This is a story about decisive weapons....

Would I rather have the pilot of my plane, the driver of my bus, taxi or train, as a completely drug-free 'clean' individual, or would I rather that they had taken 5mg of dextroamphetamine before our journey? The answer is the latter, obviously, because they will be more alert, have improved ability to concentrate and faster reaction times.

US fighter jet pilots routinely use 'go' pills before a mission, which confer the abilities above, as well as allowing them to fly longer missions with less risk of dangerous sleepiness. Many road accidents are caused by people falling asleep at the wheel. Coffee will only give you a tiny fraction of the benefits of a 'go' pill.

Do you find that after a really important day at work, where you had to be at the top of your game, and you were firing on all cylinders; perhaps you had a bunch of coffee to keep you sharp.... do you find that you're still buzzing when you get home, and you have trouble switching off and going to sleep?

Coffee - especially the super-strong stuff we seem to drink in London and New York - can contain up to 300 to 400mg of caffeine, in for example a Pret-a-Manger strong cappuccino.

The problem with caffeine is that it's a bit of a crude stimulant with lots of extrapyramidal side effects. That is to say, as you increase the dose of caffeine, most people can't tolerate the way it makes them feel. Interestingly, intravenously, amphetamine addicts can't tell the difference between amphetamine and caffeine. Also, most intravenous amphetamine users believe they are being chased by 'them' - the police, men in black, shadow people, ninjas, whatever - but these side effects are just part of the fun.

So, the beauty of the 'go' pill is that it seems that I get all those desirable effects, with no side effects. You would be completely unable to tell that I was under the influence of 5mg of dextroamphetamine. Recreational use of amphetamines is normally quite obvious to spot: talking too fast, sweating, dilated pupils, restlessness, jerky unnatural movement. No side effects? Well, not quite.

US fighter jet pilots use 'no-go' pills at the end of a mission. Having been kept awake and alert for hours, it's now time to go to sleep or at least chill the fuck out. Sleep can be difficult without a 'no-go' pill.

My personal 'no-go' cocktail allegedly contains Xanax (alprazolam) and zopiclone, which have hypnotic, sedative, muscle relaxant and anxiolytic properties. To be honest, you could probably get to sleep naturally if you took your 'go' pill as soon as you got up, but it's pretty exhausting spending a full day in a highly alert state.

Isn't it madness, me taking all these pills? Shouldn't I just go 'clean'? Isn't it best that I'm completely drug-free?

Do you remember when you quit smoking? You chewed a lot of gum, ate a lot more, drank more tea and coffee. Do you remember when the kids were little and life was really stressful? You drank a lot more gin. Do you remember when there was that project with a really tight deadline and you were working really hard; drinking lots of coffee? You were drinking lots of wine in the evenings to relax. Basically, humans will compensate to make sure things remain balanced. If you hurt your foot, you might find your back is aching, because you've shifted your body weight to one side, to put less pressure on your injury.

My injury's a brain injury and the best thing you can do for the brain is to allow it to find its own equilibrium. However, life must go on. My brain's telling me to go to sleep in a dark room for a month or two, but I need to attend hospital appointments, do the administration for my company, line up my next IT contract, find a new flatmate, move money around and make sure the cash keeps flowing and doesn't run out.

A bit of dextroamphetamine is an effective antidepressant and helps fight any supercrack cravings. It's like methadone for a supercrack addict.

I'm on a mission to get back to coffee and wine as my 'go' and 'no-go' substances. I actually worked really hard to break my caffeine addiction, and now I only drink caffeinated drinks on extremely rare occasions. I'm certainly not habituated into having my morning coffee or cups of tea throughout the day, like the majority of adults are. This is how addiction works: you don't cure the addiction, you just replace it with something else. There was a time when I loved playing with toy cars. I had hundreds of them, and I played with them all the time. Then, I got a computer, and I loved playing computer games... and the process of swapping one addiction for another continued. I'll be just fine and dandy with some tasty food, wine to wash it down with, TV and film to distract me and a girl to put my arm around and take to bed for some rumpy-pumpy later on. That ought to just about tick all my boxes.

In the last two weeks, I broke my addiction to two opiates - tramadol & codeine - and I've obviously been off the supercrack for the best part of a week now. That's fairly impressive. Please forgive me for having the occasional G&T, glass of wine and my little 'go' and 'no-go' pills, just to keep the pedals turning.

I've got a torn muscle and ligament, damaged nerve and fractured ulna (bone in my arm) but I spend most of the day with no pain relief at all. It's only at night that for some reason all these injuries start feeling super painful and I might take a couple of co-codamol.

Interestingly, amongst the opiates, heroin was named because it was thought it would have military applications, making soldiers more heroic. Heroin addicts certainly do seem to be prepared to do almost anything to get their fix and not get junk sick. I guess the idea was perhaps to addict the soldiers, and then deny them their heroin until they had done their mission. I can't really imagine it'd be a great idea to have a platoon of men who are pretty much just dribbling and half-asleep. The Nazis had the better idea, giving their soldiers crystal meth. The nickname "marching powder" for cocaine is literally what it sounds like: cocaine was given to soldiers so that they could go on longer marches. You might think of the pharmaceutical industry as concerned only with the treatment of disease, but they have profited handsomely from military concoctions.

Adding fluoride to the water supply has made a major impact on the rates of tooth decay. Drug evangelists have touted LSD and MDMA as other candidate chemicals to be added to our drinking water. The idea being that criminal and aggressive behaviour might be replaced with love and empathy, or the 'sheeple' might have their consciousness expanded. For clarity: I do not endorse such ideas.

"Go to the doctor" is now a synonym for "go get some pills". People are extremely disappointed if they don't come away from a doctor's appointment with a prescription for some lotion or potion. The reflexive response of people if you ever say you are in pain, is to offer you aspirin, paracetamol, ibuprofen or preparations containing codeine (e.g. co-codamol and Solpadeine). People have looked at me in shock and horror, when I tell them that I don't take any medication for the incurable mutative virus: the common cold. What part of incurable didn't you understand?

Many people with mental health issues are asked "did you take your pills today?" or told "maybe you should up your dose" by people with no medical training or expertise, who they simply encounter in their day to day life, such as family members, friends and work colleagues.

We should be mindful that psychopharmacology is only 60 or 70 years old at most, as a fairly advanced field with the accompanying branch of medicine: psychiatry. Before psychiatry, chemists could offer preparations containing opium, cocaine, cannabis; all of which treat symptoms, not underlying issues. We will look back 50 or 100 years from now, and laugh at how primitive our medicine was... especially when it comes to addiction, mental health and the psychoactive compounds.

One final thought: if the majority of us are taking medication for depression, stress and anxiety, are we sick or are we actually victims of a sick society?

Tags: #drugs #addiction #medication #mentalhealth

Contents

Chapter 1: The Caravan

Chapter 2: Invisible Illness

Chapter 3: The Forest

Chapter 4: Prosaic

Chapter 5: The Van

Chapter 6: Into the Unknown

Chapter 7: The Journey

Chapter 8: Infamy

Chapter 9: The Villages

Chapter 10: Waiting Room

Chapter 11: The Shadow People

Chapter 12: Enough Rope

Chapter 13: The Post Offices

Chapter 14: Unsuitable Friends

Chapter 15: The Chase

Chapter 16: Self Inflicted

Chapter 17: The Holiday

Chapter 18: Psychosis, Madness, Insanity and Lunacy

Chapter 19: The Hospitals

Chapter 20: Segmentation

Chapter 21: The Cell

Chapter 22: Wells of Silence

Chapter 23: The Box

Chapter 24: Jailbird

Chapter 25: The Scales

Chapter 26: Descent

Chapter 27: The Syringe

Chapter 28: Anonymity

Chapter 29: The Imposter

Chapter 30: Wish You Were Here

10. Waiting Room

"Do you want me to come and see the doctor with you?" Lara asked.

"No, it'll be difficult for you to take the time off" replied Neil.

"I don't mind. It's important. I can do it if it will help" she said.

Neil was now in his third week off work and he was starting to get anxious about returning to his job.

"I just wish I felt better, but I think I feel worse than I did a few weeks ago" he complained.

"Try not to stress about things. Go and see the doctor again and see what they say" she said in a comforting tone.

He'd left it almost to the last minute - Thursday - but Lara was now coming home expecting to find out what had happened at the doctor's. Neil was sat on the sofa as she came in the front door and hung up her coat. There was no new prescription on the coffee table in front of him.

"So, how'd it go?" she asked.

"They're referring me to a psychiatrist."

"Well that's good. You'll get a specialist's opinion" she said.

"Yes, but it could take weeks, months even before I get an appointment to see a consultant."

"What's the plan for the interim?" she asked.

"The doctor's signed me off for another two weeks. I said I was getting very stressed and anxious about going back to work. He said I should contact my HR department who can involve occupational health."

"He?"

"Yes. I saw a different doctor this time."

"Doctor Hughes?" she asked.

"I can't remember. It'll be written on the sick note, I guess."

"How do you feel about things?" asked Lara.

"I'm anxious about what it's going to be like, going back to work after five weeks off. It's a long time, you know?" he replied.

"People get sick. It happens all the time" Lara said as reassuringly as she could.

"Yes. But not me. And hardly ever anybody else at work" said Neil.

"Everybody will be happy that you're feeling better again when you go back to work. It'll be fine" she soothed.

"We agreed I would keep taking the same antidepressants. It's too early to tell if it's going to have a positive effect yet. It could be weeks before it helps my mood improve" he said. "I've got enough to last me a couple of months now" he continued.

"You refilled your prescription?"

"Yeah. I felt embarrassed in the chemist. All those pills. All those sick people and then there's me" he replied.

"Lots of people have to take medication for all kinds of reasons. There's no shame in it"

"Yes, but I still felt ashamed. I didn't want anybody we know to see me, walking home with that paper bag full of pills from the chemist" he said.

"Awww. You'll feel better soon" she said, pulling his head into the crook of her neck and cradling him slightly. His eyes were downcast and sad.

"The doctor said to keep an eye on things. Go back if there's any problems. There's not going to be any follow-up appointments or anything. I've just got to wait for a letter with an appointment date to see the psychiatrist" Neil said with a resigned tone.

Psychiatry. Lara's only real first-hand experience with psychiatry was helping patients with their prescriptions when they were on the ward. The patients were often quite difficult to deal with, but not because of behaviour that she understood as classical mental illness. She would be pestered all the time by the patients - "Nurse, it's time for my medication" - who would get extremely upset about the disruption to their normal routine. There were endless arguments about their prescriptions.

On the ward, the nurses would do three medication rounds per shift, plus respond to patients who were allowed a certain amount of pain medication on request. Unless otherwise indicated in the patient's notes, Lara could only dispense small doses of paracetamol, taken orally. The patient's own medications were usually locked away in a bedside cabinet that only the nurses had the key to. Any medication that the hospital's doctors had prescribed would be dispensed by the nurses at set times and that was when they usually unlocked the cabinet if there was something else that the patient was taking.

Psychiatric inpatients had their usual medications meticulously recorded in separate notes. Although the patients often knew which pills they had to take and how often, Lara had to follow the notes to the letter. The routine of the general hospital was different from the psychiatric wards the patients were used to and they could get very agitated if they felt they were overdue getting their pills.

It was surprising just how many medications some patients had to take each day. There were mood stabilisers and antipsychotics. There were antidepressants and anxiety drugs. There were sleeping pills and tranquillisers. The night shift would start with two hours of hell, as patients begged for their sleeping pills. The first dispensing round of the night shift wasn't until 9pm, so the nurses would get no peace until then. Mercifully, the psychiatric patients were often knocked out cold until the next morning though, which meant they were less trouble through the night than the others.

When on night shift, trying to sleep during the day was hard. Slamming car doors, traffic noises, people yelling in the street below, children screaming in the back gardens. The world was set up for the 9 to 5, Monday to Friday worker. Nearby builders and roadworks could mean a week with barely any sleep at all. Lara often longed for some sleeping pills herself and she knew that some of her colleagues did use medications to help them get some quality sleep during the day.

The few psychiatric patients Lara came into contact with were the most extreme. She saw the aftermath of self harm, suicide attempts and psychotic episodes. However, on the general ward the patients were heavily medicated. They were dazed and confused, with cloudy minds. They shuffled around. Some of them had uncontrollably dribbling mouths and involuntary tics.

She knew that Neil was going to see a psychiatrist - as an outpatient - but Lara made no association between him and the kind of extreme cases of mental illness she occasionally encountered at work. Neil seemed perfectly healthy and normal to all outward appearances, although she could tell that he was lethargic and more anxious and negative than she'd ever known before.

Later that Thursday evening, Lara attended an engagement party for a couple they distantly knew through other friends. Lara had started to socialise again, but on her own. She could see an expression of exhaustion and stress spread over Neil's face when the topic of going out was ever discussed. It was clear that he really wasn't up to socialising yet.

"How's Neil?" asked Katie.

Katie was Russ' new girlfriend. She was still slowly ingratiating herself with everybody and Lara felt sorry for her, as she struggled to become included in the group. Katie was young and pretty and the other girls treated her as if she wasn't worth getting to know. "She'll just be another casual fling" the girls said behind Katie's back.

None of the other girls had really asked about Neil. They had decided to just ignore the issue. If anybody else had asked, Lara would have dismissed the question with a cheery "he's fine". However, Katie was somehow disarming and approachable. Lara drew her to one side. The rest of the group were engrossed in their usual comfortable conversational routines.

"He's ever so depressed. It's sad to see him like that. I don't know what to do" Lara confided.

"There's not much you can do. Don't beat yourself up. Is he taking anything?" Katie asked.

Lara was taken aback by Katie's directness, but it was good to talk to somebody who seemed to immediately understand what the couple were going through.

"He started antidepressants a couple of weeks ago" said Lara.

"Well, it can take time to find the right one. Don't lose hope if you don't see any quick improvements" said Katie.

"Do you?..." Lara tailed off, worried her question was too personal.

Katie gave a little chuckle.

"It's fine. You can ask. Yes, I've been on antidepressants for a few years now. They do help, when you find the one that works for you" said Katie.

"But you seem. You seem so..." Lara stumbled, not knowing how to finish her question.

"Normal? Happy?" Katie said, grinning.

"Yeah" said Lara, nervously.

"Well, I have my bad days like everybody, but life is mostly OK now. A few years ago I just closed the curtains and didn't get out of bed for what felt like forever. I couldn't face the world"

"That sounds like the stage Neil's at" said Lara.

"Well, it does get better; easier. Recovery can be slow and nonlinear. Or it was in my case, anyway" said Katie, with as much reassurance as she could muster.

"He's just so desperate to get back to work, but at the same time I can see he's anxious. I know he can't face it at the moment. He's barely left the house in weeks" said Lara.

"There's no rushing these things. Tell him there's no rush. It can be a long road"

There was something harsh and brutal about this, even though it was spoken kindly. Katie spoke directly, truthfully, sympathetically. Lara had read things like this on websites, but it hadn't sunk in until now. There had been a sense of denial; there had been false hope.

"Look. Phone me. We'll meet up, just the two of us. You need support. You need to think about yourself too" said Katie.

Lara felt strong emotions welling up inside. She had been holding it all down, holding things together, acting like everything was going to get back to normal overnight. She was worried she was going to cry but she didn't. She was stronger than that.

Katie reached down and squeezed Lara's hand and made a sympathetic face. Lara was grateful to have made a friend who talked so openly, so freely, so directly.

The party was starting to disband and Russ was making his way over to the girls. Katie's face immediately switched to the bright happy expression she usually wore. It didn't seem fake to Lara. It made sense, to present a front and avoid discussing things that most people wouldn't understand.

Next chapter...

This is a story about homeostasis...

Do I think I'm smarter than a doctor? Well, consider how much training in psychiatry a generalist has had. A general physician must be knowledgeable of heart, lungs, liver, kidneys, stomach, gall bladder, large intestine, small intestine, ears, nose, throat, eyes, bones, veins, arteries, muscles, tendons. A general physician must be familiar with viruses, bacterial infections and parasites. A general physician must be familiar with eczema, psoriasis, warts, bunions, corns, fungal infections and allergies. On top of all that, a general physician has a basic grounding in the most complex organ of all: the brain.

"Would you take antibiotics if you got an infection?"

This is good question. Antibiotics are a pretty blunt instrument. Antibiotics are very damaging to the health of the gut microbiome. There are "good" bacteria and there are "bad" bacteria, and killing both can be very bad for you. Widespread antibiotic use is also the reason why we have super resistant bacteria like MRSA. It's quite possible that our heavy usage of antibiotics might be something that ends up causing huge numbers of people to die in a microbial infection epidemic.

"Would you get your leg set in plaster cast if it was broken?"

Yes, of course I would. Don't be so stupid.

"Would you take insulin if you were diabetic?"

Yes, but I wouldn't increase my risk of diabetes through bad diet.

"So why don't you take antidepressants to fix your broken brain chemistry?"

Well, my brain chemistry isn't broken. It's not like there's a broken bone. It's not like I've got a malfunctioning pancreas. It's not like I have an infection. My brain is doing what it's supposed to do: it's responding to environmental stimuli and telling me "WARNING: something is wrong!".

If you were feeling a sharp pain in your hand, you could take painkillers, or you could remove the sharp object that was hurting your hand. Pain is a feedback mechanism, telling your brain that something is damaging your body.

My body is getting very damaged. I sit on my arse, bored out of my mind, getting fat and unfit. The environment I work in is completely unstimulating. The environment that I work in could not be more unnatural.

Humans need natural light, exercise, social contact, stimulation, challenges, variation, goals. I have none of these things. I'm trapped inside a shitty office, mainly dealing with a computer. I don't even need to get out of my chair all day long. The work that I do is mind-numbingly boring and easy. The only goal is to get old and die so I don't have to go to work anymore.

Obviously, my brain - as an organ - is a lot smarter than any amount of doctors and psychoanalysts. My brain is virtually unchanged from the one that evolved 2.5 million years ago. My brain kept me safe from sabre-tooth tigers and allowed me to kill wooly mammoths to have enough to eat. My brain told me to move when things got too hot, too cold, or when I was hungry, thirsty... whatever. My brain helped me survive. My brain knows when something is wrong.

London's daytime population is circa 11 million people, with millions of people travelling in from the surrounding areas to take part in the rat race. The rush hour tube is awful. There is no personal space. People are crammed together like sardines in a tin. You think that's natural? You think that's healthy?

London's roads are crammed with cyclists, mopeds, motorcycles, cars, vans, lorries, busses and trucks. Every road junction has traffic coming at you from all directions, and scurrying commuters trying to get across the road without being squashed.

London's buildings are packed to capacity. Any spare land is built upon, as high as the planning officers will allow. Every apartment is sublet and sublet, until many cheaper places have 5 people living in one room. Every office uses hotdesking to increase the capacity. Nobody has their own desk anymore.

My brain screams out in agony at this assault on my senses. I have no car at the moment, so I can't escape when it all gets too much. To escape would mean dragging my luggage on tubes and trains, along with the rest of the heaving masses of people.

I have a little oasis of calm at home, where my apartment block is set back from the road in a gated community, and it overlooks the River Thames. At the back of the building, the sound of thousands of people, all shouting at one another, echoes around the courtyard off the hard surfaces of the buildings. Drunk people argue outside the pub. Road rage incidents occur between drivers. Teenagers squabble. Fraught mothers yell at their kids. Meathead fucknuggets yell at the top of their lungs to show off. At the front of the building, on the balcony, things are mostly calm, except for the riverboat cruises blaring out disco music at high volume, and the Thames speedboat thrill rides, zooming along at top speed.

London is pure theatre, and I fear I might crumble to nothing without its stimulation, but the entertainment is purely monkeys at the zoo, squabbling, masturbating, copulating and screeching as loud as they can.

It's clear that I need to make environmental, lifestyle changes. The problem is not my brain chemistry. The problem is the shit that I'm forced to do. I need to be in London, because London's where the jobs are. I need to work, because how else am I going to have a roof over my head and food on the table?

An obvious quick fix for my mental health would be to escape to some more unspoiled wilderness, which isn't so desperately overpopulated. I need to escape from dead-end boring jobs that I can do with my eyes closed, in shitty offices with artificial lighting, full of boring drones who I have no need or interest in talking to.

It's a shitty compromised situation, where I'm forced into yet more wage slavery until I reach a level of financial comfort where I can truly consider my health needs. It makes sense to earn a lot of money very quickly, so I can escape the rat race sooner. I need a financial safety net which I can use to find a job that doesn't desperately depress me and stress me out.

Life is fucking agony at the moment, but what choice do I have? Short term pain for long term gain, in theory.

Work hard. Complain harder.

Tags: #mentalhealth #depression #suicide #career #london

This is a story about what happened next...

Ordinary person discovers this one weird trick. When they saw what happened next, they were AMAZED!!!

So, I've been accused of being anti-psychiatry, but in fact I'm not. The discovery of chemicals that can cross the blood-brain barrier and affect your perception of the world, has been incredibly important for the understanding of neurological functions, as well as the pathology of mental illness. It's also true that pharmacological interventions are priceless during episodes that would otherwise be unmanageable.

For the record, my own diagnoses have included:

• Clinical depression
• Type II Bipolar Disorder
• Anxiety
• Stress
• Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD)

I've been treated with:

• Antidepressants
• Antipsychotics
• Mood stabilisers
• Anxiolytics / hypnotic sedatives
• Sleep aids

Then having read a meta-analysis of psychiatric treatment outcomes by Robert Whittaker in his books Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic, I decided to embark upon an unethical study, with me as the test subject. I decided to go completely unmedicated.

The general public often associate unmedicated mental health patients with some wild-eyed looney, who has slipped their straightjacket, ducked the tackles of the hospital orderlies and legged it out of some mental health institution. There is an assumption that people with mental health problems are homicidal maniacs, and a danger to the public. I'm here to dispel that myth.

Going unmedicated is not something I would ever advocate. The withdrawal effects from psychiatric medication are likely to be severe and unpredictable. It's not something that should ever be done without consulting your doctor. However, I did it, and this is my account of what happened.

Firstly, coming off medication is hard. Really hard. I've had comedowns from drug abuse that haven't been as bad as coming off anxiety medications, for example. What goes up must come down, and there's no avoiding the fact that coming off a 'feel good' medication means that you are going to feel bad. Really bad.

Fundamentally, that's why many of us take medication, isn't it? To feel normal. To feel better than we would do without it. That's certainly how I got mixed up in the whole world of mental health in the first place... because I felt terrible. I was exhausted and suicidal and depressed and demotivated and I didn't enjoy anything. I needed happy pills, because all my happy had leaked away somewhere, and I was just spending 14 to 16 hours a day asleep, and the rest of it in bed hoping that the world would go away.

The thing is, the unnatural 'happy' pills destabilised me, and my mood then swung too happy, and entered a mood cycle of alternating periods of depression and hypomania. Enter the mood stabilisers. It's starting to sound like a story about the old woman who swallowed a fly, isn't it? For those who are unfamiliar with the story, she then swallowed a spider to catch the fly, and then something else to catch the spider and so on, until she swallowed something so large it killed her.

The problem with trying to treat human moods with medications is that the brain has evolved to be homeostatic. That is to say, the brain has evolved its own mechanisms to maintain stability, and anything you introduce artificially will quite naturally destabilise those systems.

The stability of your moods can also be destabilised by supposedly normal things. We are all supposed to be able to cope with the pressure of exams, work, domestic duties and so on, but for some of us, it will all become too much. Is this mental illness, or are these 'nervous breakdowns' actually something that threaten to blight the lives of every single person? Is it a lottery as to whether the stress will become overwhelming?

I self-medicated for stress for years, using copious amounts of alcohol. Of course, at work you then have to compensate for the foggy mind caused by a hangover, so you start to drink strong coffee. I was probably having the equivalent of about 12 shots of espresso every single day. The amount of caffeine contained in those shots was practically the same as being an amphetamine addict, and indeed my boss at the time - who got me into this destructive lifestyle - had the racing speech and fast jerky movements that you would associate with a speed freak.

When I moved onto harder stimulants, including a drug that would keep me awake for over a week at a time, I found that my mind was not as robust as I had assumed it would be. I managed to induce within myself, symptoms that were unmistakably schizophrenic.

Consumed with paranoid delusions, hearing and seeing things and with completely warped perceptions, I was very mentally unwell indeed. This divided medical opinion. Some professionals wanted to treat me as if I had permanently damaged my brain, and had now become a schizophreniac. Others could see that the symptoms were likely to abate, if I just got some sleep, had some food & drink and started to detox and let my frazzled brain recover. Thankfully, the latter was the correct opinion.

Does that mean that all schizophreniacs can recover and live normal unmedicated lives? No, sadly not. I've seen quite a lot of people who have been suffering acute episodes of mental illness as a result of circumstances or substance abuse, and these people have recovered as soon as they were removed from the situation that landed them in hospital. However, there are clearly some patients who are either too badly damaged, or have some other pathology that is driving their illness, and medication is necessary to control the psychosis & mania.

For my own part, I have lived without caffeine for many years now, and I try to keep alcohol consumption to a minimum. I've been medication free for a few years, but I have dipped back into both sedatives, sleep aids as well as powerful stimulants, during times of crisis. It's been a few months since the last time I dabbled with anything psychoactive, and I'm still suffering rebound anxiety and depression.

Life is incredibly hard right now. I'm stalked by suicidal thoughts all the time, and stress is almost unbearable. I would dearly love the comforting embrace of a chemical security blanket. I long for intoxication. However, despite the hard, sharp edges of daily existence, at least my emotions aren't blunted and I feel like I have wonderful mental clarity.

Every day is a struggle, and my perception of time is completely warped. I feel like this depression is going to last forever, and I assume that everybody hates me and that I have nothing to offer the world, and I'm never going to be happy ever again. However, I'm able to be very rational, and I can see that my perceptions have merely been warped by my mood, which is partly because I'm still recovering from the abuse of sleeping pills, anxiety drugs and stimulants.

It would be easy to write off my tale as that of a drug addict, but that's not really the story. In actual fact, self medication with 'bad' chemicals was only very recently, and well after I was diagnosed with various mental health problems and had already been taking 'good' chemicals (i.e. medications). All psychoactive chemicals are inherently destabilising.

Self medication is a disastrous path to go down, but all attempts to force your moods to go one way or the other without changing the environment that you're in, will be doomed to failure. I wanted happy pills so that I could remain in the rat race, and maintain a standard of living that I had gotten used to. However, what I really needed was to escape that bullshit world.

Propping up my ailing mental health so that I could continue to work a job that I hated and that bored the shit out of me was a dumb choice. Mental health is too precious to fuck about with using pills and potions. If you're not feeling great, that's probably because you need to get out in green spaces more, eat healthier, get some new friends, ditch that mean abusive partner, disown those horrible parents who never congratulate you on your achievements and always give you a hard time, and quit trying so hard to impress people and be somebody you're not.

This is my prescription for life: be myself and tell everybody to shove their ill-informed opinions about my life up their arse. Nobody's an expert in my life and how to live it, and so many of the so-called experts are actually unhappy themselves, nor are they bringing happiness to the lives of the people they advise. Judge people on their results.

Fundamentally, there is an epidemic of mental health issues, and nobody is curing anyone, so trust nobody except for yourself, and do what feels right for you.

I discharged myself, because I was in hospital voluntarily. I've had several 'section' assessments but never been sectioned under the Mental Health Act. However, I'm an unmedicated mental health patient on the loose, so look out!

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

This is a story about the descent into darkness...

The first time I couldn't work due to depression, it came out of the blue. I had started a new job, and it was actually really interesting. I was quite enthusiastic about what I was doing, and empowered to grow into a new role. Spring was turning into summer, and so I had the seasons in my favour. What happened next was a surprise to everybody, including me.

One morning, I couldn't get out of bed. I'd had problems getting up early for work, but this was different... I couldn't face the day. As soon as I'd admitted defeat - that I definitely wasn't going to make it into the office that day - I was somehow a changed person. It was like a dam burst. This problem that I had been barely coping with was suddenly unleashed, after 11 years of steady 9 to 5 grind and reliable service in the name of the corporations I worked for.

People talk about nervous breakdowns, and I guess that's what had happened. All of a sudden, and with little warning, I was sick... but this was an invisible sickness. I felt it, and I couldn't overcome it, but I didn't believe it was real. I thought that it was fake. I felt like a fraud.

In the UK you can take up to 3 days off work without a doctor's note. After 3 days, I knew deep down that there was no way that I could possibly go back to work, but what was wrong with me? This was highly unusual for the dependable grey-suited regular 9 to 5, Monday to Friday office Joe Bloggs, that I was. 11 years of full time work and 13 years of full time education. All I knew was getting up and going to a dictated place, on the treadmill, in the rat race, following orders.

To summon the effort to go and see my doctor took the whole of those 3 days. I knew the problem was more severe than just not feeling very well. I knew it was more severe than a day off work was going to cure. I knew that something was seriously wrong, but I couldn't express it... I had no language to explain the brick wall that I'd hit.

It was so unlike me to be lacking in energy, in purpose, in motivation and to neglect my duties, my responsibilities. It was so unlike me to not do the work. I'd had a nearly 100% attendance record at work and at school and college. Bunking off wasn't in my vocabulary. Not doing things I didn't like wasn't something I ever considered as an alternative.

I went to the doctor. I sat down and explained that I was tired. I was more tired than I'd ever been in my life. I couldn't cope. I couldn't turn the pedals of the cycle anymore. I couldn't do what I'd always managed to do, which was to drag myself out of bed, and go to school, college or work, no matter what. It hadn't mattered whether the bullying was unbearable, or the stress was intolerable, the pressure relentless... I had been that guy, that perfect student or dream employee, who always turned up and did their work, like a good little boy.

Within a couple of minutes of me explaining my unexpected interruption in my perfect attendance record, and inexplicable fatigue, my doctor said "have you heard of Fluoxetine?". I had heard of Fluoxetine: it's the generic name for Prozac, which is an anti-depressant. Fluoxetine is a Specific Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI) which was supposed to increase levels of Serotonin in the brain, or so Eli Lilly - the manufacturer - thought, and told the world that depressed people had unnaturally low serotonin levels in their brain. They were wrong.

The theory that depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain, is ubiquitous. We are comforted to know that there is a medical problem with us, that can be corrected with medication. It's a neat little theory: depressed people don't have enough serotonin in their brain, and with medicine it can be topped up to 'normal' levels. Sadly, it's just not correct.

Measurements of the amount of serotonin metabolites in spinal fluid of depressed people who take Fluoxetine or other SSRIs are actually lower than supposedly healthy people. The theory was proven to be bunkum, but doctors and mental health professionals still share research that's 30+ years old and has been disproven. The theory was just too popular, as well as the SSRI medication, which millions of people had flocked to as their salvation.

I had read extensively in the field of psychopharmacology and had received unconditional offers of a University place at several prestigious institutions, to study psychology, pharmacology and psychiatry. I was probably better informed than my doctor.

I knew that SSRIs were associated with emotional blunting, anorgasmia (not being able to cum) and increased suicidal ideation (thinking about killing yourself). I knew that the long-term outcomes were actually worse than placebo, in several studies. I knew that an SSRI would take 6 weeks to take effect anyway, and that was no use to me. I needed to get back to work!

So, I declined the medication that was offered to me, within just a few minutes of talking to my doctor. I was shocked by how quickly I had been offered psychiatric medication from a general physician, which would take at least 6 weeks to take effect, and I could end up taking for a long time. I felt a little failed by the health services.

My doctor signed me off for a week, and I felt a little relieved to have some time to allow my body to hopefully revert to homeostasis, and I could hopefully get back to work. I felt like a real failure, and I started to feel anxious about the impression that my bosses and colleagues would have of me. Would I be seen as unreliable? Would my name be tainted?

The fatigue and lack of motivation, purpose, persisted and I spent a week in bed, sleeping for 16+ hours. I hardly ate. I didn't open the curtains. I turned my phone off and just curled up under the duvet. Where had this tiredness come from? I had always been in good physical shape and my body had never failed me like this before. I had always had plenty of energy.

I went back to the doctor after a week, and I was getting pretty desperate for an answer. I was looking for a diagnosis, a cure. I wanted the trusted men in white coats to make everything better again.

We did tests: blood tests, urine tests, thyroid function, kidney and liver function. We even did an AIDS test, as my doctor was at a loss to explain why I was so fatigued all the time. One week turned into three weeks. There was seemingly no end to my exhaustion and inability to cope with the thought of going back to work. There was no way I could face the day, for some reason. I had been housebound with the curtains closed, except for trips around the corner to the doctor's surgery.

My doctors remained convinced that I was suffering with Clinical Depression, and urged me to try an SSRI, but I still refused on the grounds that I didn't want another 6 weeks off work, while I waited for the medication to kick in. 9 weeks off work seemed ridiculous to me, and the side effects sounded unacceptable.

So I stopped going to the doctors. I stopped getting sick notes. I switched my phone off and went to bed, and I just tried to ignore the fact that I was going to lose my job. I didn't care because I couldn't care. There was no way I could go back to work, feeling so exhausted, so drained, so fatigued and unable to cope with even preparing food, getting dressed, having a shower. I just lay in my bed and slept two thirds of every day, and lay half-asleep, anxious about a knock at the door, with the curtains closed, for the rest of the time.

Everything seemed impossible, insurmountable. The idea of going to the shop seemed as insane as the idea of going on an expedition to the South Pole without any warm clothes or supplies. Clearly there was something wrong with me if I was misjudging the effort involved in things, but I also knew that I couldn't keep just doing the same shit, the same crappy 9 to 5 routine, and the same formula of working a job.

As the summer wore on, I started to get interested in the idea of doing some iPhone development work, and slowly I ventured outside into the sunshine in the afternoons, to learn how to develop software on the Apple platform. It seemed like a nice confidence-building exercise, as I had started to doubt that I'd ever be able to work again. I had started to feel like I'd be invalided out of the workforce for the rest of my days.

The more I worked, the more obsessed I became. My energy came back. Slowly at first. I would work for an afternoon, then an afternoon and an evening, and then soon I was doing full days of work again. But it didn't stop there.

By the time July had given way to August, I was working an 18 hour day. I was irritable and single-minded. Eating was a chore that would slow me down and get in the way of me working. I didn't want to waste time with my partner, my friends, my family. Nobody understood what I was working on and how important it was. Explaining anything to anybody was painfully slow and angered me to have to take time out from my work to even answer the simplest of questions.

I started to speak faster, in a rush to get the words out and not waste precious time speaking to people. I viewed other people as obstacles, standing in the way of my single goal, and as dimwitted fools who were sent to irritate and frustrate me. My thoughts raced, but I could follow them, but speaking was never fast enough to verbalise what was going on in my brain, so my speech was pressured... trying to will my tongue to be fast enough to keep pace with my thread of thought.

My work rang me up and insisted that we meet up. I saw my boss, and we agreed that I should give my notice. There was no way I was going back to that job. They were cool about things, but I didn't really have any explanation about what was going on with me.

I was free from the confines of the 9 to 5, Monday to Friday office routine. I was free from dimwitted bosses who had been promoted into positions of incompetence. I was free from bureaucracy and red tape and corporate bullshit. I just worked, and worked, and worked. I worked 7 days a week. I worked until I was falling asleep, and then I would start again as soon as I woke up.

At some point during this flurry of activity, I managed to get a couple of iPhone Apps to number one in the charts. Naturally, this brought in a lot of cash. I had done it. I had proven my point. I had unwittingly become a successful entrepreneur, off the back of becoming unwell and losing my job.

However, I failed to see it like that. What I saw instead was that office work wasn't good for me. I felt like office work had made me sick, and that I needed to find a new profession... well, a trade actually.

I decided to quit IT and software - the thing that I was really good at - and retrain as an electrician. I decided that the most important things to me were being self employed and working in a non-office environment. It took a couple of years before I finally realised I was wrong.

The same thing happened to me, except this time it was much, much faster.

The pressure on a small businessman, and a tradesman is immense. An electrician is responsible for the safety of everybody in the homes that you have installed an electrical system into. If anybody is electrocuted because of your shoddy workmanship, it's your fault. That's a lot of responsibility. Also, the public expect you to work for peanuts.

The sense of exhaustion and inability to cope with the pressure anymore, had hit me really hard in my cushy desk job. Now I had angry customers ringing me up because I had gotten sick. This was much, much worse, because they were ordinary people who I'd met and built a relationship with. Ordinary people were counting on me to wire up their homes, and I was personally failing them.

This depression was much deeper and darker, because I'd really run out of ideas. I felt completely useless, and that as a well known local tradesman, I'd ruined my reputation in my community. This was awful. I was actually afraid to leave the house, in case I bumped into somebody I knew, somebody who I'd let down.

I felt like I couldn't go backwards, and I couldn't go forwards. I was really trapped. How would people take me seriously as an IT professional if I'd previously been a lowly electrician? How would I ever work again as an independent businessman, when I had actually crashed a business due to my ill health? How could I ever be trusted again?

I started to think about suicide very seriously. I saw no way out of this cycle of depressions and failure. I couldn't see a way to earn money anymore, to work again. I couldn't imagine going back to my profession, or starting another business. Everything looked doomed to fail again and again and again.

I tried the medical route again, and finally got referred to a psychiatrist. It took a very long time before I actually met with the consultant, and the options were the same: SSRIs, SNRIs and NaSSAs. All serotonergic drugs. All with horrible side effects. All taking 6+ weeks to kick in.

I begged my psychiatrist to let me try Bupropion (sold as Zyban and Wellbutrin) which is very popular in France and is fast acting. He refused on the grounds that it was an off-label prescription in the UK and he'd have to get special permission from the NHS trust. It was more than his job was worth.

So, I resorted to self-medication.

Self medication worked... in the short term. I felt better, I could function. However, it took me down a path that led to the Dark Web, which led to drug window-shopping, and later to experimentation with just about every highly addictive hard drug known to man, including Heroin, Crack Cocaine and Crystal Methamphetamine.

Drugs don't work. The brain gets used to them, and then you have to increase the dose or switch to a more powerful drug. You can't artificially induce an organ that's designed to be balanced - homeostatically self-regulating - to be forced into an unnatural state.

What's the reason why those people who were taking SSRIs had lower serotonin levels in their spinal fluid? Well, it's because the brain realises that something is artificially out of kilter, and so it releases less serotonin to compensate, and puts you right back where you started.

In the words of The Verve: "the drugs don't work, they just make it worse".

Why do you think drugs from your doctor are good, and drugs from a drug dealer or the Dark Web are bad? Do you think your brain knows the difference? Of course it doesn't. Most of the drugs that are abused were developed by pharmaceutical companies originally, and used to be prescribed before newer 'safer' medications were developed. By 'safer' we tend to mean weaker and with such horrible side effects that taking bigger doses becomes unpleasant. In actual fact, the so-called 'drugs of abuse' have far less side effects than their 'safe' counterparts, at therapeutic doses. Anything becomes poisonous at high enough doses.

Does that mean I'm pro-drugs then? Am I soft on drugs, and one of these decriminalisation nuts?

Well, no, not really. Drugs are bad. They put your brain into an unnatural state and it's hard for your brain to achieve homeostasis when you are poking and prodding at it with the blunt instruments that are the chemicals that cross the blood-brain barrier.

Drugs can 'reset' your brain, in a similar way to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) which is also known as 'shock' therapy.

Medicine of the brain is very early in its development. Psychiatry has only really been a medical field since the 1950's and the true mechanism of action of medications is only very poorly understood, especially as the true nature of mental illness has not yet been revealed.

My personal view is that the destruction of families, clans and villages in favour of ridiculously long working hours in an isolated urban setting, has destroyed everything we need as humans in terms of our relationships with other human beings. Mental illness is a perfectly sane response to modern life. It's a sane response to an insane world.

The thing that's been most beneficial to my mental health has been connecting with a group of friends, while being homeless. Being relieved of the isolated silence of the commuter train, and the pressure of horrible work and job insecurity, coupled with the financial pressures of paying ridiculous rent and unattainable material goals... it was sweet, sweet relief. Living in a kind of commune, with other people who were living in close quarters with each other, sounds unbearable, but it was actually nice. It was humanising. It felt natural, and a sense of calm, relaxation and connection with the world, flooded back into me. I felt a warmth within me that I'd never felt, except maybe with Heroin.

The question now on my lips is: how do I get that again? How do I recreate the sense of community I had, either with tons of kitesurfing friends, or with tons of similarly dispossessed and dislocated homeless people, all thrust together out of necessity to stick together?

The need to belong to a tribe, a group, a commune... it's undeniable, now that I've experienced it. I place an importance on it above financial security, because without it I just feel suicidal, so it's actually essential for life in a way that money just isn't.

Human connection is the answer to the riddle of depression, suicide and addiction.

I'm halfway betwixt and between. Half in the dark, and half in the light. My brain doesn't know whether to be suicidally depressed or hypomanically fixated on a single goal.

Tags: #suicide #depression #mentalhealth #bipolar #addiction #drugs #career

This is a story about engaging your mouth before your brain...

Most of what I write is not stuff that is ordinarily shared by people. We bottle a lot of stuff up, and perhaps with good reason, but what happens if your general demeanour means you're a fairly open book?

Sure, it's true that some of my life experiences - mental health problems, drug abuse, homelessness, being arrested by the police - are not things that your ordinary middle-class professional will hopefully ever experience. It is therefore logical that I should keep all these things hush-hush. Pretend they never happened.

I don't think that privacy and anonymity is necessarily helpful, judging by the direction that life is headed for many people who I speak to. We know there is a mental health epidemic, with millions of people laid low with depression, anxiety and a huge spectrum of illnesses affecting the mind. If we don't talk about this, and share our experiences, we suffer in silence.

It seems to me as if Psychiatry has failed. Pills, powders and potions have failed to cure the ailments of our very souls. Something is wrong, broken, with society, and medicine hasn't yet come up with the cures... probably because we are treating symptoms, not root causes.

It's been a theory of mine that we were never evolved as a species to live in such close quarters with one another. Open plan offices and tiny cramped apartments in overcrowded cities certainly make me feel like a lemming: compelled to throw myself off a cliff. It really doesn't help that so many service sector jobs are so soul destroying. Moving paper or electronic money around for the mega wealthy is most of what we do in the rich nations. It's not growing carrots or building houses.

Sure, some of us are tortured artists and entertainers. Some of us create organic artisan jam, or dog's milk yoghurt, or run a creative digital agency where we wear unfashionable clothes and stupid facial hair and ride fixed-speed bicycles to work. These, most surely, are the last days of a dying civilisation.

They say you should never get too close to an iceberg, because they can flip over unexpectedly. You might be rather pleased to be part of the top 1% or even 5%, but while you're sticking up at the top, there's a huge mass under the water beneath. Sooner or later, the massive body of ice that's been held underwater rises up, and the top of the iceberg is plunged into the freezing sea.

The motto of Über is "everyone's private driver" but how can we all have a jet-set A-list celebrity lifestyle? There simply isn't enough landmass to create enough helipads for everybody to be flying around by private helicopter, chauffeur driven around the place, pampered and flattered at every turn. Technology can't make us all rich, famous and able to have an impossibly high standard of living, despite its promises.

With our MacBook Pro and our high-quality digital camera etc. we all feel like a writer, a photographer, an artist. Facebook gives us the impression that people love looking at photos of us, so we must be glamour models. Twitter turns us all into bloggers, preachers, with our followers... our congregation.

There was a time when you could quit your job and probably make a good living selling cup cakes, setting up a trendy delicatessen or being a life coach. I'm not sure if those people who followed their dreams and quit the rat race are happy, but there's certainly not any opportunity to do it today. Things are so competitive. How many cup cakes have you got to sell, in order to have a salary comparable with somebody who shuffles paper around their desk and tries to look busy and important in the office, but is just a tiny cog in a big wasteful machine that doesn't actually produce anything of tangible value.

I'm mortgaging my privacy. I'm selling my soul. By making public every little tiny detail about my private life, including my massive f**kups, I'm potentially headed up a one-way street. If I achieve any kind of infamy, then I'm basically screwed, in terms of re-entering the world of the wage-slave drones.

So, I've got the best part of 6,000 Twitter followers in the space of 6 months. Do you think that translates to pounds in my pocket? Do you think that taking the unprecedented step of writing nearly 200,000 words about a fairly spectacular life implosion, would change my life significantly? Well, the ship has sailed for anybody hoping to get an easy ride, I'm afraid.

I like what I've written. I would defend it, to some extent. It serves as a permanent public record of not only what I've been through in the past, but more importantly, there is a subtle recording of what I was going through during the whole time I've been blogging. You can read my emotions, my moods, the challenges, the stresses... in-between the lines of what's written down.

I'm starting to be accused of being self-indulgent, self-absorbed, but why shouldn't I have this? Why shouldn't I be allowed to scream and wail and tantrum a bit, if I had to be the sensible grey-suited career guy, with the good job and an impressive CV, who had the mortgage and saved money for a rainy day and got married and did everything by the f**king book like I was supposed to. I deferred gratification like a son of a bitch, and there was no f**king pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The cake is a lie.

How many people are discontented? How many people are struggling? Not only struggling with stress and poverty and unpleasant things happening in their lives, but also struggling with the injustice of things, the pointlessness of some make-work wanky job that's completely useless to humanity. Or perhaps the work they can get is just so completely degrading and poorly paid it's not even worth working at all. You might as well just get off your head on drugs and alcohol and dribble while you play computer games or watch terrible trashy TV.

How many kids are getting smashed out of their skulls on cannabis, skunk and legal high smoking blends? How many kids are consuming dangerous amounts of cheap alcohol, simply to become highly intoxicated? What is it about life that these kids want to escape? Why aren't they sharing the anguish, the inner turmoil? Why do they retreat inwards, under the heavy sedation of intoxicating drugs and alcohol?

Now Microsoft and Facebook are hitting headlines, saying they're working on chat bots. The iPhone has Siri, which is supposed to be a kind of artificially intelligent digital assistant, that can understand what you ask it to do, and try and help you. People are delighted when it turns out that you can ask Siri to beatbox, and it will kinda do it, in a weird kind of way.

Why would we be wasting our time talking to computers, when we could be talking to each other? I wrote before about us sharing 21% less on Facebook, in the space of a year. Do we not keenly feel the loss of that connection with real people, who can get in contact and try to make us feel less alone with our problems and our existential crises?

No person is an island, and the isolating existence of interacting more with apps and websites and software in general, instead of with each other is a worrying trend. Ok, so I'm bucking that by providing a veritable brain dump of sharing, which is much akin to verbal diarrhoea, but at least it's putting stuff out there, where there's a chance I can get some help from my friends.

There's obviously a bystander effect, where nobody knows quite what to do when somebody starts having a public meltdown. People just aren't supposed to act like this. Where is my stoicism? Where is my stiff upper lip? Where is my shame? Where is my embarrassment and my intense desire for total privacy?

Nobody wants to be first, and people also worry that they're going to end up feeling responsible. Everybody feels they're already struggling so much to keep their own shit together, that anybody else bleating on about their own struggles should shut the hell up. Look after number one and keep yourself to yourself. Don't you think that could be the root cause of this horrible isolated existence that causes so much damage to our happiness, our sense of wellbeing, our mental health... leading to depression, stress, anxiety, breakdowns, self harm and suicides?

We're in such a hurry to label, to judge, to jump to conclusions. We like to bracket people and problems as quickly as we can. Somebody becomes known as a drama queen, or we tire of their depressed demeanour, the dark clouds that follow them around. We start to stop inviting the killjoy out, or generally interacting with them. Let them wallow in self-pity, right? I'm sure social services or somebody from a government service will step in before they do something stupid. It's somebody else's job. Not my problem. I've got enough going on with my own stressful, meaningless, empty, unfulfilling life that I hate and I'm depressed about.

I'm just typing now. The taps are open and the words are flooding out. I have relaxed my anal sphincter and a torrent of liquid brown verbal diarrhoea is jetting out of my arse and into the toilet bowl of the internet, and nobody gives a shit, because we are all sinking with shit up to our necks. There is a whole World Wide Web of shit out there, and we're all just pumping out this useless effluent into the cesspool of human emotional pain.

Do you think I'm going to look back on this frantic period of writing and recoil with horror when I read it back? I certainly expect that I will be cupping my face in my hands, saying to myself "what the fuck was I thinking?" but it must be about as close as it's possible to get to knowing what somebody's thinking, reading this shite.

I thought to myself that I won't hold back, I won't censor, edit or filter, because I can always tear this down with a click of the mouse. A stroke of the keyboard, and all this is gone and I can deny all knowledge that it ever existed. It's the digital photo that you deleted off your camera or smartphone... those shameful ones and zeros are gone forever.

But you know what? I've not felt the urge to take anything down. I've not felt the pangs of regret at sharing stuff that makes me look really bad. I've given the world everything it needs to pigeon-hole me, to categorise me, to bracket me, to judge me, to dismiss me with a label or an over-simplification of my entire existence.

That's what we want, isn't it? Computer credit scores, and computerised personality profiling, and a computer simulation of a real person, that responds in a predictable and easy to understand way. We don't want real lives, with all their messiness and unfathomable complexity. We don't want to get to know each other, but have to live with the fact that we still don't really know each other. We don't even know ourselves, even if you're an irritatingly self-absorbed little prick like I am, who self indulgently wallows in a world of introspection and deep self-examination.

Show me some more videos of funny cats. Distract me from the banality of my existence. Please don't remind me of the humanity that my fellow Earth residents possess or incite any kind of sympathetic or empathetic response in me. I'm quite wrapped up in my own world of pain and disappointment, boredom and stress. I want to pretend like technology and the advancement of civilisation is going to wave its magic wand and even though I'm fornicating with a person I'm nearly totally revulsed by the more I get to know them, in a filthy home in an overcrowded town, on a hopelessly poisoned planet, everything will be fucking rosy for the screaming brats that end up getting spawned.

What the hell is this anyway? This is what happens when the filter gets switched off. This is my life, with no filter.

I think I was born with no filter.

Look: I bought new socks. I'm sharing the private details of my socks life. Every time I have socks, I'm going to post it up on social media. Socks is supposed to be a taboo subject. Always practice safe socks.

Tags: #privacy #depression #mentalhealth #suicide #career #socialmedia

This is a story of the people behind the camera; the unsung heros....

As I was having a "brand interaction" with Shaun the Sheep, I observed that there was one gender that was statistically more probable to be behind a camera, photographing a little person.

Mums are our unsung heros, Grannies are the nonjudgemental free babysitters for mollycoddled mummies boys, Aunties are the eyes that see everything from afar, Cousins are the ones who are 'Goldilocks'... not too close but not too far. You shouldn't marry your cousin though. Not enough genetic diversity.

Men are arseholes. Powerful men are entitled, bullying, cruel and myopic arseholes. Men are warriors, but we are supposed to be civilised. There is nothing civilised about war. There is nothing civilised about bullying, pain, human suffering, hunger and feeling unloved.

Mums are the antidote to men's raging testosterone. When women give birth, maternal instincts are programmed into the mother, which are necessary for the survival of the species. However, human babies have very large heads (ouch!) and are totally unable to support themselves and their alien head until they have drunk lots of mother's milk from the mammary glands of their mother.

Oxytocin is released into the bloodstream of nursing mothers, as part of bonding, but there is a sympathetic reaction, which is not in the mother's body, but in the father (if he stuck around for the birth). The release of this hormone is critical, to change the mode of the male, from fight, fuck and flee, into a responsible adult who deserves to have his offspring survive for long enough to possibly pass on 50% of his genes.

This is not so much the 'selfish' gene, as the 'anti-freeloader' mechanism. I'm sorry buddy, but you don't get to sow your wild oats and expect to reap what you sow. That's called rape.

I'm sorry to say it, but there are far to many rapists in the world. Men who think that they can get away with taking what they want, and not sticking around to face the emotional and physical consequences. The price for your 3 seconds of copulation could well be a pink/brown/yellow/red, screaming, incontinent midget, which can't feed itself, but yet you find yourself doing a weird dance in worship of this blood and mucus covered alien that just exited the mothership.

The "summer of love" was merely a chemical blip that nature would inevitably find its way around. The powerful drugs that have been synthesised in Bayer, Roche, Lily, Pfizer, Myers-Squibb etc. etc. which were tested on animals, including many of society's undesirables is a holocaust that we have conveniently forgotten. Baby boomers should not be nostalgic for being doped up in a field having unprotected sex, because that's f**king up society.

Many well meaning Physicians have entered Psychiatry, believing that it was a new Science, motivated by the desire to improve lives. Nobody did the long-term studies to find out whether the outcomes were better or worse. Where data has existed - for example, with Heroin, Cocaine, Laudenum, Snuff, Cannabis - the long term outcomes only look OK for the extremely wealthy. Are you the Queen of England? No? Then perhaps Cannabis is not for you. Big Pharma gets very rich indeed of patent royalties, which is completely at odds with the needs of sick people.

Psychoactive substances have always been the means of controlling society. Whether it was the Coca leaves of Peru and Columbia, Betel nut of Africa, Paan of Southern Asia, Tea of North India and China, Coffee and Cocoa of South America... and of course, Tobacco of the Americas. Older than all of these, is of course, alcohol which was brewed by monks in order to addict people to something that would fill their congregation pews.

As shamanism, witch-doctoring and magic declined in Europe, so organised religion rose to fill the void, as child mortality and and an early death were guaranteed to feature in the lives of Medieval people, along with hunger and bitterly cold winters. Life was short and sh1t.

Civilisation has advanced. We now have the resources to treat diseases, making them go away and people live instead of dying. In a hell of lot of cases that's a mosquito net and a sachet of salt & sugar, which will save the life of a person with runny pooh, provided they have access to clean drinking water. It's as simple as that.

Add food into the mixture and you're improving lives immeasurably in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Sahara is a bleak and desolate space that separates almost an entire continent from having access to civilisation. Do we travel there to distribute clean water, medicine, bicycles? No, we go there to steal gold, diamonds, uranium ore, dam their rivers, steal their resources and take what little crops the African people grow to feed themselves, paying barely enough for them to survive the winter. This is rape.

I don't know if this is coming across, but I'm quite angry about this. I have been for as long as I've been able to hold a complex thought and set of feelings in my young mind. I'm sorry I wasn't a right-on lefty liberal, born with a copy of The Guardian clutched in my hands, as I was ejected from my mother's womb. I'm sorry that you're too far up your Islington Blairite Hypocrite Champagne Swilling Holier-than-thou F**king A*se to see that the working classes care too... but they didn't have the benefit of your privileged education. But then you're so smart that you knew that? No?

Thankfully, Oxford is a think-tank, where burnt out Blairites decide to raise a family. It used to be an affordable commuter belt City with enough culture and academic interest to make the trip into Paddington on the train, worth jostling with other suits in the morning.

Oh yes, Oxford has its fair share of people who look down their noses at the great unwashed masses. Thankfully though, some of them couldn't avoid actually encountering some grubby street urchins, and having their perceptions shaken up.

There was a joke shop in the heart of Jericho, where you could buy water balloons, smoke bombs, whoopee cushions, firecrackers/bangers and other things that could shock a smug mummy's boy out of his self-obsessed preening, admiring themselves in their gowns in shop windows as they walked through the cobbled streets of Oxford's dreaming spires.

My Parents never really reprimanded me for launching a "Swallows and Amazons" style attack on the punters, from the high boughs of trees and bridges in the University Parks. We were little monkeys, who tore around town on our BMXs and skateboards faster than any Park Ranger or officious old fuddy-duddy could chase after us. We used to ring doorbells, egg houses, put treacle on door knobs. We were working class kids thumbing our noses at the establishment and everybody loved it, except for the arrogant elite.

Luckily, all the 'warrior' men were all in London, hunting big game and beating their chests. We knew our mothers would tell us off and say "wait until your father gets home" but we also knew our fathers would be exhausted from full-on days of p1ssing contests in the Big Smoke, followed by horrendous rat-race train journeys from hell.

This kind of matriarchal society took the sting out of any beatings that the kids got, and us kids bonded a lot more with our mothers than would be ordinary at that time. Did it lead to a load of mummies boys? Actually, it might have led to a group of people who feel so loved and cared for that they feel invincible. Is this a bad thing? Well some of my friends have died young, making unwise decisions when fuelled by alcohol.

There was one friend who shone bright in all our lives, and the circumstances in which we lost him were close to my own childhood experiences, of playing on railway tracks unsupervised by adults. I could totally picture exactly how it happened. It was chilling, and still is today. I am not imagining myself doing that, I am actually able to perfectly empathise with the mindset that would have led to a tiny mistake, which cost my friend his life.

I hope that his Mother and family is OK, if they read this. I'm trying to write it as sensitively as I can. Our friend is still very much alive in our hearts, and I'm crying as I write this. Tears are rolling down my cheeks and splotching onto my keyboard. I can remember how he touched our lives, as clearly as if it were only yesterday.

The cruellest twist of all, was that we had reconnected just as we were leaving adolescence; and embarking on our journey into adulthood. It robbed us all of the chance to see just how great that young man was going to become. Life can cheat and short-change us still, even at the end of the second millennium.

The challenge that life set our group of friends, was how to cope, in the modern age that had scattered us to the winds. We couldn't really grieve properly as a group. Even though, by total coincidence, this young man had ended up in the same City in Hampshire as me. Most of our other friends had remained in Oxford, where we grew up in.

I used the Internet to try and reconnect with these friends, but it was still very early days, and I felt very damaged and bitter about having been taken away from this group of beloved people. My parents were always moving me away from my friends and schools I loved. I didn't undertand why this had to happen. It was heartbreaking.

We left Aberystwyth for Kidlington, we left Kidlington for Tackley, we left Tackley for Oxford, we then had an abortive attempt to leave Oxford for Cinais in France (thankfully my teachers stepped in and stood up for me, explaining that my life was getting f**ked up by this wanderlust) but we still left for Harcombe, and then the family left Harcombe for Charminster.

By this point I had gotten f**ked off and left home at age 17/18, for Dorchester and my first job. I had barely settled in when British Aerospace then had the lovely idea of moving me to the Portsmouth/Fareham/Gosport area. Eventually I got f**ked off with that company keeping me away from my friends (and being responsible for making weapons that were used to kill people) so I moved to Winchester, where unsurprisingly I didn't have the most developed set of social skills or any ability to relate to my peers... unintended consequences, but it certainly hit me right in the feels.

I had a very weird time in Winchester, but I made 2 key friends, one of whom has recently re-entered my life, which restabilised it temporarily. Friends are important. Continuity is important. Stability is important. Trust is important. Truth is important.

I'm still working through thorny feelings about being taken away from my peers. It left me feeling I had to be fiercely independent and do everything early, in a rush. I've always felt like I had to take care of my Parents. When we were in Ireland when I was a little boy, I remember staying awake all night so that I could go and fetch the coal in the morning. I got myself dressed at dawn, and was just heading out with the coal scuttle to fetch the coal, when my Dad woke up and asked what I was doing.

Yes, you can raise your kids in a Victorian way, and they will turn out OK to outward appearances, but they may have problems reconciling your nostalgia for a time that probably didn't exist and you are over-romanticising, with reality in the 20th and 21st century. The projection of your inadequacies will have unexpected consequences. "Children should be seen and not heard" is one of the most offensive things I have ever heard in my life. F**k you, you dinosaurs.

It's not your fault. You were the best Mum & Dad (I wasn't allowed to say "Mum" or "Dad" for some reason) that you knew how to be. I did have an interesting time in my not-really-allowed-to-be-child-hood, being your experiment in denying the infantilism of an infant. It's benefitted me in the long run... I've had a great head start in many aspects of my life. I'm just not what you might call, a rounded character. For every yin there is a yang.

I'd probably make a good butler. I like dressing up and I sound posh. I can be anything you want me to be. I aim to please, Sir.

Tags: #childhood #career #london #oxford #parents #drugs #addiction #alcohol