimental to my mental health. Eventually, I was very sick indeed, and it was hard to continue... I had to go into hospital

Tags: #bipolar #depression #suicide #mentalhealth #career #banking

This is a story about the hungry tide...

Humans are supposed to live near water. It's so essential to life, that I think that we find tranquility when we are near the source of something we can drink, wash with and watch life go by, carried by the currents.

Growing up in an area of Oxford called Jericho, the canal was a moat-like border, to the West. There was a footbridge and one road bridge, but those were the only ways of getting across to the far bank, besides swimming.

A short walk up the canal would bring you to Port Meadow, where the river Thames snakes its way through the flood plains of the flat valley bottom. Although it's the second longest river in the United Kingdom, it's quite a different beast in Oxfordshire than it is in London.

By the time the Thames reaches the Isle of Dogs, it's close enough to the river mouth that the tides affect it in quite a pronounced way. At low tide, there are some fairly sizeable beaches that are revealed, accessible from ladders and steps down from the riverside footpaths.

Growing up in central Oxford, the only discernable change with the Thames was when the river burst its banks and Port Meadow flooded. Then, a huge area of green field became a massive lake. One year the lake even froze, and you felt OK walking on the ice, because you knew there was a grassy field just beneath: you weren't going to fall through and get sucked under by any river current.

The Oxford canals froze too, and although we hefted bricks and stones onto the ice to try and smash it, it would have been fairly crazy to try and walk on the ice. I do remember driving my radio controlled car on the ice, and how much fun it was to make the little toy spin doughnuts and do huge drift slides.

Presumably dogs and ball games could only take place in Mill Quay if the water is frozen over. I hate these signs that basically say "NO FUN". Growing up in the 1980's in central Oxford meant lots of playing on the streets, in the parks and on Port Meadow. Usually involving water bombs, smoke bombs or other incendiary devices.

In London a strange kind of separation of society exists, where big groups of kids hang around near their high-rise social housing, but they are more than unsupervised: they are completely ignored by the entire adult population. This is completely reciprocated. As a white middle-class thirtysomething person, you're completely invisible to huge groups of teenagers, hanging around doing their own thing. The impoverished kids and the wealthy professionals co-exist within metres of each other, but neither group acknowledges the existence of the other.

The Isle of Dogs is in the London borough of Tower Hamlets, which is one of the most deprived areas of the UK. You only have to step one street inland from the riverside apartments, to see a totally different side of London to the gated communities that line the Thames.

There's something nice about not feeling totally surrounded. Here is a city of 8 million permanent inhabitants, plus the millions more who make up the commuters, tourists and those who are unofficially living here. When you're in a basement, with several flats above you, surrounded by houses and offices on all sides, it's easy to feel rather hemmed in.

By reaching the very top of a skyscraper, so there is nothing but the open sky above you, or by reaching the water's edge, so there is nothing but an expanse of water on one side of you, you can turn your back on the chaos and overcrowding of the city, whenever it pleases you.

Sure, there's the occasional ferry, canal boat, pleasure cruise or whatever, but water represents enough of a barrier to most ordinary folks caught up in the rat race that it's nice to watch the boats go past in a way that can't be said of watching stressed commuters scuttle down underground passages.

What the hell am I doing, living in a riverside apartment I can no longer afford, since my last contract ended? Well, if you've never had to sleep rough or in a hostel, you should try it sometime, with your work clothes and all your worldly possessions. Try commuting to the office from under a bush or after spending the night in bunk bed with one bathroom and 13 other dormitory friends, in different states of alcohol and cannabis intoxication.

Homelessness, poverty... these things tend to connect you with chaotic environments that do not exactly improve your mental health and capability to rebuild a life, return to work, get back to health, wealth and stability.

When I was working, I was getting up at 7am to take a run by the Thames, and pulling some fairly serious hours spent working on an extremely stressful project. Do you think that's possible when you also can't sleep and relax at home, and it takes ages in a cramped tube, overground train and bus to get back to your miserable hovel?

When we talk about standard of living, what do we really mean? If you choose a job you love, expect to be underpaid and overworked. If you choose a job that pays well, expect to be bored and stressed. If you choose to be working in 2016, expect to have little job security and for your cost of living to be vastly more than it would have been for your parents, at the same age.

We just don't have the spare time. Our partners are not at home doing housework, and come and pick us up from the station at a reasonable hour, and we have some time at home to play with our kids, eat, even do something else with spare time. Now we get home just in time to kiss the kids goodnight, and then we shovel whatever we can into our exhausted mouths before collapsing into bed, before all too soon, the alarm goes off and we start all over again.

We're enslaved to fixed core working hours, and the idea that we can ever reach some imagined future sustainable state, by pushing ourselves to the maximum output that we can manage. Working 80 hour weeks in the hope of getting enough pay rises to be able to slack off a bit in our greying senior years.

When was the last time that you took the Thames Clipper to work, even though it takes longer than the tube? When was the last time you walked to work, across one of London's many amazing bridges, just to admire the beauty of the architecture, even though it would add another hour or two to the length of your working day?

If you look really carefully, you can see a rainbow in the clouds above The Shard, created by sunlight refracted through glass at the very top

Tags: #london #oxford #childhood #capitalism #politics

This is a story about not being anonymous...

I'm not powerless over drugs and/or alcohol. My life has become pretty unmanageable, but I don't need a higher power to return me to sanity. I don't consider myself an alcoholic or an addict and I don't go to meetings.

I certainly have trouble turning down subsequent drinks, after I've had my first 2 pints of strong European lager and I'm enjoying the company of friends or work colleagues. It's probable that I will keep drinking until I've had 6 or 7 pints and I'm reaching an intoxication limit where I'm starting to slur my words and be unsteady on my feet. I won't keep drinking though... I'll normally bolt for home & bed when I've hit my limit.

I don't think I've had an alcoholic drink before midday on any day except Christmas Day, and even then, only a handful of times. I'm pretty sure I never went more than about 10 consecutive days where I got drunk. I know I did 115 days without a single drop of alcohol. I didn't cheat once, even though there were times that I was very tempted to bend the rules.

There have been times when my drinking was getting out of control, with beer every lunchtime, long Friday afternoons in the beer garden, drinking again when I got home, drinking all weekend. I'm not sure it ever qualified as 'problematic' though. Drinking was quite ingrained in the lifestyle of my friends and the work culture, to the point that despite many years of being half-cut in the office, nothing has ever been said, except for one day I was so hungover I didn't make it to my desk until 2pm.

But alcohol really isn't my problem. Supercrack is my poison of choice. Certainly if I have this drug in my possession, there is limited chance of me doing anything sane or rational. There's the added problem of unplanned binges as well. Once you pop, you can't stop.

When I am struggling with active addiction, I tell myself all sorts of lies. The main one is that I will act in some kind of reserved, controlled way. Once Supercrack is coursing its way through my drugstream, there is very little chance of me seeing onrushing death and health damage as any reason to curtail my foolish actions.

Do we think that the many relapses that I've had mean I'm an addict for life, and as such, should always attach that label to myself, even when I'm 'clean'? Well, it's certainly true that once experienced, things cannot be un-experienced, and there is disappointingly little dissipation in the desire to continue to use a drug that one has been addicted to, if there were no consequences.

Aversion therapy, is using negative reinforcement to break the addiction to something. If you link and associate enough unpleasant experiences with your addiction, the downsides start to outweigh the upsides, and it's not so difficult to stay 'clean'. Could you be said to no longer be 'addicted'?

Human memory is a strange thing though. Negative memories seem to fade faster than positive ones. When you recall some event that was extremely harrowing at the time, each time you think about it, it loses some of its pain and regret. Humans are programmed to be optimistic and take risks. Otherwise, we would never have risked leaving our caves to hunt and domesticate sharp-toothed & clawed predators.

Another lie that I tend to tell myself when I'm slipping back into active addiction, is that there will be some way to satisfy my addictive demands with some harm-reduced and risk-managed 'lapse' that will stave off a full relapse. In actual fact, this then gives the excuse for the next addict lie, which is that the use of drugs can then no longer cease until I'm fully satisfied that I have extracted the maximum possible from the experience, even though the trend is clearly destructively spiralling downwards.

This drive to end a period of addiction on your own terms is kind of laughable, if I look at myself with a harshly critical eye. I can see that there is never any recapturing the initial high that you experience when your tolerance is low and your body in a healthy state. Your days are literally numbered while you're in the grip of a dangerous addiction, and refusing to acknowledge that continuing is futile and foolish.

Most people run out of money or run out of luck before they have exhausted their demand for their drug of choice. The common street drugs have been on the market for long enough to find a price point that has been optimised to fit the addictiveness of the drug to an affordability that ensures steady demand.

I feel very grateful that I never became addicted to Cocaine, Crack Cocaine, Heroin, Crystal Meth or other street 'hard' drugs. They say a fool and his money are easily parted, and so, the street drug addict must be the biggest fool of them all.

Or is it so clear cut? With street drugs, at least you have some direct human contact with your dealer, who has a symbiotic relationship with you, and therefore a reason to not let you tip over the edge into total self annihilation. Often, social groups might form around drug use, and there's a kind of safety in numbers. Even an addict might heed the advice of another addict when somebody says "I think you've probably had enough".

Having essentially unlimited access to the drug you're addicted to, with virtually zero oversight or social ties, is like playing a game of chicken where you're invisible to an oncoming bus driver. Only you can jump out of the way of the bus. The drug will never blink, never back down.

And so it is, I find myself able to relate to most of the stories I hear addicts and alcoholics tell, but there is something terrifyingly unknown and isolating about being amongst the first addicts to have become ensnared by mass-produced Chinese legal research chemicals, and with unlimited access to the world's hardest drugs, with a few mouse clicks on the Dark Web.

Governments have no idea what the consequences of trying to head off the cat & mouse game of criminalising novel chemical compounds will be. The invention of the Dark Web and the synthesis of these new 'designer' drugs is surely a reaction to laws and prohibition. Who could have foreseen that this would create new drugs, new markets, trap unintended types of people into the horrors of addiction and criminal justice?

That's a rock of Crack Cocaine that I was offered on the street soon after moving from North London to East London. Disruption in somebody's life can expose them to things that they've never experienced before.

Tags: #drugs #addiction #notanonymous

This is a story about destructive relationships...

I stood up my most respected and one of my most sorely missed friends for the third time yesterday.

I was supposed to see him and his family just before Xmas, then we were going to have Tea at the Ritz, then we were going to travel to Heathrow, catch up on the train and in in the ample time before his flight.

WHAT'S GOING ON?

Well, I've never not had a girlfriend. I'm too addicted to sex. After the most almighty row at my ex-wife's brother's wedding, we took a break from each other for a few days. While she discussed my faults and possible solutions with her parents, I found a way out of one destructive relationship and into another.

I have written before about our unhealthy co-dependency on sex, and sex on drugs. "NRG-3" had no ingredients listed, but it was the last untried chemical on a legal high & research chemical website where each weekend, my ex and I would fuck on a different drug.

I would spend a bunch of spare time at Cambridge, reading about research chemicals, and then I would order one, ready for when I next saw my ex. I saw us like Alexander and Ann Shulgin, and had read their candid co-biographies about synthesising about 3,500 psychoactive drugs, and testing them all on themselves. The ones that seemed safe and interesting, as an aphrodisiac, Alexander took with Ann and they compared notes in their famous books PIHKAL and TIHKAL, which I read when I was 17/18 years old.

Only "NRG-3" was going in the bin. I did some snooping and found that "NRG-x" was the name for the old stock of unsold 'legal' highs that weren't legal anymore. Most people speculated that it was Methylenedioxypyrovalerone, which Crystal Meth and Crack users were switching to because it was 1/1,000th of the price per dose. Except MDPV had terrible extrapyramidal side effects in people not regularly abusing stimulants: panic attacks, palpitations, tachycardia, hyperthermia and said to be more addictive than the illegal drugs.

John McAfee, the famous billionaire software engineer became addicted to MDPV and started posting videos of himself pointing a loaded gun at his head on YouTube. The more I read, the more convinced I was that I needed to add the pyrovalerones to my 'never try' list (heroin, crack, crystal meth, PCP).

Only, in a suicidal state after the aforementioned temporary separation from my ex-wife, I thought "fuck it, what harm can 15mg do?" 15 milligrams is 10 to 20% of the size of a dose of 'most' stimulants. The line of white powder is more of a short, thin, hyphen. Your eyes can't believe that 15mg is so tiny.

My affair started immediately. I loved this drug. I loved the effects of this drug more than the pleasure I derived from my destructive relationship with my ex-wife. I had a mistress. I was having an affair. I was also free from the fear of losing my co-dependee.

I took 800mg over 4 days when I had intended to only take 15mg, for the duration of it's effects, which could be between 3 and 24 hours. It's not a stable and predictable compound. My behaviour had always been stable and predictable: I would take a single accurately measured dose, orally, and I had never ever broken my rule.

I had tried maybe 50 drugs up to this point, so I wasn't naïve, but I found myself saying and doing things I knew were addict clichés. "I'll just have a little bit more", "that looks underweight/small, I'll just increase the dose slightly", "I'm going to have one last dose then I'm going to stop", "OK, this really is the last one".

I didn't eat, I didn't sleep until the 3rd night. When I woke up I was having a terrible panic attack. Time inched by. My pulse and blood pressure were maxed. I was convinced I was going to die. I wasn't naïve though. I downloaded a computer game called Samorst, and played that for 12 hours. I felt a bit better.

This happened a few weeks after Springboard ended. I knew I had to pitch in London a month after demo day. I remember almost turning back home as I was almost on the train to London, because the thought of leaving my drugs for a few hours was scary. Way scarier than giving a pitch while high and hoping nobody from Springboard noticed I was high, sleep deprived and I had lost weight.

Everyone said that my London pitch was better than my Cambridge one (practice? home town?  drug-induced confidence? Smaller audience?).

Maybe I just didn't care so much. Jason Trost of Smarkets spotted the founder problem I had right away. I picked a startup that would be cashflow-positive, I could code in on my own in no time, and we already had a customer (5 or 6 household names by the time we started Springboard). The problem was this: I'd solved the problem in my head, written it: boring work only now, and I had no founder passion except pride in our startup.

David Hazell should have been the CEO from day one, and it took him well out of his ColdFusion comfort zone, but he can code Java and Objective-C as well as running a well administered business.

So how do you cure an MDPV addiction? Simple. Stop taking it. My ex took it as personal that I got addicted and she thought I wouldn't quit out of stubbornness  and I just needed shouting at and abusing.

I had a 'man cave' (office/lounge/bedroom) built in the summerhouse I built, but she would still walk down the garden path to shout at me there.

As if this wasn't enough, my parents were ordered to come and take me away. Things didn't get off to a flying start when my ex lets my Dad in and he's been primed to start shouting "you're a junkie" too, the moment he got in my front door. I was in the middle of an email about admission to a specialist drug clinic in London, and I should have told the hypocritical c**t to get the fuck out of my house that I paid for, back to his house which was bankrolled by my mum, and the money that came from the profit of the little cottage that my granny bought her.

My parents then insisted that we get some fresh air (it was January and I was not in a good state). Even though I wore dark glassess and a coat with a big collar, it was still mentioned at work that somebody had seen me out on the clifftop while I was off work sick.

My GP kindly gave me 5 weeks so I could attend the 28-day detox program at The Priory, where one of the country's best psychiatrists specialising in dual diagnosis (Bipolar & substance abuse) was based. A few white lies were told to protect my professional reputation and my health insurance would pick up the £12,000 bill.

My ex-wife said if I went into private hospital, she would divorce me. My psychiatrists said dual diagnosis mortality rates are very high, they disagreed that it was lack of willpower that had meant I hadn't quit by means of being shouted at, and professional care was needed, even just to see what was going on with my comorbid Bipolar II.

3 and a half weeks is what I lasted in hospital, before it dawned on me that I was going back to the same life. 3 weeks became a kind of benchmark. I could quit for 3 weeks, but never any longer. Ignorant people will say that proves a lack of willpower. Fuck you ignoramus.

When separation and divorce finally started to happen, my friend Will rescued me back to London, where I managed 2 months abstinence before my lazy ex wife insisted I travel 240 miles to get 3 valuations on a house she lived and worked less than a mile from.

I had just founded a new startup, was in advanced discussions about raising money, had built a working prototype, cycled to TechStars London every day, had a beautiful girlfriend and lived with one of my oldest friends and made new local friends as well as reconnecting with old.

Paying the mortgage on an empty property ate my savings, especially when she rejected a cash buyer who wanted to move in 6 weeks. Instead she chose an agent who didn't know the area or have any clients looking in that area, and accepted an offer from a couple in a chain who didn't even have an approved mortgage. They took 6 months.

When my parents refused to help ease the cashflow burden like they had repeatedly promised they would - not wanting stress to cause a relapse - it took me a hell of a lot of effort & distraction to raise money that I would have prepared in advance, if I knew their offer was just hot air.

I relapsed back in Bournemouth, with the idea of turning the house into a homeless shelter or something else to piss my ex off. Rang the family solicitor after all the other laughed at me, because I had trashed a hotel room in a drug-fuelled rage, and I wanted to prepare them before I handed myself in to the police.

Strangely my friend Tim turned up, got me out of there, then my Dad got me back to Oxford. Turns out the family solicitor had phoned my mum and begged them to help their son. I was very keen my dad contact the hotel and let me settle the matter with them directly. He didn't care. He doesn't have my ethics.

I had told Will (most innocent and naïve man ever) to chuck me out if I ever got any mail from Spain or Germany. Luckily I managed to find MDPV in the USA, but it still feels shitty using drugs in your friends house, even if you're trapped on the first floor with your leg in plaster in agony because the docs won't give you anything stronger than Tramadol (in case you abuse it).

Camden Town is not a good place to be a drunk or a drug addict. I would meet with Frank every day for weeks until he got a paid hostel bed. While I was making notes, to tell his story, I unwittingly took down the addresses and contacts of everywhere I had to go to try and get help from Camden.

Eventually Will did chuck me out, because of lies my Dad told him. Will did it very nicely, but my Dad destroyed the relationship we had. I remember lying in hospital, 2 canulas, torn liver, burnt abdomen, failing kidneys, and not only did Will ask for his keys back, he asked if I had made any other copies.

This is what happens when a drug addict hypocrite c**t like my Dad starts 'helping' instead of helping like he originally falsely offered to do with a modest bridging loan.

(as an aside my parents lied to my sister and said they'd lent me 250% More money than they actually did, and that I was 'emotionally blackmailing them' by being in hospital, even though they're not my next of kin anymore and I would never bother telling them if I was in hospital. No, my mum said it's ok because it's only worth making the coroner's if they need somebody to identify my body)

I survived homelessness and further hospital admissions, so I saved my mum that train fare, but Camden Council kept reneging on their promises. I got a one line email from Camden Council Housing, saying I couldn't even get a hostel bed

"On the basis of the information you have provided I am afraid that you do not meet the residence criteria to be considered for our Hostels Pathway Scheme."

What the fuck? Do you only accept people with money and houses and nice parents?

If you ever want to speak to a psychiatrist in hospital here's a little trick. Ask the the receptionist if you can borrow her phone and then dial the switchboard. Say "can I speak to the bleep holder for psychiatric liaison please?" Make sure you don't let on you're a patient until you absolutely have to. Saying "I'm trying to locate a bed in a psych ward or crisis house in London for a voluntary admission" doesn't actually contain any lies.

In this way, I was able to get 2 whole weeks of accommodation out of the council tax I pay Camden Council. I don't feel bad, because I had a massive wound in my leg and my penis was hanging off.

At the end of the two weeks, Camden Council said "here's a number for you to phone [if you haven't been mugged or stabbed, and still have your phone]  in the morning for us to come check on you". I said I wanted to stay in a a derelict tennis court maintenance shed to stay dry. They said, "we need you to stay where [muggers are and people have pissed]".

So I booked myself into a suite at the Royal Camden Golf & Spa Resort (a 14 bed dorm in a hostel) and proceeded to go into drug withdrawal. The think about London hostel dorms is, there's bunks, and there's a bathroom, and then outside there's the capital city of London, but if somebody is going through drug withdrawal in one of the bunks, fuck London, you should stay and watch them cos there's no privacy. It's like "Trainspotting" as a live play with one of the best actors you'll ever meet.

Fuck rehab at £430 a night... a hostel is a great place to get clean, provided you have a Laurence. Laurence could see that this was a dress rehearsal, and opening night would be never hopefully, and ushered a disappointed crowd of rubberneckers off around the sights of London. 

I'd managed to hang onto enough money to put myself through the cheapest rehab in the country, which is in Bournemouth believe it or not. I told my mum to hang on though (could hae been yet more lies anyway) because I needed to finish my round of golf and I had a massage booked for later [as in, hostels are like cheap rehab anyway].

Before long I had a group of friends. Laurence from the mountains. Rory the Lidl vodka stealer. Jody the poet. Definitely not French Jack. Psychic Laura. "I just want a baby" Priscilla. "Quite Old But You Still Would" Marla, Gorgeous Flavie, My later ex (banned) Antonella. DJ Kristos.... and many many more, including Paolo who had previously been acting tourguide, but with about 8 times as many years in the Big Smoke than him, I accidentally stole that role.

The thing about a hostel is, if you want drugs, everybody else wants to share, and you have to be high in public. Also, there's none of this pious "not a drop of alcohol shall pass my lips bollocks", and it's a lot easier to get clean with a beer in your hand than an herbal tea being told by some ex-junkie "drugs are bad mmmkay".

It took me a month to get clean and another month to get a job (and stay clean) and then I stayed clean until I dumped Antonella for being abusive, and then Laura got all mumpy that I didn't move onto her. Jody, who was in Love with Antonella, also was angry with me. My entire group of friends in London (except Rory) fell apart, and then my contract ended.

• Abusive relationship = multiple relapses
• No money + massive stress = relapse
• No job + no friends = relapse
• Innocent/naïve middle class person + lies about drug addiction = no friend

So I was nursed back to health by the nicest family in Ireland. The O'Riordan's of Killlavullen, Cork [The Rebel County]. I owe them my life.

The thing about the O'Riordans is that they're the smartest most hard-working and make do people you'll ever meet. Eddie, Laurence's dad's climbed 8,000m peaks and can sail, as well as repair just about anything. Breda, Laurence's mum is just so full of love & care, without all that œdipus complex bollox that my mum needs to deal with. There's sister Maria the nurse who all the boys in Magners drink in to look at and chat to, but they know they'd get the beating of a lifetime if they touched her. Then there's Danielle, with her scholarship, but she's practically already [unofficial] #2 in a company that's about to IPO. She's got Dublin culture but no arrogance.

Anyway, seeing and staying touch, and not falling out with friends is hard. Imagine if all your money just takes you deeper into debt, and keeping your mind quiet is harder than working any job... and it used to say lots of interesting things, but now it just says one: "MDPV"

Just about anything and anything that could have hurt my self esteem has happened. Showing a nurse your penis hanging off is a good one. How's about the police leading you out of a hotel, handcuffed, just wearing boxing shorts ["I'm sure you deserved it, you devil"].

And I keep having to go back to doing what I have done since the age of 17 to stop myself from going bankrupt, but I hate it and it's so easy I can type and have a conversation at the same time. And then when I've got just enough money, I'll walk into the boardroom and I'll tell the board exactly what I think, and I always get fired, but they're too scared I'm going to whistleblow to not give me a reference, so they just quietly sack whoever needs to actually go.

So, I came up with a couple of lists of things I like doing and don't like doing, and I've come up with a bunch of ideas that bring in money, keep me busy, and doing the things I like not the things I don't.

I'm sending it to Jakub, because he's the only man alive who can judge whether I'm talking pie in the sky bollocks or it might be worth a go (maybe with some discussion with his dad).

I have a practical speculative list too, which I might send to Rory, as he's the only man alive who'd come in on me with some mad scheme to stop both of our minds from driving us mad.

Jakub, it just remains to say, I'm so sorry for standing you up, but I was 6 months clean in San Francisco, but I had to ethically walk away from the HSBC corruption and incompetence. Since then, it's been promises, promises and false starts, but I'm waiting for the day when I either die cos I'm dumb enough to figure out how to get high for 14p a day, or smart enough to do something I can be proud of and it was my destiny.

So cute (9 October 2013)

P.S. - Sansa (Happy Birthday!), Lydia, Margaret, Nicola, David, Willian, Will, Jess, Cameron... I'm going as fast as I can. It's like trying to get a 10,000kg ball rolling.

Tags; #startup #addiction #friends

This is a story about feedback...

Writing this blog has driven me deeper and deeper into the examination of the injustices and irresponsibilities of the past. The people I've targeted are ignorant, delusional and virtually illiterate.

I decided to write something else. A couple of publishers asked me to show them 10-20,000 words of a manuscript I'd written. I didn't have a manuscript, but I knew what I wanted to write.  Memoirs are egotistical, biographies are for people who are narcissists.

I've written a book that explains everything I've learned about the systems and processes, gleaned from the last 4 years: Hospital, Mental Health, Crisis Teams, Police, homelessness, unpleasant wives, parents who give up on their children, sisters who want their brothers to shut the fuck up and stop being melodramatic.

I love my Mum and I miss her, but Dad is such a cowardly domestic abuser. He expects my Mum to be a mind reader, and umpteen times a day he will says something disrespectful, unpleasant, abusive to her. That's domestic abuse.

If you want to know just how much of a coward is, he spent about an hour taking the piss out of me on the phone, so I was pretty annoyed, and I said "let's talk about this face to face, and you can say those things to my face, and let's see what happens". He's 66 years old, so it's not like I was going to fight him, I just wanted him to be brave enough to take the piss out of me to my face.

When I turned up at the house, the back door was locked. Then my Dad appeared. He made no move to open the door. I hadn't travelled for over an hour to be staring at a coward behind a door. "Come on then, let's have it. Open the door and say what you just said to my face" I said. He remained immobile.

I picked up a giant stone urn and hurled it at the window glass. The urn shattered, but the glass was merely scratched. I picked up a smaller piece to throw, and that's when a terrified looking female Police sergeant appeared. She told me to drop the piece of urn, which I immediately did. She told me to put my hands on my head and face away from the door, which I immediately did. I was cuffed and put in the back of one of the 3 Police cars that were in attendance.

It seems that my Dad is such a coward he needs 6 police officers to protect him from having a respectful chat with his own son.

All in all I think 8 or 9 officers attended. According to the sergeant, they were all very scared when I was roaring with rage for my Dad to face me like a man and have a proper chat with me. She was not expecting me to fully co-operate at all.

My book is not about what a cowardly cunt my dad is. My book is supposed to help people whose lives have not been going that well with mental illness and drug abuse, to see that it's not a downward spiral. With the help of kind, nonjudgemental people, and a belief in yourself. you can make it through some rough patches.

My Dad is a criminal. He has a criminal record (spent) for the possession of drugs. I've been caught with Cocaine, Speed, Benzos, Ecstasy and α-PVP. I have no criminal record.

Draw your own conclusions from what it means that a criminal needs the protection of 9 Police officers, from an IT consultant.

Tags: #police #parents

This is a story about modern life...

I missed 5 blog posts. 3 people were worried on Facebook, plus my flatmate. My sofa-surfing Kiwi has gone back to NZ.

2 of those people, I met at a hackathon, back in October. When I had to go into hospital a few weeks later, one of these new friends brought me a backpack that contained a set of hand-picked items from around my room, each thoughtfully chosen as something that I would probably need during a week or two in hospital. It felt like Christmas.

When I got really sick over the Xmas/New Year period, my other new friend came and sat on my bed and gave me a hug. He also did loads of my washing, cooked for me, and generally nursed me back to health. The most important thing he did though, was to just be thoroughly lovely. It makes a difference, somebody asking how you are and giving you a hug.

I was in a pretty bad way with muscle wastage and weight loss, having stopped eating for about 2 and a half weeks. Obviously I couldn't impose on my poor friend, with additional burdens, such as extra shopping to carry home, when he was already doing so much that was well above and beyond what any flatmate and friend would do.

Another new friend had become concerned by my lack of blog posts, and had actually come over to my flat on her own initiative. She's a very active person, with a busy life, but it so happened that she was off work... although I doubt that she pictured herself nipping to the Tesco Local for protein shakes, isotonic fluids and anything that had high calorie content. It was so kind and helpful of her that she did.

So, I just received an email from my sister. Apparently she's been getting shit from my parents, because they've read my blog and being the horribly abusive people that they are, they are taking it out their frustration with semi-illiteracy and their almost total exclusion from my life, on my poor sister.

Let's recap what wonderful parents they are, because apparently I've forgotten all the great stuff they did for me:

• Born to a couple of junkies. My mum was a student and my dad was failing to make enough money to support a family by buying and selling junk.
• Grandparents took pity on 3-year-old grandchild and bought them a house. Dad still doesn't have a proper job... too busy taking drugs.
• I spend all my time when I'm not at school in the pub, because my parents still can't afford to support a family, a drug addiction and alcoholism. Alcohol comes first.
• My Dad decides to scale up the junk buying/selling that didn't work before, so I have to leave all my playgroup and primary school friends to move to Oxford
• Between eye patches that I don't need and a yet another girl's bike with a fucking basket on it, I pretty much become the most bullied kid at school. I remember picking gravel out of my back whenever I was 'clotheslined' on the hard play area.
• My mum did take me to London a bunch of times, which was nice. We went to the Science Museum, which got me interested in science.
• Move to a school with a uniform. Turnups and the school blazer (optional) plus carry-over from previous school means the bullying continues. My mum sympathises with the bullies.
• I get a goldfish. He's called Fred. You can't stroke a goldfish. It's a shit pet, but I cry when he dies and make a little gravestone for him.
• Finally get a home computer. Not the Apple Mac like Julian and Joe have, or the PC like Barnaby, Ben, Marcus etc. etc. No... this is the last of the ZX Spectrums ever made
• Have to move school again. Great school. Bullying not quite so bad as there is an unpopular Russian boy and I'm in all the top sets and a good form group... so my parents decide we should move to France
• Some accountant friend of the family takes pity on me and gives me the oldest PC you've ever seen in your life. No software works on it, but that doesn't matter because the monitor is black and white anyway. This is my parents main gift to me: giving me something that's so unbelievably unfit for purpose that I try and try in desperation to make things work.
• Learn to speak French in France. Also didn't make any friends in the UK, and was away from all my other friends. Given the choice, I'd rather have friends than be able to speak French.
• Another new school. Bullying atrocious. Teachers are nice though. One of them takes me sailing after school... like a dad.
• Rather than leave me in a town where I can cycle everywhere and remain with my friends during puberty, we move to the middle of fucking nowhere. I write letters to my friends on floppy disks and post them to them. One friend comes to visit. One. That's it. One.
• Sailing club is good... thanks again to that teacher
• Another start at a new school ruined by the only bike that was capable of tackling the steep hills being a proper mountain bike. One that my dad stole. It was a girls bike. I had to ride past over 1,000 children all congregating on a big long pavement, before going up the steps to the school. My few sailing club friends disowned me.
• I was supposed to be saving up for another new computer, but £10 a week from a paper round doesn't leave a lot of spare money to buy replacement parts for my mountain bike, which gets used at least twice a day on very steep hills
• With a small contribution from me in cash, but absolutely huge in terms of the number of miles I cycled every day on my paper round, my Dad got me my new computer, well after its processor became obsolete. It doesn't have a co-processor or enough memory, but I figure I can upgrade those parts when I get a better job than a paper round.
• My dad bought the shittest, most rotten, neglected boat that looked totally not water-worthy. I restored it, then sold it for a big profit. Can't remember if I paid him back.
• I had a small financial contribution when I bought my 4th and 7th cars. The 7th car was brilliant, but I could have paid for it myself. I think I was only short a few hundred quid, and I was IT contracting so I was raking it in. I can't believe how my parents still say they "bought" me that car. I shall have to dig out the bank statements.
• That's it!

Oh, here are a few things that my parents like to misremember:

• They gave me one of their cars. My mum had crashed it and it had been repaired by a blind man. The thing is, it wasn't a gift. My granny had been saving money since I was really little so that I could get a car and insurance, and I would have easily been able to buy a small engined petrol car, in a low insurance group, with cheap parts... like everybody else my age. Instead, ALL the money had to go on insurance, and the shitty car broke down all the time, and because it was a complicated diesel with expensive parts, it was the world's shittest car for a broke 17 year old.
• Holidays: well, actually these were conferences for my mum, or the shitty dilapidated house in France where I was away from all my friends in the UK. My parents were always pulling me out of school, and sure it was an education and experience, but it was just what my parents wanted to do, with me along in tow. If you were going to do it anyway, it doesn't count as something you did for your kid. The fact we drove past Alton Towers so many times but never went illustrates their mindset perfectly.
• I've cost them a lot of money. Horseshit. I read books from the library or was playing round at friend's houses or somewhere I shouldn't have been. My parents never bought me the correct shoes to not get beaten up. Once I saved up the money from my granny and bought a pair of Nikes. I remember everybody commenting at school for days. I remember wanting to fall asleep just looking at them.
• They lent me money when I was in London. Nope. What they did was not lend me money when I was in London. I needed it in October 2013. Two years late is too late.

Ok, so there are myriad little things, mainly to do with cooking with my mum. My mum is really great. She did try her very best to give me a nice life. She worked hard, paid the mortgage and bankrolled my dad.

I'm trying to think of a nice memory with my dad, but it's all so practical. I was always watching him do DIY or cook but the only thing I think we learned together was when he taught me to read & write. Later, we would change the oil on a car and suchandsuch, but we never did something together, although I was allowed to come along to car boot sales, for example.

My only memory of him really taking an interest in something in my life was when I wanted to do a sponsored mountain bike ride, and I hadn't been doing the big hills for long enough to really travel all the way to the town where the event was being held, and then have much remaining energy to race.

It wasn't much more than a completely lumpy field, with a savagely steep climb, long traverse, descent and then back on the flat to the bottom of the climb again. I had no bottle cage on my bike and I was dressed in jeans, and it was a pretty hot day. People were laughing at this kid in jeans with a touring helmet, no other safety gear, on a girls bike.

When the race started, I left everybody who had "all the gear but no idea" behind. The traverse was quite tricky, especially without toeclips. The descent was suicidal on a fully rigid bike, but I started to lap quite fast.

The more the laps went by, the more of the skilled but unfit riders fell away. The ascent really was a killer in that heat. Anyway, I decided I'd better stop after quite a few laps, because I was feeling really badly dehydrated, and I was sick of getting flies in my eyes.

My dad was gobsmacked. I can't remember where I finished, but from his point of view, I was just lapping everybody over and over and over again. He took me to the bike shop in the nearby town and bought me a pair of clear cycling glasses for the flies, mud and stones, plus a bottle cage and bottle so I could carry a drink with me.

Perhaps if I racked my brains I could think of something else, but getting complemented on my riding, and then him making a further investment - unprompted - to allow me to take my hobby further, was a special moment.

So, my sister's pretty pissed off with me, but I can't understand why. My dad conspired with my wife and my GP to drag me away from my home, my life was dismantled, and the one time in my adult life when I did actually need and want their help - and it had been offered - they reneged on their promise in October 2013, and bang went my best chance to put my life back together in London, thanks to their lies.

I've not really altered the formula, and it's really quite simple:

• Place to live (not a hostel, tent, or shop doorway)
• Job (I'm an IT contractor. Thanks for your offer of [insert low wage job] but it would be uneconomical of me to not focus my search on highly paid contracts)
• Enough money for any cashflow shortfall until the 60+ days it takes before I get paid are done, plus I've absorbed the hit of the 6 weeks deposit, 1 month rent & agent fees
• I'm afraid that I'm so profligate that I replace my suit every 5 years, and my overcoat every 12 yeas. Shoes, I'm afraid I throw away when the shoe repair man laughs in my face. Shirts, I replace when the collar is worn through and it's horribly yellow under the arms.

There are certain things that people in London don't do either:

• They don't walk for 2 or 3 hours. They get the tube. That costs over £5 a day
• They don't bring a thermos flask of coffee into the office. Coffee is a £6 a day habit, but a necessary social visit
• They don't bring a picnic basket, get the blanket out, lay it down on the office floor, sit down and start getting foil-wrapped cucumber sandwiches out. Lunch is a £5 a day habit
• They don't drink much water. Sometimes they drink fizzy drinks. Sometimes they drink a kale, ginger and apple smoothie. Drinks are a £3 a day habit
• They don't have home-brew kegs hidden under their desks. When a Londoner goes for an after work drink, which is pretty much a social necessity, they will spend £5 a pint or more
• They don't work the longest hours in Europe and travel on a packed tube train to then get home, travel back in time, and start making fresh pasta and picking basil leaves in the garden they don't have. Your economy Londoners will buy fresh pasta and pesto, and will even push the boat out for a bit of parmesan: cost £7. Some days, you're at work so late that you might even get a luxury stonebaked pizza sent to the office, or failing that, you'll probably pick up a takeaway on the way home, because you're just going to fall asleep as soon as you've eaten: cost £15.
• They don't live in Zone 99. The zones go 1-2-middle-of-fucking-nowhere-99-100. Yes, it's true that you can save 50p a year on rent by living in Zone 99, but it will cost you over a million pounds for a travel card that goes out that far. It would also be quicker to just get a jet or a helicopter to City Airport if you're that far out.
• They don't all take loads of coke. Yes, it's true that there is some drug taking in the capital, but I bet there are good statistics to show that a far greater percentage of people are on drugs in the provinces, because it's so fucking dull out there.
• They don't fret about saving 7 pence on a loaf of mouldy bread, or consider it profligate to buy popcorn at the cinema, because wages are so much higher and you'll be working too hard to do all the stuff that you have to do to entertain yourself in the provinces on your meagre wage

So, anyway, I've shown my magic formula works. I know what I need to get back into work, routine, friendships and get on an even keel financially, so that I never ever have to explain to a dimwitted out-of-towner why the cost of living initially looks quite high.

However, my sister has a shit job, got pregnant with kid they couldn't afford, went through a divorce, lives in midlands suburbia and generally acts with incredulity that I could maybe have found it a bit stressful trying to re-enter London life on a credit card, living in a hostel.

I had said that my sister & niece were the only thing keeping me alive when I was in hospital. My life is fucked, the cashflow doesn't work, I'm not very well, I still haven't got a contract and there are now further delays. I know what'll happen... I'll get a nice big money contract, but after a month I'll be bankrupt, and my money will still be 30 days away at least. If I take it all out as soon as I can, then it means I'm not maximising my dividends, and it means I have to live on 33% of my income, instead of 100%. That means the stress carries on, month after month after month. But, apparently everybody's an expert in accountancy and cashflow forecasting now.

Apparently one of my sister's friends has it so much harder than me or something. Anyway, they're dead now. I'm just being a martyr or something. According to my sister and parents it's really easy to blag your way into a mental hospital, and slicing lengthways down my forearms with a razor blade was some kind of emotional blackmail, or maybe it was melodramatic... I don't give a shit anymore.

I literally think that you are a grade-A douchecanoe if you have no idea just how hard it has been to survive in London with no parental or state support, when I was completely fucked.

A big part of me says "fuck it". I was a homeless bankrupt drug addict in a park one day, and then you expect it to be all fixed in 5 months because I managed to get a flat, and a job. Then you only choose to help me when I'm hospitalised, suicidal. And then after it's already too late you say it's blackmail.

Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.

Can't be bothered.

Why bother?

You have absolutely no idea how hard it's been to work my way back from the brink and just how carefully I've had to budget, and how cleverly I've done my accounting.

I really didn't want to write another thing about my parents. They're dead to me. But to hear my sister echoing their lies is heartbreaking, and to receive a lengthy message telling me things that are just total bullshit, and saying "I'm sorry, but I don't want to be anywhere near you".

That's just fucking awful. OK, so I've poured out my anger at my parents for forcefully removing me from my own home so my ex could cheat on me, generally backing her up, and then totally fucking me over when they had their chance to make good on something helpful. It's something I have been trying forgive and forget but they're never going to re-enter my life. They have no interest in it anyway. My dad didn't even want to come in my London house and meet my London friends, despite being parked right outside.

My sister says I should ask if I need help. My parents don't do anything until it's too late: I'll either be dead or in hospital.

That's not emotional blackmail. That's getting rid of some worthless cunts from your life.

I'm absolutely heartbroken that my sister has been taken in by their bullshit. We had been talking about her visiting London and her getting a matching semicolon tattoo.

Fuck life

Tags: #parents #childhood #sister #career #london #suicide #depression

This is a story about captains of industry...

The boy stood on the burning deck whence all but he had fled. Is my task yet done? Rats leave a sinking ship but a skipper will go down with his vessel.

There's just no way you can have a meltdown halfway up a rock climb or a mountain that's higher than a rope's length. You wouldn't be able to lower that person safely down to the ground. There's no way you can have a meltdown in the middle of the sea or ocean. There's no chance of you being harmlessly blown into a tranquil harbour.

If you have experience leading a rope party or skippering a yacht, in the hostile environment of the sea and mountains, then you tend to be quite a stoic, calm, rational individual.

I remember we broached my yacht when I was on the foredeck trying to take the spinnaker down. I was hanging onto the spinnaker pole, with nothing but sea underneath my feet, as we heeled right over on our side. It seemed to take an absolute age for her to right herself. I looked back, and my crew were up to their thighs in water that had flooded the cockpit. I yelled "let go of the spinnaker sheets" and my crew member who was gripping the ropes that held the 'kite' in full sail were still gripped in his white knuckles, and his face was blank with terror. I had to repeat myself several times, and change the tone of my voice, so that he would break from his trance and release the wind, allowing me to then pull the sock down the sail and stow it below decks. It's interesting how people respond to catastrophe and stress.

A whole expedition party that I was in, found ourselves at the top of a large rock buttress, which we had to abseil off. There was a single thin metal piton, hammered into a crack in the rock, as an anchor point for our abseil rope. This piton was clearly bending under the weight of a person abseiling. I wasn't leading that expedition, and I was told to shut up and be quiet, when I whispered my concerns to the leaders. This was a decision motivated purely by money. The leaders didn't want to leave behind valuable equipment, in the interests of safety. You should never belay or abseil on a single anchor point, as my friend Sam was to later find, with tragic consequences.

I'm completely mental, and take some crazy risks, but I don't put other people's lives on the line. When I climbed Crib Goch with friends, I took them to a saddle in the hills beneath the mountain where we could get a good view of the ridge, and I showed them the route I was proposing. I told them it was very challenging, and talked about the exposure to steep drops either side. I told them that we would quite possibly have to retrace our steps, if we couldn't find a suitable gully in which to make our retreat. I shared the information, so that each person could make their own decision about the risks. We were all grown ups.

The sign reads "CAUTION: Route to Crib Goch". The choice to continue up to this knife-edge ridge is yours. You read the sign. You stepped over the stile. You knew what you were doing. Individual responsibility.

Our nanny state is trying to protect people from themselves all the time. We have railings at road crossings, so that you can only cross at one specific place. We have warning signs on hot drinks and for hot water taps, cautioning us that hot water is hot. I'm surprised that we don't yet have laws outlawing running with scissors.

From April, the UK is going to have bizarre legislation in place that attempts to outlaw all drugs except for nicotine, alcohol and caffeine. Does this sound sensible to you? Well, it makes about much sense as banning the sale of parachutes, mountain bikes, horses, skis etc. etc. If you look at the statistics, many sports and hobbies are more dangerous than most of the drugs that are being banned.

Drugs are dangerous, don't get me wrong, but the government concentrates on making things illegal, rather than minimising harm and risk and treating those who do get into trouble. I myself became addicted to a legal high, which was made illegal with absolutely no plans around supporting those addicts who were criminalised. There was no treatment plan or alternative offered to me. I was forced to turn to the black market, and then my own savings in order to get treatment in the private sector. If I hadn't had a pot of savings, I would have been picked up by criminal justice, rather than by national health. That's appalling.

If we were to, say, make mountain climbing illegal because it's dangerous, do you think that would stop people wanting to climb? If the danger didn't discourage people, why the hell do you think laws are going to be any deterrent. The laws are flying in the face of human nature.

Imagine every mountain and cliff in the UK, surrounded by a razor-wire fence, with policemen at the gates and patrolling the perimeter. Perhaps there would be guard towers with powerful searchlights, just in case anybody tried to scale or cut through the fence at night. Perhaps the fence could even be electrified. Does that sound like a sensible plan, for the protection of society?

People talk about drugs causing an increase in crime. Yes, there is a mountain of data showing that alcohol causes monumental problems in society. Anti-social behaviour is rife in town centres across the United Kingdom. Binge drinking is out of control. You don't tend to hear a lot about fights at raves though, do you? Yes, not a lot of anti-social behaviour amongst people who just want to dance, even though they have taken loads of pills. Also, Ecstasy is less dangerous than horse-riding, as Prof. David Nutt once famously commented.

We really do need to end this war on drugs, which is a load of hot air, rhetoric, causing the needless destruction of so many lives. Being tough on drugs is just another way of saying that you're going to chuck your friends and relatives under the wheels of the bus because you're too ignorant to educate yourself about the damage of criminalising somebody, demonising them, excluding them from society, offering them no treatment and generally shaming and isolating them, blaming them for society's ills.

Prohibition puts every man woman and child at risk of slipping and falling into the death-trap of the 'undesirable' bucket. We label drug takers as undesirable members of our society, and push them through the revolving doors of a criminal justice system that makes people unemployable, while also connecting together a criminal underworld that has to survive on its wits, given no lawful alternative.

The police are being forced to make judgement calls about whether to pursue prosecution against members of the public, who have made wayward decisions, but are they really criminals? While we haven't solved violent and sexual crime, and the poverty that drives people to steal, how can we be wrecking people's lives for messing around with recreational drugs?

I bought a yacht at the age of 21, and it cost me a buttload of cash. Boat ownership is a costly addiction. Mooring fees, antifouling, repairs, insurance, fuel... all of this nautical dependency was hazardous to my wealth. Did you know that there is no legal requirement to be qualified to navigate UK waters? I could buy a boat and go and get myself in big trouble in some part of the sea that I'm completely clueless about, and then just phone the coastguard to come and rescue me. Does that not seem a little more anti-social, than a gay man taking poppers in the privacy of his own home?

Perhaps I'm not a very good mascot for the anti-criminalisation movement, because I've most definitely cost the NHS a buttload of cash, as they struggled to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. However, maybe I am. If there was actually a plan to help and treat addicts, my issues could have been resolved before I even got so sick that I ended up needing emergency treatment to save my life. A stitch in time saves 9 and all that.

I think I count 32 stitches in my leg. All those stitches were completely avoidable. It was pure ignorance and stupidity and manipulation by government and media that led to me being cornered and attacked. You're looking for victims? Try taking a look at the early deaths and health complications of people who are marked as black sheep, disowned by their own families, labelled as criminals by a 'justice' system and shunned by society, to the point where sure, the needle seems more of a friend than any of the hostile sneering faces.

Why should alcoholics and addicts have to be anonymous? Why should they have to hide themselves away in groups of their own kind, recounting tales of their own weakness, their faults, their shame and their regret. Why do you refuse to give a homeless person money, because "they'll only spend it on drink/drugs"... yes, they probably will, if that's your attitude.

We're kicking people into the gutter, and I'm not OK with that.

When my friend John had completely ballsed up the interview I had gotten for him, and he was facing the reality that life is a little bit harder than just larking around doing whatever the hell you want, he started to become critical of me. He started to attack me rather than make a critical appraisal of himself and his own choices. It was interesting that he tried to use my prior misdemeanours, that I had told him about in confidence, as a weapon against me. It's amongst the reasons why I chucked him out of my flat.

Addicts are not weak people. In fact they are probably a lot stronger than you, because they not only endure the crushing guilt they place on themselves, but they're also a convenient scapegoat for anybody else who's feeling a bit s**t about their own life. Calling somebody a junkie is a lot easier than admitting that you've failed as a fellow member of society. A junkie's life is no way easy. It's a wall of death, with the addict having to ride faster and faster to stay stuck to the wall, while gravity tries to pull them downwards to their untimely demise, destruction.

There's some stats for you, on your common junkie. 15,000 steps a day on average. That's a lot more than your average couch potato, sitting around reading rubbish newspapers, watching crappy TV and sitting in judgement over groups of people they're totally ignorant about.

Do you see an obese junkie? No. Do junkies drain loads of NHS money by giving themselves diabetes, because of all the sugary drinks and junk food they stuff into their faces? No. Junkies are hard working and resourceful.

How would you rather that resourceful intelligent people spent their time? In the getting and taking of drugs, or perhaps put to some more productive aims and objectives?

We are wasting talent. We are wasting human lives. We are destroying people's dignity. We are robbing people of opportunities to shine and show us the better side of their character. We have untapped resource and we are wasting other resource in locking people up and dealing with preventable consequences of terrible drug policies.

There are good people out there... sheep in wolves clothing. We have tarred people with the junkie brush, and it's a crime to write people off like that.

It's a crime to kick people into the gutter.

Tags: #addiction #drugs #alcohol #nhs #injury

This is a story about rehab...

What's the difference between detox, rehab and inpatient treatment for mental health disorders? Very little actually. Here's my little exposé into being a patient of the UK's most notorious private drug and alcohol abuse treatment provider.

As far as my medical records show, I was admitted to The Priory for treatment for Type II Bipolar Disorder, during an episode of acute illness. My private health insurance picked up the bill and JPMorgan gave me the time and the space to get better. They're a great employer actually.

I had found a local private psychiatrist, as I was running out of ideas for how to deal with my Dual Diagnosis (Bipolar & substance abuse) and I knew that the stats weren't good. Not many people recover from such a death sentence of a diagnosis.

I was very lucky to find the psychiatrist that I did. I had been trying to get in contact with a number of specialists directly, but things were very slow going during the Xmas/New Year period, when a lot of people suffer a big decline due to the bad weather and family pressure to put a jolly face on everything during the holiday season.

I contacted a general psychiatrist at the local private hospital, and he turned out to be one of the nicest, kindest people I could ever have hoped to meet. It was pure relief to meet somebody nonjudgemental who would hear my story without leaping to immediate conclusions. The first time I met him, he simply said "we can only play the cards we are dealt" which had me in floods of tears, as it was the first time that anybody had ever said something so kind to me.

I had been taking quite a kicking from my supposed loved ones - but I'm not going to go into that anymore - and been made to feel very guilty and a total failure for having gotten sick. It should be noted that I became clinically depressed and suicidal before any substance abuse entered the picture. Bipolar symptoms had always been present in my life, but it took a further 2 years to get diagnosed. Then, finally, substance abuse reared its ugly head and became the most pressing issue.

From my point of view, I had struggled for years and years with recurrent suicidal ideation, suicide plans. I have struggled all my life with mood instability. To be simply dumped in a bucket labelled 'lost cause addict' was a bit s**t to be honest, after 30 odd years of reliable good service, despite fairly debilitating mental health problems.

Perhaps I'm complaining too much, making too much of a big thing of my struggles? Yes, yes, yes, there are people who've had it so much harder than me, blah, blah, blah. Ok, unless you've sliced your forearms multiple times, lengthways along your veins, with a razor blade, do me a favour and shut up? Some of my friends are wonderfully supportive and have gone out of their way to learn about mental health problems. Perhaps you could follow their example?

So you think this is attention seeking? Save it for the funeral.

It's true that it's taking me a while to work up the bravery to take the Final Exit. Ending your life is a big deal, and you've got to do it right, otherwise you're just going to end up in hospital in pain.

I've had cans of inert gas to suffocate myself, 2 grams of Potassium Cyanide, enough barbiturates to slip into a coma and drown in my hot tub while unconscious, travelled to the top of tall buildings, cliffs and peered over the edge of high bridges. The most serious attempt I made was trying to open my veins with a razor blade. I must admit though, I was just testing the water. You want to make sure that you open some major veins, like the jugular, if you want to die quickly.

Stupidly, I still have hope and some faith in myself. I should write myself off for dead, like those-who-shall-not-be-named have done.

So it came to pass that I went into The Priory, with a referral to one of the country's leading experts on Bipolar Disorder and Dual Diagnosis. JPMorgan were told that I was experiencing mental health problems (true) but the main objective was for me to detox for 28 days, so that there was a clearer clinical picture, and the treatment of my Bipolar and depression could begin.

That makes me an addict right? Don't need to read the rest of the story. Skip to the end. Case closed.

Well, actually, The Priory and my psychiatrists were concerned with my mental health, and saving my life, not just labelling me as an addict and sticking me into the revolving doors of mistreatment and stigma that those suffering individuals endure. The Priory is actually a private hospital, and cares primarily for those suffering with various mental health disorders that are less controversial and stigmatised than substance abuse. There were ten times as many patients who were there because of depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, eating disorders etc. etc.

It's actually all part and parcel of the same group of problems. One fellow patient had been admitted with mental health issues, but out of some drive to self-destruct, she started filling up a mug with alcohol-based hand sanitising gel and flavouring it with orange squash, and drinking it to get drunk.

One of my fellow patients tried to commit suicide by climbing a high wall and hurling herself off, while I was there. Does it matter if she was being treated for depression, or for substance abuse? The fact of the matter is that she was suicidal at that moment. Mental illness of some kind had driven her to try and take her own life.

There was a game we used to play, when a car used to roll up to the house, and out would step the worried looking family members, dragging some dishevelled son, daughter or partner out of the back seat and into a meeting about admission. We used to try and guess what they would be admitted for. Sometimes it was obvious - if they had red wine all spilt down their clothes for example - but often it was nearly impossible.

But what's it actually like, in private hospital? Are there rock stars and stuff? Well, my doctors had treated a number of high-profile sportsmen and women, but when I was there, there weren't any rock stars. Couple of millionaires but no rock stars.

Really, it's much like an NHS mental hospital, except a little more well appointed. Everything is bolted down and the windows don't open and the doors don't lock. The lights don't dangle down and there are no curtains. Mirror glass is made of plastic, and pictures are screwed to the wall, not hung. Yes, there is quite a lot of anti-hanging thought that has gone into things.

When you arrive, you will hand over your razor, scissors, tweezers, solvent containing toiletries, shoelaces, belt etc. to the nurses to keep at their station. If you want to have a shave you'll have to ask for permission, and you'll only get a short amount of time to attack your face with something sharp.

Plus, it's still a hospital, and people are very sick. One woman said to me "it's OK, your secret is safe with me" and tapped her nose with a knowing wink. It later emerged that she thought I was a royal prince, and that my presence in hospital was a state secret. She also came into my room and stole all my underwear and my books, before the nurses tracked down her hiding place.

The rooms are actually as good as any 3-star hotel, with a writing desk, nice view of the gardens, an OK single bed and an ensuite with no shower curtain or plug (drowning is frowned upon). Once you're off suicide watch, you might get to move to one of the double bedrooms that are further away from the nurse's station.

Other than the slight refinement of having a TV and a telephone in your bedroom, there is little different from NHS mental health treatment. The food was very good, I have to say, but your days are generally structured around morning and afternoon trips to the dispensary hatch for your medications, and being regularly checked on by nurses if you're not in some group activity.

Between art therapy, yoga, mindfulness, music therapy, table tennis, TV, movie night and generally socialising with the other patients, it all sounds like a thoroughly lovely spa break. There was a gym and quite big grounds that one could roam in, provided you told the nurses where you were going and how long you'd be gone for. Leaving the compound within my 28 days was forbidden.

Your partner can come and visit you, and you can give a knowing wink at the nurses station before you have sex, so that nobody barges in on you unannounced. Just don't take too long. Visiting is only on a Sunday, so you'll probably have a sack like Santa anyway. You have to hand over your mobile phone and laptop, and digitally detox, so pornography is hard to come by. Probably because sex addiction is also treated at the hospital.

We should remember that although people talk about 'rehab' we need to be quite clear about the treatment route of substance abuse. There is first a detox. It's necessary to break the body's dependence on substances, and treat the withdrawal. If you are an alcohol or a benzodiazepine abuser, there's a good chance that withdrawal could kill you, so the hospital will put you on tapered medication to get you off those substances. If you are an opiate abuser, you will get very sick from withdrawal symptoms, and these can be attenuated with substitute prescribing or by putting the patient into induced sleep. If you are a stimulant abuser, you will suffer cognitive impairment, exhaustion and suicidal depression.

After detox, which could take the whole 28 days, then comes rehabilitation. Depending on how dysfunctional a person has been, they could need 3 to 6 months of rebuilding their damaged life in a safe environment. Just breaking the cycle of chemical dependency is not enough. There's a reason why a person entered that cycle in the first place. There's a reason why that person stayed in that cycle.

We know that gambling addicts don't inject packs of cards into their veins, so addiction can't just be about chemical substances, can it?

So it was, as my time at The Priory drew to a close, the staff gave me the bad news that my treatment was incomplete. I would need another 3 months of rehab if I wanted to make the changes permanent. I flipped out. I discharged myself, went home for a day. Then I spoke to one of the staff on the phone and decided to go back for the remaining few days of treatment. She-who-shall-not-be-named decided that I had "failed" in my commitment to getting better. That's simply a lack of understanding about the commitment that is needed to support somebody in recovery.

Recovery is not about abstinence, it's about having people who love you trying to support you. Support does not mean hectoring, bullying, nitpicking and generally being obnoxious to a person. Your holier-than-thou drinking and smoking and generally behaving like it's OK to do whatever you want and laughing in the face of the abstainer is not helpful, OK?

Abstinence doesn't even work anyway. It's just a continual reminder of what people want to believe: that you're somehow a bad person, that you're faulty, defective. People want to treat you differently, want to label you. Teetotallers are ridiculed, treated with contempt. Why bother being teetotal?

Certainly, not being a smoker was a problem in hospital. There would be long periods where I was left all on my own, because everybody was outside smoking. There is no real abstinence in the world. I found the nurse's stash of caffeinated coffee in one of the more remote kitchens, and in some hospitals you are even allowed to have caffeinated drinks. 'Addicts' are encouraged to not give up smoking and tea/coffee, because they will need those things as a crutch, during those early days of abstinence.

If you look a little more closely at human behaviour, you will see that people are self medicating in one way or another. You'll see the hypocrites, dosing themselves up with stimulants in the form of caffeine. You'll hear the hypocrites, being hypocritical about addiction inbetween puffs on their cigarette. You'll suffer the hypocrites, swallowing their pills and liquids they have as government sanctioned, medically approved substitute addictions.

I could go to my doctor and get a prescription - called a script in addict parlance - for something to salve my addiction and turn it into something seemingly acceptable in society. It's OK if my pills come in boxes from the pharmacy, with my name printed on them and with a prescription from my GP or psychiatrist?

If I had to go to work at the moment I would probably need some Dexamphetamine, or at least a gallon of super strong black coffee. Because I've used so many stimulants, I can drink heaps of coffee without having the anxiety, palpitations and sweats that you would get, but it's a poor substitute for genuine amphetamines, even if the caffeine molecule is virtually identical.

There's no magic in treatment. There's no magic to recovery. It's just time & space and being treated nicely by people, being respected as a human being.

It's important to respect people.

Just respect people.

Tags: #addiction #alcohol #drugs #suicide #mentalhealth #nhs #bipolar #depression