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 doing more faster...

Startup accelerators are a good thing, don't get me wrong. But what's to be done with the wayward founders, the ones who burn out? How does somebody decompress, decelerate from the high demands of an intensive program like an accelerator?

Here's something I wrote on day 28 of the 13-week Springboard program, which is part of the global TechStars network: https://springboardcambridge.wordpress.com/2015/06/01/day-28-guest-post-validated-madness/

My company was shortlisted for TechStars, Boulder, CO, USA. I got the news at 6pm on a Wednesday evening. I needed to be in Boulder for about 10am the next morning. Solution? Get on a plane to Denver that night and drive straight to Boulder in the morning. No problem.

When I arrived at London Heathrow airport and went to check in for my flight, it turned out that the visa waiver program had changed since the last time I was in the USA. I needed an ESTA. This was a problem... the embassy was now closed. However, I managed to apply for my ESTA and get the all-important number in about 15 minutes, standing at the checkin desk, via a US government website.

On the plane, I read a book from cover to cover: Do More Faster by Dave Cohen and Brad Feld, founders of TechStars. It seemed apt, and I had finished the book by the time we landed in Colorado. I then met Dave Cohen later that day, along with Nicole Glaros who was heavily pregnant at the time, but still running the Boulder program.

I guess I shouldn't really associate myself with the TechStars network, given my precarious professional position, and the nature of this blog, but it's impossible to tell my story without somehow including the post-accelerator implosion that I went through. Certainly it's important to state that I always had the support of the network and fellow founders at all times though. Things would probably have ended up a lot worse without that safety net.

Anyway, I didn't really love my startup. I didn't have a lot of passion for the industry sector it was in and the software challenge had already been overcome. We started the program with a cashflow positive business, working software and an established customer and reseller base. I definitely took the wrong startup through the Springboard program. We should have pivoted more aggressively, but you live you learn.

I should have ceded control to my co-founder, David, a lot earlier. The acting coach that Jon got - Annette - to help us with our pitches, suggested that we give David a shot as the CEO. It was good advice. However, ego got in the way. I liked having those three little letters as my job title, even if I wasn't any good at the job and hated all the roles and responsibilities of it.

The problem is, I'm an engineer, and engineers just want to solve problems. In sales meetings, I would be far more concerned about the customer getting the solution that met their needs, than trying to extract a commercially sensible amount of cash from them. It was more important to me that my software was being used, rather than it bringing in sustainable revenues.

Looking back now, it makes much more sense that David and I should have switched roles. He's really good at the whole business administration and driving a hard sales bargain thing. He's really good at making sure that the whole business runs smoothly and is well administered. I only care about the software.

Jon did an interesting thing to try and save us from ourselves (or rather, from me). He got in a bunch of psychologists to come and tell us that we should be consultants, not running a startup. He had tired of nursing us through the growing pains of founder conflict, and joking about our "mutually assured destruction (MAD)" pact, which he wrote on the whiteboard above our heads.

Between Jon, Jess and the other founders we somehow managed to muddle through to the end of the program. There was only one time that I was so offensive that I nearly got my head kicked in. I would have deserved it. I was wrong, David was right, and my beef was with the browser, not him. I was upset that some technical detail wasn't quite measuring up to my preconceived notions, and refusing to try David's suggestion, which wasn't to specification. Of course, it did work, but being a stubborn engineer, I just didn't want it to work like that.

The weird thing is that David and me didn't have a very startup-y lifestyle. After I had finished with TechStars in Boulder, I jumped in my hire car, drove to Vail and went snowboarding. David used to be a ski instructor and sometimes do programming work in Arinsal, Andorra, inbetween forays onto the piste. We both had a pretty nice life. We didn't really need startup stress, hassle and belt tightening.

Apart from living away from our girlfriends in Cambridge for 3 months, there wasn't a lot of hardship that we really suffered, apart from the sheer workload of Mentor Madness and having to try and run a business at the same time as participate in a startup accelerator. I'm glad we did it though. Those experiences and contacts are very precious to me, even if I've not exactly made the most of them, yet.

Our intake must have been a record one for babies. There were two founders - including my co-founder, David - who had girlfriends who were pregnant. The first Springboard babies were born only months after the program ended. How those guys did it, I have no idea. Hero dads.

Obviously, David wanted to maintain a stable family home near Bristol for his first-born child. The end of the program marked the culmination of the intractable problem of where to locate the business. My ex-wife certainly wasn't giving any ground or prepared to compromise even an inch. I was rather caught inbetween a rock and a hard place. Naturally, I just had a meltdown rather than dealing with things in any sensible way.

The sensible thing to do would have been to ditch the girl who never supported me in any of my endeavours and was simply an ungrateful drain on my time, money and resources. She expected zero impact in our lifestyle, from me choosing an entrepreneurial lifestyle. Funding lavish holidays for her on a startup salary is quite hard to budget for.

But an unstoppable change had been started within me. I found Cambridge life to be exciting, exhilarating, even if it was only by some tenuous association with the University of Cambridge. I loved being around smart people. Startup founders are great to hang out with because they say "yes, and" rather than "no, but".

I really needed to go through a breakup, but I don't really handle failure very well. I knew my startup was going to fail with me at the helm. I had failed as CEO. I had failed to make my relationship work. I wanted to change my entire life, but I felt trapped.

My word is my bond, and I take commitment very seriously. I'm also a completer-finisher. I would rather finish something to a terrible shoddy standard, than leave a job uncompleted. I have lots of finished projects, but most of them are not to a very high standard. I'd prefer something was done, rather than perfect.

So it was, that I came to be trying to meet the screamed selfish demands of a spoiled partner, whilst also unable to bite the bullet and step down from my position as CEO, and also accept that I needed to chuck away and change most pieces of my life. They were challenging times, in the couple of months following Springboard.

During one trip back to Cambridge, in an attempt to secure a seed round of funding, I pretty much told all our potential investors that there was no interesting intellectual property in our business and it was a completely copyable business model. Not a smart move. I could almost see my co-founder facepalm when I told the panel this. Engineer's problem. I cannot speak a lie on technical matters.

Anyway, perhaps I wanted the thing to die, because my life was pretty miserable post-Springboard. Back in my spare-bedroom office, over a hundred miles away from my co-founder, and over a hundred miles away from London, and the wrong side of town to get to Cambridge. It felt like I was in the middle of nowhere, which I was.

Just about the only thing I've done too slowly in my life is to ditch a dead relationship. I tend to pick the wrong partners and allow klingons and coat-tail riders to try and hang on for a free ride. I tolerate fools too gladly. David is certainly no fool, and I feel very privileged to have gotten to work with him. However, he quite rightly stood his ground and didn't compromise on matters that were my responsibility to resolve.

The pressure to provide a luxury lifestyle for an ungrateful and unsupportive partner, and give up on my hopes & dreams was too much to ask of me. I was sinking fast into a depression, as my all-too-brief foray into the liberating world of running a business and being an entrepreneur, plus my time in the company of startup founders, mentors and academics, was looking like it was over forever.

I tried to prop things up, getting a job back in corporate bankerland. Shovelling other people's s**t for a living. It broke my heart. You can have the most lavish lifestyle in the world, but if what you do for 50+ hours a week is basically total bulls**t that you hate, then it won't be any compensation at all.

My ex-wife and my Dad really worked very hard to pull the rug from under my feet, and I'm really upset about it. However, I know it's my fault for not pushing those toxic people out of my life and following my dreams. They've been wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong again, but they still can't see that their small-mindedness and lack of vision has caused so many golden opportunities to be wasted. I actually have hard numbers showing that investment ideas of mine that they vetoed have now turned out to be ridiculously profitable. Never mind.

I actually feel as though I've never been allowed to dream. I've always been expected to just shovel shit for everybody else to prop up their dreams. I didn't go to University when all my friends were going, because my Dad made such a big deal about what a waste of money it was. I didn't follow my startup dreams, because I was pretty much forced to provide a luxury lifestyle, and chain myself to a remote seaside town for an ungrateful partner who didn't appreciate a single cent of it.

Anyway, moan moan moan. That kind of negative attitude is not going to get me anywhere. I've watched it all burn down, while my Dad and ex have stuffed their pockets and then distanced themselves from me. It should have been vice-versa. I should have shut those toxic people out of my life a lot sooner.

Shoulda. Woulda. Coulda. That's not going to be my epitaph. There's no sense in living in the past, and I apologise that this blog has been firmly rooted back in time, as I struggle to move forwards with my life.

You probably can't understand why I've left highly paid jobs and contracts, and put myself through all the stress of founding a business. I know I complain about the overhead of business administration sometimes, but I really have few complaints about the entrepreneurial lifestyle. I know that Jon's psychologists told me that I'm not cut out to be an entrepreneur, but it's something that keeps coming back to me... that desire to found and shape businesses, to lead, to create.

You don't see the sacrifice that has enabled me to enter the corporate world on a decent wage. You don't know how much of an isolated lonely existance that a geek had at school, programming their calculator and designing sprites in the back of their exercise books, when they should be having schoolday antics with the group of friends that they didn't have.

The loners, the eccentric introverts, the odd-ones-out are thrust together out of a necessity for safety in numbers, and sure those people become friends, but you're all still prisoners in your own mind to some extent. You might be able to see your friends get bullied too, but when it's your turn, you have to endure it all on your own.

Suddenly, being a techie geek startup guy becomes cool, and you are hot property. You can earn big cash selling your soul to the corporate sector, or you can sell lies to investors and have a super cool office of your own. Fake it until you make it, but you never faked it. You just woke up one day, and you're one of the highest paid people, because of stuff you did because you had a lonely childhood, with your head buried in books, or hunched over a keyboard.

Look, there are those sprites I designed in the back of my school exercise book, now on the wall of a global bank's office. You can't see how hard I've worked. You have no idea how much suffering there has been behind the bored looking exterior of the guy asking awkward questions on a conference call, slouched in his chair at his desk.

I can't hark back to 3 or 4 years of my life when I had very little to do except read books and write essays about things I found interesting. I never got to spend my investor's money on cool mosaic decorations on the wall, and bean bags and a table tennis table for my team. My startup life spans pretty much 3 months in a startup accelerator. That was the only time in my life when I really believed in what I was doing. When I was surrounded by smart people who I liked and respected. I was forging my own path through life.

So, what's to be done? Well, I'm running low on cash again, so I guess I will have to do another stint at the coal face. I will have to go on a raiding mission into corporate crazy-land and shovel s**t for some more dollars. I don't really have enough capital to risk chasing my dreams, as usual. As usual, I have been nickel and dimed by the klingons, coat-tail riders and the toxic people in my life, and I'm the one who feels bullied and alone.

I'm kinda used to it. I guess you could call this regression therapy. I've gone back to my childhood, where I had my head in the clouds and I was just writing programs and designing sprites, to distract myself from the crushing loneliness and brutality of the daily bullying.

It looks like there are a lot of open doors to me, but you've got to believe me when I tell you that it's virtually torture to go back into the corporate world, having had a taste of freedom.

I'll do what has to be done, and I'm sure you hate me for acting all spoiled and privileged, but you have to understand just how heartbreaking it is to sell your soul so cheaply.

Tags: #career #startup

This is a story about snow & ice...

If the days are going to be short and the weather is going to be bad, I want a snowboard or a pair of crampons strapped to my feet. I want there to be deep snow, and frozen lakes and waterfalls. I hate it when the weather can't make up its mind whether to be bitterly cold, have a torrential downpour, or be pleasant. I hate drizzle and the endless grey.

January is awful. The days are short. There's no Christmas festivity. The credit card bills are hitting the doormat and it's a long time until payday. It's ages until the weather will start to improve.

February is a shorter month, so it somehow seems tolerable.

March is when the really wintery weather finally seems to hit. That's when we get a decent dump of snow in the UK. The roads & railways are chaotic. There's excitement in the disruption and because spring is just around the corner.

But, here we are, in the middle of bloody January, with all those cold months of bad weather stretching ahead of us, and the post-Christmas austerity as a further kick in the ribs.

Words fail me today.

Tags: #depression

This is a story about challenging your reasons for doing things...

If somebody said to me that Bipolar was an excuse to do whatever you want, whenever you want, I would find my position a little hard to defend. However, to fall into line, to fly straight, to conform, to bend my mood by sheer weight of will... that's not possible.

I'm a fairly liberated character. Since living with daily threat to my life and livelihood, my risk profile has rather altered from that of a normal rational individual. I tend to leap before I look, and certainly with very little premeditation.

To an outside observer, things look erratic, out of control, recklessly dangerous. To me, things look pretty much the same, but my actions do fit onto some kind of macro plan. Even when I backslide into something or somewhere I really don't want to go, it's a bit of a calculated gamble. It happens when there appears to be little else going on of importance, little other opportunity.

So, have I deliberately sabotaged my own life, at times? Yes, I probably have. But you might be surprised to learn that the motives are not always clear cut. I have become quite an uncompromising character, who finds it near impossible to live in a situation where my values, ethics and professional standards are being infringed.

When you have pushed yourself to the limit and beyond to deliver projects, to create cashflow positive businesses, you know the upper bound of what is possible, both personally and for a software team, and what the reward feels like. You start to get a sense of whether it's worth pushing yourself that hard, or not.

When you have sunk to unimaginable depths, in despair and abandonment of everything, you know the lower bounds of what is survivable. You know how low you can go before you will either shuffle off your mortal coil, or some shred of self-preservation instinct is finally activated. You know what it feels like to literally make a life or death decision. You start to get a sense of whether you really want to die, or not.

Above is a picture of me, 24 hours after having been discharged from the psychiatric ward of a hospital. I had been body surfing in Cornwall. Those powerful waves and strong currents. That thrashing violent cold winter sea.

There's little doubt that this extreme environment activated my self-preservation instincts far more effectively than a week-long stay in a locked Mental Health ward, where nurses checked on me every 30 minutes to make sure I hadn't topped myself. That's not to say I'm not extremely grateful to everybody in the NHS who helped me.

Teaching my friend Klaus to surf in Bude, I drifted into the river mouth, where a deeper channel has been cut into the sea bed. The water flowed faster there and I started to be pulled by a strong current, well out of my depth and into the path of breaking waves. I knew that it was going to take time, a load of stamina, and a certain amount of calmness, to swim out of that channel and back into safer waters, and body surf my way back into the shallows where I could stand on the sea floor again. I had no floatation aid, no surfboard of my own.

Drowning in the sea would be a much more unpleasant way to end your days than, say, clattering into the hard ground at 125mph from an aeroplane or a tall building, or slowly losing consciousness as your blood leaked away out of ruptured blood vessels. However, I still find it interesting that I was making game plans to save my own life. Was I going to try and attract the attention of the lifeguards, who would see that I was out of the safe swimming area and come and pick me up? Was I going to try the riskiest but less energy-consuming tactic of swimming for nearby rocks that waves were breaking onto?

It's weird how you can find yourself messing around with Sir Clive Sinclair's latest invention in Cambridge one minute, so full of passion and energy, optimism and enthusiasm. Then your mood seems to suck all the life out of you and you're not sure where or when it's going to bottom out. You're not sure if you're on a ride all the way to oblivion, or whether you'll pull up out of the nosedive at the last possible moment.

That's my true reaction to my moods, to pressure, to risk, to addiction, to unhappiness, to discomfort, to instability: I will do something extreme. I will actively seek out something that will challenge me to my very limits. I will push myself until I find the true edge of the abyss.

Sometimes you feel like you've tried your hardest, that you can't go on, that something's not possible. You've reached the limits. I'm regularly surprised by what reserves we seem to store up, as human organisms. The disparity between perception and reality is most pronounced, when it comes to strength, stamina and depression. When you come close to those limits, you realise that your fear is giving you a safety margin, a buffer, that keeps you a safe distance from the true edge.

However, my brain has been somewhat corrupted, warped, miscalibrated. I had little hesitation in attempting to climb up on a ledge on the 48th floor of a tower block, where there is a little outdoor area. It's only that my colleagues pulled me back that prevented me from standing there, on the ledge, eyeing up the drop.

As you can see, the ledge is quite wide, but there's still something that isn't quite wired up quite right in the head of somebody who would climb onto it, 48 floors above the pavement.

None of this quite compares with riding through central London, on a black bike, dressed from head to toe in black clothes. No lights, no helmet. Frankly, drivers quite often don't spot the cyclists who are wearing high-vis vests and covered in lights anyway, especially in the wet when London's many lights, and the reflection in puddles, make it virtually impossible for a driver to see what's going on around them.

I took an almighty tumble when a taxi driver who was indicating left and pulling over changed his mind in a fraction of a second, and decided to do a U-turn right in front of me. My rear brake was loose because of a buckled back wheel, and I was so quick and hard on the front brake that I went over my handlebars and busted my ribs, hip, ankle. The taxi driver didn't even see me. I jumped up and back on the bike, and carried on, and then this huge surge of pain hit me.

That could be a metaphor for my life, since losing my grip on stability in 2008. I take massive risks, but I jump up and carry on cycling after being completely obliterated. I push through the pain, knowing that stopping will only make it worse.

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

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 protecting the fruit of your loins...

I wouldn't blame you for jumping to the wrong conclusions about whether I'm safe to be around your family. You're programmed to protect. You're programmed to be paranoid, and act irrationally. The chances are that there isn't a Sabre-Toothed Tiger lurking outside your front door, but your DNA doesn't change fast enough for you to not at least subconsciously check for vicious predators outside your cave.

The assumption must be that everywhere I go, I leave a trail of used hypodermic needles infected with HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis, even though I've never injected drugs and I don't have any infectious diseases.

Perhaps my bags and coat pockets are full of highly toxic drugs and medications, which are not in child-safe containers? Perhaps your inquisitive child may go through one of my unattended bags or pockets and discover something that looks like sweets, only to be fatally poisoned. No, I don't carry things like that around with me.

But what about my influence? Perhaps I'm 'soft on drugs' and my laissez-faire attitude to narcotics will somehow rub off on your tiny tots, and just being within earshot of me will lead them to later experimentation with powerful narcotics, addiction and death. Well, actually, one of the main reasons for writing this blog is as a warning klaxon, to those who might venture up the same dead-end alleyway where I unfortunately found myself stuck.

I hope that nobody thinks I'm glorifying or making light of my numerous brushes with irreversible health damage and death, that I have sustained over the last few years. In fact, it's only been because of the published memoirs of some other unfortunates, that I've not abandoned all hope on the assumption that my own fallibility is some indictment of my character.

Certainly, it's easier to divide the world into good and bad, light and dark, virtuous and evil. Certainly, it's easier to condemn a character. Certainly, it seems somehow safer, prudent, to keep bad apples away from the rest of the harvest, lest infection spread.

However, that's not how human nature works. If you make something taboo, then you make something more interesting to people, but they will hide their curiosity and feel guilty for feeling drawn into a forbidden world, even though it's totally natural to be inquisitive. For the outcasts, the misfits, the eccentric family member who has been excluded, is shaped by the imagination of those unhappy children, into some kind of folklore figure. The family freak, the black sheep, can end up being far more influential than you had ever intended, just by your very refusal to acknowledge their existence.

Anyway, I'm soon going to reject all the labels, which I have been urged by most Psychiatrists and Psychologists to not apply to myself anyway. I push more and more of the actions of the past into the annals of history. To judge my character on a few select moments from 36 years on the planet seems like the real madness. To condemn my entire future based on some ageing evidence that is entirely outweighed by a mostly normal healthy life, is not exactly very fair or very kind, is it?

You would be shocked to learn that the whole private psychiatric/psychological treatment setup is driven to protect your professional image. You are encouraged not to use clinical labels. You are encouraged to maintain medical secrecy, privacy. I can see why, but I'm enjoying playing with people's prejudice. I'm enjoying seeing how close to unemployable I can get, before I step back from the brink of reputational ruin.

So, if you're keeping me at arm's length, at a safe distance, I do understand. I forgive your instincts to protect your family. It's only natural.

You should know that I would never venture anywhere near you or your home if I was in a mess though. I have no fear of living on the streets again. I choose suicide and destitution ahead of putting any of my friends or my sister and niece in any danger.

I choose suicide. I choose destitution.

Tags: #suicide #mentalillness #depression #addiction #bipolar #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 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 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

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