This is a story about demon drink...

Drinking champagne, meant for a wedding. A toast to the bride, a fairytale ending. Those are some of my favourite song lyrics.

I'm not alcoholic because alcoholics go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and they can't stop drinking. Alcoholism, by its very definition, is the inability to curtail your consumption despite the damage to your health, wealth and relationships. I don't abuse alcohol and I can stop drinking for long periods whenever I want, so I'm not an alcoholic. Quod erat demonstrandum.

I can go lengthy periods without alcohol. Currently, I've not been drinking for the last 76 days, and I'm going to do 101 days, just because I can. Yes, you might have the odd 6 days off drinking, but I bet you've never done 8 days. I bet you've never done 28 days. I bet you've never done 90 days. The chances are, if you tried to quit, you'd find that your 'willpower' is very weak indeed.

Alcohol is brilliant for treating anxiety. It calms the nerves. It's like Diazepam (Valium) in a bottle from the supermarket, with a hangover. The two drugs - alcohol and Diazepam - have exactly the same effect on the Central Nervous System (CNS)... the brain. They both cause the release of a neurotransmitter called GABA, which calms the brain. Alcohol is a GABA agonist which means it causes GABA to be released in the brain.

If you flood your brain with GABA, you will be more relaxed and somewhat disinhibited. People incorrectly say that alcohol is a depressant but it's actually a CNS suppressant. That is to say, it suppresses a certain amount of brain activity. It makes you chilled out and stupid. It does not make you depressed, but if you are depressed, those feelings may come to the forefront of your mind, because you are disinhibited.

You can get happy drunks, angry drunks and sad drunks. All that is happening, is that the person's mask is slipping and you're seeing what they're really like behind their public persona. Alcohol is almost a truth serum. In vino veritas, means "in wine, truth". The Romans knew a lot about wine.

Why do I keep quoting latin at you? Well, it's because I'm challenging your shorthand notation for a person's life. I think I overheard somebody describe my reason for not drinking the other day as "because he's a recovering alcoholic"... that's outrageous! I have elected not to drink through choice. If I was an alcoholic, I would be alcohol dependent, and therefore unable to choose to stop drinking despite my desire to save my liver and bank balance from being decimated.

In actual fact, stopping drinking has cost me staggering sums of money. I was working on HSBC's number one project - Customer Due Diligence - which was an incredibly stressful project requiring very long hours of sustained high pressure. The only way to cope was with alcohol. When I quit drinking, I could no longer cope with the madness of that failing project.

I had decided to quit drinking for the Go Sober for October charity event, which would give me an excuse to resist the relentless peer pressure to get drunk with my colleagues. I lived and breathed the project I was working on, and I live and breathe banking, which means I lived and breathed drinking culture. It's very hard to be a sober banker, especially on the number one projects.

Alcohol carried me through JPMorgan's DTCC project (their number one project that year) and we delivered it on time and on budget with a green offshore team of Accenture developers. I was the Development Manager. Just about the only way to cope with the pressure and stress of that project was with copious amounts of alcohol... oh and some very cool bosses who just let me get on with my job.

I've had the good fortune of working with some very brilliant people. Most of whom have been massive drinkers. I've started to lose friends to liver damage though. Alcohol abuse catches up with you eventually.

Is it some health scare that caused me to stop drinking? Well, so far as I know my liver is OK. I had an ultrasound a couple of years ago, and my liver was torn from blunt trauma and damaged by hyperthermia, but it wasn't cirrhotic. Alcohol didn't cause the damage because I wasn't drinking at the time (or eating, but that's another story). My liver has been fully recovered for quite a while now. It's one of the few organs in the body that can repair itself, if you give it a chance.

So, what's the short answer? What's the shorthand? What's the soundbite? Well I'm afraid there is no shorthand. You can't label me as an alcoholic because I don't abuse alcohol. I don't even drink. Q.E.D.

Did alcohol abuse cause me to go homeless? Did alcohol abuse put me in hospital? Are those events connected to alcohol? No.

No, sorry to disappoint you. I wasn't drinking at any of the times when I have been hospitalised. I know you're hunting for something to point your finger at. I know that victim blaming is convenient. We like to label people. We like to pigeon hole people. Sadly, I don't really fit inside a neat little box. Nobody does, despite how much easier and less scary life appears to be when we imagine that we can pre-judge everybody.

Nothing good ever came from prejudice.

That's a photo of the last alcohol that I consumed, on the 25th of September 2015. A glass of port with some shrooms. Not magic mushrooms, containing the psychedelic chemical Psilocybin, because that's a Class "A" drug. Nope, those shrooms contain ice cream. Those glasses contain port wine.

Since then, I've had a fall-out with one of my oldest friends who's now not talking to me, I lost my job and I've been in hospital for a week. I also nearly threw myself off the Golden Gate Bridge, due to suicidal thoughts. All in all, not a great case for sobriety. My wealth and mental health have been severely impacted by my 101 day experiment, but I've started so I'll finish.

Conducting this in-vivo experiment has been extremely unethical. To risk your life and livelihood in order to discover the link between alcohol, anxiety and depression, is not something that any medical professional could sanction, condone. I've had to ignore the advice of healthcare professionals in order to uphold my commitment to discovering what happens when you quit drinking.

I'm not completely reckless. I know that for dangerous levels of alcohol dependency, quitting drinking abruptly can kill people. Having a seizure due to the sudden drop in the alcohol levels in your bloodstream can kill you. In a treatment centre for alcoholism, they would give you Librium and taper your dose down gently, to prevent you from having a fit.

Despite not having a physical alcohol dependency, it has still been exceedingly unpleasant to quit drinking. The elevated levels of anxiety that you experience, due to the conditioning of your body to expect alcohol as a coping mechanism for high stress levels, makes life fairly unmanageable. You have absolutely no idea how much of a crutch alcohol is in your life, because you've never quit boozin' for months on end. You just haven't done it. Period.

I really don't give a toss whether you want to carry on drinking or not. I won't judge you. I'm not preaching to the world about the few benefits of being a non-drinker. I'm not expecting people to go teetotal like me. In fact, I really don't think you can do it. It's too hard for most people. Most people are addicts. They say "I can quit anytime I want" because they can not drink for 6 days and not have tea/coffee/coke for 2 days. Those are not long enough periods of time to make any pronouncement about your addiction. Those short periods of time prove nothing, except that you can fool yourself into thinking you're not substance dependent.

It takes time for cravings and withdrawal to kick in. The headaches and cognitive impairment associated with stopping caffeine use takes at least 3 days to kick in. You will have terrible cravings after a week or so. You don't know this stuff, because you never go for long enough without a cup of tea or coffee, or a can of Coca-Cola.

The anxiety associated with alcohol withdrawal is something that creeps up more gradually. Your body is conditioned to know that there's always a bottle or a glass handy when you need it. Just knowing that alcohol is readily available actually makes you less anxious. Just knowing that stress relief is available on tap actually makes you less stressed. You will feel relief from your anxiety, flooding your body from the very first sip of an alcoholic drink. That's not possible. The alcohol can't enter your bloodstream that quickly. Your brain has simply learnt to release the GABA, in response to the smell of wine, beer & spirits. It's a conditioned response.

I'm sorry to report that you're no different than Pavlov's Dog. Yes, you respond to the ringing of the bell for last orders at the bar, by salivating for more alcohol, with just the same conditioned response as a dog slobbering for its meat chow, when the mealtime bell is sounded.

You might think you're high & mighty, because you can use your higher brain functions in order to pass judgement over other people. But under your pseudo-intellectual skin, you're the same animal as anybody else. You simply aren't well educated or well informed enough to be aware of your own ignorance, when you pass judgement over people.

So am I a functional alcoholic? Well that's a contradiction in terms. Killing yourself, damaging your health and wealth... surely that's dysfunctional behaviour, by its very definition? The fact that I can start and stop drinking at will, whenever I want, for however long I want... surely that undermines the whole concept of any kind of alcoholic, functional or otherwise?

I will probably start drinking again, after 101 days. For my next trick, I'm going to have a glass of red wine every day, and no more than that. I'm going to show that I can exercise self-control even with the disinhibition of the intoxication from a dose of ethanol. Yes, it's obvious that impaired judgement associated with ethanol intoxication is a reason why people drink more than they planned, but the rational brain never gets put to sleep entirely. We can still exercise a degree of self control.

None of this is very hard for me... because I'm no longer homeless. I have the threat of homelessness hanging over me, because I lost my job (because I stopped drinking). When you're homeless and you have no hope of a better life, drinking helps to anaesthetise you from the cold. The cold of the weather, and the cold shoulder that friends, family and society shows to you. You become untouchable. You are considered a tramp, a bum, a loser... you are shunned.

There is a vicious cycle associated with homelessness and alcohol abuse. People never consider chicken and egg. They never consider the reasons why somebody started to abuse alcohol, and whether those reasons are still present. Alcohol abuse is a symptom, not a cause of somebody's problems. People don't drink to excess unless they're very unhappy about something.

Alcohol abuse is a form of self medication. Alcohol is not inherently the problem. It's a symptom of a problem. Treat the root cause of the issue, and the alcoholism goes away. Plenty of people drink to excess, but they're not homeless and destitute. We applaud Hooray Henrys who throw wild parties and drink with gay abandon. Those glittering socialites are heros.

Drinking £700 of sparkling wine that was meant for my wedding should have been a warning sign, but I was too intoxicated to see what was really going on. Self medication numbed me to the fact that I was trapped in an abusive relationship, and had taken to the bottle to be able to cope with it, and a super stressful job. It was more than any human is capable of handling, without chemical assistance. My medication of choice was alcohol, for a long time.

Am I confessing that I was an alcoholic? Let's repeat this once more: alcoholics are people who are unable to stop drinking despite detrimental effects on their life, and the lives of those around them. I can stop drinking at will, whenever I want. I'm an expert on not drinking. I know far more about not drinking than you do.

Perhaps I should do 9 months of not drinking, or however long it is that good mothers don't drink for. But we already know that stress, anxiety and depression in pregnant women and new mums is a huge problem. So there's already a good data set to prove that quitting alcohol is hard on the minds of women, despite the elevated oxytocin levels associated with childrearing. That's pretty damning evidence about the long-term psychological/brain damage that alcohol abuse does.

It's very controversial to be writing this stuff, but there is heaps of data and anecdotal evidence around to support it. We just need to be good scientists, and observe what we see in the world around us. Conducting in-vivo experiments is dangerous and unethical, but it's yielding interesting findings.

Roll on 101 days!

You've structured your life around addictive substances like alcohol and caffeine more than you will ever possibly know unless you do a lengthy period of abstinence (September 2015)

Tags: #alcohol #addiction #notanonymous

This is a story about being down and out on the streets of Camden Town...

Performing your greatest hits over and over again drives you insane. However, the public and society expect you to keep repeating what you do best, again and again and again, like a dancing bear or a dog trained to do tricks.

Whoever pays the piper calls the tune, but I'm not a CD player. If you want to listen to the same song over and over again, just press the repeat button on your iPod. Making an artist compromise on their creativity, in order to simply be a human machine, a robot, can destroy them.

The anxiety associated with knowing you have to do something that you've done so much that it's a complete paint by numbers, starts to become an unbearable burden on your ability to be able to function. Pretty much the only way to remain functioning is to drink yourself into such oblivion that you just don't care anymore.

Alcohol is a GABA agonist. What that means is that it suppresses a certain amount of your brain activity. It's effectively making you chilled out and dumb. Yes, if you're chilled out and dumb, you don't mind doing the same stupid shit over and over and over again. If you're intelligent and creative it destroys your soul, your desire to continue living.

Is it arrogant to say "fuck this" and stop doing what your talent and experience qualifies you to do, because it's destroying you? Should I just shut the hell up and "get a job" as I've been told to do by some ignorant twats? Well, it would literally kill me.

There are 2 ways I could die right at the moment. I could kill myself or I could drink myself to death. These are both sane responses to an insane world. I'm not a robot. Sorry about that.

My whole job is to automate human tasks. My whole job is to get mechanical robots, machines, to perform repetitive tasks instead of having human slaves or human robots doing them. We have reached a point with the development of technology, computing, software, where we don't need to do stupid repetitive shit anymore. Even creating software doesn't have to mean re-inventing the wheel anymore.

So, if you ask me to do something that's just plain wrong, I won't do it anymore. If you ask me to write code that's just going to go into the dustbin, I won't do it. I've stopped writing bugs. I've stopped supporting failures and idiots who don't have a software background. If you don't know your arse from your elbow, I won't show you the respect that you don't deserve.

If you want to know how to build software that can process $1.16 quadrillion ($1,160,000,000,000,000) per year, you can pay me for my professional opinion and I'll show you how it's done. That's the most money that's ever been processed by a banking software system, so that means I know what I'm talking about. If you don't want to listen, we can part company and I'll wish you the very best of luck.

1% of 1 quadrillion is 10 trillion. 1% of 10 trillion is 100 billion. 1% of 100 billion is 1 billion. 1% of 1 billion is 10 million. Any questions?

Ignore what people tell you. Money really does grow on trees, for those who can be bothered to climb. Yes, geese that lay golden eggs really do exist. You just have to climb the beanstalk and risk the wrath of an angry giant.

Magic beans are not a waste of money. They can help you to climb the beanstalk. They won't help you climb back down again though. What goes up must come down, but you might take a tumble. More on this in a future post entitled: Self Medication (Part Two).

You've heard about doping in sport. Why would you think that the athletes of the corporate world would be any different from those who compete in the Olympic Games? The pressure to perform at the very top of your game is just the same, if not greater. The competition is fierce, and anything that gives you a competitive edge is needed unless you want to be trampled underfoot by the thundering herd.

Did you ever wonder why London drinks so much coffee? Did you ever wonder why people are prepared to pay the best part of £3 or £4 for some bitter black sludge? Well, it's because of a plant alkali called Caffeine. Yes, that's a performance enhancing drug. It helps you to concentrate, and allows you to work with more energy, stamina, than would ordinarily be permitted by your body & mind. It increases your output potential.

Limitless? No, not limitless. There is a cost involved, and that cost is insomnia and anxiety. But don't worry about that, because there's always alcohol to take the edge off the anxiety and put you into an alcohol-induced coma that is a substitute for sleep.

You are never more than a few tens of metres from an outlet for caffeine or alcohol in London. They even have bars at bus stops. Well, they don't really, but me and my friends made one. It was very popular. It was the ultimate London pop-up.

What can I get you, sir? Would you like uppers or would you like downers? Uppers in the morning, and throughout the day. Downers after work and throughout the whole weekend. Uppers again on Monday morning to get you going again. Heaps of downers on a Friday to try and calm down from the working week, to 'rest' and recuperate. Oh yes, London is a very high performance place.

So if it's not limitless, what happens when you reach the limits? What happens when you're working on the number one projects for the number one companies, dealing with the biggest amounts of money that have ever been processed in the history of humanity? What happens when you have completely saturated yourself with alcohol and caffeine?

Well, you need crutches. You need a wheelchair. You need something to keep you rolling. You become somewhat disabled, but you need to keep moving, so you get wheeled around or you have to hobble along. Why do you think your office chair has wheels on it? It's because you're probably so f**ked that you can barely stand.

Yes, globalisation and corporate culture will f**k you up. You're only playing by the rules. You're only trying to compete and stay up with the herd, but it's f**king everybody up. Setting everybody up to compete with one another is causing people to be trampled to death.

Adversarial culture is wrecking lives. Us vs. Them and the zero sum game is in the spirit of competition, not co-operation. For somebody to win, somebody else has to lose. The system is designed to have losers as well as winners, and because there can only be one winner, that means everybody else is a loser.

Ultimately, somebody is going to win. Yes, that's right. One person is going to have it all, and everybody else will be dead and buried. An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind, apart from the one-eyed man, who is king of the world. Everybody else just starves to death. Great system!

But we're all in this together, right? There's safety in numbers, surely? Well, you shouldn't put the Lions in charge of the herd of Zebra. That's pure madness. The conflict of interest between the Lions and the Zebra means that the Lions are not best placed to be in charge of the herd, even if they are at the top of the food chain.

Being an apex predator does not mean that you are best qualified to judge what the greater good is. It means that you're incentivised to be selfish. You don't want to tumble from your position at the top of the pyramid. Being one of the struggling masses is shit beyond belief.

Counter-culture does not mean sitting around smoking dope. That's just totally dumb. You might as well just hurl yourself into the Lion's mouth. Making yourself slow and stupid is just about the dumbest possible thing you could do. It's playing into the hands of the oppressive ruling class.

You think this is a bit paranoid and conspiracy-theory-esque? Well, do you feel lucky, punk? 2.7 billion people live on less than $2 a day. Would you and your family like to join them? Would you like to get to the back of the queue? Would you like to swap your decadent western life for the life of somebody in the developing world? No, I didn't think so. You'd much rather prop up the adversarial system where you're lucky enough to be near the top of tottering tree.

Yes, luck is the decisive factor here, not skill or hard work. You don't think people in Asia and Africa work hard? You don't think people in the developing world are smart and resourceful? You're wrong. You're arrogant. You're deluded.

So, why do I reject the system that I profit from? Why do I prefer to live on the street in a cardboard box? Well, it actually pains me to know that I'm part of a system that's causing so much human misery. It's actually physically and mentally damaging to me to help to perpetrate deeds that cause death and destruction. I can't bury my head in the sand like you can.

I know you'll say or do anything to defend your family. More fool you though for not keeping your cock in your trousers. There are plenty of orphans who need parents. Why the f**k didn't you adopt? Are you literally the most selfish c**t in the whole wide world? Yes, the evidence would suggest that you are. You prop up the adversarial system and you create more mouths to feed in the decadent west and do nothing to give a hand up to the already starving mouths in the developing world.

There's no pride in having made a screaming, shitting, vomiting midget. Your body is evolved to do that. You had sex because you enjoyed having sex. You had a baby because your body is programmed to make babies. You did what snakes and scorpions do. You did what sharks and wasps do. You did what spiders and mosquitos do.

If I could give you one bit of advice, it would be to have a lobotomy. Ignorance is bliss. Being stupid is brilliant. Having higher brain functions is a curse. Being conscious and able to absorb information from the world and process it using rational thoughts is a f**king nightmare.

If you're wondering why I liked living with homeless people, it's because our footprint was much smaller. We lived small. We only consumed what we needed, and nothing more. We weren't making more arrogant ignorant greedy clones of ourselves to fill the void in our meaningless lives. We were just surviving and self-medicating for the agony of the f**ked up world.

We were very cheap, in terms of our economic, social and environmental impact. When a white middle class rich person goes haywire, they normally hurt the world a great deal. That's why it's such a great shame that the west is run by such criminal psychopaths. They'll drop bombs and starve people in order to remain quaffing champagne in their palaces. I include relatively modest homes when I say 'palaces'. Yes take a look around at your home and remember that $2 a day to keep a person alive for a year is probably the price of one of your many flat screen TVs.

So am I a hypocrite? Well, calling me one from your palatial surroundings makes you a hypocrite. You can't hypocritically accuse somebody of hypocrisy. That's ridiculous. Have you been homeless? Have you lived on less than $2 a day? No, I didn't think so. Shut the hell up and go and buy your kids an iPad.

So, what's going to happen to me? Well, my current thinking is that I'm going to finish my story and then take the final exit. I can't really see any more point in existing beyond telling this story, this cautionary tale. I'm literally wasting oxygen.

I loved being homeless in Camden Town. At least it was an honest existence. At least it was true to my values (September 2014)

Tags: #homeless #suicide #frank #capitalism #drugs #depression #alcohol #london #career #banking

This is a story about piggy in the middle...

Caught between a rock and a hard place, the police have a very difficult job to do. I have nothing but admiration and respect for front line officers. I have found the police to be the nicest, kindest and most amazing people I have ever dealt with.

Maintaining the status quo by upholding the laws that you effectively voted for, when you elected your member of parliament, is very challenging. This is because you probably didn't get the MP that you voted for, because the majority of people either don't vote or don't get the person they voted for.

Yes, that's right. Here's the simple maths that proves it:

Turnout: 66%

Conservative vote share: 36.9%

Percentage of people who voted for current government: 24%

So, less than a quarter of the UK population want a Conservative government.

Some strange things start happening when so few of the population are politically represented. People can be criminalised by laws that are only in the interests of the minority rather than the majority.

It happened to me, and the police had to use their judgement to save my life, rather than the letter of the law. Yes, I nearly died in police custody, but that was just part of the story. The whole fiasco is far too complex to go into in a single blog post, and your presumption gland is already throbbing and swollen, so I'm just going to leave this hanging for now. You can start guessing. I bet you'll be wrong. Maybe suspend your prejudice, just for a minute?

Our front line police officers see first hand, on a daily basis, the result of the laws that are passed in Westminster. Things like Care in the Community for example, which was a Tory policy, which pushed vulnerable people, who are a potential danger to themselves and/or others, out into the cities, towns and suburbs.

Changes in the law are rarely made with enough safeguards in place for the impact. Care in the Community made everybody assume that their neighbour was an axe weilding maniac, discharged from an insane asylum, and made everybody put extra locks on their doors, not talk to strangers and ring the police to deal with issues that they used to resolve themselves between one another.

So, I'm that axe weilding manic [N.B. I don't own an axe, nor would I wield one]. I was clearly sick enough to be locked up in one of the few remaining Psychiatric Hospitals. So what the hell am I doing, being allowed to wander the streets wearing a nice suit and working for the biggest bank in Europe on the #1 project? I don't even take my medication. Perhaps I should be sectioned and forced to take it, in the interests of public safety?

But that can't be right, can it? Surely, there's a contradiction there? How can somebody who should be locked up in an institution be the guy that the CIO of the number one project in HSBC put in charge of the top priority item on the number one project, at the Town Hall meeting, in front of the entire department? How does that work?

Well, if you think it was lies, deception, fraud, that got me that position, you'll be very disappointed to know that isn't true at all. The programme director actually said to me that he was really happy with all my work, just before I left. He was also happy to phone me every weekend, until I said I couldn't handle that kind of pressure any more.

Yes, fundamentally, I'm only human. If you prick me, I bleed, and I bleed red. If you pile pressure on me and work me very hard, I eventually need some time off.

But everything is too highly leveraged. The cracks are showing, but nobody has allowed any contingency for stopping and fixing things, or even slowing down a little bit, in the interests of long-term sustainability. All our targets are so short term.

So an entrepreneur is somebody who throws themself off a cliff and builds an aeroplane on the way down. However, when managers try and imitate the entrepreneurial mindset, they will fail to be able to build the vehicle while travelling along without the wheels falling off and the thing crashing horribly. Never ask people to work harder than you're prepared to do yourself.

Our politicians are asking the police to protect them from an angry electorate. They are asking the police to uphold laws that hurt people, rather than protecting the most vulnerable members of society. They are asking the police to suspend their better judgement, and see people who are the wrong side of the law as 'evil' rather than 'good'.

Being human is not about good vs. evil. We are built for survival. If you starve a man and take away his means to earn money, deny him any way to get food in legitimate ways, why do you call him a "thief" when he steals an apple? [N.B. I'm not a thief... guess again, sucker].

We make the rules for the game of life. Why do we punish people who play by the rules, but there is literally no way for them to survive, beyond what would be categorised by Eton-educated idiots in Westminster, as 'criminal' behaviour? These public [private] school toffs have absolutely no idea what it's like to be a British citizen. They have probably never met an ordinary person in their insulated existence, so far removed from reality.

I actually quite liked Thatcher and Major. They came from humble backgrounds. They were actually ordinary decent people. Unfortunately, the party they led is full of the old-boys network who think they're masters of the Universe. Those disgustingly spoiled brats think that the world was made for them to scorch. They'd hunt peasants on horseback if they thought they could sneak the laws through parliament.

I'm disruptive but I'm not a criminal. The thing about disruption is that it's actually a good thing. Whenever the status quo is overturned, the ordinary people are normally the biggest benefactors. People are held beneath glass ceilings, they are oppressed for far too long. The trickle down effect is just a lie. The fat cats are not sharing their wealth.

White collar criminals are the very worst. Do you think Stuart Gulliver the CEO of HSBC keeps his wealth in the bank that he runs? Do you think he pays tax in the UK, where he works in the HSBC headquarters, at 8 Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London? Nope... he keeps his wealth in a Swiss bank account and pays his tax in Hong Kong. What a crook.

How can you defend such actions? How can these hypocrites be so influential in UK politics? It stinks.

Please sue me. I look forward to battling it out with you in court. A fair fight, in the full view of the public is all I ask.

That is all.

You don't normally get to see stuff like this. Privacy laws protect us, to make sure that prejudice doesn't destroy people who are innocent of any wrongdoing. Guilty by association... is that really guilty at all? Aren't we all connected by no more than 7 degrees of separation? (no date supplied... keep guessing, sucker)

Tags: #politics #notanonymous #civildisobedience #mentalhealth

This is a story about psychoactive substances...

Here's an example of the kind of run-of the-mill parties I used to throw for all my friends. I once spent £700 on sparkling wine during one particularly lavish garden party. I think I was a bit of a 'lush'.

Drinking culture is sometimes celebrated. Certainly throughout the City, we thought it pretty normal to be slightly sloshed at our desks after lunch quite often. After work was carnage. A copious amount of alcohol was consumed by all involved.

I worked for HSBC for a little over 4 years, and JPMorgan for a further 3 and a bit, before my body really needed a break. At my leaving do I was downing shots at 4am with an alcoholic who later needed a liver transplant. The consumption was unchecked and rampaged out of control.

So, I've not been drinking for 52 days and I don't go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, so I can't be an alcoholic, can I? The definition of somebody who is an addict or an alcoholic is somebody who can't stop taking a substance, despite the detrimental effects on their life. Seeing as I don't drink or take drugs, I can't be an alcoholic or an addict. Quod erat demonstrandum.

In fact, I'm not somebody you normally meet. I don't drink tea, coffee or other caffeinated beverages, such as Coca-Cola and Red Bull. I don't smoke. I don't drink. I don't take any medication. I don't take any legal or illegal drugs. That makes me a real oddity.

People like to say "I can quit anytime I want" and are particularly adept at avoiding their most obvious addiction... caffeine. I've written about it before, but it's worth reminding people... you're probably addicted to caffeine but in denial. You need to give it up for over 3 days to really experience withdrawal, because you have reached steady blood-plasma concentration which means that it will take that long before you start feeling the withdrawal and cravings.

So, basically, don't lecture me on addiction until you reach the level of clean living that I have achieved. I'm not lecturing you. I'm just giving you the facts and telling you why I won't listen to a hypocritical word you say until you prove your 'willpower' to me.

On the topic of mood stability: I self-medicated successfully for years using caffeine to fight depression & somnolence, especially during winter. I used alcohol to calm my anxiety and racing thoughts, and treat my insomnia. I had a high-powered job and successful career throughout, so it's hardly like anybody can argue that I was not extremely adept at self-medicating.

Except that one day, my body decided it had enough. I was struck with extreme fatigue and depression that was completely debilitating. If you say "oh just get out of bed and stop complaining" after somebody has worked as many hours as I have done, don't be surprised if you get punched in the face.

It's not a competition. Except that it is. There's an arms race in the City. Who can stay later than their boss to try and impress and get that big bonus. And then when everyone has stayed later than the boss, the game is to stay later than each other. How late can you send an email to the boss, basically saying "just leaving the office now [you should know that I won the prize of working hardest]".

Sadly, that's pretty much how the bonuses and promotions get decided... who's worked the longest hours and raised awareness of just how hard they've been working, louder than anybody else. If you want to get to the top of the pyramid scheme you have to clamber over the other clawing bodies in the pit with you.

Getting ahead in your career is also dependent on how well you handle your ale. Yes, there is a lot of machismo in drinking culture. Going home and not going out drinking can damage your career. You need to be seen to be seen. You have to wait until everybody is so drunk that nobody remembers you leaving, before you slope off home.

So, between strong coffee and lots of beer & wine, that pretty much fuelled the first 11 years of my career. It certainly worked, in terms of pay & promotions, but it cost me a lot in terms of health. Not obvious health, like having to have a liver transplant luckily, but more subtle than that. My body & brain are just not very good at managing without stimulants and depressants to manage my mood... I've been drinking heavily with workmates since the age of 17.

So, if you think I'm less of a person for struggling with my moods and you are looking for an obvious thing to point the finger at, you are going to be disappointed if you want to point at drink & drugs, because I'm abstinent from both.

You might also want to consider your own relationship with alcohol and caffeine before you brand any labels on anybody. You would be surprised to learn about your own 'addictive personality'.

There's actually no such thing as an addictive personality. We are all programmed to like food, sex, gambling. Our brains are all affected by plant alkalis and alcohol and other substances that will cross the blood-brain barrier. You're no different from me.

That is all.

Cheers! (July 2009)

Tags: #addiction #drugs #mentalhealth #career

This is a story about some bags I lost...

I think I might have accidentally left some bags unattended on the underground. When I was riding the tube around London, distributing free colourful cardboard stars, during rush hour on Bonfire Night, November 5th 2015, I think I may have been a little distracted by the fact that I had lost my job. I also haven't been taking my medication. Oops.

I've made this little map, to show where I went with my bags, while distributing free colourful cardboard stars. I have put a star on the map to indicate where I think I might have lost each of the bags. The tube stations were pretty busy at rush hour, so I'm sure lots of people went right by my unattended bags, but whether they picked them up and took them to lost property I don't know yet.

I'm so pleased that there wasn't any disruption caused by me leaving my bags unattended. I know that unattended bags are something that we need to be vigilant of, as Londoners, during a time when we are dropping bombs on Syrians and causing a major refugee crisis. I know that bags on mass transit are something we should be worried about when planes are being blown up in Egypt.

Luckily, in this instance, the bags were totally safe. Nothing to worry about.

Stay safe, London.

Tags: #notanonymous #terrorism

This is a story about doing the right thing for the wrong reasons...

I had 3 options: hospital, suicide, support network. Thankfully, I still have the latter.

I really didn't fancy another inpatient hospital admission. I probably would have had to accept stronger psychiatric medication, as it's pretty clear that my life hangs by a thread. One rash, hot-headed decision and it could be snuffed out in the blink of an eye. Think that sounds melodramatic? Screw you.

If you think that people say that they're depressed and suicidal because they're attention seeking, you're wrong. If you want to understand suicide a little more, you should watch The Bridge, by Eric Steel. It will cost you £2.49 and 90 minutes of your life.

I watched The Bridge as an inpatient. My suicidal plans to take Potassium Cyanide, changed. I decided that jumping off the Golden Gate bridge would have much deeper personal meaning, seeing as I had to cancel a San Francisco trip because of my horrible divorce. If you're going to die, do it quick & clean, or do it in some meaningful way, right?

Does it seem irresponsible? Well, actually I took out life insurance that covers suicide, that will leave a small legacy for my sister and my niece. I'm sure they'd rather have their brother/uncle, but suicide isn't really a choice but instead it's a reaction to unmanageable factors out of the control of that suffering individual.

So, instead of going back to hospital and being put in a chemical straightjacket, I made a video explaining what I was going to do and why. Then I booked a flight to San Francisco, packed a bag and headed to the airport. I was a man on a mission, but also a man on fire.

My friends have been scattered fairly far & wide. My friend John came back from Australia relatively recently, but we have been out of contact for years & years, and I struggled to support him - paying his rent and wages - when my need was very much vice-versa. We fell out when I grew impatient with his adoration of TV rather than job-hunting.

My friend Dave lives near Bristol. I would love to spend more time with him, but it's away from my work in London. That was one of the problems that was a coffin nail in our startup: Hubflow. I'm super grateful that Dave is such a great guy that he forgave me for becoming a complete sociopathic a**ehole as the pressure and stress of it all became too much, when I was CEO, and that we still seem to have a good friendship.

My friend Tim lives in Bournemouth. I really want to avoid that place. Bad memories linked to my divorce and startup failure. London is home. I like London.

My parents and a few old friends live in Oxford. I was dragged there against my will, and then my ex cheated on me, while I was temporarily evicted from my home. Bad memories. It's not my life... I live in London, not Oxford.

My sister and my friend MG live in Nottingham. I'd like to give it a go, but I haven't let London run its course yet. I will probably try and have a little pied-à-terre up there soon, so I have a base nearby my sister at a way lower cost than London. It's good to have an escape plan in case sh1t goes bad. Don't have one at the moment... hence suicidal thoughts.

I really want to get up to the North-East of England to see my friends Andy and Jim. It's a strange land for me though... I've been to the USA more times than I have been in the North of England, in my adult life.

So, when I booked my flights to California, USA, I knew that I was at least going somewhere with relative familiarity, even if that familiarity comes only from the movies I have watched and technology companies (Apple, Google, Oracle, Facebook etc. etc.) that I worship.

Also, I knew that there might be a chance to see long-lost friends, Ben & Jakub, who are business founders in Silicon Valley. Now, I feel very very embarrassed about the way I have conducted myself while things have not been going very well. I feel most embarrassed of all in front of these role models of mine, who have handled the same pressure and stresses. They have done it without vindictively and publicly blaming their shortcomings on their ex and/or parents.

Embarrassment drove me into my shell, made me withdraw. I didn't want the London Kitesurfers and my Cambridge peers from the Springboard Program to see me - an enthusiastic, happy-go-lucky, extroverted, capable and entertaining guy - so subdued by unhappiness in a destructive relationship. 

I stopped talking to my friends.

That was nearly fatal. Social media is the reason why I have maintained a toe-hold in life. Friends have reached out to me, when I'm clearly fumbling around without a bloody clue as to what the heck is happening to me, except that I'm loosing my grip on my will to live. That's made the difference. That's why I didn't chuck myself off the Golden Gate Bridge.

Thanks.

Jakub lent me the Apiry.io bike so I could cycle to Marin County, across the Golden Gate Bridge. Another thing ticked off the bucket list (Friday 30th October, 24 hours after making the video)

Tags: #suicide #depression #bipolar #startup #entrepreneur #parents #childhood #oxford #london #media #mentalhealth #friends

This is a story about the rise and rise of mental illness...

I used to be a Sea Scout. The motto of the Scouts is "Be Prepared".

When I suspected that I was becoming mentally unwell, I read every book, website, academic paper and journal that I could find that I felt related to my mental health and its potential treatment. I educated myself.

I'm an educated patient. Because I'm an educated patient, I avoided being medicated with a Selective Serotonin Re-uptake Inhibitor (SSRI) which would have caused greater mood instability than I was already suffering with.

SSRIs are also linked to emotional blunting and the destruction of the sex lives and relationships of many couples. My relationship was already on the rocks, hence going to the doctor to see if there were some magic beans or a silver bullet, that could cure my ills.

Fundamentally, I believe that some mental health issues are risk not destiny. There don't seem to be any genes that are clearly faulty in individuals who suffer from Unipolar Depression and Bipolar Disorder. They are complex spectrum disorders. Some people are really dysfunctional when they are unwell, and others find ways of coping, sometimes to the point that people around them don't even know they are suffering.

However, out of desperation, I have tried the following medications, prescribed to me:

-----

Mirtazepine

This was well tolerated (no nasty side effects that made me want to stop taking it). It certainly seemed to reduce my stress levels and get some sleep. I think I might have rebounded though and started to go hypomanic fairly quickly.

Quetiapine

Unless you like weight gain, constipation, dry mouth and feeling like a drugged zombie for the few hours that you are awake, before your next dose knocks you out and you start the whole miserable 24 hour cycle all over again... I can't say this medication gives much quality of life beyond dribbling at daytime TV.

Aripiprazole

This is useful to see if your head is held straight. If your head is leaning to the left, then you will dribble out of the left side of your mouth. If your head is leaning to the right, then you will dribble out of the right side of your mouth. If you are holding your head perfectly straight, then you will dribble out of both sides of your mouth.

Lithium

This is hardcore. You need to have regular blood tests. It will shorten your life. Avoid if you can tolerate other meds or manage without.

Sodium Valproate & Depakote

Do you plan on working again? In an office? 9 to 5? Not really compatible with going back to work full time. If you're not completely manic (psychotic) then best avoided.

Lamotrogine

Just takes so damn long to get up to a therapeutic dose, you go through another hypomanic episode, decide that you're fine, and then stop taking your medication anyway. It's pretty subtle. Apparently it improves REM sleep. I dream a lot anyway. My sleep quality is more a function of good sleep hygiene.

Olanzapine

Fast acting. Good to calm you down if you're having an unmanageable moment. Makes you sleepy though... couldn't really work 9 to 5 on it.

Bupropion

Fast acting. Incredible antidepressant. It did give me a panic attack once though. Also stokes my hypomania pretty bad. Although it's a nicotinergic agonist, it actually shares many characteristics of stimulants like caffeine and amphetamine. Makes you pretty horny. Helps you quit smoking too (I don't smoke though).

Diazepam

Mother's little helpers (Valium). This powerful long-acting GABA agonist is an amazing anxiolytic. You could literally stand in the middle of a highway and not give a sh1t about the cars whizzing past you at 70mph. Super addictive. Horrible to taper off.

-----

Fundamentally, do any of these medications work? Well, I can vouch for Bupropion, Olanzapine, Mirtazepine and Diazepam for their short term efficacy. However, the body soon gets used to the effects and builds tolerance, which means you forever need to increase the dose to get the same therapeutic effect... welcome to homestasis, b1tches!

In my anecdotal experience, it's better to tough out the storm and not mess with the ridiculously complex organ that is a brain. When the psychopharmacologists imagined how Prozac (Fluoxetine) was having its antidepressant effect they expected to see higher serotonin levels in spinal fluids. They told the world that depressed people had "low serotonin". They just guessed and they guessed wrong.

Type I Bi-Polar Disorder was also known as Manic Depression. This is a serious illness that requires serious treatment. It's not my place to comment on whether medication plays a part in that. I'm no expert on Type I BPD.

Type II Bipolar means that you have hypomanic episodes, not fully blown mania. That means risk taking, spending money, hypersexuality, racing thoughts and pressured speech... amongst other symptoms, such as reduced need for sleep & food, and intolerance of slow-witted fools.

I'm Type II. I think it's a very important distinction. If I can control my mood disorder with good diet, good routine, good sleep and abstinence from alcohol & drugs (including prescribed drugs) then my brain has the best possible chance of finding homeostasis.

If I can remove unnecessary stress in my life, caused by complete ass-hats, and I'm empowered to just get the f**k on with my life, then my symptoms will abate. It's as simple as that.

This was the first time that Frankie had ever seen snow. His brain adapted to the change in environment (December 2010)

Tags: #bipolar #mentalhealth #depression #suicide #sex #drugs #frankie

This is a story about burnout...

Here I am, back in Cambridge, after 4 years of ups & downs. What happened?

Well, I got hit by a perfect storm. I could see the storm coming - I'm a sailor after all - but I couldn't sail fast enough to get out of the way. Part of the reason for the sudden breakdown was uncontrolled self-medication with the GABA agonist, ethanol, which had suppressed my natural anxiety response until things were literally unbearable. The other reason is a lack of support from my parents. In fact, they actually undermined me and lied about supporting me.

Life is stressful. My sister is a single mum on a low income, working 6 days a week, going through a horrible divorce. That's stressful. I was a startup founder, in conflict with my co-founder and my girlfriend, who were both pulling me in different directions and away from my investors in Cambridge and my customers and talent pool in London. That's stressful too.

Our parents are always looking for the easy way out. They are not good at taking any responsibility, but I don't blame them. Whatever it is that causes them to be so slippery at accepting that they have 2 children who need their support, I want to find out and help them. My sister is a supermum to her daugher, my niece.

Even though our parents don't realise or appreciate it, we have been working so damn hard all our careers to make sure we don't place any financial burden on them. My sister and I have suffered in our adult lives as a result.

Something had to give.

You should give your children enough to do something but not enough to do nothing. It's as simple as that. If you don't give enough to allow your kids to do something then you're not a good parent. Simples.

My sister gives my niece a brilliant life.

So, I want to help my parents with their alcoholism. I want to help them see that projecting their inadequacies onto their kids is over-pressuring them. I want them to see that their kids are nice people who care about family and want to look after their parents in the manner to which they have become accustomed, but we are living in an age when the government has bankrupted the country.

Life is hard as a young person.

Baby boomers had it unbelievably easy versus the prospects that a young person faces today. The chance of a young person being debt free, owning their car, buying a house... these are pie in the sky dreams that will never come to fruition unless your parents are able to comprehend that their dreams of being idle pensioners are of lower priority than miserable deprived grandchildren and stressed anxious children, who have become parents themselves.

We have known about contraception and family planning for long enough, that there is no excuse for not thinking about the wellbeing of any children you might spawn. Having a baby does not make you clever. It means that your body did something that it was evolved to do... just the same as a slug, a pig, a fish, a bird. Reproduction just means that you failed to use your higher brain function, and acted instead, no differently than a fly laying eggs in putrid meat. Well done.

There are a great number of barely educated and underprivileged kids who are bored on housing estates and have no hope of escaping these sink holes. They are incentivised to perpetuate generations of welfare dependent and economically inactive families. These people have been robbed of the things that would enable them to work their way out of poverty and deprivation.

My parents both went to University, so they have no excuse.

I delayed starting a family until I had done more research into the genetic factors in Type II Bipolar Disorder, and had verified whether I could consistently manage my own illness in a stressful environment. Only when I know that I'm not going to pass on bad genes and I'm not going to have another stress-related burnout, will I consider stopping using contraception.

Condoms are a good thing.

My parents enjoy looking after my cat, Frankie, until I'm ready to be a good human to him again (August 2012)

Tags: #university #career #divorce #parents #depression #suicide #alcohol #addiction #bipolar #youth #sex #politics

This is a story about observation...

Frankie is a people cat. He needs company. When we went away to France for a couple of days, he was lonely and wouldn't leave our neighbour alone. He invited himself into her lounge and wouldn't leave. When we got home, he yawned, stretched and padded over to greet us. He let us all know how much he missed his humans.

It would be rather sinister to say that I had been observing my fellow patients in hospital, but it was kind unavoidable. I don't really watch TV and I find humans much more interesting than most other things. I also bonded with my companions, and the staff.

It was a locked ward, but I was there voluntairily so I guess I could have asked to be discharged whenever I wanted. But I went there to be safe, so it seemed crazy to ask to leave when it took me 13 hours to be admitted, and I was in a place of safety.

It's a bit of a strange compromise though: safety under lock & key. I wasn't sectioned but, scarily, the consultant did consider it, which was a little ridiculous considering I had been safe for 6 days by that point. A section can be 72 hours, 28 days or even 6 months... terrifying, considering all I did was go to my GP one afternoon.

Anyway, hospital was brilliantly therepeutic. I managed to tackle a bunch of stressors in my life, with the help & support of the NHS team. My treatment was very holistic: drawing, sculpture, drama, cooking, socialising, plus non-judgemental chatting to mental health professionals, of course.

Medication plays a role too, but it's very unclear whether it helps or it hinders, in the long term. Sure, if I was having a psychotic episode - seeing and hearing things - and was a real danger to myself or others, pharmacological intervention might be unavoidable, but is it really necessary to medicate a functional, articulate, self-aware and coping individual?

When I presented to my GP, we had the briefest of chats imagineable. My GP only really needed to know one thing: I couldn't guarantee my own safety. I had tried to keep myself safe, but plans to kill myself had formed in my head. It was only a matter of time before I acted on them. Free will is an illusion. We are controlled by circumstances. Try choosing not to be in pain next time you stub your toe.

Wanting to be in hospital is a big deal. Psychiatric wards are not for the faint hearted. You will have somebody checking on you a couple of times an hour - especially at night - and people yell out randomly all night. People sing to themselves. People wash obsessively (or is it compulsively?). People shuffle. People mutter incomprehensibly. People steal your stuff. People ask you strange questions. People are aggressive. People are inappropriate. There is a lot of anger, crying, frustration, fear, boredom, confusion, despair... but there is also hope and optimism. Strangely, I find the environment to be calming. It's supposed to be. It worked for me.

Obviously, you can't have shoelaces, belts, razors, scissors, cables (e.g. for charging a mobile phone), curtains (including shower curtains), locks on doors, furniture that's too tall, windows that open more than the smallest possible crack, windows or mirrors that could be shattered... there's a fairly comprehensive list of safety considerations.

Here's a little picture of the space where you can get some fresh air:

Nice, isn't it?

Well, yes it kinda is. The fact that the NHS has gone to all the expense of designing something that is - presumably - to discourage people from climbing the walls and jumping off. I guess that most people aren't such a good climber as me though, so it works for the majority of suicidal patients.

People also have unmet needs that are fairly obvious when you observe them for a little while. As a lifelong non-smoker, it was obvious to me just how important nicotine was in the lives of almost all the patients. The hospital has been smoke free for nearly 3 weeks, which is a huge burden on staff, who must accompany patients off the hospital premises every time they need a cigarette. Yes, that's right, need... these people are psychologically drug dependent. Nicotine is an extremely addictive drug.

Luckily I had already eliminated alcohol from my life too, 3 weeks prior to hospital admission. I actually have a working theory that that it's the reason why I became so deeply depressed. It happened to me in 2008 as well, when I quit drinking. It's so hard to avoid alcohol though - it's so socially engrained - that conducting an in-vivo study has been very hard, but I've gathered quite a bit of excellent quality data now (I've agressively managed to control other variables).

Frankly, I'm a bit of an oddity. I'm completely unmedicated, abstinent from caffeine and all drugs and alcohol. I have been for a long time. I'm about as clean living as they come. A perfect test subject for an unethical experiement into whether mental health issues come about due to environment, genetics, diet, social factors, stressors etc. etc.

Why unethical? Well... quite simply, if my mood sinks too low, I will take my own life. It's really not a choice. I don't want to die - at the moment - but when those dark times come, I feel quite differently. You feel differently too, and that's why you're thinking "why?" or some version of incomprehesion. You don't know how it feels until you've been there, and I really do discourage a trip to the edge of the abyss.

It's ironic. I have no fear of death, but yet I am able to rationalise that it would be foolish to make an irreversible decision. I ride my bike through handlebar-width gaps between double-decker busses, I climb the tallest trees, jump out of aeroplanes, have my photo taken on perilous ledges with no ropes attached to me, and drive at the limit of control.

One of the staff in hospital suggested to me the other day that I could keep 1% in reserve, just in case of emergency. It actually didn't sound too crazy.

Please support the Junior Doctors if they strike, and any other NHS workers. They deserve better pay & conditions (October 2015)

Tags: #suicide #depression #bipolar #NHS #mentalhealth #drugs #alcohol #caffeine #nicotine #frankie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Have you heard of Fluoxetine"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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