This is a story about being overwhelmed...

I sit sunning myself in the park. It all looks very idyllic, doesn't it? How enviable my life is - I have not a worry in the world. Wouldn't you too, love to be as footloose and fancy free as I am? Wouldn't it be great if you were unburdened from all your responsibilities and worries, and could just cavort around doing whatever the fuck you wanted, just like me?

A friend phones me. He tells me that all my problems are all my own fault. I can't disagree with him. He tells me that I'm self-centred. I can't disagree with him. He tells me some stories about some problems in his own life. I can't say that my woes are worse than anything he's been through. He tells me about how tough things are in the developing world. I can't disagree.

My head buzzes with thoughts. My thoughts aren't racing; they're quite rational, reasonable, structured and logical. My thoughts aren't warped by a broken ability to correctly perceive reality - I corroborate how I'm feeling with people who are considered to be sane, to validate that I'm not thinking what I'm thinking because I'm unwell.

I've been seriously unwell before. I sat in ice-cold bathwater for hours with a sharp knife at my throat, keeping my elbow on the bathroom door so that if it was opened it would drive the blade into my jugular vein and carotid artery - that was unwell.

I've been seriously unwell before. I've imagined people abseiling down the side of my apartment block who were going to smash in my windows and come into my bedroom. I've imagined that I'm being spied upon. I'll leave it to the reader to conclude what psychiatric label is usually attached to such thoughts.

I've been seriously unwell before. I spent 12 or even 18 hours at a time, trying to make something out of cardboard, string, plastic, rubber, metal, wicker, cloth or whatever else was lying around. I was once convinced I was building a house around myself, but when I had a moment of lucidity, I realised I had simply been moving the same cushion around in a small circle, in a trancelike state.

Of course, I'm not claiming to be well at the moment.

It's been suggested to me by a few people that I could be malingering - that I took an overdose that was very likely to kill me in circumstances where I was very unlikely to be saved, fully knowing that I would survive... somehow; that I managed to fake mental illness so well that I was brought to hospital under a section 136 by the police, and that I continued to fake mental illness so well with the team who assessed me, that I was detained in hospital under section 2 of the Mental Health Act. It's either the greatest ruse - a masterful piece of deception and death-defiance - or maybe it's really easy to abuse the few brain cells I still have left, for nefarious purposes.

Anyway, I'm not supposed to be writing about myself. Think about the starving African children.

Where do you think I live? How do you think I eat?

I'm dependent on charity.

Park bench.

Yeah, damn straight I'm glad I was born in Northern Europe, in a wealthy country where we have a welfare state. Damn straight I'm glad I don't live in some hot dusty shithole, where hunger and disease are rife.

"I want to go home"

My home is this park bench. It's true, I have received kind offers to live with a couple of very charitable people. It's a big deal, to invite a mentally ill, recovering alcoholic, recovering addict, into your home. I bet you wouldn't do it, would you? I probably eat newborn babies and stomp on kittens' heads, just for my own sick amusement.

"I want to go home"

I hear people asking to go home a lot. Every day I hear people shouting that they want to go home. I don't ask to go home. I wonder why?

I chat to somebody about living in a caravan and hiding from debt collectors. My heart leaps. I yearn to escape the relentless pressure I feel to get back to work and start turning the pedals again, but I'm conflicted - I'm a principled man and I want to service my debts; I want to play by society's rules.

Nobody plays by society's rules, except those at the bottom who are trapped into poverty - they have no choice. I've played by the rules for long enough, and it's made me so miserable that I tried to kill myself. People urge me to take a break from the rat race, but they don't understand that the house of cards is going to collapse - there's a lot of money riding on me being able to get back on my feet.

Like a sportsman who chokes at the critical moment, I feel immense pressure to perform and it affects me.

It sounds like I'm pointing the finger of blame everywhere other than myself. Is that your signature on a contract that says you would accept Payment Protection Insurance (PPI) on that loan? Why didn't you read the contract? Did you take out that endowment mortgage or didn't you? How come you didn't understand something that was completely straightforward? Why won't you take responsibility for your obligations?

My friend is right. My life is a problem of my own making.

This whole fucked up mess is a problem of our own making. We are joint and severally liable - do you understand what that fucking means? Do you own up to your part that you've played in all of this?

I'm trying to do my bit and it's making me unwell. So unwell in fact that I tried to kill myself. I mean proper kill myself - dead, forever, gone, finito, sayōnara, the end.

Either I'm the most devious bastard that ever disgraced the surface of the Earth, or circumstances are somewhat out of my control - I'm not fully responsible for the gigantic mess I'm in. Of course, I'm a very convenient scapegoat though.

Although it seems very disjointed and jumbled, this blog does not write itself effortlessly. This blog is not unimportant. This blog is important to me, so that's at least one reason why it's important - I don't need any more than that. Call me selfish and self-centred all you like but I've tried to remove myself from the picture, and I failed. Am I supposed to be sorry that I'm not dead, and I'm still wasting your precious oxygen? Am I supposed to apologise for writing something that you could choose not to read, if you wanted to?

Think about the starving African children. Wow I'm cured!

Tags: #mentalhealth #homeless #suicide #bipolar

This is a story about being observant...

Where do blue tablets actually come from? Well, presumably they are pooped out by blue fish, like the ones that can be seen swimming here on the pavement and road. Can you see them - the little blue fishies?

With our Sherlock Holmes deerstalker hat on, puffing from our pipe, we might deduce from the proximity of a large hospital and the lack of water, that these are not actually fish. What could they be?

An electroencephalogram (EEG) is a graph of what's going on in our head, quite literally. En kephalé means "in head" in Greek, and the gram bit means "written down". Electro should be relatively self-explanatory.

Were these fish involved in seeing what was going on inside somebody's head? No, I don't think so.

An electrocardiogram (ECG) is a graph of our heartbeat, as denoted by the cardio part.

In order to know what our heart's doing, we are all very familiar with the stethoscope, but there's a more accurate test that doesn't depend on human hearing. The muscles that pump the 4 chambers of the heart never stop unless you go into cardiac arrest or otherwise die. Muscles give off tiny electrical impulses, and these can be measured with highly sensitive equipment - an ECG machine.

So what about these fish? Well, it looks like they're the little sticky electrodes that are put on each of your ankles, arms and across your chest around your heart. When you are hooked up to an ECG machine, you've got a stack of cables attached to you.

One of my fellow patients at the hospital was in such a big hurry to get rid of these stickers, after having the health of their heart measured, that they tore them off and discarded them onto the floor, quite possibly in a fit of rage at having been cared for by one of the finest healthcare systems in the world. It's quite understandable that having received lifesaving treatment that's free at the point of use, this individual should have ripped these electrodes off their body and tossed them onto the road and pavement - that'll teach society a lesson, now that a street sweeper will have to come along and clean up this trash!

We might note that there are only 4 stickers, and we can presume that these are the ones from the person's wrists and ankles, which would have been most conspicuous. Perhaps it wasn't until the person explored their body later, that they found 4 more on their chest - one of which was lurking around on their left hand side and might not even have been discovered until a later date.

Debate rages in the United Kingdom, about whether we should have penalties to discourage people from treating the National Health Service disrespectfully. We could charge people for a no-show to a General Practice (GP) or outpatient appointment. We could charge people for any visit to Accident & Emergency for trivial matters that could have been treated at a minor injuries clinic, or perhaps did not require medical attention at all.

There is evidence that we are starting to allow a two-tier society to emerge where none is supposed to exist. Doctors' waiting rooms have plush leather seats for 'VIP' patients - who are paying for private consultations - while the NHS patients sit on hard wooden chairs. For an operation, paying to go private might mean skipping waiting times, even though it will be the same surgical team, in the same hospital, with the same equipment and in the same operating theatre. Although it's not supposed to happen, surely some of the waiting times are because private patients are queue-jumping?

Those at the bottom struggle with zero-hours contract minimum wage jobs, with the purchasing power of their pay packet decreasing every month, due to inflation. Things are not a lot better on the next rung of the ladder - an NHS Clinical Support Worker's salary tops out at around £15,000. That's £259 a week. Ouch. My rent in London was £480 a week. The wealth disparity is disgusting, isn't it?

While the cost of housing and the cost of energy - electricity and gas - is skyrocketing with double-digit percentage increases, wages barely increase at all. One only needs to look at the use of food banks, to see that the little people are struggling - people who clean your toilet, scrub your floor, wipe your bum, cook your food, stack your shelves and scatter rose petals along the privileged path that you walk. But, these spoiled brats still vote for a ruling elite who care nothing for the wails of distress that are now becoming a deafening scream of pain.

The bulk of the BBC was moved up to Manchester a few years ago, and it's been quite evident that it's had an effect on the mindset of the people who work for the broadcaster. In London, the homelessness problem is inconspicuous in wealthy districts, but in Manchester - where homelessness has soared 1,100% in just 7 years - the problem is inescapable. The BBC has shown a number of documentaries which accurately reflect exactly what I have seen and experienced: there are vast numbers of people in dire need of assistance.

Who wants a McJob that doesn't even pay enough to be able to rent a room in a shit apartment, and have any life at all? Does it surprise you that people are smoking strong synthetic cannabinoids which allow them to escape the stress and hopelessness of a hideous reality that nobody in Government seems to want to address.

There's a crisis that's going on all around us. Pull back the covers and human tragedy is unfolding underneath.

This is not a "wake up sheeple!" alarmist or sensationalistic think-piece, but in actual fact an unfliching and painfully truthful account - I bear testament to what I've seen - of the shocking disparity between London and the South-East, where our wealth is concentrated, and the rest of the United Kingdom where things are very grim indeed.

We talk about the 'Westminster Bubble' and I can attest first hand what it's like. At the beginning of this year I was at the grand headquarters building of Her Majesty's Revenue Collectors (HMRC) and it had been refurbished to an incredibly high standard. I was taken to an extremely grand room, which was capacious enough to hold at least 50, maybe even 100 people, but only had me and the two people interviewing me. Otherwise this space was left empty and unused, so far as I could see - perhaps a metaphor for all the empty homes that have been bought by foreign investors in London.

Meanwhile, it was barely two years ago that I was in social housing apartment (council flat) in London, which was in such a poor state of repair that there was literally 2 inches of water that one had to paddle through, in order to use the toilet or a terrible shower that barely worked. It's quite clear where our tax money is going - tax breaks for millionaires, not houses for nurses.

Bursaries for nursing have now been removed, so our nurses will emerge with the best part of £60,000 of debt when they qualify, which will further reduce their take-home pay. The interest on a student loan of that magnitude is more than 12% of our nurses' starting salary of £22,000, which means they will sink deeper and deeper into debt each year.

Who will mop up your sick, piss, vomit, blood, mucous, pooh, give you a sponge-bath in bed, say soothing things and give you painkillers when you cry out in agony, come running when you press the call button and generally make you as comfortable as possible when you're unwell?

As comrade Corbyn said: a millionaire in their mansion is going to need an ambulance if they have a heart attack, just like anybody else.

Tags: #nhs #hospital #politics

This is a story about winning a prize...

This week's big climber in the UK top 40 is a new single from the National Health Service. This band has been churning out smash hits since 1948 and is loved by tens of millions of fans. Here on Top of the Pops tonight, you'll see a live performance from this sensational act. Keep watching to find out what the UK's number one hit single is, at the end of the show.

Here on this page are the dry words of a deranged individual. How will you choose to interpret them?

Language is a rather crude and imprecise tool to fully express ourselves. Ambiguity creeps in and the thoughts and feelings of the author are not communicated with high fidelity - each reader will arrive at a different impression from the text.

As a software engineer who's been building systems for some of the world's biggest companies for over 20 years, I could easily copy Uber's dastardly tactics of diverting any web requests from a certain region of the country - e.g. a specific city in the North of England - in order to display a different page.

Most of my readers are using smartphones or tablets. Readers who are using Windows XP and Internet Explorer are quite unusual, and it's easy to flag up those anomalies - they stand out in the data that I gather about my visitors.

It's not hard for tech companies and technologists to present something that has been customised and tailored for each visitor. You might think that you'd see the same Google search results as somebody else, for example, given the same search terms, but Google works very hard to identify individuals, even in their anonymised dataset.

Traditional print-media widely reports that we are living in social media bubbles, where we are fed things that we like, because we're more likely to share that content and spread it 'virally'. What is less well reported is how wedded we are to the walled gardens that we live in - Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat et. al.

How long are you going to keep reading for? There's nearly 700,000 words here. Are you gonna read it all?

The best defence against anybody who would seek to jump to the wrong conclusions and make silly assumptions, is to present more data than can be reasonably processed - information overload - such that the farcical nature of reducing the complexities of life to some pathetic synopsis, are exposed as pure stupidity.

Of course, we would all love to feel that we understand all the laws of the universe. I've fried my mind with stacks of books and papers on theoretical physics, attempting to understand the fundamental nature of reality itself. Emotionally, I don't want to admit defeat, but digging deeper only seems to reveal even more unfathomable weirdness. Some of the quarks are called strange, charm and beauty. I love that.

Are you bored yet?

Can you not see that my intention is to create a maze of complexity that's impenetrable? It's not possible to know my mind. Even for me, I struggle to understand fully why I say and do the things I do. If it's hard for me, it's going to be impossible for you to dissect or categorise me; to judge me and to simplify me into something that can be captured by written language on a sheet of paper. What are you going to write in your report or your email?

There's mockery and disdain here, but if you dig a little deeper I hope you see that I don't have disrespect for anybody whose intention is to help and support me, and I have no intention of damaging my own treatment and recovery, nor anybody else's, nor cause any difficulty for the hard-working staff of the National Health Service and the ancillary support services.

Today, I'm a free man - an informal patient - but that puts me in an additionally vulnerable situation. I could be discharged from the hospital without a discharge plan - no place to live and no income. I'm sure some pen-pusher somewhere sees the opportunity for a quick win - am I just a statistic on a monthly report?

It upsets me that front-line staff have been cut, while middle managers have plenty of time on their hands to justify their pointless existence. The managers have survived the cull, the pay freeze and the excessive demands placed on the over-stretched people who actually do the damn job. Police, NHS workers, teachers - to name but a few - are getting a bum rap.

The first thing that I'm excited about doing with my newfound freedom is going to a protest at Tory cuts and austerity, to co-incide with the start of the Conservative Party conference, in a certain Northern city. The establishment are coming to me, and I will thumb my nose at them and boo them. A friend suggested that I could throw eggs and if I got in trouble with the police, they'd probably just bring me back to hospital on a section 136... put that in your damn report.

"Risk to the community - possibly going to throw eggs at Theresa May, to protest against cuts to front-line services and damage to the NHS, as well as undue stress on the police and other workers who care for and protect our most vulnerable members of society".

Tags: #hospital #politics #nhs #police #socialmedia

This is a story about customer service...

Amongst a small group of my friends, we have all found that a medication called pregabalin - marketed as Lyrica in the UK - has been useful to us, but also has adverse side effects and is difficult to stop taking. Pregabalin is quite good at combatting anxiety and improving sleep, which are obviously the desirable effects: most of us have stress in our lives, and struggle to get enough high-quality sleep. Personally, pregabalin is an effective treatment for the phantom limb pain I feel, due to damaged nerves - I can't feel my left foot. Pregabalin is far better than the opiate painkillers, which left me sweating and nauseous at times. However, stopping taking pregabalin leaves me feeling anxious and gives me insomnia - what goes up must come down.

Soon pregabalin - "the new Valium" - will be scheduled as a class C controlled substance, which makes it much harder to obtain a prescription, and possession without a prescription could be punished with a criminal conviction.

Here on the psych ward, a man screams for a "blue tablet". Perhaps more blatantly obvious as an addiction, another man attempts to wheedle more Subutex (buprenorphine) out of the staff - he's been droning on about having his dose restored from 8mg to 16mg, because he is being weaned off the synthetic opiate he is addicted to. I can hear this guy, who is obviously no stranger to our prison system, chopping and snorting drugs his room. The man who screams for a "blue tablet" is actually asking for a 10mg diazepam pill - blue in colour - which is Valium. Our screaming friend decides he wants to leave hospital, and the staff tell him he can't leave because he's going to take heroin. "It's my body! I do what I want!" he screams. Then, he starts getting abusive.

Early on in my hospital detention under section 2 of the Mental Health Act, I ask a nurse if she can nip to the shop to get me a 4-pack of beer. We lock eyes for what seems like an eternity. I maintain a completely straight face. Then, we both snigger and she regains her composure. She jokes that we should have a big piss-up on the ward. With a different nurse, I tell her with a straight face that they have forgotten my methadone and she immediately unlocks the cabinet containing the opiates that are so coveted by some patients here... I hastily tell her that I was joking, but she still continues to search my medication chart. Do I look like a junkie? I certainly don't have track marks on my arms or other identifying features of an injecting drugs user, such as abscess scars.

A doctor comes to take my blood. She doesn't shut my bedroom door. Three men, who I know were heroin users, peer into my room and I feel bad that I didn't ask the doctor to close the door or get up and close it myself - surely the sight of a needle going into a vein is going to be a terrible trigger. There's good evidence that addicts' brain reward pathways are activated when they see drugs and drug paraphernalia for just 33 milliseconds, which is less than the 40 milliseconds that a single frame of cinema film is shown for.

Having been detoxed from my physical dependency on benzodiazepines and alcohol, I find that I crave nothing more than a few drinks in the evening - some wine or some beer - to take the edge off the stress and anxiety of my situation and help me relax during what is a fairly dreadful clusterfuck of issues with employment, housing, accommodation and my health. However, I don't want to sabotage my treatment and recovery.

I'm incredibly grateful to the NHS, for accidentally detoxing me while they were treating my deadly deliberate overdose - my suicide attempt. Being physically dependent on a medication is to be shackled to it - to stop taking it would cause seizures and potentially death. There wasn't a 'buzz' that I was chasing with booze & benzos. I was using mind-altering substances to soothe my jangled nerves: self medication.

Am I glorifying drug taking, or making light of serious matters? Don't be so ridiculous.

An epidemic of illicit opiate use sweeps across the United States, with the number of overdose deaths and addicted babies born, skyrocketing in the past few years. An epidemic of mental health issues has pushed the services that are there to support those who become unwell, to breaking point. Only a wilfully ignorant person would turn a blind eye to what's happening all around us.

Carfentanil - a synthetic opioid - is so powerful that an aerosol of it could be sprayed in a packed metropolitan area and cause hundreds of people to die from respiratory arrest. This drug is being sold as an adulterant in bags of heroin, in the United States today. In the UK, carfentanil's less potent - but still deadly - chemical cousin, fentanyl, is quite common now in batches of street heroin. If you're worried about terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, these things have already arrived on the shores of the US and UK, in the form of incredibly deadly chemicals that are available for sale to anybody with the money.

My fellow patients are unrelenting. There's been a 2-day nonstop assault on the staff, as the patients attempt to get a tiny amount more synthetic opiate out of the doctor. There's not much else to do on the ward, and whatever medications the doctor has decided to write on their chart will remain fixed for a whole week. I guess they've got nothing to lose apart from their 30 minutes of escorted leave from the ward. One patient has done a runner, sensing that the doctor's decision has not gone the way he would prefer.

"You've not done anything wrong. You can come back and you won't be in any trouble" a stressed looking nurse is saying down the telephone, to the patient who has gone AWOL. Meanwhile, a patient takes breaks between harassing the staff for 8mg more Subutex, in order to chop and snort lines of white powder in his room - presumably he has a plentiful supply of his own drugs, which he wishes to supplement with a legal prescription.

I try to calmly await my section tribunal, despite the chaos outside my bedroom door.

It should be noted, that the quality of care does not vary with one's behaviour - the staff are supremely professional - but good manners are declared as the number one thing that every staff member wants, on a notice board that tells the patients a little more about the team of people who look after us.

Good manners cost nothing.

Tags: #hospital #mentalhealth #drugs #addiction

This is a story about peaks and troughs...

I'm in the middle of a warzone. "I WANT TO GO HOME" yell multiple angry men, who are considered unsafe to be out in the community. It's all kicking off on the psych ward, because today is ward round with the doctors. Today is the culmination of a week of waiting and hoping; hoping that today will be the day that the consultant decides to grant some liberty to the men who are detained here - the top doctor is all powerful.

Ward round is supposed to be 10 minutes per patient, but I'm a psychiatric anomaly - completely unmedicated, yet compliant, articulate and reasonable. The staff - nurses and support workers - report that I have been polite and well mannered. It's rare that a middle class person winds up on an NHS psych ward - my fellow patients are all victims of poverty, and their mental health conditions make them most unmanageable indeed.

Having moved from an 8-bed Psychiatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) to this ward that sleeps 20+ men, the intensity of what's going on around me is much greater, even if there isn't the sound of struggling patients being dragged down the corridor to a padded and soundproofed isolation booth. At least on the PICU I could lock my bedroom door and feel a little safe. Of course, the staff opened a little peep hole every 15 minutes to check I was still breathing, but it was a much less stressful environment.

The world's most terrible shower was one of my big disappointments, as I repeatedly pressed a push-button to get a pathetic dribble of water that could barely wash away the soap from my hair. At least the water was warm, I thought. Then, a nurse knocked on the door and offered to make me a bacon & egg barm (roll) and I was pleasantly surprised. Returning to my bedroom, I was greeted with the delicious sight of the lovely breakfast snack pictured above.

A lot of people have presupposed that the food is terrible on the psych ward, but it's actually very decent. Through my turbulent journey of the last few years, I've eaten a lot of hospital food. When you're on a general NHS ward, you actually get a spectacular choice of meals, plus kosher and halal options too, which I can highly recommend.

Because my ward round time overran, I missed lunch. I asked if the staff were making any trips to the local shop - my permission to leave the ward has been cancelled due to the fact that I'm a suicide risk - and if they could get me a sandwich.

Despite the commotion, somehow a kind nurse managed to make me beans on toast with scrambled eggs. I was actually more disturbed by the disruption of the routine than I thought I would be. The amount of stuff that's happening all one one day is insane. The clamour for the doctor's attention is just as bad as you'd think it would be, given that everybody's been locked up all week and only this one guy has the power to allow anybody off the secure ward.

These two meals - breakfast roll and beans on toast - are unlikely to be in line with the NHS's ambitions to reduce salt, sugar, fat and other unhealthy things from patients' diet. Salt sachets are liberally sprinkled onto all the regular food we get, replacing the salt that would usually be added by the chef - the net salt consumption must surely be the same. There was something delicious about these beans, in their sweet tomato sauce on white bread. The carbohydrate content of this meal must have been huge, even though it was virtually fat-free except for a light coating of margarine on the toast.

The fluctuations in blood sugar and medications are very pronounced. From 10pm to 9am, no medications are dispensed, but they are dished out throughout the day. From midnight to 6am, the smokers are not allowed to cluster around the doorway that leads to the tiny outdoor area surrounded by high fences, in order to get their nicotine fix. Tea and coffee is decaffeinated, but I quit drinking hot drinks quite a few years ago. The fluctuation in the importance of days of the week, is all fixated around Tuesdays, when ward round happens. The tension in the air is palpable - patients want their freedom.

Being a non-smoker, the passing of time is marked by food and sleep for me. Masturbating in the world's shittest shower is not something I've even brought myself to do, yet, although the sexual needs of the 20+ men on this ward can't be magicked away with medication. There's clearly an undercurrent of sexual tension, which reveals itself in inappropriate ways... however, can we view the natural urges of these men - myself included - as wicked and wrong, when they are simply part of our biological make-up?

Three hot meals a day. None are particularly photogenic, but I devour every last bite. The pleasure of eating is one human thing that can't be denied to us, despite the dining not being haute cuisine. I'm grateful for the safety of this NHS psych ward, and the food I receive at taxpayers' expense.

My ensuite bathroom has no shower, but at least I don't have to share a toilet to dispose of the digested remains of what I shovel into the hole in my face. I barely chew, but mealtimes are the three happy moments in my day, which is otherwise just spent waiting... waiting.

Tags: #food #mentalhealth #hospital

This is a story about the comeback kid...

Here's quite an interesting document, to me anyway - it says that I was transferred to a Northern city hospital's intensive care unit (ITU) on Sunday 10th September and all I had were the clothes on my back. The date of my original admission to hospital - Saturday 9th September 2017 - is shown quite clearly in the top left, under my name.

The reason why this document is interesting to me, is that I started having seizures at some point after arriving in hospital. I was already well into a fatal tramadol and codeine overdose when the emergency services got to me. I'm pretty sure I remember the hospital telling me that they'd make me as comfortable as possible but I was probably going to die, or words to that effect.

I've been through all my paperwork and I can't find my hospital discharge summary. I suspect that it may have gone wayward during the insane events of the Wednesday & Thursday following my fatal overdose. I will be obtaining another copy as soon as I can. Any documents I can lay my hands on are useful for me, because seizures, coma and unconsciousness are not particularly conducive to remembering the events of my hospitalisation very well.

What must be self-evident is that I was very sick indeed, to have been in intensive care.

Anybody who's followed my story knows about my plans. One only needs to go back to a blog post on August 10th to see one of the actual boxes of legally prescribed medication that constituted part of my fatal overdose.

I use those words fatal overdose quite deliberately. I had calculated the dose that would be fatal, doubled it and then chucked in another shitload of prescription opiates for good measure. I wasn't messing around. This wasn't a cry for help. This wasn't some attention seeking bullshit. This was a very real, calculated, pre-planned and meticulously executed suicide - following the precise steps that I had outlined earlier in the day.

It might surprise you to learn that I set an alarm on my phone, so that I wouldn't tweet or otherwise let on that I was in the process of killing myself, before I was beyond the point of no return. Who does that? Certainly not somebody who has any intention of going on living, I would've thought. Would you be brave enough to take a fatal overdose and gamble that you might get saved by social media? Seems like a pretty dumb publicity stunt or way of getting attention - in all probability you'd just wind up dead.

I remember when I was in the Emergency Department of the hospital, trying desperately to get a drink of water - I was fully aware that having more fluids in me would allow more of the deadly medications to be absorbed into my bloodstream, accelerating my death. The hospital were wise to my suicidal intent and they knew that they could ignore my requests to not be treated, as soon as I fell unconscious or started having seizures. The anaesthetists must have stepped in at some point and put me into a medically induced coma.

Imagine waking up in a hospital gown, with a tube coming out of your piss hole, sellotaped to your leg. Imagine waking up and not being able to speak, because there's a tube down your throat. Imagine waking up and all you can see all around you are machines that are either pumping stuff into you or taking stuff out - loads of screens and loads of digital readouts. I had more input and output ports than a Personal Computer (PC) from the 1990s.

I've written about this before, but I need to write about it again, because I'm trying to process what happened to me with only the scant information that's available. Between the hospital and the police, they pretty much conspired to keep my friends, family and work colleagues completely in the dark about whether I'd lived or died and what the hell was going on. I wasn't really conscious until Tuesday 12th of September 2017 - that's quite a long time to be in limbo land. On the Tuesday, I was vaguely aware that my sister and my work colleagues wanted to speak to me, and I wanted to speak to them, but I wasn't allowed to. What utter bullshit.

The police have since phoned the company that I was working for, and told them in no uncertain terms that I was in hospital and not at all able to communicate with them to let them know I was going to be off work on the Monday & Tuesday. However, the company has severed all contact with me and has been avoiding the office since Wednesday 13th September 2017. What on earth could they be so afraid of, that they daren't answer the phone or go to the office? What on earth are they thinking? I have no idea, because they won't return my calls or reply to my emails.

Over that Wednesday & Thursday following my fatal overdose, everything collapsed around my ears. Without a phone, wallet, cash, laptop or any of the other things most of us take for granted every single day, I was lost in a city that was nearly completely alien to me, with not a single person to turn to. It was highly distressing. It was exhausting and stressful, to go from place to place, replacing whatever I could.

The Apple Store in the nearby shopping centre became the centre of my world, having been impolitely muscled out of my office with rather flimsy excuses. I dug my heels in, because something fishy was going on and I wanted people to come clean - what the fuck was going on? Why was I being treated so unprofessionally? It was a horrible experience, and not something I should have been put through, given my recent discharge from hospital.

I received a phonecall saying I had an email with some letters from a solicitor, from the company I was working for. How was I supposed to read this email, without my laptop or smartphone? Nobody from the company would speak to me properly. I did not receive even the bare minimum professional courtesy that should be extended to somebody who'd been a valued member of the team for some time.

Because the matter is now being handled by legal professionals, due to the complete refusal of the company to treat me with the common decency that any human being might expect - let alone adhere to contract and UK laws - I can't really go into any more detail. I'll be sure to share the details of any court proceedings so that this blasted company can't get away with their inexcusable misbehaviour.

Of course, the pages of this blog document my darkest secrets in unflinching detail, but this is therapy for me and I do not mix my professional and my social media identities in a way that might besmirch or sully the reputation of a company that is trading ethically and within the law. There are a lot of Nick Grants out there in the world, and I'm just one of many. In fact, this whole blog could have been created by somebody who maliciously intended to impersonate me, for nefarious purposes, couldn't it? Have you been careful to check who actually controls my Twitter, Facebook and blog? Is there anywhere that there is a direct reference to who and what I actually do for a day job, that could justify the mistreatment I've suffered?

One should remember that this blog has been the best thing I ever did, in terms of being able to stabilise my life and recover my poise after homelessness, addiction, alcoholism, financial problems and a whole world of pain, absolutely tore me to shreds. Should I hang my head in shame and hide in the shadows? Should I keep my mouth shut, and pretend that nothing bad ever happened to me?

There's absolutely no way you're gonna shut me up without killing me. I'm loud and I'm proud. It's more important that I write my story in unflinching detail, than cowering in fear and attempting to cover up what's happened to me. What have I got to be ashamed of? I've worked damn hard to get my shit together after it was blown to bits, so I'm damn well going to write about it.

Of course, culturally we only allow those who are already successful to share their stories of their life struggles, that challenge the status quo and our preconceptions. Paul Gascoigne and George Best have done a lot to bring the ethical debates surrounding alcohol abuse into the public consciousness, for example. Ronnie O'Sullivan and Stephen Fry have candidly shared their experiences of cocaine addiction, but yet we still revere them as great people... why is this? If you've been reading carefully, you'll know that I'm teetotal and I'm not on any drugs, except for pregabalin (for nerve damage) and zopiclone (because it's bloody hard to sleep on a noisy psychiatric ward of a hospital) which are both legally prescribed to me.

It seems I've taken a battering, because of foolish assumptions that have been made about me. Just about the only correct assumption that you could've made, is that I should probably be dead, after having ingested such a massive overdose and had plenty of time for it to take effect before the emergency services got me to hospital.

I really can't get myself into the mindset, where I would mistreat somebody who'd been hospitalised and was very sick. Please, somebody explain to me what have I done wrong, apart from what I've already very publicly admitted to? Is it right to crucify me; to punish me beyond the punishment that I've already suffered? Do you not think it was awful, what I've been through? Why would you put the boot in and kick me when I'm down? I don't understand why the shit continues to be rained down upon my head.

Does somebody want to explain to me how it's at all ethical, that I came to find myself homeless, unemployed and isolated in a city I'd never set foot in two months ago, after I took all the risks and put in so much effort to try and make a go of things?

Answers on a postcard to Nick Grant, Planet Earth.

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

This is a story about seeing red...

My dad had a fairly simple moral code for me, when I was a little boy: boys shouldn't hit girls or boys wearing glasses. That's about it. I remember guns were bad and I got in trouble (age 3.5) for looking like I enjoyed myself playing with a friend, who had brought his plastic guns with him. I eat anything and everything today, but I also remember being terrorised into eating rice pudding - which was slimy and disgusting in texture to me, before the age of 4 - so much so that I started throwing up with stress and anxiety, before every mealtime and lost so much weight I had to be hospitalised.

Perhaps it's clear, in retrospect, why I would turn to a hospital to protect me from bullies.

But, perhaps it's me who's evil, and needs to be locked away from the general public? Certainly, now that I've got chance to stop and catch my breath, I'm finding I've finally got time to examine the morality of the way I've acted in the past.

If you hit your kids or generally terrorise them to the point that they need to be hospitalised, trust me, they're not having a brilliant home life. At playgroup and school, I took this pacifism thing that my dad had been very angry about - a.k.a. playing with a friend with a plastic gun - very seriously and I got the crap kicked out of me by other kids... it wasn't until many years later that my dad suggested fighting back, which seemed somewhat odd given that I'd received these hippy lectures about being nonviolent. Anyway, I went down the path of pacifism and that's where I stayed. I was not having a brilliant school life - I was picked on every single day, to the point where, again, it would leave me collapsing in uncontrollable sobbing fits, while on the way to primary school.

Boo hoo! Get the violins out!

My first experience of domestic violence was me crying and being punched in the face, giving me two black eyes and a broken nose. I didn't even defend myself, let alone strike back... why would I need to? I didn't understand why I was being victimised like this, by somebody who was supposed to love me. I had to go into work with a bullshit story about having collided with a buoy while kitesurfing, to explain my two black eyes. It was the male extreme sports equivalent of "I walked into a door". I had to lie to her parents, when we went to see them for a planned visit soon after my face had taken that pommelling.

I'm 6ft tall (183cm), 13 stone (82kg) and I still retain some of my muscle bulk from rock climbing, kitesurfing and wakeboarding, although I'm obviously not in peak physical shape. I've got the mindset of a terrorised 3-year-old, ganged up on by two fully grown adults, but I'm in a body that can do some damage and defend itself now.

The problem - if there is one - is that if I feel bullied and attacked, and you managed to corner me, I'll smash my way out of the situation. I don't hit people - I'm still nonviolent. I don't get into fights. However, very occasionally I will trash something - more often than not it will be my own property - because the insanely horrible emotions just have to come out.

"Do you think that was the right thing to do?" a stern-faced looking policeman asks me. "Do you think there might have been a better way to handle that situation?" comes a second question, as if the first one - which I haven't had chance to answer yet - was not clear enough for me. Of course, I would have loved to handle things differently. Of course, I feel guilt and regret when I snap; when I can't take the onslaught anymore, and I've done something that I wish I hadn't - some property has been damaged.

She's asked me to travel out to the suburbs from the city centre; it's a considerable car ride away, including some travel on a dual-carriageway - the main road South, which turns into the motorway and would safely take me back to London, if we stayed on it. I get the cab to stop at a shop so I can buy some things for a romantic evening. I'm greeted with a hug, we lie on the bed kissing and cuddling... this is all how I hoped things would be; I'm relaxing and enjoying a pleasant evening; this is very nice. Then, she's hurling abuse at me, telling me I'm a terrible person... I'm sitting down while she's standing up, verbally attacking me and generally bullying the shit out of me. She suddenly asks me to leave... alright, no problem. I jump up, grab a rolling pin from the kitchen where it lies idle on the worktop and I smash her laptop to pieces, then I leave immediately. I regret it instantly and text her that I want to replace it, as I make my way to the nearest cab rank, to get a taxi to retrace the journey that I took hardly any time ago. Why had I been summoned to the suburbs for this abuse? Certainly, my loss of temper at the injustice of it all is in no way a justification for destroying her laptop - it was a disproportionate response.

I don't think people really see what's going on underneath the surface, even though I tell them.

Two police officers are interviewing me. It's 2am in the morning. I was just discharged from hospital after a suicide attempt, and my kidneys are still not fully functioning. My body is bruised as hell from where the emergency services had to kick in the bathroom door to get to me, slumped in the dark, dying. My muscles ache from the damage that was done to them by the massive overdose of opiates - prescription painkillers I had stockpiled. I answer the police questions. I admit smashing up that laptop - of course I did it and I want to replace it. The last messages I ever sent while still alive were attempts to get her bank details, so I could transfer her enough money to get a brand new replacement... although of course the destruction of her laptop must have been a shocking over-reaction in her eyes and upsetting for her, and I can never fix that.

Don't people see me as vulnerable? I feel like a 3 year old, being beaten up by grown-ups. I feel vulnerable; scared. People must see me as an easy target, because they certainly don't hold back when they're ripping into me. I find myself back in my trashed apartment at 3:30am on Wednesday morning. How did this happen? Why do people think I'm perfectly fine - OK to chuck out from hospital as soon as my kidneys are working a little bit? Why do people think I'm physically and psychologically indestructible? Why would the massive overdose that I took be seen as unimportant, and that I'm perfectly able to pick myself up and carry on with life?

I feel like I get a double-whammy. I feel that people take advantage of my good nature: my trusting and happy-go-lucky approach to life, where I try to be generous and loving. I take the risks - I make the first moves - and I put myself out there in the hope of getting something back. If I get nothing back, that's fine - let's just leave it there and move on. Why did I have to get dragged all the way out of the city centre and far from my home, simply to receive cruel and unpleasant treatment and be told to get out? My reaction was out of proportion though, so I also get the guilt. I'm guilty of smashing up that laptop. I'm guilty of seeing red, losing my temper, retaliating at the injustice of the situation, in a totally unjustifiable way. Now, I still carry that guilt and I always will - it stopped her hurling abuse at me, but that doesn't make it right. In fact, I can never make things right - I'm always going to feel terrible about her stunned silence, and the fact that it must have seemed like a crazy over-reaction to a bit of 'light-hearted' bullying and abuse in the place she'd dragged me out to, to do it - in the middle of fucking nowhere. If it sounds like I'm conflicted, I am. Where's the sympathy for the fact that I was taken advantage of, abused and left feeling totally abandoned in a strange city? Where's the consideration of the fact that it's obvious that I was on the edge: I very nearly succeeded in killing myself, as the very next thing that I did.

This whole traumatic episode has forced me to dredge up every 'bad' thing I've ever done, and reconsider whether I could have handled things better. What the fuck am I supposed to do? Turn down friends and girlfriends when they cross my path? Am I supposed to be negative and untrusting? Am I supposed to shut myself away, isolated behind closed doors and be anti-social, because I always end up just feeling like a mug... financially taken advantage of and cleaning up after my 'guests'. Should I not give people a chance? Should I be closed and negative, assuming everybody's out to get me? Certainly, everybody's come and picked my fucking pocket, quite gleefully.

I'm no angel. This is certainly not a piece that argues things in black & white. If you want to talk about black & white, then you have it in black & white: I smashed up her laptop with a rolling pin in a sudden fit of rage. My regret and remorse is meaningless - I did it, so that's that. I'm guilty of being an "angry man" right?

I wonder what percentage of my life I've been angry for. Certainly, most people who've known me for any length of time would not think "angry" as one of the first words that sprang to mind. Perhaps I just hide it very well. It's not really for me to judge anyway, what my personality is in the context of this tale and the wider issue of whether I'm some kind of crazed nutter, intent on smashing up the entire world.

I guess you could consider the nature of a dog, as an analogy. How much can you abuse the dog, before it bites you? Are the best dogs the ones that just whimper and maybe even shit themselves? Does a dog - even though it has sharp teeth and powerful jaws - only qualify as a good dog if it never turns on somebody who's abusing it? If you can answer that question, you might have gone some way to answering the question that fills me with doubt at the moment: am I a bad person; am I evil?

Frankly, I think we're all capable of saying and doing regrettable things, in the heat of the moment. The question is, how do you feel about what you did? Do you do horrible things on a regular basis? What's your predominant personality - are you a victim, victimiser or something in-between?

I don't want to fall into the trap of feeling too sorry for myself; feeling too victimised. I've said and done things I wish I hadn't. Also, why can't I stick up for myself? Why can't I avoid the people who think it's OK to pick my pocket? Why can't I tell those who would take advantage of me, to fuck off, before they bleed me dry?

I've seized upon this word "vulnerable" which neatly sums up me and my situation. I trust when I shouldn't; give when I shouldn't; take a chance when I shouldn't and generally end up fucked. Surely nobody would argue with the facts: I'm the one who ended up isolated and alone, dying of an overdose, losing all my property, losing a lucrative consultancy contract and an employment offer. I'm an example of the person that lawmakers had in mind, when they created laws that protect me from mental health discrimination and prejudice based on confidential matters.

There's a line in a song I've probably never heard, but I know the lyrics because my guardian angel told them to me. The song talks about how bullying a kid every day created a monster.

Am I a monster? I certainly seem to fight with monsters. Perhaps I would be wise to remember the words of Nietzsche, and be careful that I do not turn into a monster myself, if I continue to fight monsters.

It's not my instinct to fight. It's my instinct to be nonviolent. I only fight^* when I've got nothing left.

Tags: #bullying #relationships #suicide

* - I don't mean fight her. She's got the money to replace her laptop now, I hope, and I really hope we can move on with our lives as best as we can, although I do appreciate that it was traumatic and seemingly an over-reaction from me. I feel very bad about what I did.

This is a story about therapy...

Everybody's an expert on my mental health, it seems. I need to be exercising more, eating a balanced diet, abstaining from alcohol and mind-altering substances BUT not the ones the doctors want to give to me. But which doctors? Every doctor has a different idea of how I should be treated - which doctor should I listen to? Perhaps somebody else knows, because people have some very strong opinions on what I should be doing, considering that only a handful of individuals with whom I am still in contact, have known me for any length of time and have followed along. Only I know what I've tried before and what I haven't - what works and what doesn't.

Here, there's a student nurse whose dissertation investigated the benefits of exercise, in terms of potentiating - that is to say improving - the efficacy of medications. Not considered for a single second, was the control study which would have investigated the efficacy of exercise alone. This student nurse, who I find passionate and intelligent, was eager to suggest that I tried sodium valproate or lithium - both life-shortening medications prescribed to people who have regular episodes of mania where they believe they're Jesus reincarnated etc. Everybody thinks they've got a cure to a problem I might not even have - it was under a very dark cloud that I entered hospital, one must remember.

Externally, the perception of a psychiatric ward is that it must be a place of therapeutic activities and meetings with doctors to fine-tune my medications and cure me of my madness, making me safe to release back into the community again. Internally, my fellow patients perceive staff members as persecutors, jailers and masters of everything from food & drink, to bedtimes and bathtimes - a cross between a policeman, a teacher and a parent. Certainly, to have a blackboard on the wall is an incredibly dated nod to the classroom days of our youth. Note that the list of activities for the ward is completely blank, which I find quite accurate... not that I'm complaining.

The UK's stringent fire regulations for institutional buildings - hospitals, schools etc - mean that they look very similar. A company that manufactures and supplies the fixtures and fittings for a school will probably also supply those same items to a hospital. Everything needs to be built to last in this incredibly abrasive environment, where the footfall in the corridor would destroy even the most hard-wearing of floors, laid by a contractor who normally worked in regular houses. The finish is not just high standard, but the selection of the materials used has been honed over the years to create an interior that is easily mopped and wiped down, and very hard to damage.

As a patient, I find myself recalling my schooldays, as a dinner lady ladles goo onto plastic plates and I sip juice from containers that are identical to those that I had in my boyhood. Just like school, nothing much really happens except for crowd control. There is a little sifting and sorting, so the naughtiest boys end up in the shittest parts of the hospital, and the golden child will find themselves in the top class. However, it must be remembered that staffing a hospital is a job to quite a lot of people, and over the many years that they will work their job, any ill-founded notions of making a difference, will be thrashed out of them by the system. Nothing changes very much or very fast in massive organisations - you can't fight the system, or else you will drive yourself insane... that goes for both patients and staff.

It's very hard to not be driven mad by being hospitalised. It's a chicken and egg situation. For sure, nobody gets hospitalised without putting some effort into it. It's very hard to get a psych bed in the UK, unless somebody's gonna pay £5k/week for you to go into a private place. Of course, the patients here are here for a reason, but I have also experienced the terrifying moment where I realised that my liberty has been restricted. I just heard the jangling of a massive bunch of keys, carried by one of the staff members, as she passed my bedroom door. If I was to draw back my curtains, I would see bars on my window, to stop anybody climbing in or out. There are constant reminders that I'm here under lock & key, and to escape would require a little more social engineering (or climbing) than another secure ward that I was on in 2015, where I could have just walked out behind somebody who was leaving the ward, and then run away. To run away now, I would need to request an escort off hospital premises, and then I would simply get an Uber or perhaps I might have arranged a local cab company to have my getaway car waiting. I came into hospital with £1,150 in crisp £50 notes, so I have the financial means to grease whatever palms I need to.

Why would I want to escape though? Yes, you're right - to discharge myself prematurely would be a mistake. This isn't a very therapeutic environment, because staff spend so long spying - quite literally - on patients, which is absolutely dreadful for mental health: creating an us & them culture and exacerbating even the slightest hint of paranoia. If you value your dignity, privacy and liberty, psych hospital is not for you. There aren't any therapeutic activities. However, it is a safe place where my rent and bills are paid, I get 3 free hot meals a day, I get my own bedroom/office type thing which is quite generously proportioned and has an ensuite bathroom, and I don't need to cook, clean or otherwise worry about the responsibilities that burden nearly every other creature that was unfortunate enough to have been born.

Sounds nice, doesn't it? Perhaps you too would like a stay - mandated for up to 28 days on a section 2 - in the hotel "psych ward". Perhaps you imagine that it's a calm and restful place, where I get to sleep lots and read books. I think perhaps you're getting confused with that holiday you took to Tuscany last year. On a psych ward, you get woken up in the middle of the night by alarms going off, staff running in the corridors, yelling and screaming. On a psych ward, music blasts at top volume from patients' bedrooms, because headphones are not allowed lest we strangle ourselves with the cables. On a psych ward, one must evaluate the level that one's fellow patients are intoxicated by their cocktail of medications, and whether one has the energy to engage in their psychoses that are extremely repetitive - I've been here a week and I've learned a little of everybody's "thing"... their particular identity on the ward, which is characterised by an apparent madness, which is why we must remain here. I wonder what mine is? The staff tell me that I'm lazy - always just sitting with my laptop. Yes, that must be me right? Probably just watching mindless Netflix rubbish on it, right?

Ward rounds - when important decisions about "leave" are made - happen on Fridays and nothing else happens apart from waiting and hoping. Most patients here are hoping to get some leave. Some have not left the ward for nearly 6 months - considered too much at risk of running away, if they were allowed out of this super secure part of the hospital, accompanied by a staff member.

Gossip is rife, and everybody on the ward knows that I arrived with a wad of cash and was granted leave from the hospital almost immediately. I try to downplay these things, and now people have forgotten. When takeaways or shop orders are being placed, I feign not having any money, in the hope that I can alter my perception in the eyes of my fellow patients and the staff. I remember being called into the office, simply because some of the senior staff members wanted to have a look in my envelope, containing all those fifty pound notes. It's totally vulgar, and an accident of the illness that was stimulated into existence by the ridiculous sleep deprivation, stress and disruption to my medications and routine, over Tuesday / Wednesday / Thursday of last week, which followed my near-fatal suicide attempt... it should be expected that my behaviour would have gone a bit haywire, under the crushing pressures I faced.

Perhaps I will be "stepped down" to a less restrictive ward today. I had to pack my bags last night, because I thought I was being moved. I should have remembered that nothing happens very quickly in the National Health Service, but sometimes if you're quick, you can nip in before the system decides that actually you're getting ahead far too fast. I'm not really in a rush to go anywhere though - this ward is perfectly decent and I know the two spots where I can get 3G signal.

I'm here to recover, but I'm not here to feel completely isolated. Who do I know in the local area who can come visit me? Two months ago I'd never set foot in this city, and the company I've been working for has cut all contact and has been skulking around in a most unusual manner. I have nobody - it's a real ball-ache for any of my friends to travel, just for a 2 hour visiting slot. Even my fellow patients, who are locals, do not have visitors - the hospital environment is not exactly somewhere people would like to spend their free time.

Should I immerse myself in the daily rhythms and routines of the hospital? Should I hang around by the door to the kitchen, looking for food scraps to be tossed out? Should I hang around by the door to the yard, hoping to be let outside? I'm not a fucking dog. I find it immensely useful to maintain contact with those who are still in full possession of their marbles, while I'm in an environment where staff humour the patients - "is it Tuesday today?" one asks, and is told that yes it is, even though it isn't... is that useful, helpful, therapeutic?

I was very sick when I was brought in, without a doubt. Some incredibly stressful things still hang over me, like Damocles' sword. I have little power to influence the speed of my recovery, nor the speed with which those who have wronged me are forced to offer recompense. At least I'm in a safe place to pursue what is rightfully mine: to get money that is owed to me and recover my possessions. I'm in a safe place to make arrangements for housing and income, so that I don't fall flat on my face, as soon as I leave.

I'm glad I'm here, at the moment.

Tags: #mentalhealth #bipolar #suicide #depression #hospital

This is a story about ganging up on people...

I was born in late July. If I was born in late August, I would have been the littlest kid in my school year, but I was born a month earlier and I was probably the second littlest kid in the school year, for a long time. I gravitated towards kids from the year above, who adopted me as a kid in need of protection, or kids from the year below who were grateful to have an older friend. As school wore on, some kids put on early growth spurts, and I gravitated towards the tallest kids. I suppose I felt safer scampering around in the towering shadow of these giant figures. It wasn't until I left Oxford - where I had the bulk of my schooling - that I finally put on a late growth spurt and finally had the physical assets with which to defend myself.

Fundamentally, I'm a lover not a fighter. I'm a pacifist and non-violent at heart.

In my time in hospital, I've encountered two tiny little old men that I want to tell you about. I shan't breach their confidentiality, but they dovetail into my story and I think it's ethically OK to share.

The first little man was at a treatment centre for dual-diagnosis - mental health problems AND substance abuse combined. This little chap only had one tooth in his head, and his circulation was dreadfully affected by a needle fixation that meant he'd inject anything he could get his hands on. Not wishing to cast negative aspersions on a vulnerable person - my fellow patient - but I'm sure this chap was never the brightest, and a life of drug abuse had certainly done nothing to enhance his intellect. This might sound like the pot calling the kettle black, which it is, but fundamentally I'm not going around trying to pick fights with people who are taller than me, heavier than me and in much better physical condition, regarding fitness, strength etc.

I feel now is probably an appropriate moment to tell you about prison.

I've never been to prison, but I think it's like a scaled-up version of all the shittest bits of school. Basically, school seemed to me to be like a holding pen for a lot of kids who were destined for a life that was going to be in and out of prison - you could see it on their feral little faces.

In prison, there's far too much testosterone and far too few women, plus it's jam-packed with children who weren't loved enough when they were little or whatever it is that makes a violent bullying child. It's not something I've put a lot of thought into - yet - so I shan't wander further up a dead-end alleyway of speculation without a working hypothesis based on a reasonable set of facts.

What I can tell you about prison is that it takes violent men who are struggling to play by society's rules, and turns them into violent men who believe that violence is the only iron rule: you can almost pick out a man who's been in prison, by the way that he will escalate any situation into one of violent confrontation as quickly as he can, in order - presumably - to ward off a beating from bigger inmates. "COME ON THEN! LET'S FUCKING 'AV' IT!" scream men who presumably, have had their faces pommeled into pulp one too many times. Like a Chihuahua dog, yapping "don't tread on me!" these little men must've had to use some kind of psychological trick, to avoid becoming victimised.

The second little man is in a hospital in the North of England, on the psych ward with me today. This determined little fellow is in far better physical shape than the other guy I described, but he's still a very small person. My diminutive fellow patient has retained far more of his mind than the other guy, or perhaps it's that he started with a very impressive brain indeed - this guy managed to start a chain of adventure sports shops that is well known today, with at least one branch in every UK city. To this end, he waits until I'm about to turn the corner, at least 50 feet away, before he starts yelling aggressively at me. I note, that he does not yell that he himself is going to rain down any physical blows on my head, but instead shouts about how big his nephew or his cousin's friend is or something like that - I smirk to myself when I'm safely out of his sight... yes, that's the smart thing to do: to get somebody else to do your fighting for you.

So, do I think I'm a right smartarse? No. I'm just fighting for my life, even though you can't see what's going on under the surface, 99% of the time.

Tags: #bullying

This is a story about twisting my mellow...

Here I am, in bed, wearing my convict pyjamas. I just woke up. Not looking too bad for 127 year old man. Mad for it.

Actually, I was woken up before 8am by the kerfuffle outside my bedroom door. On the opposite side of the corridor is the dispensary hatch, where the medications are dished out to everybody. It's quite lively at certain times of the day on this psych ward, which has some of the very sickest people in the North of England, receiving treatment for their mental health problems.

Have you ever thought to yourself "I can't go on" or maybe even "I wish I was dead"? Have you ever thought that you're going to have a breakdown and you need to be in hospital? In actual fact, you're tougher than you think. Very few of us will have an acute mental health crisis that is severe enough to require inpatient hospital treatment.

Am I admitting that I had a "nervous breakdown"? Don't be so ridiculous. I left the city where I have spent most of my working life and relocated to this Northern city, where I have no friends or family; I took on a very stressful new job; I tried to build a new group of friends and get a girlfriend... when that all came crashing down around my ears, doesn't it seem understandable that it would have destabilised my already fragile little life? I'm just an animal - like you - and I respond to the stimuli of my environment: if I'm being stressed by external things, then of course I'm going to have a reaction. Action -> reaction. Is that so hard to understand?

Of course, it might look like madness to have taken on so much stress all at once, but I did need to shake things up. I never quite reached the point where I was safe and stable, so it was sadly necessary to do something drastic. You might liken what I did to Electro-Convulsive Therapy (ECT) which is also known as "shock treatment". In fact, I had multiple seizures on Saturday and Sunday, and maybe even Monday. To be honest, I'm struggling to remember much about the time that I was unconscious for some reason.

It's pretty terrifying that there's this big hole in my life, where I was having fits and was in a medically induced coma. The memories around those 12+ hours that I was under a general anaesthetic and having a machine breathe for me, are pretty hazy. When I came out of the coma, there was an intensive care team there to greet me, who explained what was going on and knew all the right things to say to put my mind at rest. The team - every member of the huge NHS organisation - at the hospital was amazing. From arriving in A&E resus, starting to have seizures and being taken to intensive care, being moved to a high dependency ward to look after my struggling organs - which were being destroyed by the massive overdose of tramadol I had ingested - to finally being moved to a general ward... the whole journey through a National Health Service hospital is incredible and I'm crying as I write this, because it's the most amazing example of the advancement of our civilisation, that I can possibly think of.

Of course, I feel a great deal of guilt for the huge burden that I have placed on the NHS, which is UK taxpayer funded. I wonder to myself how much I must have cost, versus how much I have paid in. We can't all take out as much as we pay in. Obviously, we can't all take out more than we pay in either, but to spell that out is a bit patronising, no? Those who work in the NHS certainly wouldn't want me to feel guilty, but I do. I also feel grateful. Grateful to be a British citizen and resident of the United Kingdom, where world-class medical care is free at the point of use. Grateful, but indebted... guilty.

Another analysis might reveal that perhaps a stitch in time might have saved nine. I first approached a doctor about my mental health in 2008, and I was fobbed off within seconds of opening my mouth. Our general practitioners have very little time to understand their patients' problems and offer a diagnosis and treatment. Most of us would be unhappy to walk away from the doctor without a prescription for some pills. It has always been my stance, that I would decline any treatment that I didn't understand; couldn't see good evidence for the efficacy of;  I needed to see proof that the long-term outcomes were positive.

I remember writing passionately online, as early as 1998, about the analogy of putting a sticking plaster over a gaping wound. I wondered aloud, whether the psychiatric medications that are dispensed for mental health problems, are merely masking the symptoms and not treating any underlying problem. To this end, I applied to university to study psychology, and was granted unconditional offers for some of the best degree courses available in the United Kingdom. I decided not to go to university. I could see that clinical psychology was desperately underfunded. It's a helluva lot cheaper to give somebody some patent-expired pills, than it is to let somebody talk to a therapist.

Now, nearly 20 years later, I've seen enough evidence; I've done a meta-study of the literature. It's quite clear that long-term outcomes for the mentally ill are not at all improved by the medications that are commonly prescribed. It's also quite clear that we are in the midst of an epidemic of mental health issues. I use that word epidemic in its most precise sense - we are literally seeing explosive growth in the number of people suffering from mental health issues, and a dreadful decline in the prognosis for those unfortunate enough to be affected.

It's my firmly held belief that mental wellbeing is a function of our environment. In a world of Donald Trump, global warming, the threat of nuclear armageddon and a Conservative government who are determined to pass legislation that will allow them to hunt poor people, on horseback, doesn't it seem quite natural that we should all feel rather threatened and afraid?

One of my early childhood memories is of chatting to a U.S. Air Force base worker called Wayne, who drunkenly boasted that America could destroy all life on Earth with bombs that exploded with enough heat to vaporise a human being. Please, when you tuck your children into bed tonight, don't share this charming tale with them. I can almost remember the very moment that an 'irrational' fear of death sprang into existence in my head. If I had been born 30 years later, I might have been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder - I became afraid of everything, from horses to fairground rides, to electric sockets. I don't really agree with the 'irrational' part of the fear though - it does seem rather rational to fear things that can kill you.

Doing extreme 'adrenalin' sports and training to be an electrician is actually very logical - one needs to face one's fears, if we are ever going to conquer our anxieties. Children who have allergies so bad that they face deadly anaphylactic shock if they come into contact with things like peanuts or dogs, have had their allergies cured by simply introducing their body to tiny trace amounts of the allergens that could kill them. If there's one amazing thing about the human body, it's the ability to adapt itself - the plasticity, if you like.

Now, I've taken the 'trick' of putting myself in hostile and extreme environments, to a ridiculous level. Most people would be psychologically disturbed by having their liberty removed and being detained on a psychiatric ward with some very unwell people. Most people would crumble to dust under the kind of pressure that I've been under. This sounds very boastful and big-headed, perhaps even grandiose and delusional. Well, yes, if the facts were not in my favour then I would agree with you.

Here I am, writing to you quite calmly and happily from a psych ward. Do you think you would be doing the same, trapped inside an insane asylum with people who are too dangerous to be allowed out into the community? There's the constant sound of shouting, screaming, slamming doors and alarms going off. Staff members - perhaps as many as two or three per patient at a minimum - run from crisis to crisis. One itinerant patient can have their entourage of mental health professionals, trailing in their wake all day and all night long, as they make their "obvs" (observations). Sometimes a patient must be cornered, captured, and dragged off to solitary confinement, where they are thrown into a soundproof padded booth. "STRAP ME DOWN LIKE THEY DO IN PRISON" screams one particularly unwell patient. Is this treatment or is this punishment?

My working hypothesis is that we used to be able to remove the 'bad apples' in order to have a functioning society for the rest of us, but that was never the truth - basically, we've been leading up to the mother of all crises, because the vast majority of people are stressed as fuck and eventually the masses were always going to stumble to their knees, under such immense pressures. Society is very sick, but it's only just coming to light, now that we can no longer sweep the most conspicuous problems under the carpet.

I'm the eccentric mad uncle, carted off to the insane asylum to keep me out of sight and out of mind. However, it doesn't work so well when I'm able to continue to be connected to the world, through the internet and social media. Perhaps one might argue that mental health problems are contagious, and are spread through words - written or spoken. There's certainly good evidence that a suicide will spark a whole bunch of copycats.

So, I'm struggling to wrap my head around the fact that I nearly died, but I'm finally in a safe place in which to recover, where I don't need to worry about paying rent, buying food or even cooking and cleaning. All of the chores of daily existence have been removed from my long list of responsibilities. I pretty much just need to make sure I remember to take my next breath, while I'm in hospital.

Jeepers creepers, it's been a long hard road to get "sectioned". What a relief!

Tags: #mentalhealth #suicide