This is a story about the willing suspension of disbelief...

People think that beating drug and alcohol abuse is about abstinence, sobriety. It's not.

Are you familiar with experiments where rats were given bottles of water laced with drugs, as well as bottles of clean water and food? In cages that had a placebo, the rats obviously ate, drank, slept and lived until they died of old age. In the cages with heroin in the water, the rats would drink some heroin, fall asleep, wake up, eat, clean themselves, drink some more heroin, sleep some more... until they too died of old age. In the cages with cocaine in the water, the rats would drink and drink and drink from the cocaine laced water, until they died prematurely.

These were barren cages, with nothing to do but drink from a bottle, eat some plain food pellets, or sleep. No other rats to socialise with. Nothing to explore. Nothing to play with. No stimulation. Not really much of a life, even for a rat. What do you think you'd do, behind bars with nothing to do except drink from a bottle?

Did you know that they ran those experiments again, except this time they created Rat Park, which was packed with everything a rat could want from life. There were other rats to socialise with, and have sex with of course. There were tubes and slides and places to hide, and nice bedding and toys. The food was varied and tasty. Of course, there were still two water bottles, one of which was laced with drugs or a placebo.

Do you know what happened? The rats weren't interested in drugs. They were happy in their little ratty lives, and drugs had no place in those happy fulfilled rodenty days.

So what does that tell us about addiction? What do you think would happen if you took away somebody's self-esteem and pushed them out of society? What do you think would happen if you labelled somebody a junkie, a druggie an alkie, and demonised them? What do you think would happen if you mistreated your fellow human, your family member, your partner, your friend? Do you think that would cure them of their addiction?

Rehab is for quitters. Ha ha ha! No, not really. Rehab is a bit of a joke to be honest. The relapse rates are appalling. It's really not working. Do you know why it's not working? Because rehab is the place we send the black sheep of the family to beat themselves up, and to make us clean-living superior people feel better about ourselves.

What's the difference between an addict and a normal person? One puff on a cigarrette, one gulp of tea or coffee, or one sip of liquor.

Yes, it's true that addicts and alcoholics are on a death-spiral downwards that they can't stop on their own. The destruction of their life has begun, and they're going to ride that helter-skelter all the way to rock bottom, unless there is intervention.

Intervention means locking them away from their poison of choice, right? Wrong. Everything in that person's life that caused them to become addicted to drink or drugs is still there. Their environment, their social group, the pressures, the stresses, the broken life that they have... all those things are still there.

Finding the key that unlocks your addictive potential is not easy, luckily, but finding the key that unlocks you from the trap of addiction, that's easy: you just need a life that's better than living on the street in complete destitution, begging and stealing enough money for your next fix, while the whole of society thinks you're a piece of s**t and wouldn't p**s on you if you were on fire.

But that can't be right, can it? Lots of rich people get addicted and die young, and their lives are amazing. Well, let's examine that claim a little more carefully.

Having been down-and-out on the streets of Camden Town, London, it seems apt to talk about Amy Winehouse.

They tried to make me go to rehab but I said, 'No, no, no.'

Yes, I've been black but when I come back you'll know, know, know

I ain't got the time and if my daddy thinks I'm fine

He's tried to make me go to rehab but I won't go, go, go

Everybody wanted her to sing that song. Over and over and over again. Can you imagine that? Being a human jukebox, a human CD player, just performing the same song, over and over and over again.

Imagine being an amazingly talented creative artist, but nobody wants to hear any of your new material, they just want you to stand on stage and repeat the same old s**t, again and again and again.

Dancing bears get driven insane, and will dance and dance, even when they're not performing. How do you think the human psyche is affected by similarly being whipped and cajoled into performing the same act, repeated and repeated and repeated again.

But Amy Winehouse was rich. Tina Turner was rich. I've been relatively rich. How can these rich people complain or get messed up, when they're so rich? Rich people's lives must be amazing. Well, actually, the rich cry too. Rich people need the same emotional sustenance as anybody else. Rich people need to feel fulfilled too, and just being rich doesn't make you feel fulfilled.

It's less of a "how can they be sad" and more of a "how dare they be sad". People are incensed by the fact that they think they want the life of a wealthy person, but they haven't considered the sacrifices that that person has had to make in order to become wealthy. You haven't heard about how hard Michael Jackson and the Williams sisters fathers drove them, for them to attain success, for example? It's well documented.

This could very easily turn into a Monty Python sketch, where I implore you not to donate any money to help save the rich, so I had better re-ground things. The point is, we're all human. Wealth doesn't really touch the soul. Wealth is just a silly made up game that's external to all of us. Sure it seems to control much in our lives, but the really important thing is human connection, and money can't buy you love.

Sure, it's true that money is a major stress factor in most of our lives. I have got less than two months before I'm financially screwed, but it takes 60 days before I get paid on a contract and I don't currently have a contract anyway. Does not compute. Doesn't add up. I'm going to be out on the street whether I work or not.

Surely that's down to self-sabotage? Surely that's down to a lack of planning, of cashflow forecasting? Well, there's only so much you can do. I worked my arse off, got paid a lot of overtime, but it made me very unwell. It's a Catch 22. I can 'sing that popular song' over and over and over again in order to plump up the bank balance, but it makes me sick... literally.

Yes, mental illness is invisible and poorly understood, but you feel it just the same. You feel it in your dark thoughts, you feel it in the pit of your stomach, you feel it when you deliberately hurt yourself to try and let the pain out. Isn't suicide the ultimate in self sabotage?

My days currently consist of lying awake anxiously all night, then sleeping until I force myself to get up and have something to eat, then I try and distract myself from the anxiety until it's time to pretend to go to sleep, but just lie there anxiously all over again. Lovely life, huh?

I started to fantasise last night, not about taking drugs, but about doing a backflip off the 48th floor of a nearby building. I thought about the slow rotation of my body, head over feet, as I accelerated through the air towards the ground. I thought about the collision with the pavement below, and how it would bring instant relief. No more stress. No more anxiety. No more depression. No more isolation. No more demonisation. No more pain.

I then started to think about BASE jumping from up there, and you know what? I started to get stressed. I started to think about getting caught by security. I started to think about having line twists or colliding with a streetlamp or some hard object. I started to think about how much it would hurt, to survive. I got sweaty palms and my pulse started to race, my body became restless. The thought of staying alive, with all this stress and pain and anxiety is not a pleasant one.

That's how people get pushed into addiction. When their life becomes stress and anxiety and depression, and all of their human connection collapses. You're driven inwards by stress and anxiety when nobody is there to help you. When people who care about you start to label you, demonise you and refuse to assist you, you retreat into yourself, you have to be self-reliant and you no longer trust people around you.

I know that all I need to stay alive is the food from soup kitchens and the Hare Krishna, plus my good sleeping bag and my bivouac. Yes, there's a certain amount of pride that stops me from crawling over broken glass back to my parents. I'd rather be homeless and destitute than live with their abuse. Without any self-esteem or identity I might as well just slit my wrists now.

I knew things were going to get tight if I didn't find work right away in November, but I didn't care. I couldn't work. I was exhausted and depressed, and my mood was sinking lower and lower. With retrospect, there was no way that I was ready for another contract. I wouldn't have lasted more than a week.

Now I'm looking down the barrel of financial armageddon, but I can't care. There's literally nothing I can do about it. I'm swamped with stress, anxiety and the feeling that I might as well give up. Where do you think those feelings lead?

What do you think happens when you swamp somebody with anxiety, stress? What do you think happens when somebody has no opportunities? What do you think happens to cornered rats?

The motherf**king cycle continues.

There's my old bike at Silicon Roundabout. I could tap up Tech City for some work, but it's the last bridge left unburnt and I'm definitely not having my finest hour

Tags: #drugs #alcohol #addiction #suicide #depression #career #london

This is a story about dying while doing something you love...

Please forgive the gallows humour. I find death quite darkly comic, having lived in its shadow for far too long.

I found myself in possession of a year's supply of Supercrack once. It cost me less than $150 including shipping. A whole year of drug abuse, in one little baggie. Addiction never leaves your side. You can go anywhere you want, but you can't escape yourself.

Having a year's supply of your drug of choice should be an addict's wet dream, right? Well, it depends on the nature of your addiction. If you're still managing to eat and sleep, then perhaps you will make it to the end of the year. If you're not eating or sleeping, then you're simply committing suicide, slowly.

When I was trapped in an abusive relationship and kept away from London, I had given up on life. I was dying. I used to occasionally get scared of death, and clean up my act for a few weeks, but then I would always relapse, because of the same old abusive relationship and isolation from the city I call home.

I finally made it back to London, but there was pointless crap dragging me back into things that were far less important than saving my life.

That's a letter I received, in my mother's handwriting, hassling me about some divorce paperwork that could have waited until I had completed the treatment that I was undergoing to save my life. I had explicitly stated that I didn't want my wife or parents to be in any form of contact with me, while I was trying to get better. During this second attempt, I explicitly forbade my wife and parents from having any contact with me or the professionals who were paid to take care of me.

It was time to get better, get away from the s**ts who nearly hounded me to my grave. It was time to move on. It was time to recover.

Eventually, the vultures f**ked off and thankfully I had enough money left to pay the deposit on a flat and the first couple of months rent and bills, so I could get myself settled, get into a new job etc. etc.

I rented a room in a shared house near some friends in Kentish Town. My time up to this point had been wasted on pointless divorce crap that could have been deferred. I had been relentlessly harassed. Also, having my leg in plaster cast and being on crutches didn't help. My treatment was ruined by people not respecting my wishes. I was in a worse state than ever.

I hobbled into my new room and collapsed. I spent a week crying myself to sleep, I was so exhausted by the trauma of everything that had gone before. I had just about enough money left to make a go of things, but not quite. Everything had to go perfectly.

I had resolved not to commit suicide in my friends' house, where I was a guest, as it would have been a very unpleasant legacy to leave behind in somebody's home. They seemed committed to making that house their forever home, so there was no way I could do that to them.

After moving out and having a week where I felt that I didn't have the reserves of strength and money to continue, I decided to shut up shop. I decided to commit suicide.

The final straw was when my Dad tried to poison my friend's opinion of me, with his warped version of events. People were talking behind my back, and my confidentiality and consent to share information were completely breached. The place where I had spent the best part of £8k on treatment became some kind of counsellor and general centre for misinformation for my parents, despite explicit instructions that they weren't allowed contact.

I took a massive overdose and collapsed on the floor. The three metal prongs of a plug were sticking painfully into my thigh, but I couldn't move. The hot transformer for my laptop was burning my abdomen, scorching the skin, but I couldn't move. My arms were in the most uncomfortable position, but I couldn't move. The weight of my head rested uncomfortably on my chin, with my neck extended very awkwardly, but I couldn't move.

When you have taken an overdose, and you realise that it's overwhelming you, you start to panic. Can you make yourself throw up, if you've swallowed your poison? You know that it's too late... the chemicals are already entering your bloodstream and vomiting will make no difference. There was a moment's regret, and then resignation.

My body spasmed and twitched for quite a long time. There were a lot of auditory disturbances (I heard weird things). My mind kinda went blank for ages, or was caught up with weird confused thoughts. Then it dawned on me that I was alive but still on collision course with death. Day turned to night, and night turned to day, and so on. About 4 days went by with me paralysed like that... just breathing, and my body spasming.

I then started to think about death. I started to consider the possibility that I was going to discover if there was an afterlife or not. I started to think how embarrassed I would be to meet some deity who I never believed in. I didn't start believing in any god, but I considered how sheepish I would be if I met my maker.

Next, I started to think about the waste of it, the waste of life. Not that I was wasting my life, but that there was nothing positive that was going to come from my death. I started to consider how I could leave a message that would somehow prove useful to those who survived me. I started to consider how frustrating it would be to discover something in death, but have no way to pass on that discovery to the living world.

I started to imagine a weird experiment, where two suicidal people would risk their lives to discover if it's possible to communicate from beyond the grave. They would be in two isolated chambers, each with a keyboard. There would be a randomly timed event that would kill them, but they would get about a minute's warning before they were about to be killed. They would then type messages, and only in the event that the messages were co-incidentally the same, would the time be extended.

Eventually, one of the experimenters can type no more and rushes out of the experiment exit to safety. The other experimenter is killed. When the messages are later examined, we can see that the co-incidence of the messages being the same is immensely unlikely, but yet there were a sequence of messages that were identical, despite death being inevitable at that point.

Don't worry, I didn't decide to start a cult with a suicide pact. I did however decide that dying alone, leaving no note or anything was rather silly. I summoned the strength to claw myself off the floor and onto my bed, where I lay in agony for some time.

I urinated into a pint glass - I was virtually immobile - and saw that my urine was cloudy and the colour of orange juice with a lot of blood in it. My organs had started to shut down. My thigh was a painful mess from the plug that had dug into it, and my abdomen was burnt from the laptop transformer. My kidneys hurt and my tummy was tender and painful. My muscles were weak as hell. I had a lot of fluid on my lungs and my chest was tight. Breathing was difficult.

I decided to try and make death a bit quicker by severing my jugular vein, but my blood pressure was so low and it was actually really hard for me to even find a pulse. I kept blacking out with orthostatic hypotension.

Later, my ex-girlfriend discovered me in this dreadful state, and got me to the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, where the hard-working lovely people of the NHS saved my life.

Here's the view I woke up to, from my hospital bed. I was quite surprised to wake up (May 2014)

Tags: #addiction #suicide #divorce #depression #london #nhs #injury

This is a story about repetition ad nauseam...

I have been stuck in a trance, obsessed with the past wrongdoing of a couple of people. I need to draw a line under things and move forward. I know they will be relieved to hear that, and feel that they got away with things and they're off the hook. However, my writing has gotten very repetitive and boring, because I keep labouring the same points. Time to change.

I know it must come across that I'm very stubborn, determined, single-minded. I don't quit, I don't relent, I'm a dog with a bone that I won't let go of. This has taken me fairly far in life, because I've solved problems that other people couldn't. I've achieved things that other people wouldn't, because it just requires too much sacrifice and dedication.

Mucking about with computers is not healthy or normal, and it's certainly not a choice, it's more of an alternative when other routes are barred. Yes, I would love to be part of the gang, part of the crowd sometimes, but I'm clearly odd-one-out. Piggy-in-the middle is fun to tease. Excluding a minority gives you somebody to pick on, to point and laugh at, to make you feel better about yourself. "At least I'm not them, ha ha ha!"

I've retreated inwards as a response to stress and depression. It might seem mad to cut yourself off, but when your general life experience is of loss and people turning on you, then your survival instincts tell you to be self-reliant in dark times. A life lived on Facebook is no life at all, but the virtual world seems more friendly to me than the one where I have lost so many friends.

It takes two to tango, and I know that I've not been a very good friend. I know that I've let friendships go cold, not replied to messages for long periods, not picked up the phone. I can't remember the last time I made or received a phonecall. It must have been over a month ago.

Communication is a strange thing. I remember being able to text message at lightening speed on an old Nokia phone where you had to press the number keys multiple times to get the letter you want. Why didn't I just phone? It would have been quicker.

In a world that has been largely offensive and unpleasant to you, bullying, the protection of a screen is hard to deny. I can compose my thoughts. I can review what I'm about to say. I can edit before I send. I also like the fact that there is a written history of what has been transmitted and received. I find that a lot of people have very poor memory of what has been said, when later quizzed about things.

I find it very frustrating dealing with people who are not honest, straightforward, rational and have a good memory. I'm not sure whether it's drug and alcohol abuse, or simply genetic flaws, but there are definitely people who I find it very frustrating to deal with because of their selective recall of events, and irrational bias that they place on their interpretation of reality.

Everything in the world is fairly clear-cut to me. I try and avoid black & white thinking, but sometimes the blindingly obvious is clearly a polar thing. There is such a thing as right and wrong. All the interpretation and alternative opinion in the world doesn't make a difference when you apply a rational objective analysis of events over the top of things.

You normally get quite a few warnings from me before common sense eventually has to prevail, with me leading the charge. My friend Laurence was driving too fast down country lanes. There was a friend and me as passengers in my hire car. He was jeopardising three lives, plus whoever he was going to have a head on collision with, plus my hire car that he wasn't insured on. I warned him multiple times that I was unhappy, afraid, and that he needed to slow down.

I pulled the handbrake on as hard as I could when we reached a straight piece of road. This seemed very sudden and dangerous to Laurence, but it was quite a calculated act after a good 5+ minutes of me warning him to slow down, and the lanes were getting narrower and narrower, with more and more blind bends. Potentially there wasn't going to be another wide stretch of straight road, before we collided head-on with another vehicle. It was then or never.

Keeping a sliding car on a straight road is not hard. Momentum will carry the car on a straight line. Even if you spin, you're unlikely to do much more than bump off the hedge. More likely, the car will just continue on the original trajectory, because there is so much forward momentum. The back of the car started to slide out, but it really didn't make much of a difference whether Laurence corrected it or not.

Laurence was upset, but his interpretation of events was incorrect. He was speeding down narrow country lanes, round blind bends, uninsured in a car, with two other people he was responsible for, ignoring all reasonable pleas to slow down from the person who was legally in charge of the vehicle. Clear cut. Case closed. No other interpretation necessary.

When I act, it might look sudden and brutal, but a lot of thought has gone into things. My actions are far more premeditated than they look. When I take risks, they're calculated.

Sometimes I can override my own calculations. My friend JP was hanging off a broom handle tied to the roof rafters, suspended several feet above the ground, in order to practice some kiteboarding moves. I said that it looked very dangerous and I thought it was going to snap and drop him onto the hard ground. After he had been successfully doing it for some time, I decided that perhaps I was wrong and I would risk having a go. Of course, it snapped, and I landed on my shoulder, possibly breaking a bone. I now have a lump on my shoulder on that side. I literally have a chip on my shoulder.

However, I'm a balanced person, because I went snowboarding on an indoor slope, tried to do a flip and landed on my shoulder the other side, doing a very similar injury. I now have chips on both shoulders, balancing me out.

You will find me fair and reasonable.

Oh man I miss boardsports. I would love to be kiteboarding or snowboarding right now

Tags: #divorce #parents #friends #childhood #computing #socialmedia

This is a story about discovering yourself...

Nostalgia is a liar that tells us that there was a bygone era when things were better than they are today. It tells us that despite a lack of antibiotics, immunisation, modern surgical techniques, telephones, internet, jet aircraft and reliable fuel-economical automobiles, there is something that we're missing from the pre-war years.

The fact is, that most people didn't have enough to eat, struggled to stay warm & dry and lived in fear of preventable diseases, which killed a huge proportion of people. Manual labour and low standards of health & safety killed men early. Childbirth and a lack of family planning killed women early. Infant mortality rates were stupendously high. Life was short & shit.

There's no point in looking backwards to those times. There's no point in stuffing your house full of antiques and dressing your children like some Dickens pastiche. There's no point in preaching a values system that probably never existed. You might like to believe that there was a time when there was more respect, more order. Do you think that the whip, cane and the gallows were never used? Even with corporal and capital punishment as deterrents, people still stepped out of line.

You might bemoan unruly or even ferral children, and imagine that there was a time when kids "behaved themselves". In fact, it is you who is delusional. Children are not dollies and mannequins. Children are not there for you to play dressing up games with, and to robotically comply with your instructions. They are little people, with their own identities.

The sooner that you accept that we live now, not yesteryear, the better. Your child does not have some imagined Victorian values stored hidden inside them. Your child exists as they do, today. They are shaped by this very moment, not your flights of fancy, nor your imagination.

Sure, as a parent, you have some preprogrammed delusions. You will always believe your baby is the bonniest. You will always think your child is the most adorable, the smartest, the one destined for success. No, probably not.

It's a good idea to back your kid up, to be on their side, to fight their corner. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with that. It all goes a bit skew-whiff when you start using your kid to live out your own fantasies though, getting your kid to compensate for your own inadequacies. If you didn't do well at school, pushing your kid too hard to be the academic that you failed to be will never fix your past failure.

And so it came to pass, that I arrived at the age of 17 without the foggiest idea of who I was as a person. I was quite clear about two different imaginary people that my parents wanted me to be, and just how much contradiction and impossibility there was in realising their fantasies. However, I hadn't the faintest idea of what shape my own personality took.

Discovering the drug, Ecstasy, allowed me to feel self-love and explore my feelings for myself. It also gave me a strange identity, bound up with drugs, dancing and music. I was a clubber/raver. I knew who I was on a Saturday night, in a sweaty railway arch, cutting shapes in the air and with pupils like saucers, high as a kite on MDMA. The rest of the time was dead to me. I was just counting down the hours, minutes and seconds until the next weekend.

This was clearly not a sustainable and complete identity, and my self-esteem was still at absolute rock bottom. In this vulnerable phase in my development, I slept with my male boss, believing - hoping even - that I was possibly gay. Turns out that I'm not gay. Shame. Life could have possibly slotted into some order, as at least there is some strong identity in being camp and effeminante, as a man.

The next cruel twist of vulnerability was to see me get involved romantically with an achondroplastic dwarf. She's one of the nicest girls you could ever hope to meet, and I really hope her feelings aren't hurt if she reads this, but she was quite aggressive in her advances. As I was completely lacking in self-confidence, I struggled to assert myself. I went along with things. I complied.

It's a bit strange, dating somebody that you're not attracted to, but I guess it's no different from my experiments with homosexuality. It's just that she was less unpleasant to kiss than somebody whose face is covered in stubble. Being f**ked in the arse is tolerable, but not exactly pleasant. This girl at least didn't want to penetrate me with some part of her body.

This strange little life had formed itself. I switched myself off during the week and went into hibernation. Then at the weekends I would take Ecstasy, and under the influence of this chemical, my feelings became much more fungible. It's easier to believe you have fallen for somebody, under the influence of the 'love drug'.

I guess I always maintained some toe-hold in reality though. I always knew that my feelings were being psychopharmacologically pulled this way and that, and I knew deep down that something felt very wrong.

It takes a long time to fix broken self-esteem and for you to emerge from the oppression of people who never allowed you to have your own identity. My own tastes had never been allowed to develop. I had never gained the skills of choosing my own clothes and outfits. I didn't know how to dress.

My hair was unruly and an inconvenience. I didn't like its style, but I had no idea how I wanted it to be cut. I had no idea how to tame my wavy locks. It's only because of an outdoors lifestyle, that I arrived at the shorter cut that I wear today.

IT contracting gave me the money to attain status symbols like a nice car, which I'm ashamed to admit, helped my self-esteem to some extent. Becoming some twat who is rather pleased with himself because he's rich and successful in those materialistic measures was not a road that I would have liked to continue down though. It was rather offensive to be flashing the cash to compensate for crushing inadequacy.

It was London that eventually gave me the space and the time to develop my own style, my own precious identity. It was tough going. One very bullying housemate drove me to the very limit of what I could endure, before she finally pissed off. Oh, what sweet relief! To finally be living in the Angel Islington, as a well dressed young man in a job that I was good at, with a healthy circle of friends and acquaintances. It was bliss.

The combination of corporate identity midweek - nice suit and crisply pressed shirts - with a surf style at the weekends, coupled with my newfound love of kiteboarding, really sealed the deal. I felt like a complete person, and for the first time in my life, age 23, I actually asked a girl out on a date.

I was still crushingly insecure, but I mostly muddled through because I was busy and I was optimistic and positive. I bungled a lot of the growing up, and failed to see the opportunity for bed-hopping for what it was, and instead continued to think I was falling in love at the drop of a hat.

I was hopeless at reading even the most un-subtle of advances by the opposite sex, and screwed up opportunities to trade up with some girls who I fancied the pants off. I was a faithful monogamist, but perhaps only because self-esteem and experience were still quite lacking in my love life. I kick myself now, when I think of some of the gorgeous women who advertised their availability to me.

In London you can find people whose style you wish to emulate. You can find those few inspiring fashion pieces, which can prop up your fragile self-esteem. You can start to develop your own identity, your own style, your own wardrobe. You start to feel good in your clothes, and then later in your body.

My broken self-esteem was restored to the point where I was confident enough to make a permanent mark of ownership on my body, in the form of a tattoo. I'm now so self-confident that I made the mark in a place where I can't even see it. From the photos that I've seen, it's not even quite in the right place but I don't care. It feels nice to have disfigured myself, deliberately, through my own choice.

I even grew a moustache for Movember, which is something I never thought I would do, given my lack of ability to grow decent stubble or a beard.

There's this tightly-bound link between London, outdoor/adrenalin sports, working for a corporation and being a secret raver/clubber, that is instricically linked to my identity. It's hard to shake those foundations as the things that I will run to in times of stress.

I know that MDMA will release me from the shackles of shame, regret and self-criticism, when I become paralysed by those oppressive thoughts. I know that the chemical will help me to have an epiphany of sorts, and move on with my life when I have become stuck in a rut. It's like taking a brief holiday from yourself and all your baggage. It's pretty hard on your body & mind in your thirties though! Quite a hangover.

I know that adrenalin sports will remind me that I'm alive, when I feel dead or dying. Just riding across London on a bicycle is enough to reaffirm that you still have some self-preservation instincts. You always end up having a moment where you nearly die, which puts things into perspective.

I know that immersing myself in corporate culture is occasionally good for my identity. It feels good to put on a suit, and know that the public are somehow looking at you as somehow more respectable, more mannered, more civilised. It feels good to puff your chest out with self importance and pretend like being part of the big money machine means that you have some value, even if the bubble soon bursts.

I know that being part of the heaving mass of bodies that make up London is a very cool part of somebody's identity. When you are somewhat hardened to it, used to the noise and the invasion of personal space, and the offence on your senses, you then start to get enjoyment from gliding serenely through the carnage. You know that people are looking at you and wondering how you managed to cut through the crowd and anticipate the seemingly random movements of individuals, so that you dance around the dawdler and dodge the ditherer. It feels good to have mastered the capital city, to know these mean streets.

Put it all together and you have quite a strong identity, quite a distinct personality. It's quite nice that a 'me' has emerged after a rather difficult upbringing, and further struggles to break free from parental oppression and some relationships which preyed upon my vulnerability, my insecurity.

If you wanted to try and get me outside the M25 now, you'd have to put my dead body in a pine box.

I love this dirty town.

Tags: #london #career #childhood

This is a story about brain damage...

When George Ricaurte and his team vivisected Rhesus monkeys and dissected their brains, after having given them enormous intravenous doses of Methamphetamine, they found that their neurons had been damaged. The very cells of their cerebellum had withered and died.

It's very hard to objectively judge whether you have driven yourself irreversibly insane, or how stupid and brain-dead you have made yourself, through the abuse of drugs & alcohol. But both are freely and relatively cheaply available in massive quantities to almost anybody who wishes to avail themselves of such substances.

I have a rough measure for the strength of my sanity. I can tell you, in terms of number of nights of sleep lost, at what point I will become psychotic, and at what point I will lose consciousness. 10 seems to be the magic number.

I had to go back to my house in Bournemouth, leaving behind my new home, my new friends, my new girlfriend, my new startup and my newly incorporated company, in order to rummage in my attic and find some crap to sell in order to raise some money, because my parents had reneged on their promise to save me the stress and hassle.

For 9 nights, I was hopped up on Supercrack, just about managing to sell my car and gather a few high value things, but otherwise totally out of it. On the evening of the 10th night, just as it was getting dark, I was convinced that the house was surrounded by police, and climbed into the attic without the ladder and tried to close the hatch behind myself.

I blacked out, and when I came round I didn't know what I was. I literally couldn't understand my blurry vision or what any of my senses or thoughts were telling me. Then I didn't know who or where I was. Was I in a rustic farm building? Was I a farmer? Then it became clear to me that I was in an attic, and I remembered who I was, but I had no idea how or why I would be there. Then it became clear that I was perilously close to the edge of an open hatch, with an 11 foot drop onto steep stairs, which descended another 10 or so feet onto a hard wooden floor.

A previously absent sense of self preservation caused me to cautiously lower the ladder and descend from the attic, whereupon I noticed that it was late afternoon. At least 18 hours had elapsed. I surely could not have slept, for I'm sure that movement in my sleep would have sent me tumbling through the hatch.

Remembering then, why I had entered the attic, I was surprised to not see any police. As a precaution, I then went and hid in my shed for another day or two, before I phoned a friend and asked if he could drive me back to London with the couple of valuable items I was going to sell.

It must be re-iterated that these items were not going to be sold for drink & drugs. Supercrack costs just 18p per day, remember? I'm not really built to sell junk from attics and sheds. I find it stressful. My Dad's 'job' since getting my Mum pregnant with me had been to buy & sell junk. My job, for almost my entire professional career, has been to write computer code in an air conditioned office.

Anyway, you can see that my window of opportunity had closed, and my life had become rather dysfunctional.

As soon as I got my share of the house sale money I put myself through 8 weeks of rehab, before remembering that there was some Supercrack hidden inside a golf brochure sent to me from Canada, in my stack of unopened post from 2 months prior. Given how much I hated my parents for tossing me to the wolves, I saw no reason not to pay them a visit and have a massive relapse in their home.

My left leg was destroyed as I tried to leave, in an unnecessary tussle with my Dad. I then tried to O.D. in some terrible flat in Kentish Town. As the amount of blood in my urine grew and grew, as my organs slowly shut down, I phoned an ex-girlfriend for help, when I felt sure that I only had about 24 hours left to live. The hospital gave me about a 30% chance of survival, and treated me for about 3 weeks, 6 intensive days of which were very touch-and-go.

Camden Council were most uncooperative in helping me, despite letters begging them to support me, from my GP and Psychiatrist. Finally, with no state support, I ended up in a hostel in Bayswater, and then living in a bush in Kensington Park Gardens.

Obviously, life was rather unstructured and dysfunctional, and again after the magic 9 nights of madness, I believed I was being pursued by police, ran across a rooftop, fell through a glass window, and then went and hid 80ft up a massive tree with a huge shard of glass sticking out of my 'good' leg.

The scar on my leg is about 5 inches long and nearly an inch wide. I lay in my bush in Kensington Park Gardens, in agony, until it healed enough for me to hobble to Paddington Station, where there is a public shower. I got cleaned up enough to get myself a hotel room.

A friend invited me to come and stay at her flat in Notting Hill, but I was so mad by this point that I tried to hide under a mop bucket in her basement. A fully grown naked man cannot be concealed by a mop bucket on his head.

She coaxed me out of the basement, whereupon I then tried to hide in a fortress of pillows and sofa cushions, and then decided to hide in her shed. I then took offence to my own penis and tried to rip it off my body. Having made quite a mess of it, and clearly sanity having escaped my grip for far too many weeks, I decided to try St. Mary's Hospital and Westminster Council.

Westminster Council beat up Camden Council for being so beastly towards one of their residents, and UCLH Androgyny were quite helpful in repairing my male member. One of the mental health Crisis Houses took me in for a couple of weeks while a search party for my marbles was despatched.

Fundamentally, I still believed that the state would keep its word in helping somebody who became addicted to a legal high, which the government then made illegal. My social worker had promised imminent admission to treatment services. There was also the promise of supported accommodation, post-treatment. This was salvation.

However, it all got botched. One social worker lost all my paperwork and had to restart the process entirely, and the next one decided to keep deferring my case, because she believed I could recover without state support.

It was me who blinked first, after 6 months of this hell. I used my credit card in order to get myself a hostel bed and no longer be sleeping rough on Hampstead Heath. In a way my social worker was right, I had been sufficiently scared, shellshocked and traumatised. It helped that when I once got arrested, the police doctor was very surprised that I didn't die in custody when she saw how low my blood pressure was. Being in a cell, dying, is not a very nice experience.

Anyway, I went cold turkey in a 14 bed hostel dorm, in full public view, on street bail with the police.

After a couple of months, I got a job and things appeared to be going swimmingly. However, the lifestyle of a completely insane, drug addicted homeless person, is somewhat incompatible with the life of a middle-class IT consultant working for a global bank. There was a certain amount of friction between old life and new.

Somewhere between losing all my friends, losing my job, the contract ending on a room that I had let and the general disintegration of my life, the whole horrible cycle started again. Recovery is fragile.

By May 2015, I believed that my mobile phone was talking to me and giving me instructions. Under its direction, I then embarked on a half-marathon, with a fully loaded backpack with all of my most valuable possessions in it.

This is your brain on Supercrack. Pre-existing mental health problems + drugs + gentle external encouragement = completely bat shit insane behaviour. Somebody doesn't just run like this just because they're on drugs, but it doesn't take much to get them going.

Don't worry though, because by June I had a job working for HSBC on the number one project: Customer Due Diligence, which is naturally where you would expect a homeless, insane, drug addict known to the police to find themselves. The global bank is clearly an expert in doing due diligence background checks on people.

Anyway, I might have made all this stuff up just to embarrass HSBC and the CIO in charge of the number one project, plus the rest of the management team, who are making a bit of a botch job of things. You'd need to do the due diligence to find out, which presumably HSBC did?

So, I leave it to you, dear reader, to judge. How do you find me? Completely bat shit insane on a permanent and irreversible basis that means I should be 'committed' immediately to an institution, where I will shuffle around for the rest of my heavily-medicated days, no longer a menace to society... or is there a question mark hanging over the whole infernal affair?

This very document, this entire blog, seeks to challenge your presumptions about addiction and mental health. Has it succeeded yet?

Tags: #nhs #mentalhealth #addiction #bipolar #depression #suicide #career #banking #london #homeless #injury

This is a story about logical conclusions...

My parents were illegal drug addicts for 30 0dd years, but their logic was that they weren't proper addicts because they supposedly didn't become addicted when they used heroin, cocaine and speed. They used to boast about being "old school" people who were immune from addiction (apart from the drugs they were addicted to, of course).

I was getting pissed off with my parents and ex-wife's assumption that they held some moral superiority over me. I was suicidally depressed, so I obtained all the drugs, to prove that I could take them and then stop taking them, without becoming addicted.

The first thing i got hold of was Cocaine. It didn't do much for me. I could see that taking Cocaine leads to more taking of Cocaine. I was able to see that it was self-reinforcing, but I couldn't really see the point. All that happens in your brain is that it tells you "do that again". There was no enjoyment, only addictive potential.

So I took what was left of my Cocaine, mixed it with baking soda, microwaved it, and made my own Crack Cocaine. Because I was a middle-class homeowner with a similarly highly paid group of friends in professional jobs, I didn't happen to have a crack pipe lying around. My solution was a wine glass over the stove with a drinking straw to catch the smoke.

Crack Cocaine was not pleasant. My heart shot right up to Maximum Heart Rate (MHR) and my nose and mouth were all numb. It was a bit scary actually.

So I bought a rock, and then decided to break a bit off, crush it up and snort it. When that didn't have any effect, I ate the remaining rock. It turns out that Crack is not water soluble. You can only smoke it. I bought another rock and got somebody to show me how to smoke it off a perforated Coca-Cola can. It was shit. Don't waste your money.

Ok, what next? Crystal Meth. So I didn't have a meth pipe, on account of being a respectable member of the community, so I just chopped it up really fine and snorted it. It kind of worked. Not mind-blowing, but there was energy and euphoria there. I could imagine myself getting addicted, and for a week, I did take it. But I couldn't quite see the fuss. It was just like having a massive dose of speed.

I assumed the problem was ROA (Route of Administration) so I bought a pipe. There's something satisfying about watching the stuff liquify and then vaporise. The high is very short lived versus snorting it or eating it though. It also starts to leave you pretty edgy, anxious, paranoid.

So, having tried, Coke, Crack and Meth, there was only really Heroin to complete my 2 week experiment. I bought a gram of No. 3 Afghan Brown. I have no idea what that means. It just looked like dirty brown powder. Given my lack of hypodermic syringe, I decided to try foiling it (chasing the dragon). It's quite hard to stop the damn stuff from running around when it liquifies, and it takes co-ordination to not burn yourself and catch any smoke. My first experiments were not successful.

I decided to use my meth pipe to try and smoke it. It's got a lovely sweet flavour, but maybe that's psychosomatic because you're getting 'high'. I didn't feel high. I felt like I wanted to have a really nice sleep. Solution: put crystal meth AND heroin into the pipe together. Non-injected speedball. Man, that confuses the hell out of your body. On the one hand you're monged out, and on the other you're highly stimulated. Everything takes on a warm yellow glow.

Now I ripped through the Crystal Meth, but I'd barely used half the bag of Heroin. I decided that it was probably too subtle - like Coke and Crack - to even notice addiction creeping up on you, so I flushed it down the loo.

When the Crystal Meth was gone, I looked at the price, and thought "screw that". You can get nearly 30 grammes of Speed Paste (Base) at 70% purity for the price of a gram of Crystal Meth. So I used Speed Paste to manage my nonstop poly-drug usage down to a level where I was functional again.

Then I switched to Dexedrine/Dextroamphetamine. Very expensive, but at least it's slower release and you know exactly what dose you're getting. Was I addicted? Well, it's a very effective antidepressant. Fast acting and long lasting. You don't even get much of a high.

The final route to freedom was Bupropion (legal). It's pretty much like an amphetamine. You get an energy boost, a mood lift, and it takes care of cravings for other things. It makes normal things enjoyable again.

I know it says Zyban, but it's Bupropion and is marketed as the antidepressant Wellbutrin

You can re-enter the world of the living, legally. Bupropion is not a controlled substance. Buy it from India or somebody's leftover prescription from when they tried to quit smoking, and hey presto, you have some semblance of a normal life back.

You can't even take too much Bupropion because you'll just have a seizure. Thankfully my seizure threshold is quite high.

However, the insomnia and anxiety, panic attacks can be quite bad, so it's useful to have some Zopiclone for sleep, and some kind of fast acting benzo for any panic attacks. Zopiclone's not a controlled substance, but most most benzos are. Benzos are physically addictive and abrupt withdrawal will kill you.

You have to do a lot of half-life calculations to get off benzos. Diazepam lasts frigging ages. It was still coming out in my urine 5 days after I stopped taking it. Alprazolam (Xanax) starts to move you in the right direction. Then move on to Zopiclone to get some sleep without being totally monged out the next day. Then there's Zolpidem, which is handy when you're off all the other stuff but you just can't initiate natural sleep. Then you just need to half the dose, then skip every other night, and before you know it, you're free from the Benzo trap.

From top to bottom: Zolpidem (Ambien/Stilnox), Zopiclone, Alprazolam (Xanax)

But, back to the original point. I can know tell my parents and my ex-wife to go f**k them selves, because I've been able to try these drugs, and not become addicted. I just needed to escape their sneering ignorance, and sense of superiority to quit drugs cold turkey. When my life was a living hell with the people who are supposed to care about you but treat you like you're weak, inferior, lacking in willpower, I showed that substitute prescribing could replace harmful hard drugs with medically sanctioned antidepressants and sleep aids. The root cause of the issue was still present though... the people who are supposed to care about me most in the world treated me like shit, with no excuse.

So is addiction a disease? Is addiction a way of treating depression? What's causing the depression? In my case, I was depressed because the people who supposedly loved me wished me dead. The whole thing started out with me wanting to die of a drug overdose, and suddenly I was the bad guy. My ex-wife and Mum absolutely loved the faux sympathy they got from spreading my secrets and painting my problems in the light of somebody who'd done something selfish and didn't love them enough to stop.

You're damn right. If you're going to spread rumours around my family, friends and work colleagues, you might as well just smother that person to death with a pillow while they sleep. That's what you're doing to them. It's not about you, cunts, you'll have plenty of time to grieve when the person's dead. You can't blame the drugs. Drugs didn't buy a gun, come to my house and shoot me.

"How did he die?" people say, and if the answer is "drugs", then the response is "oh, yeah, drugs are so evil". No. Incorrect. Most people take drugs because people treat them like shit and it's a way of escaping the ignorance and the blame. Blame for what? If somebody commits suicide and they never took any drugs, and they leave a suicide note saying "I couldn't take your bullying, and being treated like dog shit anymore" then where does the blame lie?

People are slippery little cunts. I know I keep banging on about it, but my parents have zero respect, and they're liars. For some reason my Auntie wouldn't re-issue a cheque I forgot to cash. For some reason my Dad thought he knew what the f**k he was talking about when I travelled over 200 miles to sell my house. If my ex wanted to get a bunch of valuations, she lives in the local area, she could get as many valuations as she wanted. If I make a trip to sell a house, I sell a house. I had the deal done on the same day, with cash buyers who wanted it all completed in 6 weeks. I battered the Estate Agent down on his fees, and there wasn't a single penny needed spending on the house to get it sold.

Instead, my ex-wife put it on the market with a total fucktard agent, took weeks to put the place on the market, brought us some buyers in a chain who used the most retarded firm of solicitors imaginable, and quelle surprise, the 6 week sale took 6 months.

I actually offered to top up the sale price £7k in cash, if she'd just back the fuck away from financial and property matters she didn't have a frigging clue about. Worst case, I'd lose about £3.5k but I wouldn't have had to pay her a £1k bribe for unnecessary 'decorating', so that puts my loss down to about £2.5k.

It was obvious that there were many tens of thousands of pounds of equity being unlocked, and my parents told me not to worry about short-term cashflow. What a couple of lying cunts. I could have used my good credit rating and low interest rates to bridge the gap, but when I really needed to raise some  money, my parents had put their efforts into telling lies about me. They told people I was addicted to expensive street drugs, and I was as good as dead. The truth of the matter is that as soon as I left that abusive relationship with my ex-wife, my 'addiction' just magically disappeared. Hard drugs bought illegally are expensive. I've probably spent less than £300 on illegal drugs in my life. You see what happens when you lie?

There is a substance nicknamed Supercrack. It used to be sold as NRG-3 for £13.50 a gram. A gram is 1,000 milligrams. A dose of supercrack is around 10mg and lasts 18 hours. S0 y0u can fuck yourself up for 3 months for 14 pence a day. Now, I did get addicted to Supercrack. You can snort it, rub it on your gums, swallow it, put it up your arse, and presumably inject it. The stuff is potent. 10 days without sleep is my record, and then I passed out in my attic hiding from 'police' (there were no police, I was just psychotic).

I'm not even going to tell you what Supercrack actually is because I had decided I was never, ever, ever going to take it. The horror stories were just too much to bear. It's clearly one dangerous drug.

Anyway, thanks to the tabloid press, they alerted me to legal highs, and I read about them all, but nobody knew what was in NRG-3, so I didn't risk it, especially as everybody who'd written about trying it had ended up in hospital. Anyway, when I got home from trying to get enough courage to kill myself by driving into a concrete pillar at 100mph, I decided to try it. I was pretty terrified.

2 days later I heart arrhythmia and was having trouble breathing, having consumed 800mg of a substance you're only supposed to take an absolute max of 30mg of. I wrote a note describing my symptoms, saying what I'd taken and would you please mind taking me to hospital if I was unconscious, and stapled a £20 note to the note. I then walked to the hospital. I calmed down a bit before I got there. I found that it was mostly a psychological problem and my tight pounding chest and shortness of breath went away if I kept my mind occupied.

Anyway, Supercrack became the benchmark. Regular crack, crystal meth, heroin... they're all a bit 'meh!' once you've tried Supercrack. The comedown is so terrible that you are literally convinced you're going to die, but you can always take more until you pass out through sleep deprivation.

The more you take, and the more sleep deprived you get, the more paranoid you get, and the more obsessive you get with completely futile tasks. I spent a whole 12 hours trying to rig up a webcam so I could see if anybody was coming to my house. I spent hours and hours trying to rig up a sheet and a towel as a short of makeshift privacy curtain. You're so obsessive that you keep trying the same thing over & over, even though it didn't work the 999,999 times you tried it before.

The worst part of all, is that you're addicted and psychotically ill, but then the government decides to make Supercrack illegal, but you're already addicted. Is there any plan for those people caught in that net? Is there hell. I managed to wangle myself 28 days in The Priory thanks to a pre-existing mental health problem: Type II Bipolar. However, they call it Dual Diagnosis when you have mental health and addiction problems. The statistical outcomes don't look good for the double whammy.

I could always manage 2 or 3 weeks without a 'fix'. You're so f**ked from 5 to 7 nights without sleep and hardly any food, that you're body is pretty badly in need of those things. The problem is, that all the reasons why you were susceptible to addiction are still there, and everybody's got the same genius idea that taking drugs causes addiction, not a shitty lives that cause people to take drugs.

Everybody assumes that when you're not taking drugs, your life is f**king peachy. Well, normally it's a lot worse than when some selfish shitbag decided to start slandering your character. My own mother said "I can smell the drugs on you" on the morning of my sister's wedding. That's total bullshit. I hadn't been taking drugs, and even if I had, the only thing you might be able to smell is a slight sweatiness, and that's only if you're absolutely so off your nut that your body temperature is getting towards hyperthermia.

If somebody has pupils like saucers in a relatively well lit space. If they have restless legs. If they're talking faster. If they seem to have boundless energy. If their mood seems extremely elevated, they're chatty and confident... those would be giveaways. The smell capabilities of somebody who's nearly 60 and smokes are not going to detect something that a portable mass spectrometer can't. Sure, you can swab surfaces like hands and the inside of your mouth, and detect drugs, but just about the only thing you can smell on a drug addict is self-neglect.

Naturally, I was showered and wearing a freshly dry cleaned suit and laundered shirt to my sister's wedding. I was also wearing body spray and a splash of aftershave. It's people's presumptions that they know f**k all about you and your life that makes life very hard to justify continuing.

I once took a flight out of Heathrow and I was taking Dexedrine at the time. A policeman and his drug dog came over, his dog sniffed me, but he didn't sit down (the signal that the dog has smelt something). It's possible the dog was trained for coke and heroin, but you would have thought that if any animal could smell drugs, it'd be a trained dog,  but you're probably wrong.

I've got a theory that the dogs can't actually smell the drugs or explosives, but they can smell fear. Fear of a dog is a fairly primal instinct for animals, from the time we were preyed upon by packs of canines. For dogs to be able to track the scent of an animal in fear, obviously has huge evolutionary advantages, when hunting. Domesticated dogs are also incredibly good at understanding human body language.

So, perhaps even dogs can't smell drugs. They can just smell fear. You probably want to train a pig if you want it to snuffle for something valuable.

Anyway, where were we? Oh yes, I quit cold turkey a bunch more drugs than my parents ever have, or indeed most people have. I've done the experiments, and Supercrack is top of the pile. Heroin relapse rates and overdoses are highest (about 40% of heroin addicts will die in a 20 year period, from OD or AIDS) but of the stimulants, Supercrack is way more addictive than regular Crack or Crystal Meth according to my research. I've actually chucked Crack and Heroin down the toilet, just because one addiction at a time is enough to handle.

They actually sell opiates over the counter, legally. You just have to go to about 8 chemists, buy the maximum of 3 boxes of 32 tablets you're allowed to buy of Co-Codomol (8mg of Codeine). So that's potentially almost 768mg of Codeine. You just have to get rid of the 48g of Paracetamol, because that'll f**k up your liver.

Luckily Codeine is soluble below 5 degrees celsius, but paracetamol isn't. So you smash up all the pills, dissolve then, then put a load of ice in there and put the saucepan in the fridge set to 3 degrees for ages. Then you filter the paracetamol out of the liquid. It should weigh the same as the paracetamol + pill filler, once it's dried out. You might want to rechill the liquid and repeat the filtration, just to be sure you get out as much paracetamol as possible.

Then you're left with 768mg of opiate dissolved in water. Enough to kill you. So just drink half. 384mg of codeine is way less than the 450mg that would kill somebody of my weight, 50% of the time (calculated using the LD50 = the lethal dose that kills 50% of people). It's 17% less, so I figured that gave me a 67% chance of surviving. 2 in 3 odds.

I hadn't really reckoned on the fact that I was fairly drunk when I came up with this crazy idea, and that would affect my tolerance, but I did still manage to do the sums and follow some kind of experimental procedure to safeguard my liver from paracetamol poisoning.

Anyway, I had a nice sleep, and everything was kind of 'rose tinted' for a bit. Not what you''d call euphoric, but my problems did kind of melt away. I was soothed. Can't see myself getting addicted. It's not really life enhancing, it's more life avoiding. It's nice to take a day off, but it's not real life, is it?

So, what of Supercrack? Well, I've done 6 months without it, cold turkey. But so what? People will say "oh, that explains everything" even though I made a buttload of cash, got through a divorce, moved house a million times and worked on some incredibly stressful projects. Also, if I had all the money I'd spent on drugs back in my pocket, I'd maybe have £700-800? Remember... Supercrack is 14 pence a day. I spent far more on anti-addiction drugs like Bupropion, less addictive substitutes like Dexedrine and treatment. Let me tell you about treatment.

The way it's supposed to work is that you detox to get your brain back to some semblance of normality. That's a 3 or 4 week process. Then you rehabilitate. All the backlog of shit that hasn't been done because you've been completely dysfunctional is piled up and threatening to topple over and squash you flat. If you try it on your own, you're swamped by stress and depression and pressure, and you're brain is quite rightly telling you that you have to deal with twice the shit of everybody else, because you have to run the household affairs, and deal with the backlog. Actually, it's 3 times the shit because nobody will help you because everybody's been telling people you're an untrustworthy addict

Sure, don't let somebody in active addiction come and stay in your house or lend them money. But what if they detox? What if their game plan has changed from "get drugs, take drugs" to "get friends, get place to live, get job, get hobby, get girlfriend"? Well, you have a little insider information thanks to kind people like my parents and my ex-wife, who like to talk about isolated incidents of behaviour as if they're really talking about character.

"He's dangerously violent, he hit me" is the nice sound bite that condemns a man's character. It's also asymmetric information. The complete statement might read "I used to verbally and physically abuse him, and hit him, and then one of the many times when I was getting aggressive and threatening and he was scared, he hit me" which is behaviour, not character. The next question, to our 'dangerous' man would be, "how do you feel about having hit somebody?". If they say "they deserved it, they got what was coming to them, it felt good to get some revenge" we might doubt the character, but if they say "I feel really guilty and ashamed, and bad about what I did"  then we start to build up a true picture of somebody's character. We can ask the other person, and they might say "he should have stuck up for himself. it made me angry when he wouldn't do what I wanted. it made me angry when I didn't get what I wanted". Now we have discovered the root of why addicts struggle to quit.

It doesn't matter if you're 6 months clean, or 6 years clean, you still know a hell of a lot more about self-discipline and biting your tongue in the face of blatant character slurs, than those who like to taunt and undermine. My parents are dead to me because they can't be bothered to travel 45 minutes to help me, or even see me die in a hospital bed. If I want help, I'll go and get it from somebody who wants to see me succeed, not some arsehole who never leaves the house out of sheer laziness and smugness. If I want help, I'll go and get it from somebody who keeps their promises. There is no excuse for breaking your promise to somebody at the most fragile time in their life. Some pathetic pocket change, 2 and a half years later, probably done without my Dad knowing. It's a joke.

Don't claim you don't owe me anything. You offered help, I didn't ask. Your risk was secured against a huge pile of equity. You owe me for the damage of breaking your promise at the most critical time imaginable.

I blame you for 2 and a half years of setbacks. I blame you for making me so unwell I had to spend £17,000 trying to get better after being hung out to dry for 3 or 4 months. After you f**ked me over.

You owe me the self esteem you stole from me, sending me to school on stolen girls bicycles, dressing me like a fucking idiot, not listening to a single word I said about what was important. These weren't "nice to haves" you stupid cunts. I had to spend 35 hours a week in those c**ting schools. I had to face the consequences of your selfish ignorant decisions, not you.

So if you think I'm going to ask nicely for help: f**k you! So if you think I'm going to be grateful for a pittance of cash, 2 and a half years too late: f**k you! So if you think I'm to blame for having to spend £17,000 on treatment to try and undo the damage you did by breaking your promises and undermining me: f**k you. You think it's helpful to take someone away from their own home, own friends, everything in their life: f**k you.

You sell some f**king stuff and bust your balls photographing and describing stuff on eBay for some pittance.

I came back to London, beat addiction, did a new startup and incorporated a Limited company ready to do some IT contracting. What did you do? Fuck all apart from get in the f**king way and undermine me, so here's the bill:

• 4 months house sale delay mortgage: £4,000
  
  Butt the f**k out of my house sale. I needed a deal done quickly because my ex-wife said she wouldn't wait until my life was stabilised. I did a great deal. You f**ked it up
  
  
• Detox: £10,000
• Rehab: £7,700
  
  Yeah, if you lie to somebody, tell them you're going to support them, delay their house sale by 4 months and leave them virtually penniless, that cost is YOURS to pay. I had enough bitcoins to buy a lifetime supply of Supercrack but I was clean until December. when you started supporting my horrible ex-wife in some bullshit game where she was trying to keep my money from me until March. What a shower of c**ts.
  
  
• Grievous Bodily Harm: £3,500
• Recovery loss of earnings: £18,000
  
  Yeah you remember when you smashed up my leg. Can't really get suit trousers on over a plaster cast. I had interviews lined up. There's this thing called human language. You should look it up sometime. Physical attacks are for animals.
  
  
• Loss of earnings due to stress caused by your recent lies: £6,000
  
  Remember when I had to spend 2 weeks in hospital. No, you can't remember s**t can you, you f**king c**ts. Especially not your promises.
  
  
• Additional expenses occurred because of your recent lies: £2,800
  
  Stay in a hotel you said, because you didn't want me to be stressed out of my mind. I think you'll find it was me who paid, and that kind of wasted money is stressful.
  
  
• Self storage costs due to your lies: £4,000
  
  One day, a nice parent will help their child, until then, they'll always being trapped in a load of shit you made for them
  
  
• Having to borrow from commercial lenders because of your lies: £7,200
  
  Yeah, you remember when you said 2 and a half years ago that you didn't want a stressful divorce, moving house, finding friends, finding a job, getting back on my feet to be a stress when I had many tens of thousands of pounds just waiting to be released from my psychopathic ex-wife? Yeah, you lied.

TOTAL: £64,500

All of this has come out of my own pocket, or is owed to me for the Grievous Bodily Harm.

The time to get you the fuck out of my house, get you the fuck out of my life, shut your lying trap has long expired. You've had your chances to defend me, to make good on promises, and now it's time to add up all the damage you've caused by dragging me somewhere convenient for you and my ex-wife, smashing up my leg and then pretending I don't exist. All the damage caused by the fact that I believed that I could avoid thousands in interest payments if you kept your promises. 

All my f**king time and money wasted coming to see you sitting on your lazy f**king arses talking b**lshit. All you do is criticise and break promises.

So, this is goodbye. I've had enough. I know you'll never settle your outstanding balance. I know you can never be trusted. I know that you robbed my childhood happiness in order to give you just about enough money to sit in your house reading newspapers and watching TV, slowly selling off your assets until you die penniless.

G00d for you that you just did whatever the f**k you wanted, whenever the f**k you wanted to. Good for you that you're so heartless you didn't give a shit about the suffering of your children.

I mutilated my own body to show you how much I hate you. The words in this blog barely express how you've left me totally in the s**t. My Mum would be OK if I could get her away from my Dad's poisonous words. He's so controlling over my Mum that I have to voice record telephone conversations with them, to point out that he's stopping her from loving and supporting her children. When she does help, it has to be in top secret.

My Dad knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. He's the son of a wealthy accountant who sent the kids to private school, and they always had cars and motorbikes, and he fucked about all he wanted, changing jobs because he's a spoiled middle class twat. My Dad could never have afforded to send me to private school or buy me a decent bike, or a decent computer, or do the activities my friends did, or make any contribution to higher education if I wanted to go. He's a classic case of a middle class guy who's fucked up every opportunity and has nothing to show for it.

Yes, my Dad's got some property (which is really my mum's... she's always bankrolled my dad) but it's their pension fund, and they're going to have to sell all of it so I can put them in the shittest nursing home I can find. I want to find one where the patients are degraded every day, bullied by the staff, patronised and talked down to. Yup, that will be poetic justice for the shit they put me through.

I had offered to pay for one of the houses to be set up with a lift, and home nursing care, but f**k that. I'll probably just wait until they've been 2 and a half years dead and then burn half the cash equivalent sum of £50 notes, and mix that in with their ashes, and then scatter them in a sewerage farm. Ashes to ashes, s**t to s**t. Rest in pooh.

I hope you can see from this simple illustration that if you have a hard working son who is doing everything in his power to be self sufficient and generate a substantial income, and a large proportion of that had been earmarked for supporting my ungrateful parents, your belittling of children you don't love, messing around doing things that never make any money, and generally ignoring the distress of your kids, is going to have major consequences.

Instead of your kids worrying that you're getting old and you're going to die, you're already dead to them and they're angry with you. You failed as a parent.

Hopefully, the silver lining is that if I become a dad, I'll reprioritise my life, so that I have adequate income to provide for the family. I'll provide a stable home, and try and be the most consistent father I can be. I'll try and listen and understand my kids and their frustrations. I'll concentrate on them having as many friends as possible, rather than dragging them all over the country and asking them to say goodbye to all their old friends, and have to make a load of new ones. I will look for value not cheapness, and if something is really important to that child, I'll buy the best that I can afford and economise in my own life. I'll try and treat my kids as individuals, rather than putty to be moulded into uniform shapes. I won't treat my kid as a performing animal or a clotheshorse.

There's potential in people, and you just have to support them so that they can achieve it. Assuming somebody is bad until impossibly proven beyond all reasonable doubt that they're amazing (which means they're not bad, they can never be amazing because they were once labelled as bad) despite everybody booing and jeering  and sneering and trying to hold them back.

Tags: #addiction #drugs #childhood #parents

This is a story about a society that makes pregnant women sleep in barns...

I'm not having a go at any one particular society, nor men who haven't fully thought through the implications of where their newborn is going to sleep. Sure, your 3 seconds of copulation was fun, but 9 months later, you've gotta think about putting a roof over your family's head.

So, the nativity story tells us about a couple that rather irresponsibly got pregnant, Mary lied and said it was the work of an imaginary space wizard, to cover up for the fact that she'd been sleeping around, Joseph was enough of a dumbass to buy the stupid story AND be be persuaded to take her away from whoever might inconveniently confess that the child was theirs.

Anyway, they had a whole 9 months to find somewhere to live, and they abysmally failed at that. Basically, they were pretty flakey and unreliable.

So, this kid was born, in a barn, to flakey unreliable parents, and we now worship that kid as the son of God, because he was a carpenter up until the age of 30 before he decided to start doing miracles and stuff. He was just killing time up until then.

The end.

Tags: #sex #parents #childhood

This is a story about killing yourself slowly and painfully...

So, this one time, I stopped eating on a Saturday, then I can't remember if it was Monday or Tuesday that I was dragged off against my will to Oxford John Radcliffe hospital. Yet another 'mistake' of my parents that left me dangerously malnourished. They didn't ever learn that antagonising and terrorising a person makes them anxious and not want to eat. In their haste to force me to do whatever the hell they wanted to do - they didn't actually tell me - my leg was cut to the bone.

In hospital, they had a look at everything that was wrong with me. The most worrying thing was the toxicity of my blood. My Creatine Kinease (CK) readings indicated that I had damaged kidneys. The large laceration to my leg indicated that a traumatic muscle injury had occurred. Blood vessels had be severed, causing Ischemia to large parts of my muscle, which promptly died. My kidneys were going to die too. They were already barely functioning and quite badly damaged.

This is called Rhabdomyolysis. You don't actually need a test to diagnose it. If your piss is the colour of coca-cola and stinks, you're well on your way. If your piss starts turning the colour of orange juice with loads of blood in it, you've pretty much had it.

So they didn't bother to operate on my leg, they just put me in a high dependency unit and pumped as much saline and glucose and the machines could pump. My arms were pincushions from the phlebotomists taking blood measurements around the clock.

It wasn't until the following Saturday that the muscle damage was repaired. It should have been a day procedure, but because none of my friends would pick me up from the hospital and I lived on the 1st floor, the doctor's couldn't really discharge me with my leg in cast and expect me to get up the stairs on one leg.

When my friends prompted me to move out a few weeks later, I stopped eating again. I had no body fat left. My kidneys were already damaged. It only took about 5 days to collapse on the floor and be unable to move. I had been trying to cut my jugular vein and femoral artery, because I knew I only had to lose about 8 pints of blood before it started overbrimming the waterproof container I had made, and by which time, nobody would be able to resuscitate me.

Only a friend Lara came over, discovered me, and took me to hospital. I was in hospital for a week that time and two weeks recovering nearby after a psychiatric bed couldn't be found for me. Being sick in Camden is shit.

I can barely comprehend the shitness of a situation where somebody can barely walk and is in complete agony from muscle damage is supposed to go and deal with bureaucrats and fill in reams of forms. How much sleep do you think you get in a week on a ward with loads of people dying next to you? In Oxford, I literally heard about 3 people stop breathing, and presumably their heart stopped beating because loads of alarms went of and staff rushed over to see if they could coax some life back into their fucked bodies.

In London I was on more general wards after a couple of days in A&E. People there are just in a lot of pain and discomfort. Night time is worst. People seem to be distracted from their pain by TV and visitors.

I really don't want a life shuffling and muttering to myself, doped up on the drugs they give you when you can no longer cope with hectoring ignoramus parents, abysmal jobs that suck wealth out of the developing nations while destroying the planet, people who do charity work more because it makes them feel good about themself, rather than for a noble cause.

If you're reading this, it's because you've learned English and you have access to a computer. That means the chances are that you have never been in hospital because you didn't eat enough.

There're billions of people who don't have enough to eat. Do you like your office job and cheap groceries and enormous apartment more than you like those people? Look at the evidence. The evidence shows that you're happy for the developing world to grow all your food and make all your clothes and other goods. The evidence shows you're pretty happy with the current arrangement. Putting £1 a charity collection box is great value money for you. You can bullshit yourself that you played your part in changing the world.

£1 for a clear conscience. Bargain of the century.

Tags: #nhs #charity #oxford #london

This is a story about legal highs...

When your parents are drug addict losers, you have to do a lot of research if you're going to save their life. Their health damage is probably too bad to save them now, but if my niece gets to spend a little longer with granny & granddad, then it will have been worth it.

The above amino acid and vitamin complex is what is necessary if want to replenish the brain chemicals that drugs wash out of your system.

Let's do a bit of a tour:

L-Tyrosine

This is the precursor to dopamine. You can give yourself early-onset Parkinsons if you take excessive dopamine agonists (e.g. Cocaine) and damage the neurons in the Basal Ganglia. Don't fuck with dopamine. It gets you out of bed in the morning.

You can fuck up your domaninergic system with all kinds of drugs. Crystal Meth and Amphetamine and Caffeine. Yes, that's right, Caffeine. Same thing. Caffeine is legal amphetamine.

5-Hydroxytrypophan (5-HTP)

This is the precursor to Serotonin and Melatonin. Very important for mood regulation, digestion and sleep. You do want to poop don't you? Well, it's best to not cause neurotoxicity to your serotonin releasing neurons. 5-HTP can also be an excellent sleep regulator, as it will give you a melatonin boost.

There are few street drugs that deplete 5-HTP. But there's one very popular one: 3,4-Methyledioxymethamphetamine... Ecstasy, or 'pills' as they're colloquially known. Suicide Wednesday is not known by that name for no reason, amongst the clubber/raver community.

Phenylalaninie

This is the precursor to adrenaline and noradrenalin. You might think it'd be cool to be like me and have your adrenal gland so burnt out that I have no self preservation instinct, but most people don't drive or cycle with the ability that I do. You're an organ donor if you hesitate for a single second in threading the eye of the needle in-between double decker busses.

Adrenalin might seem annoying when you get "Elvis Legs" on a really difficult climb, trying to clip a bolt and knowing that if you miss, you're going to fall about 40 feet or more. Eventually your body re-adjusts, and standing on the top of a 1,500ft tall spike of rock, without any ropes attached to you, is all about the photo-op rather than the potential death.

In the office, people get annoyed with you. They wander over to your desk to tell you how important the report they need is. You just ask them how many people's lives are at danger. You ask how many lives are going to be saved, and then they go away.

Vitamin B6

Very good for allowing all the amino acids to be absorbed into your body. You get a lot more bang for your buck with B6.

Tea & Coffee Extracts

You've been drinking tea and/or coffee for most of your life and your "because I like it" excuse is not watertight. It contains caffeine, so you have habituated the ritual of drinking it. I like making tea. I like the hot water plant alkaloid extraction method (infusion). It reminds me what a bunch of ignorant addicts - who are in denial - that I have to live with.

The extracts that I take are a bit like decaf tea or coffee. They are giving your body the other complex set of chemicals in tea and coffee, without the addictive caffeine and the weirdo behaviour of having a hot drink on a hot day.

Vitamins & Minerals

Yes, everybody knows you can knit your own yoghurt if you have a flower in your hair and have wind chimes that annoy the shit out of the neighbours. Rather than grow a massive pile of fruit and vegetabes in a window box that I don't even own, it's easier to make sure that I'm topped up on all my vitamins and minerals with a single daily pill.

Pills don't replace a balanced diet but they sure as hell are more convenient than having to plan meals around whether I'm getting adequate trace amounts of everything that makes a healthy body.

If you drink alcohol or take mind-bending drugs, they're depleting your body's nutrients. Your brain will be flooded with a month of serotonin, for example, when you drop an Ecstasy pill. I don't condone drug taking, but kids will be kids. The best thing that the mum and dad of a raver kid can do for them is to buy them some 5-HTP, if you want to avoid suicide Wednesdays.

Also, if somebody who isn't me had been on a massive drug bender, their cravings would be pretty damn terrible. The NHS will put you on a 'script'... that is to say that they will keep giving you the drugs you need because the crash will be so awful that you'll probably kill yourself, or go and nick a car stereo to pay for a bag of drugs. It's smart drug policy to have your population not nicking car steros and killing themselves on a comedown.

Would it surprise you to learn that I've been in The Priory? It was a bit shit actually. There were no celebrities (apart from me) and the tellies were bolted down so you couldn't even chuck them out of the window, not that the windows opened very wide.

I wasn't in The Priory on a Librium script, so I couldn't have been an alcoholic. I wasn't in The Priory on a subutex or methadone script, so I couldn't have been a heroin junkie. I wasn't in The Priory on a dexedrine script, so I couldn't have been a crystal meth or amphetamine junkie. I've decided to make it the world's shittest Christmas present to tell the world why I was in The Priory, on this coming Christmas Day 2015. Just for the hell of it.

One of the most amusing phone calls I have ever received was from my boss at JPMorgan saying that they'd got a really nice bonus for me, because of all my good work in the 6 months I'd been in the team. I'd saved the world from a market liquidity event that could have seen another Credit Crunch get triggered. I had other things on my mind, but it's still nice to hear that stuff.

If I had one piece of business advice for you: hire a junkie. They work their fucking arses off.

Staying clean is expensive though. What goes up must come down, and you're going to need £200 of dietary supplements to plug the hole in your brain.

When I say 'junkie' I also include those compliant little freaks that like doing homework, and people who are prepared to neck huge bottles of Modafinil and Methlyphenidate (Ritalin) and any other study aids. Doping in eduction is as bad as doping in sport, if not more widespread. The drugs are cheap and your earning potential will pay you back many times over. It's a good investment.

The adversarial system with 'winners' is totally screwed.  People will do anything for a competitive edge. Personally, I just want to have the odd day where I'm not lethargic and negative and disinterested in everything, and I have to try and shout down the urges to run a sharp knife through my radial artery.

Never let it be said that I didn't try every avenue.

No drugs for me, please. I'll just take a coffee to go. Could you just put a shot of dexedrine in it for me though, please? (February 2015)

Tags: #drugs #addiction #notanonymous

This is a story about stormy weather...

Apologies for the interruption to the blog regularity. This was caused by unpleasant winter weather and being unemployed. I also couldn't see straight and I passed out. Normal service will be resumed again soon.

Since my life fell apart due to illness and divorce, I have never managed get all the essential life things in place at the same time:

1. Stable Accommodation (without 13 snoring people per dorm)
2. A job that's more than just giving blow jobs in a toilet (never tried it, but it's plan "Z")
3. Friends, who respect me, and understand that my life was decimated
4. Family, including parents who can understand how hard it is to do all the things on this list (with no money, despite working)
5. Getting my stuff out or storage and into my apartment
6. A hobby: kitesurfing maybe. Failing that, at least some holidays
7. Deal with a huge pile of 2-and-a-half-year-old post
8. Do my business administration and tax affairs
9. Live near work
10. Not just getting totally smashed drunk all the time, and don't abuse drugs

You have no idea how hard it is too do almost all those things, when you are barely just surviving. The individual tasks are not hard for a person with a job, girlfriend, home. I'm is pretty much totally exhausted and suicidal from other attempts to fix my life. When you get low on funds then idiots start pulling the plug, and all the other work is ruined.

Just because you have a sorted life, don't lecture me. I bought my own home and did loads of work on it, never missed a bill payment, quit my job despite having a "top" ranking in the company (according to my annual performance review). I went to work for New Look to help them internationalise. Job was OK. Commute was too far.

I became an entrepreneur again. I sat in my back garden and made iPhone apps. I had a couple of number 1 hits. This gave me encouragement to say away from 9-5 drudgery, I started IT contracting again, and it was an improvement on being disrespected by the people above your pay grade.

I was then an electrician. If you think your paperwork is bad... wait until you've got to do safety certificates, inspection reports, quotes, cashflow forecasting, wholesaler credit and the challenge of doing all of this comes before paying any money into the bank.

After being an electrician, I went back to iPhone apps, but developing custom ones for companies. That business gave me just about everything I wanted, except a high quality team, and having the cash to grow. There is also even more paperwork associated with a technology company.

I took Hubflow/Mepublish business through the Springboard Accelerator program in Cambridge. We even won 2nd prize at the Cambridge Union Society. The angels didn't want to invest in me at first, because I pitched for their money in flip flops. We still managed to find investors though.

Seeing 150+ mentors in 2 weeks, plus all the other Springboard work was hard too. We had very little time to fix our users bugs, stay on top of invoicing our clients and all the other business administration crap. There were actually too many things on the list.  It was too much to handle.

When I got back from Springboard, my horrible ex was there, pressuring me to go to social occasions and blocking me from moving to the Startup capital of the UK: London. She liked having at least 3 or 4 luxury holidays a year. She liked doing a hobby job that got to stroke her ego. Teachers can work anywhere. She needed to support my 3 years of busting my balls to get into the Tech startup scene.

Anyway, she wouldn't. Her main preoccupation was getting blind drunk at social occasions and then smashing up my expensive camera(s). She'd smashed up one of my cameras 3 weekends in a row. She was never sorry. "It was an accident" is not accepting blame. "I'm sorry" is how humans apologise.

Shortly after Springboard finished, in 2011, the last evening event we ever went to, she smashed another camera, and then when we got back to our hotel room, she started verbally abusing me. She was saying things like "you're a weirdo, none of my family like you [not true] and none of my friends like you [not true]" then she got up, opened the door and stood in the doorway, just shouting "YOU'RE A WIERDO, YOU'RE A WIERDO, EVERYBODY HATES YOU, YOU WEIRDO, YOU'RE A WIERDO" at me at the top of her voice.

I'm not sure whether she held the door open so that people could hear, if I shouted back, or whether it was so she could make a quick getaway if she verbally abused my too much. Whatever the reason, it backfired.

I snapped. I don't really remember what happened, because the next thing that I remember is her screaming. Her scream brought me back to reality. Reality at the time was that she was on the floor, pinned down by me, and my fists was raised in anger.

Because she screamed I let her go and she ran off to many of the concerned faces peering out of their bedrooms: they had been woken up by her tirade of verbal abuse.

I tried to remember what had happened. I remembered asking her to stop abusing me. I asked her to stop being so disrespectful about having broken 3 digital cameras in 3 weeks... I'm the one who paid for those cameras and replacements. I remember being called a "weirdo" over and over again, which was often a schoolyard chant for bullies, which I was on the receiving end of a lot.

Afterwards, my brain finally pieced what had happened together. She had said I was worthless and abusively insulted everything I've ever done, interspersed with calling my a "Weirdo" and telling me that friends and family don't like me.

I grabbed her, but she started trying to punch me, so I threw her on the ground and pinned her arms. She spat in my face, and then the rage was really unleashed. I was no longer in control - I'm guessing - because I don't remember the rage bit. I threw 4 or 5 punches against the struggling abuser before she screamed. The scream woke me up and I got off her and let her run away to the people who had been looking, because of her shouting "weirdo! weirdo".

She spent the night surrounded by her friends and family. I got in my car, knowing that there were a couple of concrete columns I could drive into at 100mph.

Domestic abuse perpetrators should commit suicide though, right. I agree that there need to be severe repercussions for those who commit domestic abuse. Smashing up my face with her fists, going though my personal stuff, isolating me from my friends, controlling my life, verbally abusing, destroying my stuff with no intention of replacing or repairing it, generally being a low grade piece of shit... that kind of stuff affects people.

I blamed myself. I didn't even use the provocation or fact that she physically abused me, as an excuse.

I turned my airbag off and made I made a couple of 100+mph lunges for motorway pillars on the way home. Sadly, most of them have fencing to deflect drivers who  have fallen asleep or want to die.

When I got home I bought something online to kill myself with. It almost worked, but it had very unexpected consequences.

If you think domestic abusers deserve to be miserable, depressed and die, then I'm in agreement with you to some extent.

I had to go to work with two black eyes and a broken nose, and lie for my girlfriend. Nobody can see the verbal and psychological damage that she was doing either. She had an insatiable appetite for spending hours, days, outside my cell, just hurling abuse and threats of violence.

If there is that kind of abuse going on, and you're missing one or more of the 10 things on my list, you are going to struggle to be well. Yes, my mood gets very bad in winter and Xmas/January are particularly horrible times for making it through the seasons.

How can you expect somebody to sort out all the broken things in their life, when they just escaped an abusive relationship, but they lost their job, their home, their friends, their money etc. etc. Just because you've entered a routine boring life, doesn't make you special. I had a normal life. In fact, it wasn't ordinary. It was extraordinary.

Bipolar Disorder can have its blessings. When I'm depressed I can't do much about the shits who gang up on me, but when I'm hypomanic I can work like an absolute machine and avoid having my reputation tarnished by the people who hit and verbally abuse me, and make promises they have no intention of carrying through (another form of abusive): like waving a £50 note in front of a homeless person, asking them if they want it, and then setting fire to it.

To help somebody with a manageable mental heath problem, it's really easy. Just don't lie to them. Don't insult them. Don't stigmatise them. Don't make them spend all their money on private treatment, so they don't have any money. Don't take away their house. Don't badmouth them too all their friends so that they're totally isolated and alone. Don't tell them that you know f**k all about managing a mental health problem that they already successfully managed for 32+ years.

If you're always leaving them out in the cold. If you're always removing opportunities rather than creating them. If you're physically injuring them. If you talk to them in a disgusting way. If you're a totally disrespectful c**t... that's going to drive that person to a bad place.

During my 6 month experiment I discovered this, beyond all reasonable doubt. My Dad's an abusive waste of space who would ruin a supercar to save the money on a single bolt. My Mum is kind and generous, but she's not immune from ignorance, and she trusts my Dad's disgusting views. My ex-wife wanted me dead so she could have my live insurance money, and she's successfully painted a picture of me as some sort of demon.

In private treatment, they teach you not to accept a clinical label for an acute illness as a it will be used against you as derogatory term. Stress and unreasonable expectations, abuse and the relationships collapse around you. Your only visitor is the one who runs the prison. The prison in your home. Your gaoler will come and bang on your locked door around the clock, to make sure you are as agitated as possible.

That's what I've learnt. I've learnt that playing by the rules, being kind, not being vindictive, trusting professionals, but fundamentally evaluating everything base on an objective analysis of the data, has shown this:

• The NHS is wonderful, but Fluoxetine as a first line of defence is ruining lives
• The NHS is wonderful, but getting a referral to a Psychiatrist takes far too long (6+ months)
• The NHS is wonderful, but their Psychiatrists are used to dealing with mostly psychotically ill people who are completely dysfunctional
• The NHS is wonderful, but it's NICE who get to decide what medication they can use. Most things on offer will give you horrible side effects and have very little evidence of long term efficacy
• So, in short, if you're an educated patient, don't listen to your GP. My GP helped to kick me out of my house, so my absolute c**t of an wife could have an affair without distractions
• Your parents know f**k all. Especially if they've put you in hospital a couple of times. Oh, and if they've caused Grievous Bodily Home because they've such primitive apes that they don't have the power of speech, to say "I'm coming to attack you with a piece of glass now because I only know how to be a violent psychopath"
• Private Psychologists and Psychiatrists can be very kind and non-judgemental, and can actually say things that really help. You can actually have a conversation with them about whether a medication is good for dribbling and Jeremy Kyle, or whether there are any upsides
• Dual diagnosis is a fucking curse. Dual diagnosis is a death sentence. When you say something, people have an unlimited amount of ignorant idiotic crap with which to belittle and dismiss your opinion.

But the short explanation is this: people are not very mature and people are not very intelligent. People love to point and laugh and label and exclude the different kid. That translates into adult life too. One of the big reasons why adults don't lose their vicious c**tishness is that all they do is do crosswords and watch TV. They're hopelessly idiotic. When I go to the doctor, I tell them what I want, and they give it to me.

I went to my GP and said "I'm having unmanageable suicidal thoughts, and thinking about self-harming. I've tried to keep myself safe, but I no longer feel able to keep myself safe any more".

My GP wrote a letter to Psychiatric Liaison at the Royal London Hospital, and sent me there immediately.

I spoke to Psychiatric Liaison, and explained that my life was unmanageable, because "my parents kept lying about supporting me, but they were just stringing me on, and that was an unmanageable situation, with a stressful job and the recent stress of moving (without their help of course). I explained that 2 years ago they had told me not to borrow a small amount of cashflow money, and that they would help. I explained that they lied. They waited until the last minute and pretended they had never made the offer, even though they had made it on multiple occasions"

I spoke to the Duty Psychiatrist, and told her I wanted Olanzapine (never taken it before, but I knew it was fast acting... I had no plans to take it... I just wanted to give the Psychiatrist a job) but I wanted to be admitted to hospital.

The Duty Psychiatrist gave me the spiel about hospitals not being a nice environment. I reassured her that I had been on Psych wards before.  She suggested Monday to Friday visits with the Crisis team. I pointed out the day was Saturday.

When I got into the Psych Ward that I wanted, I was happier, relaxed. That's the way things are supposed to work. It took me 13 hours, but I got what I needed.

One of the nurses brought me my Olanzapine, which is what I said I wanted. I knew it's a much smaller pill than Quetiapine, so I could hide it under my tongue and then spit it out when I was out of view.

Yes, I finally got what I wanted out of the NHS, which was to help me from committing suicide. They gave me a safe hospital environment to shield me from the bullshit life that drove me to suicide. Can you believe that my boss at HSBC actually gave me and my sister a hard time. I was in hospital for 2 weeks with a suspected heart condition. That's disgusting.

3 hot meals a day and a bed. Oh, and maybe a TV. I was a little bored, but the other patients were good to talk to, and we did our little Hole in my Bucket musical number. A s**tload more interesting than working on a project that's falling flat (HSBC Customer Due Diligence: CDD) on it's face because they terminate the contracts of anybody with expertise and skill and has a track record of turning failing projects around.

Oh, and while I was in hospital (was it the 4th or the 5th major admission, I've lost count) my parents decided to give me half the sum of money that they promised me I could borrow off them 2 and a half years ago, but just lied. That's right, they lied. They lied about wanting to help, and their lie was exposed too late for me to be able to arrange an alternative. Two and a half years later! Having to spend 2 and a half years living off my wits in London is hard.

So here's the bottom line: if you love your children and you want to help them, listen to them and if you make a promise to help them, don't let them down.

If you think you've got a "bad kid" you're probably a hypocritical c**t. My mistreating your kids, mugging them off, taking the p**s out of them, never praising them for anything, just doing whatever the hell you want all the time. There's no such thing as a "bad kid" they've all got parents. If those parents drink and smoke and take drugs and can't be bothered to get a proper job, and had their house bought for them by their elderly parents... what disgusting hypocrisy.

The reason why this blog post is late, is because I always have to take matters in to my own hands. You know all those anti-depressants you pop, and the beer, wine and vodka that you tip down your gullet? You're buying overpriced medication, and self-medicating for whatever problems you have in your life, or baggage you're still carrying around.

I'm still not drinking, but I'm sick of being in hospital. I'm sick of how much time & money it costs me to be your convenient scapegoat. I'm sick of people looking at medicine bottles and thinking that they know something about me. I actually keep my medication in a bottle by the bed to get rid of shallow girlfriends. The medications inside have never been touched.

I'm going to start tapering psychoactive substances into my life. Total abstinence proves nothing. If we follow the abstinence theory to its ultimate conclusion, we give up on food, because it's converted to glucose in the body, and glucose is sugar.

So, which is a more fitting epitaph?

Here lies Nick. He was such a non-addict he even gave up food. Any oxygen. What a hero. He died, so that his parents could continue being complete selfish ignorant cunts. A noble sacrifice. Turns out that life is a lot more livable with sugar and other things

Or I've got another one for you. Do you like this one?

Here lies Nick. He died doing what he loved. His parents actually gave a shit about him, so they decided to support him for once, and involve the rest of the family rather than just spreading malicious bullshit about him. Turns out that you don't die young if you're nice to your sons and daughters. Rumour has it that Nick's dad even gave £1 to charity for the first time in his miserable life, in the hope that Nick could see it from the afterlife.

They're quite long. Maybe they need to be edited down a bit.

Anyway, chemical oblivion awaits. Wake me up when 2 and a half years have passed and my cunt Dad might actually let my mum help her son.

Oh, help myself? Did you say "help yourself".... yeah, good idea. I've been doing it for my entire adult life, because my parents are such selfish liars who should never have had kids. I've had barely the briefest breaks in between companies in my career. I work my f**king arse off. I'm busting my balls to help myself, and others too.

This is what my parents think I spend my money on. No, when my life has been completely fucked over I very rarely spend the price of a large Dominos pizza on enough drugs to tranquilize an elephant, because you lie to me and fuck over my plans, which is very stressful (December 2015)

Tags: #drugs #suicide #bipolar #nhs #addiction