This is a story about rehab...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's important to respect people.

Just respect people.

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

This is a story about unusual techniques to stay alive...

I once filled up a law firm's email server with pictures of myself. I was quite concerned that I was dying and wanted to get the attention of the family friend who was mediating on a matter that was very stressful - an acrimonious divorce was threatening my life & livelihood. Still, very strange behaviour.

When I was getting completely nonsensical replies via email from somebody, I started CC'ing more and more people, so they could see that none of my questions were being answered and an ulterior motive was being pursued by this other person.

Obviously, letting people know when I was in hospital was a bit 'attention seeking' apparently, but messages of support were gratefully received. I know I still have to reply to quite a few people who were kind enough to reach out, but you can believe me when I say your messages did really make a difference.

There was a guy in London who was going to kill himself, but he decided that if, as he walked along, one person looked him in the eye and smiled at him then he wouldn't go through with it. The urban solitude of London had made him feel invisible, uncared for, alone. Thankfully, somebody did look him in the eye and smile. Human connection is important. Somebody saved that man's life with the simplest of gestures that cost nothing.

Urban solitude is a problem for many new arrivals in the capital. People have their headphones plugged in, reading a book, or their kindle, watching a movie on their tablet or perhaps just idly playing with their phone. Especially in the morning rush-hour, nobody is talking or in any way acknowledging that you're all crammed together like sardines in a stuffy tube carriage, on the way to that job that you all hate, from some far-flung flat that you can barely afford.

Anybody who shops in a town centre is probably expert at avoiding the people with clipboards who "just need a moment of your time" to fill in some survey or sign up to direct debit some regular donation to a particular charity. We have become experts in walking right through people giving out leaflets, who aggressively thrust them into areas of our body near our hands, but yet we avoid actually taking a damn leaflet. We can walk right past the beggar and the Big Issue seller without even acknowledging their existence. 1,000-yard stare, off into the distance, and pretend like you didn't even hear them, didn't even see them.

I was thinking today about the improvements that Frank made to his story he told me, in order to seem like a more worthy cause. He shaved 4 years off his age, and showed me his forearms and asked me to inspect for the track marks of an injecting drugs user. It makes me feel bad that I've told my own story of homelessness, if people are going to dismiss it because of my drug use that I'm being completely honest and open about.

When you meet homeless people, they are often very keen for you to know that drugs and alcohol play no part in their homelessness. To be honest, I was very surprised, when I sat down to have a chat with a homeless person, Matt, underneath the bridge outside Chiswick underground station. Matt was extremely articulate and erudite, and I owe him a big debt of thanks for some of the nuggets of information that were later to serve me well on my own journey through homelessness. I have to admit that although I believed him, I was extremely shocked when he told me he had no drug or alcohol abuse in his past. He was simply p**sed off with the system.

If it looks like I'm dropping all this stuff about getting to know the homeless, and trying to help Frank, into this narrative in order to big myself up as some kind of philanthropist, you're wrong. Actually, I found it fascinating, informative, later useful and certainly helping Frank helped me to avoid dealing with my own life at the time, and feel better about myself. There was no alturism there. It was escapism.

Every fun-run that you go on. Every sponsored walk or abseil, or parachute jump or whatever it is... you probably did it because you wanted to do the activity, to feel part of the event, to feel like you made a difference. Sadly, you didn't, except to your own sense of wellbeing and achievement. Yes, we salve our middle-class guilt by making paltry charity donations and taking part in fundraising. Charity doesn't work. It's failed.

We are arriving now at a situation where we are in the middle of a refugee crisis, a housing crisis, a benefits crisis, a pension crisis, an economic crisis, a mental health epidemic. Cancer, AIDS, Multiple Sclerosis and a heap of other diseases are still rife. Poverty has not been made history by any rock concerts.

I'm absolutely not discouraging you from getting involved with philanthropic work, and if you're a volunteer or you're doing your bit to directly help in the lives of others then I applaud you... not that you want or deserve such condescension. Sorry about that.

Everything's just so damn broken. Life's really not working well for the vast majority of people on Planet Earth.

If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem, and I feel very guilty indeed.

Here I am being driven to work through a massive slum in Mumbai from my 7 star hotel. I'm off to help JPMorgan process $1.16qn of Credit Default Swaps, with a team of underpaid Indians who travel for hours on dangerous and overcrowded busses and trains to get to the office. Do you think I was helping this nation of 1.1 billion souls?

I was there in the middle of Ganesh Chaturthi and the monsoon rains. The streets were crammed with trailers with idols and flowers being towed to the sea, with dancing neighbourhood groups beating drums and dancing in the road behind them. The roads are pretty much gridlock anyway, without some gawping tourist of an investment banker sitting in the middle of the chaos with his private driver.

We can feel very special being driven around in the developing world, and living like a king relatively speaking. Many people fall for it. Many people fall for the trick and start believing they actually are special and they deserve their place in the world. That, for me, is where a person can cross the line and stray into narcissism and a sense of entitlement.

Several friends have told me virtually the same story, about thinking they were a hit with the ladies in South Asia or South America, and having 'pulled' a local girlfriend, they were surprised when later asked for cash. Just because you're not obviously in a whorehouse, doesn't mean that you're not participating in prostitution. Just because you're not obviously on a cotton plantation, doesn't mean you're not participating in slavery.

Economic slavery means using your hard currency (Dollar, Sterling, Euro, Yen etc.) in order to buy labour (and all labour's fruits) far more cheaply than you would be able to in a country with a hard currency. You can't get pedalled across a European city in a bicycle rickshaw for less than $1. In London it's £10/minute to be ferried around in this manner, and you can be stung with a £200 bill for a journey that would take 3 minutes by bus.

So, I'm able to sit about on my arse writing the equivalent of two novels all about myself on a blog, peppered with photographs of me. This can only happen at the expense of everybody who grew my food, stitched my clothes and manufactured the expensive laptop on which I type these very words. You could say I'm the ultimate narcissist and profiteer from the hard labour of others.

However, modern life can make you very sick. My friend Klaus often says "it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a sick society". I think he's right. Just because we are dry and warm and well fed and comfortable here in the UK, doesn't mean that our island is now 'full' and we should 'look after our own'.

We are beginning to pay the price for Imperial aggression and an unwillingness to share. That we don't even redistribute enough wealth to end homelessness and poverty within our own borders, shows just how far we have taken small-minded 'look after number one' attitudes. The tabloid reader's belief that immigrants are not an integral part of our society, is ironic when a great many of Britain's working class are clustered together on sink-hole estates that they can never escape. Nobody from higher social strata would ever have cause to venture into the isolated community of poor white Brits.

Do I think I'm better than those people? Am I above living in a council flat, claiming JSA and integrating with the [not] working class? Actually, I feel rather angry that these people have been manipulated by the media into scapegoating the wrong group of people. It's the moneyed political elite who are the reason for economic inactivity and stressful hand-to-mouth existance of the ordinary British public, not the immigrants and refugees.

Yes, I'm privileged. Yes, I still have some shred of self-esteem. Yes, I'm somewhat conceited in writing so much about myself and plastering photos of me all over it. But am I unaware of my actions? Am I unable to perceive the self-absorption of it all? No.

The fact of the matter is that I just don't want to be trodden underfoot, so I'm yapping like a little dog. I don't want to end up dying young, with everybody wondering what happened and whether they could have helped at all, whether they could have intervened.

Suicide might be a sane response to an insane world, but I do appreciate that it's not a pleasant thing for other people to have to deal with, when you're gone. I've written before about compassion fatigue, and it must be hard when one of your friends or a family member becomes unwell with something so poorly understood as a mental disorder.

Drinking yourself to death, or slowly killing yourself with drugs... these things are clearly part of the spectrum of mental disorders. Substance abuse is just part of a complex picture of declining mental heath that is tightly bound up with prejudice and urban myths.

I had to quit drinking for 101 days, and all drugs and substances for 6 months, in order to be taken seriously. I suffered for my art and my cause: to draw attention to the plight of ordinary human beings who are suffering, not because they are corrupt and immoral, but because our very society is sick, and we are turning our back on our own friends and relatives, because of stupid media bulls**t.

Things have to be pretty bad in somebody's life for them to take a risk with a deadly substance. Things have to be really bad in somebody's life for them to be driven into the arms of a chemical dependency, in preference for choosing life.

Why did I choose not to choose life? Why did I choose something else?

Tags: #drugs #addiction #homeless #frank #career #divorce #politics

This is a story about maintaining a degree of freedom...

Which one of these faces represents your mood? What if there was a pill, powder, liquid or a gas that could take you from a face on the right, to a face on the left? Would you use it?

Apparently 90% of adult Americans drink coffee. That's a pretty amazing statistic, isn't it? Officially, there are 350 million Chinese smokers. That's more than the entire population of the USA. Every weekend, town centres across the United Kingdom are turned into warzones, with huge numbers of binge drinkers, taking themselves to the brink of alcohol poisoning, and even beyond.

That's just the stuff you can buy in shops, over the counter. You can walk down the road, 7 days a week, and purchase coffee, cigarettes and alcohol.

Now let's talk about prescription medications. In Tower Hamlets, the borough of London where I currently live, Prozac (Fluoxetine) prescriptions are rising at 8% per year. London issued 5.21 million Prozac prescriptions last year. Over 20% more Londoners are taking antidepressants than 3 years ago.

So, in all probability, somebody somewhere has got their hooks into you. Either you drink coffee, you smoke, you drink alcoholic drinks, or you take mind-altering prescription medication. You are owned by somebody. A proportion of your wealth and tax dollars are going on mind-bending substances.

The picture above is of a blade that I have managed to remove from a Gillette Fusion razor, and crudely bend into a cutting implement. It's actually pretty tiny, hence why I never noticed that it was still lying on the bathroom floor. However, it's easily big and sharp enough to slice open veins and arteries.

Wouldn't I be better off taking antidepressants, so that my mood doesn't sink so low that I attempt suicide? Wouldn't I be better off in a chemical straightjacket?

Given that I have no fear of homelessness and destitution, why do I need something that artificially props up my mood and allows me to function, when my natural mood is telling me that something is wrong?

What goes up must come down, and for every desired effect of a medication, there are one or more side effects. Often times, people will take a medication for one ailment, and then have to take another medication to compensate for the side effects, and perhaps even some more for further side effects. It's much like the old lady who swallowed the fly, who ends up swallowing a horse.

Ok, so my mood episodes are pretty brutal, but at least I have a clear clinical picture, in medical parlance. It's fairly easy for me and any clinicians to see what my mood is doing, as the water is relatively unmuddied by mind-altering substances.

So what is my mood doing? Well, it's yo-yoing up and down like an insane elevator operator. However, it pretty much follows the instability of my life. 7 or 8 months ago I was homeless, then I was living in a hostel, then I was living with an alcoholic and his unfaithful wife, then I was sofa surfing with a friend, then I was living in hotels during a time when just about every London hotel was booked out for the Rugby World Cup, and then I got a flat.

Jobwise, I had a 9 month contract, and then a 6 month contract. I'm working about 6 months in 12, with the chance to push that up to 9 in 12 if I can get my arse back in gear. It's not a very stable work environment though.

I spent about 15 weeks receiving inpatient treatment in 2014. That really was an annus horribilis. I was in hospital for about 8 days (2 admissions) in 2015. That's quite a big improvement. 2016 remains hospitalisation free, despite some fairly sketchy stuff that probably should have seen me admitted.

But you can't see the other data that I have in front of me. My alcohol consumption, my coffee consumption, my abuse of drugs & medications... all of this is going through a radical transformation too. From regular and massive binges on wine & beer, coffee to prop me up in the mornings, drugs and medication to while away the time inbetween jobs: I've knocked almost all of that on the head. Life is a lot more straightforward when you're not peering through a haze of mind-altering substances.

However, it's a little too straightforward. In terms of stress levels right now, I'd rather give up the responsibility of having a flat, bills to pay, a man to kowtow to. It might be cold and wet and s**tty weather outside right now, but I'd still rather be living in a tent and not looking at a stack of 8 box files full of paperwork I need to deal with.

Seems bizarre, right, to choose to be homeless, destitute? Well, I don't think it's any more insane than working your arse off to pay for your rail season ticket and pay for the mortgage and bills on a house you never get to spend any time in.

Personally, I just feel as though modern life is making me unwell, so I reject as much of it as I can. I do the bare minimum to keep the wheels turning, and otherwise I turn my back on the madness. I try not to be swept along by the current.

I know my mood will change, and I will feel differently about things during a different kind of mood episode. I'm not going to poke and prod at my mind though, and try and coerce it into taking on an altered perception of reality.

Tags: #bipolar #depression #suicide #mentalhealth #nhs

This is a story about self prescribing...

If you know what medication you want, you can cut out the middlemen and just buy it yourself direct from a country that doesn't have a rigid system of prescriptions, provided it's not a controlled substance, and therefore illegal to import.

I wrote about self medication through non-pharmacological mechanisms in a previous blog post entitled Self Medication (Part One) if you wish to refresh your memory.

Going GP -> Psychiatrist -> Pharmacist is actually quite a slow process when you're trying to find a medication that works for you. Also, many medications are only licensed to treat certain illnesses, but there is sometimes a strong body of research that proves they are effective on other illnesses. Because of concerns about medical malpractice lawsuits, it's quite hard to get an 'off label' prescription, even if there is good data to support the use of a particular medication in your individual case.

So it was that I came to be experimenting with medications like Pramipexole (Mirapex), Bupropion (Wellbutrin), Cabergoline (Dostinex), Aripiprazole (Abilify) and even crazy ones like Piribedil (Trivastal). Results were a mixed bag.

The bottom line is this: you probably don't want to f**k with medication. Aripiprazole left me uncontrollably dribbling, and unable to speak without an unintended spray of saliva. Piribedil would cause me to fall asleep randomly, like a narcoleptic.

But, Bupropion works. It's a very effective, fast-acting antidepressant. However, it raises your anxiety levels, causes insomnia, panic attacks and exacerbates hypomania. It's not a good medication for somebody with Bipolar, unopposed by a mood stabiliser.

Messing around with medications was very dangerous, and I may have even put myself at risk of early-onset Parkinson's disease. Certainly, my later messing around with L-DOPA was on a trajectory leading to complete disaster.

It's about harm reduction though. Tea and coffee are on a stimulant continuum that leads to amphetamines and even stronger stimulants. Alcohol is on a depressant continuum that leads to benzodiazepines and even stronger 'downers'. If you have been using coffee & alcohol to self-medicate for your mood fluctuations, you will be driven to seek out stronger alternatives, when those substances no longer work anymore, or face a breakdown.

Eventually, you'll find that heroin is really great to help you sleep, and crystal meth is really great when you need to be awake and get stuff done. You don't want to end up there. Don't go there.

There are modern sleep aids like Zopiclone & Zolpidem, and newer wakefulness and concentration promoting agents like Methylphenidate (Ritalin) and Modafinil. Naturally, I experimented with these.

Ritalin, I found to be very much like cocaine. You want to take more but you're not sure why. You don't really feel like you're getting anything out of it, but you strangely find yourself taking loads of it. Dangerous. Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote a book called More, Now, Again which is amongst the literature that inspires my writing. However, it's simply not possible to snort 60 Ritalin pills, like she claims. That volume of powder will simply not fit into your nasal sinuses. She's right about one thing though: Ritalin is addictive.

Modafinil simply makes you awake, not happy. More time awake, unhappy, is really the very last thing that you want if you're depressed, so I discontinued its use and find no function for this wakefulness promoting agent, personally.

Zolpidem doesn't keep you asleep for long enough to be of any use. Sure, you fall asleep, but then you wake up again and spend the whole night with your usual insomnia. Useless.

Zopiclone works but it's a little too brilliant. Again, for somebody with Bipolar, waking up feeling totally refreshed simply stokes your hypomania to dangerous levels. It delays an inevitable crash, when the drug ceases to be effective at acceptable dosages, and insomnia leads to exhaustion, which leads to depression.

It's all available, out there on both the public internet and the Dark Web. It's a few clicks away for a middle class person with a computer and a postal address.

My parting advice is this: don't go there. Don't even look. Don't tempt yourself. Don't give yourself false hope. Don't experiment. I've done the experiments, and found nothing good there. The side effects just aren't worth it. The downsides outweigh the upsides.

There are no medicinal cures. There are no medications that 'fix' Unipolar Depression and Bipolar. It's an avenue not worth pursuing.

Sorry about that.

Tags: #bipolar #depression #mentalhealth

This is a story about helping people...

Those are some kids from an extremely poor fishing village in Northern Brazil who I gave my surfboard to. Imagine one of them gets really good at surfing, like former Brazilian windsurfing World Champion, Ricardo Campbello. But then imagine if they get a lucrative sponsorship deal and then with their wealth and fame, they get into drugs and die of an overdose. Did I help or did I hinder?

Same dilemma when a friend or relative gets sick. If you help them back to health, they might then go on to do something that they wouldn't have been able to if you'd just let them die. You now feel responsible for their fate. If they do good things, you feel glad and proud of what you did to help them. If they do bad things, you question whether you should have helped them, and not just let them die.

Is that how it works? I don't know. I don't tend to look at people and actions as good and bad. I tend to assume that there is a set of circumstances, an environment, that drives a person's behaviour. I also can't stand by and let things play out. I don't want to play God either, and decide that I know the future, and sit in judgement over anybody. I feel it's my duty to help where I can.

And so it was, I came to be helping Frank, or trying at least, to escape alcoholism and homelessness. A hotel and a hostel that I stuck him in, to get him off the streets, were not exactly thrilled to have him as a guest. But unwittingly, they are part of a larger story that saw Frank go through treatment for alcohol dependency, go teetotal and get a place to live.

For all I know, I may have delayed or detracted from something that was inevitable anyway. I might have actually risked his recovery, for all I know. All I know is that when I met him, he was homeless and a polydrug abuser with an alcohol dependency, as well as numerous other health complaints that were being exacerbated by living on the streets.

Naturally, Frank wanted more than I could give. He wanted me to make all his problems go away. Nobody can do that for somebody else. We're all fighting our own fight at the end of the day, we just need some supporters in our corner. We just need somebody to hold the bucket while we spit blood into it.

So, what's the difference between a lapse, and a fully-blown relapse into drug and/or alcohol abuse? Well, somebody who's had a drink, sobered up and is now telling you "I won't do that again" but has a bottle of vodka in their bag is clearly not very committed to sobriety.

During my recent shenanigans, I hid my little bag of Supercrack. Then I took a load of legal benzos and went to sleep. When I woke up, I considered that I needed to end the binge completely, or risk total relapse, however it was too easy to just go and retrieve my little baggie from its hiding place and continue the whole horrid affair.

It wasn't until I chose to flush the chemicals down the plughole, by my own free will, that I had clearly delimited the episode as a lapse, not a relapse.

Anybody is capable of going on the Internet and following the steps that I did, and then tearing open the postal envelope and snorting the contents inside. Therefore, we share the same addictive potential, you & I. In fact, I'm less of a risk than you, because I have far greater first-hand knowledge and experience of what the negative consequences are. It might take you several months or years before you realise that you're in deep s**t.

So, I'm presently going through a chemical and digital detox. That means that I probably haven't read any blog comments, Facebook comments, Facebook messages, WhatsApp messages or anything that has been sent to me electronically. Sorry about that. I do need those messages and I will get round to reading them and responding. I am extremely grateful that you took the time to send me anything. Please keep reaching out.

I do need your help, and it will make a positive difference. You're not 'enabling' me to continue to do anything naughty/bad, and you're not guilty by association to some future as-yet uncommitted crime spree or whatever it is that holds back those who think they have God-like Minority Report style powers to preordain the future.

I've been a bit of a puppet on a string, but I've managed to sever the ties to those unseen hands, and now I'm just your friend, who is very sick and very tired and very alone and very sad and very vulnerable.

Tags: #frank #homeless #addiction #alcohol #drugs #addiction

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 dangerous combinations...

When people started dying of AIDS, everybody thought it was a disease limited to homosexual men. Everybody knows that hetros get HIV too, but what about high levels of promiscuity and apps like Grindr? Well, hetros have Tinder now etc.

Silendafil (Viagra) started to be commercialised globally during the 90's, and this also changed the public consciousness, to make the use of drugs during romantic interludes, more widely accepted.

Performance enhancing drugs get everywhere. EPO & Anabolic Steroids in sport. Modafinil and Methylphendiate in academia. Cocaine on the banks' trading floors. Dexedrine for the fighter pilots and soldiers.

Sex now has Cabergoline, which allows men to have multiple orgasms, as well as the erectile dysfunction medications. Also, stimulants like Crystal Meth give people unhuman sexual appetites and stamina.

The problem with combining an addictive drug with a compulsive behaviour, is that you are linking hardwired survival circuitry into the learning & reward mechanisms, which creates a feedback loop. Every time you get horny, you're going to want drugs. You can't stop getting horny... it's evolved into your DNA. You've misprogrammed your mesolimbic pathway.

I ordered some alloy wheel cleaner from BASF in Germany, which a few drops of used to accidentally fall into a gulp of orange juice for my ex-wife and me. "Should we do some more?" she used to say, and can you believe that I used to have to be the sensible one and say "no, we'd better stop there. Know our limits. Keep a handle on this thing".

So, my divorce was more than the loss of a life partner. It was the loss of a shared drug & sex addiction too. It wasn't healthy. It was co-dependent. It needed to end. It's just that whoever was weaker at the time was going to get destroyed. That was me.

If you feel like a freak, don't worry, in London you'll blend right in. You can get a f**k on Craigslist in about 30 minutes, on on Tinder in about an hour. I once met a chap in the park who asked me to be his eyes to get him to hospital because he had gone literally cross-eyed after eating 16 Viagra.

Too Much Information (TMI)? Well, actually, if you read more carefully there's no actual confession there. I'm just giving you the scope and the scale of the problem. The parameters that I'm working with.

Thankfully, you can't just walk to a stall on Camden Market, or a sex shop in Soho and buy Legal Highs now. You can't do it on a whim. You can't just happen to be passing by.

You can't even sell Legal Highs now. You have to call them Research Chemicals, and mark them as toxic. Not for human consumption. That's right. Accidents happen though.

None of this stuff is in my life, but it's 24 hours waiting for the postman away.

I've been dreaming about having a meal, having something to eat, but every time I wake up I feel too overwhelmed. I've lost my appetite. It can't possibly be a lack of blood in my drugstream, because there isn't anything alien in my system. I'm as clean as a whistle.

There's a mountain of things I need to deal with, including drinking & eating enough. Most of it is very mundane and practical. I know we've all shoved post in a drawer and tried not to think about it at some stage in our life. Imagine doing that with everything you need to do, including the consumption of enough calories to sustain life.

I'm sorry it all sounds a bit pathetic and needy. I'm sorry it's all so sordid and grubby. I'm sorry it's all so personal and embarrassing and shameful and private. You know, it's exhausting, hiding an alter ego that you're terrified of anybody discovering.

Oh well, f**k it. Cat's out of the bag now. I'm so exhausted. I'm going back to sleep. Maybe I'll have a lovely dream about Greggs the Baker again.

Tags: #addiction #alcohol #drugs #sex #divorce

This is a story about trying to break the loop...

I reprogrammed my brain. Infinite loop. Game over.

It was really hard but I mostly programmed it back. But you know why code line numbers go 10, 20, 30 etc? It's so that you can add extra lines without having to renumber your whole program: e.g. 11 GOTO 20

I took my working fixed code, and added an old buggy instruction that I used to write. It's a screwup, but I know where the bug is and how to fix it.

It's not something the hospital, or mental health services, crisis team or some specialist private care, or social services, or the police, or my GP is going to fix. There's an art installation called The Pharmacy by Damian Hirst, about our faith in medicine, at the Tate Modern. You should think about what he wanted you to think about, when he made that artwork.

Please don't think there's somebody qualified or professional out there, unless they can show you the evidence and data that proves that they and/or medications are 'curing' people of Type 2 Bipolar & any substance abuse issues they might have (Dual Diagnosis).

I managed my symptoms down to just a single suicidal episode in 5 or 6 months with zero drugs, medication, alcohol & caffeine. Also managed 5ish months work. Long hours too. Also had to move house a bunch of times, nearly go bankrupt a bunch of times, travel 3 times further than necessary, carry my life in a few bags. I would say that I'm the qualified one around here.

However, somebody has activated 'professional help' so I may be disappearing into one system or another, or one via another. The bug will still be there if I ever get out of the damn revolving doors and it's so exhausting you never have enough energy left to finish the job of rebuilding your life and getting better.

Please wish me the very best of luck in being 'assessed' and whatever is going to happen instead of me trying to fix my life and get back to normal.

I know it's well intentioned, but please re-read this whole thing again. It explains why it hurts more than it helps.

By the way: Nurses, Porters, Phlebotomists, Doctors and all the people who have to do a very difficult job under difficult circumstances. I am grateful and I do think that what you do is very important and helps enormous numbers of peoples's lives. I'm sorry for the time & effort that is about to be wasted on me.

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

This is a story about one hundred and one days sober...

I did it, and I also managed to go cold turkey on caffeine, sleeping pills, medication (antidepressants, mood stabilisers, anxiety drugs) and legal highs (sorry, they're called 'research chemicals' now) & illegal drugs, plus get some control over sex and spending money.

For 6 fucking months I sucked up the pill/powder withdrawal effects and over 3 more months no alcohol. I had not a single chemical that I could turn to to salve the emotional wounds, to ease the turmoil in my brain, to anaesthetise the pain. To attenuate the distress. To take a holiday from the stress.

Pure fucking discipline went into turning down every beer after work, every glass of mulled wine, every cup of tea or coffee that was offered, and every pharmaceutical that I can get by feigning symptoms in order to get an official prescription or just buy on the black market, and every 'research chemical' or just whatever the hell you want that is just one click away on the Dark Web.

Easy enough for a happy fulfilled 2.4 children, 9-to-5 family unit who watches TV all week and goes on outings at the weekends, and has their time filled with mopping up excrement and vomit and doing the kids homework. I'm sure it's very fulfilling to be guardians of your cloned genes, working as hard as you can to give those genes a chance to clone again.

I reached a critical juncture in my life where I was earning six figures including my iPhone apps, and I had a flexible lifestyle, and my fiancé/ex/girlfriend was earning £15k and didn't have very much flexibility. She wanted to be a trainee teacher, so evenings and weekends were for lesson planning and marking. I could write an iPhone app in a day and it would earn £8k. But she had a grand plan because she was so clever.

In the end I gave her three choices: either I go on medication so I don't give a shit that what I'm doing is soul destroying, I switch careers to one that will be really much less psychologically damaging but our kids will see much less of me, or we get pregnant and then it gives a reason for me to do what my professional experience qualifies me to do.

We opted for the latter, but I pulled the plug because I wasn't sure if I was going to pass on Bipolar genes or get too stressed and turn to drugs & alcohol to cope. I love her, I love kids, I love doing family stuff. But it's not all swings and roundabouts and cotton candy and rainbows. I started to doubt my coping mechanisms. I started to believe I couldn't be a trusted father (based on no evidence, beyond the fact that other people's kids love to play with me).

So our relationship became about hedonism. We took loads of GBL (GHB) which makes women have amazing orgasms. I took Cabergoline so I could have multiple orgsasms. Better sex through chemistry (or psychopharmacology actually).

I started fucking about with legal highs that would give me the energy to fuck all night. I was systematic. I would buy shitty tabloid newspapers to read what the kids were taking. Usefully, they led me to the piperazines and the cathinones (e.g. BZP and M-CAT a.k.a. Meow Meow). Those drugs are utter shit, but they led me to Methylone (bk-MDMA). I tried all the others on sale except for NRG-3 which didn't have an ingredient declared.

I'd made a list for myself of drugs to never take: heroin, crack, crystal meth, MDPV. Hang on, wait, what, MDPV. Yeah, it's the stuff that crack addicts and crystal meth tweakers get addicted to and then end up killing themselves or eating a tramp's face off or buying a Caribbean island and fucking a 17 year old girl while holding a loaded gun to their head and putting it on YouTube. Kinda standard stuff for a billionaire technology entrepreneur, right?

So if you don't know what's in the 'legal' high called NRG-3 and there are loads of crack addicts and meth addicts online saying this shit is way more addictive and they're now more fucked than ever and crack and meth seem like a weak cup of tea by comparison, alarm bells should be ringing.

In September 2011 I needed to break up with my selfish bully of a girlfriend. I didn't have the guts. I Went home, bottled out from driving into a concrete pillar at 100mph with the airbag turned off. Got home, ordered NRG-3, it was there the next day. Recommended dosage: zero milligrams. Insane dosage: 5 to 15mg. My dosage: 1,000mg.

I played with fire, got hurt, my fault right? Don't come crying to me when your medication gives you an averse reaction or a deadly interaction. Don't come crying to me when your medication does very little for your symptoms, but an endless list of side effects.

Turns out your heart can beat at 200bpm and not explode if you'e reasonably fit & active. Turns out your brain won't even start hearing voices or seeing things if your reasonably sane. Stimulants are a terrible thing to O.D. on. Barbiturates, opiates, cyanide, ricin, botox, nicotine, inert gas, poison gas, set fire to yourself, chuck yourself off a tall building or a cliff, sever a femoral or radial artery if you know enough about anatomy. Jugular veins, and any other large visible veins will get you there in the end. Fall on a sword around rib number 3 and hit the aorta or vena cava. That's all going to be in the 30 second to 4 minute region. Remember, you need to lose 8 pints of blood or suffocate for 3 minutes approximately.

Electrocution is hard now we have RCD circuit protection devices now, but if you're an electrician you'll be able to rig a circuit without protection. Hold something earthed in the left hand, touch something live with your right hand. Current will flow right across your chest and put your heart into ventricular fibrillation and probably cause enough internal burning to make defibrillation impossible.

Breathing pure nitrogen 0r s0me other inert gas probably seems least scary. No hypercapnic alarm response. Just like falling asleep, forever. Suffocation and you don't even know it's happening.

Jumping in front of busses, trains and tubes is unethical. Those witnesses will be psychologically scarred.

O.D.s... well most home attempts just screw up your organs and you die a slow and painful death. It has to be a nerve toxin, breathing suppressant, or something to stop the heart. An over-the-counter remedy would be co-codamol/Solpadine (without caffeine). Dissolve everything in warm water, then chill to sub 5 degrees C. Now filter out the nasty liver destroying Paracetamol using lab grade paper. Chill the solution again to sub 5 degrees C and filter again. What you're left with is liquid death.

Stabbing yourself in the aorta or vena cava or a pumping chamber is quickest. Just hammer the blade into rib 3 to 5 on the left hand side, and don't let muscles and tendons pull you back to the solar plexus or onto other ribs. You just need to 'fall on your sword' as the Japanese say.

A friend has given me enough to survive, food & drink wise. My flatmate has given me the space and time. My psychosis has gone after sleep. I need to check my kidneys function but my bladder seems to still be filling.

Shame seems to be the next threat to life. I have a blade that's long enough to penetrate my chest muscles, ribs and reach the top of my heart where the blood is at its highest pressure and death would be quickest. Seems prudent when I feel nowhere near close or well equipped enough to turn my health around and get my room into a phase 1 cleanup state, with the eventual state being pristine condition.

If not allowed to live without soul-destroying shame, I'd like to be a fly, vomiting on food and sucking up digested contents, laying eggs in putrid meat. Bhuddism is for me. Humans have a neocortex - consciousness - so I'd rather be re-incarnated as non-human. Thinking is a pain, although I could write an academic paper and a couple of books in a tent or a cave, or a psych ward or a prison, but the easiest thing of all would be non-human, and not troubled by consciousness.

The irony is that I now have several cerebral and physical/social things I would like to do, but I'm paralysed by shame that only I can begin to resolve. Being in hospital/psych/custody now just leaves me impotent to do anything to resolve anything. The end of the story will be written by somebody else.

Tags: #suicide #addiction #alcohol

This is a story about taking things to extremes...

I stopped eating for the last 4 days. It was easy. I just didn't eat, and then when I got hungry, I still didn't eat. Then I stopped feeling hungry, and I continued not eating.

Food contains carbohydrates and carbohydrates are broken down into glucose and glucose is a type of sugar and sugar is a drug. So I quit all drugs for 4 days (actually 6 months, if you don't include food).

Now, we all know that cheese is as addictive as hard drugs. In fact, food, water and oxygen are all as addictive as hard drugs, because you keep taking them and taking them, and then you die. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Giving up cheese wasn't very hard. I've hardly eaten it at all for months, but total abstinence is the only way to not be called a junkie and spat on by your own family, right? They'll spit on you for not inventing a time machine and erasing your prior misdemeanours, and call you an ex-junkie in-between their injections of heroin that is.

Basically, I win, you lose. There's literally no way for me to take this precious abstinence any further unless I put a plastic bag over my head and duct tape it around my neck so I can't breathe.

And contrary to popular belief, my life has been absolute living hell. I feel like a special robot that can feel emotions, and that emotion is sadness. I go through my robotic motions, and I wonder to myself "why the hell am I doing this? what's the fucking point?". Pretty much the only thing that's keeping me going is that I'm on day 90 of a bet that I made with a friend that I couldn't do 101 days. Every day I think to myself, only X days to go before I've proved nothing and I can either go back to being like every hypocritical judgemental ignorant idiot I have the misfortune to have to be judged by, or I can I can kill myself at the point where you would have to write in the obituary "we can't blame drugs or alcohol".

Ha ha ha. I win.

Tags: #addiction