This is a story about being tired & depressed all the time...

As things start to get out of control with uppers and downers, you're going to come across legal highs and the black market sooner or later. Let me describe my life to you, after it was ravaged by depression: I never left my bed except to go to the toilet. I never answered my phone. I never answered the door. What does a depressed person want? They want a life.

For the summary of what I'd tried myself to date, you can read:

https://www.manicgrant.com/2015/self-medication-part-one

and:

https://www.manicgrant.com/2015/self-medication-part-two

I was completely disillusioned with medications. The common antidepressants take 6 weeks before they kick in, and they're a nightmare to stop taking: the withdrawal effects are horrible.

I went on a legal highs website, and I systematically worked though every chemical they had on offer:

• 5-IAI
• 6-APB
• MDAI
• Benzylpiperzine
• Ephenidine
• Ethylphendiate
• 3-Fluromethamphetamine
• 3-Flurophenmetrazine
• Methedrone
• Methiopropamine
• Methoxphenedine
• Methylenedioxypyrovalerone
• Mephedrone
• Methylone
• Pentedrone
• 4-MePPP

Those are just the ones I can remember. I have a spreadsheet somewhere that documents everything I bought, and all the dosages I took. I used a high accuracy measuring scale (down to 0.001 of a gram) which I calibrated before every use, and I was careful to do an 'allergy test' before taking anything approaching a psychoactive dose.

The short version of the story is... all these designer drugs were a pile of pants. Complete rubbish. Waste of time & money.

With one exception: Methylone. The chemical name of Ecstasy (MDMA) is 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine. The chemical name of Methylone is 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylcathinone. Basically, the clever chemists swapped out the crystal meth and replaced it with Meow Meow. The novel compound is known as βk-MDMA, instead of just regular MDMA.

If you were to try and take Ecstasy every day, you probably wouldn't get much sleep, and people would think you were really weird. Your face would be gurning all over the place, and you'd keep telling strangers you loved them.

Methylone is not like that. It was as if I'd just gotten over a really bad sickness and I was back to my old self. I had energy and motivation. I could feel joy again. I was getting stuff done. I was functional.

I used to measure out my exact same dose every morning, and then I could feel the storm clouds part about 30 minutes later, and I could get on with a normal day, just like a normal person. I did my work. I did my chores. I socialised... I had re-entered the world.

This went on for the best part of 6 months, and then the government decided to make it illegal. I stockpiled as much as I could afford (about 2 months supply) but when that ran out I was screwed.

Prolintane and Pyrovalerone (sold as Jolly Green Granules) propped me up for a while, but I had pretty much lost my antidepressant. There was no more gas in the tank. The engine was spluttering to a stop. All the other stims I tried were just that: stimulants. They made me awake, alert and they stopped me sleeping. The best part of all about Methylone had been that I could sleep normally at the end of the day.

Out of a suicidal death-wish, I tried NRG-3, which sounded from anecdotal experience very much like MDPV (Supercrack). I was so terrified by this chemical that I diluted an entire gram in a litre of water so that I could measure a very precise 3ml (3mg) as a test dose, using an oral syringe. Turns out that water completely screws up the compound.

 Anyway, after the car-crash that was my ex's brother's wedding, I decided "fuck it" and measured out 15 milligrams of the powder on my scale.

"Binge" was not a term that I had first-hand experience with. Not until that point.

When 3 or 4 days go by, you haven't eaten, you haven't slept, you're just shovelling white powder up your nose... yeah I guess I had my baptism of fire.

When you wonder what day it is. When you wonder when the last time you checked the time or the date, or did any kind of reality check at all... you're pretty deep into a binge.

It's weird, how somebody who was always so self-disciplined, so self-controlled, even with coke and speed and pills... one day they find their drug of choice and they're like an instant junkie. I did kinda panic a bit when I'd had 800mg of a 1000mg bag, because I'd read about somebody who suffered heart damage after 800mg of this potent stimulant, but you find yourself saying "ok, well I'll make this the last one".... until it's all gone... and all you can think about is when can you get some more.

The reason it was so addictive, is because it broke my dependence on my girlfriend. We needed to break up, but I couldn't see an alternative. I couldn't imagine going backwards to go forwards. This stuff was powdered girlfriend. She no longer had any power over me anymore. I wasn't afraid of us breaking up.

She didn't like that very much.

Tags: #drugs #addiction #depression

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a story about taboos and titillation...

That's a photo of a big black cock. It has been quite hard to pair some photos with this blog post, given its provocative title, but I think I've nailed it with this one.

I'm aware that my writing has reached a level of honesty that pretty much makes it unreadable. It's just too unflinchingly brutally open. It's too gut-wrenchingly, stomach squirming and churningly letting all the skeletons out of the closet. People aren't supposed to say these kinds of things. People aren't supposed to talk about this kind of stuff.

It's an absolutely ludicrous experiment, to write down everything that's in your head, in a public journal. However, it's my belief that the age of privacy is over. We are now too wedded to technology to step back to a previous era, but many people are unaware just how insecure their data is. We are almost living in the age of open data.

My laptop is infected with a keylogger, with the attacker hoping to skim credit card details, passwords and obviously able to see every single word that I type. I have also been the victim of a ransomware style attack, when I was using some Google products (phone, smartwatch) which saw me bullied into doing something against my will, when my privacy was massively compromised. I have even conducted a spot of phishing of my own... only in the interests of computer science, of course.

I imagine that my webcam has, at times, become compromised. I dread to think what that electronic eye has witnessed, but we are all watched over by machines of loving grace, at all times. On my bedside table I have my smartwatch and my phone - 2 microphones and 2 cameras - which are pretty much recording around the clock. Next to my bed is my infected laptop, with its microphone and webcam. Whether the data is persisted or not, I wouldn't be qualified to speculate.

Getting to the heart of the matter, human beings are known to pleasure themselves from time to time, even when they are getting enough sex. It's pretty much a fact of life. There's no sense in denying it, or just pretending it doesn't happen. I'm talking about it. This is happening. I'm breaching the taboo.

Let's talk about pornography. Have you watched any music videos lately? They're basically soft porn. Pornographic content has entered mainstream media. Whether it's more and more explicit sex scenes in movies, or the use of pornographic imagery to sell products, it's there on open display, all around us.

Around 2001 I moved into my first flat with a girlfriend. I also, briefly, had a bit of a problem with the amount of 'video-based art' that I was downloading from peer-to-peer networks. It was unhealthy for my relationship, which subsequently ended. I moved back into a shared house. You could say that it was a brief addiction, given the damage to a relationship and my living status.

Porn is probably the most easily accessible of all the addictions. You can stream all you want via your broadband internet connection, for free. Even a gambling addiction costs money. Even a food addiction requires you to go to the supermarket.

The phallic column in the background is The Monument to the Great Fire of London. There are now an impressive array of tall buildings that have been erected in London, in recent years.

We all know that London's seedier side is openly on display in Soho, but actually, there's a lot of willy-waving that goes on throughout the metropolis. On-the-spot fines are having to be issued to the super-rich playboys who cruise around Kensington and Chelsea in their sportscars, with their long bonnets, revving their engines aggressively.

Too embarrassed to go to a strip club? Don't worry, there are now bars in the City that bring the dancing girls into a respectable setting, for you to oggle.

This is my [female] agent's idea of corporate hospitality. Tipping cocktails down the client's neck while scantily clad women shake their booty. This is an acceptable night out to put down as an expense claim, when trying to get your client to renew your contract.

The porn industry might be losing money to piracy, copyright infringement and amateurs who seem to want to share their most private frissons with the world, but sex is very much mainstream and an accepted part of daily life. TV shows now get great ratings if they are filled with buxom wenches and nudity. It worked for Game of Thrones.

Personally, chemsex links horribly with an addiction mess that includes porn and masturbation. As I've written before, my libido has started to become my enemy. A natural survival of the species instinct prompts me to now seek out drugs, and with drugs in my system that libido gets twisted into something very shameful indeed.

Obviously, drugs don't change who you are fundamentally. They can only amplify and exacerbate. However, we all like boobs, ass, pussy and/or cock. We are all programmed to try and achieve some degree of sexual satisfaction. We can't shut down and deny that side of our nature.

Why on earth would I write about this stuff? Well, that tightly wound ball of shame needs to unwind. At its core is a seed that dwells within all of us. I might have corrupted myself, twisted myself, become unrecognisable from an innocent starting position, but given the same conditions it could happen to anybody. I took the risks, and it happened to me, so they're my consequences to own. It's my burden to carry. Only got myself to blame, eh? It just so happens that I'm going to write about it all and see what happens.

Writing about this stuff seems more rational than tearing my own genitals off my body, although the life of a eunuch looks enviable to me in some ways.

Do you like flowers? You do know that a flower is the sexual organ of a plant, don't you?

Tags: #sex

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 one hundred and one days sober...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: #suicide #addiction #alcohol

This is a story about logical conclusions...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TOTAL: £64,500

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: #addiction #drugs #childhood #parents

This is a story about self-imposed constraints...

I was hoping my depression would go away if I gave my brain a chance to achieve homeostasis, but there's always something that's pulling your mood this way or that. Whether it's a new friend, girlfriend, going shopping (even just for food), exercise or being a slave to the highs and lows of social media. Work is also obviously something that affects my mood in a huge way.

Apologies for this stupid Advent Calendar thing I wanted to do. It's just because I had an idea for a blog post on December 26th. I've padded things out, laboured points, repeated myself.

I'm looking forward to letting things flow naturally again.

Merry Christmas, by the way. I'm sorry my stuff has been so self-pitying and not at all festive. In fact, I've been quite the boring misery-guts. I appreciate that over 100,000 words on oneself is either conceited as hell or it's just me trying to brain dump and order my jumbled up thoughts.

Nearly 6,000 words on subjects as diverse as climate change and subatomic physics was really not written with the idea that anybody might read it. I'm embarrassed if you did, but maybe you got a little glimpse into the world I'm trying to navigate.

I don't know where I stand on social media. In some ways it's addictive and anti-social. In other ways it's a lifeline and a means of maintaining some social contact, when you haven't figured out how to get a social life back again, yet.

Anyway, I appreciate all the lovely messages of support, and people looking out for me.

Tags: #friends #socialmedia #computing

This is a story about global children...

I should have been in Prague today, December 22nd, visiting the greatest Kiwi-Czech couple I know. I love them to bits. I'm sad I didn't get to go.

My ex-wife was a programmer when I met her. I thought there could be nothing greater than dating a geek. Turns out it's better just to date somebody you like and who is nice to you.

Yes, I went out with my checklist of things that I wanted:

• Science degree
• Computer programmer
• Outdoorsy
• Adventurous
• Ambitious
• Prepared to follow me into dangerous situations
• Able to stay calm in a crisis

I would say that I got most of those things. The problem was that she never backed me up. There were so many times when I expected her to have my back and she didn't. In fact she was an even more harsh critic of me than I am, and I'm unbelievably hard on myself.

She ended up trying to be me, which is a bit weird. She wanted to learn to climb, so she paid money for a guide and porters to drag her up a mountain. I could have taken her up some Scottish winter routes that are amongst the most brutally dangerous and exposed in Europe.

She wanted to learn to sail. I'd already pretty much taught her, but I could have found some really nasty tidal eddies and extremely tough ports to navigate into, where loads of boats run aground. I could have taken her out on a brutal day where you surf down the waves and try not to broach. No, she wanted to pay SunSail to bob around on a floating caravan in non-tidal waters.

She said she wanted to drive a rally car and thought she was a good driver. I've raced round the Belgian Formula One circuit and won a bunch of karting races. She bought herself a little car that looked a bit like a sports car while I was in hospital once. I bought her a 1972 MG Midget with wire wheels, for her to drive all summer while she was off work.

You would have thought that she'd take care of me, but either she didn't realise how good she had it, or she had a highly inflated opinion of herself.

It occurs to me that a lot of geeks would like a geek girlfriend. They're highly sought after.

I probably just picked badly.

Also, being nice to somebody doesn't make them nice, it turns out.

This photo was taken 8 days after we met. My life skills were ploughed into learning how to be a good adventurer, leader and geek, rather than pick a good life partner (July 2005)

Tags: #divorce

This is a story about stormy weather...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, which is a more fitting epitaph?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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