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 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 interpretation...

Anybody who has studied physics to an advanced level will tell you that at a certain point you have to suspend the search for the tangible, the intuitive, and start to make some leaps of faith. The Newtonian Universe, with action and reaction, starts to struggle to explain real-world observations.

I'm not in a survivable situation. I shouldn't have even been able to get this far, to climb this high. The odds are stacked against me in every way. There's not a chance that I could have been through what I've been through, and emerge relatively unscathed. People just don't recover from the trauma that I've put my mind and body through.

On examination, I have a facial tic and two hefty scars on my legs. My facial tic appears to have improved somewhat, since the summer. It's made worse by tiredness and stress, but I feel like it's not as pronounced as it was.

But what does this evidence tell us? Well, it's the tip of the iceberg. My mind and body have been to hell and back, quite a few times. For example, having functioning kidneys is a big surprise. You can't see the damage from the outside, but I suffered near-catastrophic levels of muscle loss, with accompanying damage to my kidneys, as the breakdown products from my body eating itself were going to ultimately prove fatal.

Would you believe that I have induced within my mind, all the symptoms of schizophrenia? I have, at times, believed that 'they' are out to get me (I have no idea who 'they' are... that's the point... it's mental illness) and been hearing and seeing things in a distorted way, misinterpreting what my senses have been telling me. These psychoses should be permanent. I should have been left permanently paranoid, psychotic.

The fact of the matter is that sanity is quite delicate. Anybody will start to have strange thoughts, if you skip enough nights of sleep and meals. Sleep deprivation and hypoglycaemia will mean that your brain will struggle to function. You can't really predict how badly each individual will react to these unusual stresses, but you can be sure that every human needs sleep & glucose.

I guess when you total up all the time that I've been in a psychotic state, it adds up to quite a worrying amount. Certainly enough to give me that facial tic. I used to have really bad full-body spasms, but I figured out which neurotransmitters needed topping up, as a form of prophylaxis to protect against early-onset parkinsons.

If you wonder why I eat so much protein, and take so many amino acids, it's because those things are providing my body with the building blocks to repair and protect itself. It's a thin line between temporary and permanent insanity.

If you were a psychiatrist or a psychologist, just looking at my clinical picture on paper, you would have to assume that I'd be a gibbering wreck. The path that has torturously wended its way through a few different counties NHS mental health services, through the private sector, and then back into NHS with rather a lot of chaos and the involvement of emergency services, across the midlands and several boroughs of London. Well, it's not a story that sits easily alongside a person who appears - to all outward observers - to have their s**t together.

The fact that I'm coping without medication, without the help of the mental health crisis team, without outpatient services, obviously not an inpatient... it's not something that very often crops up, given my case history.

I'm a bit of a statistical anomaly. I don't fit the data very neatly. If we're talking probabilities, I'm dead & buried several times over.

But what's going on inside my cranium? How much crazy am I just bottling up? Well, it's not pretty but it's not that bad either. I'm certainly not battling any psychosis. I don't hear voices, I don't see things, I don't think that I can read thoughts or control people with my mind. In fact, I have never experienced psychosis like that. My sanity has, thus far, been fairly solid in its foundations.

However, I have poked and prodded at questions, which are to all intents and purposes, unanswerable. I have plumbed the depths of what is knowable in an Earthly realm. I have considered things which are really not advisable to consider, lest you drive yourself insane.

Once you start to consider the full implications of something like the Many-Minds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics you start to question the very meaning of what it is to be conscious. When you start to do some basic maths, regarding the chances that you are alive and conscious at this very moment in time, with 7 billion other souls on the planet, then you can get rather overwhelmed by the statistical significance of it.

These thoughts come back to haunt me time and time again. When I'm unwell, I can even believe that I can perhaps model some of the Universe from base principles. I can perhaps come up with some great unifying theory of everything. Clearly this is a delusion of grandeur.

However, I'm no less able than anybody else to conduct thought experiments. In fact, I'm blessed with a very rational, logical mind. I have even done 'game of life' simulations and models in the past, with some success. But the fact remains, we're talking about hard problems, where hard doesn't even come close to cutting the mustard as an adjective.

So what's all this rambling all about? Well, in one sense my fate is sealed. If we were to consider the evidence, the clinical picture, the pattern of behaviour... I'm doomed! Either insanity, suicide or slow suicide by addiction should surely claim my life soon. It's a miracle that those fates have not already consumed me, and I'm here, stringing a sentence together.

Indeed, many people in my life have chosen to act as if there is a known outcome, as if they have a working crystal ball. Perhaps they have simply computed the odds based on the raw statistical data, and are playing the numbers. According to the numbers, I don't actually exist. According to the numbers, I died a long time ago.

I used to be very upset that people were writing me off before I had even had a chance to make an attempt at life. I used to get very frustrated that I was always a few days or a week or two behind those who wished to frustrate and undermine me. However, the tide has turned now and I finally have a fair wind behind me, and the gradient of the ground in my favour.

It must be upsetting to have somebody who just refuses to die and conform to your prophecies. It must be frustrating when somebody won't fit in the pigeon hole that you have assigned to them. It must be frustrating when somebody refuses to act in the way that you preordained, based on a supposed character flaw or some gift for knowing the future that you believe you have been blessed with.

I'm quite a fly in the ointment, refusing to shuffle off my mortal coil, or be driven irreversibly insane. People are a lot easier to handle when they fit nicely somewhere on the curve.

But I'm an outlier. I'm a stubborn son of a gun who refuses to just lie down and be neatly categorised. I'm very hard to manipulate. I'm very hard to discredit. I'm very hard to marginalise. I'm very hard to silence.

People have tried various underhand techniques to tame me, such as bullying, shaming, assaulting and the gathering of 'evidence' that they believe will show a 'smoking gun' unequivocally pointing to some easy conclusion that can be drawn. I'm sorry, but I'm just not that simple.

If I had one bit of advice for you, it would be to stop jumping ahead. Stop thinking that you can extrapolate from the few data points that you have. Stop thinking that you can predict the future, my future. I'm writing my future, and it very much seems as though my fate is not yet sealed, from what I can see. The grand finalé is as yet unwritten, despite your impatience to flip to the last page of the book and see how it all ends.

People come and go from my life, and I'm very grateful to those who have loyally stuck by my side. You have hopefully been rewarded with seeing a few different aspects of my character, and you can see that understanding and knowing a person is not as simple as making a rash judgement based on what you see, the moment you walk in on a person's life.

People are full of surprises, and even if you've known somebody their entire life, you still don't know what makes them tick, or what they're going to do next.

Tags: #mentalhealth

This is a story about patience not being a virtue...

There used to be 3 bathrooms in my old house in Oxford. I once hid in the shower for over 3 hours, waiting to step out and give some guests a tour of the facilities. That's strange behaviour for a 9 year old boy.

I'm still teetotal, and it's been 107 days since I last had an alcoholic drink. That doesn't mean that I'm not still patiently waiting though, for something. Some imaginary finishing line, some trigger, some excuse.

I kinda screwed everything up around day 90 anyway. I took 3-FPM, Mexedrone, βk-2C-B and Flubromazolam in a massive crazy binge, trying to stave off a relapse onto MDPV (Supercrack). You can't fight fire with fire, and if you're testing your patience, your patience will eventually fail.

The problem with being very patient is that people can mistake it for self control, good behaviour. People start to think you're OK. People start to think you don't need their help, their support.

Since the advent of the Dark Web, it has been possible for a respectable middle class person who doesn't know any drug dealers to obtain absolutely anything they want, through the mail. You just have to pay your money and wait for the postman.

Waiting for the man is something that you will find lots of popular cultural references to. I once waited 3 weeks for a Quaalude (or 'lude' in common vernacular) to be delivered to me from some far-flung corner of the globe. Yes, I watched the film Wolf of Wall Street and decided that I needed to add Methaqualone to my list of drugs that I had experienced. I very patiently waited for my delivery. I waited a long time for the man. The mailman.

Given enough spare time with no mission, no project, no goal, I will eventually relapse. A relapse onto a ridiculously powerful stimulant drug will not be pretty. It will be quick and destructive. There's a good chance that it will result in death or hospitalisation.

This is how you get temporarily free. You hit it with 4 powerful benzos, to kill the psychosis and get to sleep. Then the next day you hit it with 3 powerful benzos, to slay the anxiety and restlessness. Then the next day you hit it with 2 powerful benzos, to taper off the 'downers' without having rebound insomnia and unmanageable panic attacks. Then, the next day, you take your 1 remaining benzo. You have an awful night of sleep. You have rising panic and butterflies in your tummy, but you're almost free. Then the final day you're drug free again, but you're all alone and you feel like you want to die.

Monday is the first time that I would be able to re-order something to restart the whole horrid cycle of self-destruction. Tuesday is the earliest that something could be in my nasty sweaty little palms, with me eagerly tearing the packaging apart.

It might not sound like it, but to a 'conventional' drug addict, that's an unthinkable amount of time. They're used to picking up the phone to a dealer and meeting them within hours. In fact, many addicts' lives are structured around such immediacy that they know their dealers' movements intimately, and can know within a window of 15-30 minutes when they are going to get their fix.

You might think that drug addiction is about willpower. What did I demonstrate, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month, if it was not this magical 'willpower' stuff? It's not the solution to anything. I just put myself into standby mode. I just put myself into hibernation. I was just waiting.

Drug addiction is about having a life that's not worth living. "The opposite of addiction is not sobriety, it is human connection".

Human connection is important.

Tags: #addiction #drugs

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 extrapolation...

I just met two social workers who I had never met before, therefore they had no reference point, from which to extrapolate.

They've gone now.

I'd like to get back in contact with you, friend, soonish. I'd like to stay in regularish contact. It's important that I do. It's been too long. Also, I have too few people who I see on any kind of regular basis.

Too unwell to even know what help to ask for. How ironic.

I have started improving again, since 12:10pm.

Unless you've been nearly dead (multiple times), nearly in prison, nearly on a mental health section (multiple times), nearly bankrupt (multiple times) and nearly totally alone, it's a bit hard to imagine what all the fuss is about. Personally, I've stopped believing I exist, because it's too statistically implausible. I'm assuming I'm make-believe, like the tooth fairy or unicorns, because my reality doesn't sound very real.

I'm going to try again to sleep. I totally screwed up the whole of yesterday and last night, because of something I decided wasn't important, that later turned out to be. My hand slipped. It was a 50:50 chance, but instead of one or the other it was limbo. Slipped through the crack.

How do you morally judge an actual good act, when chance results in a bad intention? I did the bad act that I intended, fixed the original good, and now I have good intentions, all the way to hell.

It's too difficult for a non-existant person to figure out. I'm going to try and go to sleep and see if I feel more real tomorrow.

I've got a couple of people who care whether I'm still breathing, so don't worry. Would be good if you could be there for me in some small way soon though. It's a long road.

Tags: #nhs #suicide #depression #mentalhealth