This is a story about music...

The only things that seem to be capable of making me cry at the moment are Disney movies and a 90-second passage from The Tempest, which is about dreams and sleep. I quote it now for your interest, and as I write this big salty tears are rolling down my cheeks:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air: 
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, 
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, 
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, 
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff 
As dreams are made on, and our little life 
Is rounded with a sleep.

It seems remarkable to me that I'm not able to resist the mawkish and emotionally manipulative thrust of the Disney movies, and I blub in all the right places and even some of the wrong ones. To accuse me of being emotionally unstable or having a tendency towards inappropriate emotional responses to situations, is grossly inaccurate and untrue. I would agree that I'm unguarded; trusting... a little vulnerable and certainly quite naïve, although I would argue that I prefer to be naïve than cynical and guarded.

In terms of protecting myself from whimsically falling in love and getting hurt, I would say that I don't protect myself at all. My emotions go where they want to go and I let them. I use the "L" word very sparingly and tend to distrust strong emotions, viewing them as transient; fleeting. I favour loyalty above everything else. I've got no time for game playing and wimpy wusses who are afraid of getting hurt.

Under a railway arch in Vauxhall, I experienced what the children of doting parents must experience their whole lives - to be loved, cared for; adored. I felt a sense of contentment and security that had been absent throughout my bullied childhood. I felt the warm embrace - the hug, if you like - that had been absent in my life and had turned me into an insecure person who completely lacked self-confidence and a sense of identity. I'd been through 8 schools and lost countless friends due to my druggie alkie loser parents not giving a shit about the damage they were doing. The experience of clubbing under the railway arches was curative - this was the love that had been sorely absent in my life. The catalyst? MDMA.

Fifteen years later, my marriage was collapsing. I needed to go to hospital. I was admitted to The Priory thanks to my private health insurance.

It's actually unremarkable that I grew out of a brief period where I dabbled with recreational drugs - ecstasy - and went on to have a 15-year blemish-free career, before the stress of a toxic and abusive relationship tipped me back into the very state I was in when I was a child: in desperate need of some unconditional love. It seems obvious that depriving a person of their identity and security, and bullying them, would result in trauma and psychological damage. It seems obvious that the same negative stimuli would elicit the same negative response.

While I was in The Priory, I handed in my iPod after a couple of weeks. I had decided that I was using music as a way of manipulating my moods, in a similar manner to people drinking, smoking and using drugs, in response to stress and other negative situations. I decided that if I was going to take treatment seriously, I would have to avoid things which I could use and abuse to alter my mood.

Presently, we seem to think it's virtuous to deny ourselves all the things we enjoy. Cream cakes (too fatty), fizzy drinks (too much sugar), beer and wine (alcoholic), masturbation ("wanker", "tosser" etc.), spending money (too fun) and all the other things that make life mildly bearable are given up for January, while we run on a treadmill in a gym, or lash ourselves with a bunch of nettles or whatever the f**k it is that 'virtuous' people do these days.

When I was seized with the notion that pure devotion to a 'natural' life would lead to happier, healthier times, it became as obsessive as anything else that might be characterised as an addiction. I became addicted to making every single tiny health tweak in my life that I could. I cut out dairy and gluten. I washed out my sinuses with saline. I probably would have done colonic irrigation if I'd thought about it at the time. The whole thing was dumb - pure superstition and pseudoscience.

Today, I take dietary supplements - 5-HTP, tyrosine and magnesium - which are supposed to provide my brain with the building blocks it needs to restore normal mood and improve my sleep. However, I've also abused simple amino acids and even pure dopamine - in the form of L-DOPA - to put my brain into a completely unnatural state, with the intention of achieving an otherwise unattainable euphoria or level of performance.

I've abused stimulants to stay awake and give me the energy to dance all night. I've used prolactin-suppressing medications to allow me to have multiple orgasms. I've used erectile dysfunction medications to allow me to sustain an erection for priapic lengths of time. I've used drugs to move my mood up, down and sideways - attempting to 'play god' if you like.

How many drugs and medications have I tried? Two hundred? Three hundred? More? This is not hyperbole - I had the time, the money, the determination and the means.

If you think I'm an idiot who makes bad choices, I ask you to look again. Imagine what my upbringing was like before I discovered that there was this chemical - MDMA - that unlocked me from that miserable prison. Of course I was going to mistakenly believe that it was a trick that could be repeated. In my desperation to escape a toxic abusive relationship 15 years later, I tried heroin, crack and crystal meth - amongst innumerable others - and none of them grabbed me. I methodically worked my way through everything I could get my hands on - illegal drugs, legal highs and black-market prescription medications.

The net result was not a predictable one. Instead of being dead in a ditch due to poly-substance abuse, I'm now quite averse to any psychoactive substances. I'm one of the few people you know who doesn't drink caffeinated beverages. That I'm unmedicated for my mental health problems is not because I think I'm "well" but because I know that I prefer to suffer the symptoms - very few people you know are prepared to tolerate depression and anxiety, but I do so on a daily basis without medication to assist me.

There's a part of me that wants to quit carbs, quit booze and join a gym, but frankly I've got enough shit on my plate just trying to get up in the mornings and not kill myself.

I loosened the purse strings and bought a few new clothes at the weekend. I went on a couple of dates. I'm listening to euphoric dance music, eating what I want to eat and drinking quite a lot. Fuck it. Life's too short to be miserable.

Last night, a woman ran up behind me as I was crossing the road and started asking for money. I said "sorry". She launched into an escalating level of abuse, accusing me of saying "no" and for toying her when she was "begging [for my] help". She was too busy yelling and screaming horrible names at me to be interested in the fact that I would've helped her, absolutely. In fact I still would. Fuck it, even if she was just rattling for "B and white" (heroin and crack, also known as "dark and light") and she was short for the score, I'd have helped. You've got to acknowledge the complexities of life and human nature if you want to help anybody. Expecting everybody to be gym-going, kale-eating, alcohol and drug free totally fucking ridiculously 'virtuous' people is absurd. Most of us have a vice.

When I think about how long I lived without my cat to stroke, and without the pleasure of snuggling with a girl I'm really into, I'm surprised I made it this far. What's the point of life without a good healthy dose of oxytocin? Is life even liveable without the bonding hormone? I really don't think it is.

So, as we approach the end of Jinxed January, I'm throwing caution to the wind little by little. I'm buying myself new clothes and having a haircut, because it's great for my self-esteem. I'm dating and having sex because it's fucking awesome. I'm letting myself do a million little things that just make my day a little bit more bearable, because that's what life's all about if you don't want it to be suicidal misery.

There's a chance that all the little changes in my life will destabilise me. It's all quite stressful, even if it's also fun. I'm quite well aware that something as simple as a late night can throw my world into quite a lot of chaos, but sod it, life's too short and I've waited and been sensible for long enough.

I don't think I'm going to go clubbing and take any MDMA any time soon though.

Tags: #relationships #sex #bipolar

This is a story about non-pharmacological interventions...

The word "choice" is a little unfair. To suggest that people could help themselves by making better lifestyle choices assumes that our choices are unbiased. It seems obvious that we'd choose low-fat, low-carb, low-salt options because they're better for our heath, but we're biased towards things that taste nice. It seems obvious that we'd cut alcohol, caffeine, drugs and medications out of our life, because they all have nasty side effects, but we're biased towards things which make us feel good. It seems obvious that we should work less, spend more time with our families and not commute so far, but sadly it's not easy to up sticks and move closer to our jobs and often we have to do jobs we hate because we need the money.

At my meeting with a psychiatrist today we essentially agreed that I can manage my disposition towards mood disorder using lifestyle choices, but it's going to take a lot of hard work. I need to exercise more, I need to change my job and I need to cut down or even quit my alcohol consumption. As well, I need to continue to have strict bedtimes, avoid caffeine, dim the lights after dusk, use a light box in the mornings and eat a balanced diet. I also need to resist the urge to spend money, take risks, be promiscuous and dabble with drugs. All fairly obvious stuff, but none of it is much fun.

Aside from some disagreement over whether I'm type 1 or type 2 bipolar, and the severity of my illness, I actually got on pretty well with the psychiatrist. To hear the words "you have a chronic condition that cannot be cured" is not very nice and my instinct was to argue that I don't have a condition at all - my symptoms have been a product of my environment; caused by the stress of my situations I've been in. In actual fact, I concede that I've had symptoms of bipolar for as long as I can remember... it's just that my bosses and work colleagues have always been very understanding of my highs and lows. A lot of people would get sacked for coming in to work two hours late every day, or shooting their mouth off and throwing a tantrum in the middle of the office, but there's a place in the workplace for somebody who can work for weeks without any sleep when there's a crazy deadline to meet. I agreed with the psychiatrist that I've got a lifelong condition, which will need careful management. It doesn't scare or upset me, because I managed my condition effectively for years before things got dangerously erratic.

To hear lithium and sodium valproate banded around as potential treatments is not what I wanted. I prefer to think that I've got a mild form of bipolar which can be managed with a medication like lamotrigine, or no medication at all. I consider that my 'high' periods have been hypomanic because I had no grandiosity, psychosis or paranoia. The psychiatrist considers me to be a fully blown manic depressive, because my manic phases have lasted more than a week. I think we'll have to agree to disagree, because my mania does not seem at all severe, except when exacerbated by drugs and sleep deprivation.

I asked about talk therapy. There's an 18 month waiting list. I'm being referred, but 18 months is a heck of a long time to wait for psychological therapy. Getting some kind of talk therapy has become a crusade to me, because I first sought treatment in 2008, so it's been 10 years since I asked and I still haven't received any therapy.

In short, I think I agree that I have a certain amount of risk towards becoming really unwell, but it's not destiny. I have a lot of hard work to do, and I have to continue to make so-called smart choices, when really my life's not a lot of fun and I still have to figure out how to pay the bills somehow. I do agree that there's something about me - call it an illness if you like - that means I have to pay a bit more attention to my lifestyle than others might, who don't share the same predisposition towards mood instability.

I went into the psych consultation feeling quite unique and special. I was feeling pretty proud of myself for being unmedicated and having dealt with a lot of things that were definitely wrecking my life. Then the psych helped me see that a lot of people who are bipolar have a similar story of reckless risk taking, money spending, hyper-sexuality, drug taking, getting into conflict with bosses, drinking too much and all the other things that lead to a point where lives get utterly screwed up. I suppose there comes a certain point where a person just can't continue to live their life a certain way - the end of the road. Where my inclination was previously to commit suicide, I'm perhaps slightly erring on the side of trying to mend my ways and crawl back into normal society over broken glass.

I can see the temptation of a chemical crutch to aid my 'recovery' but I'm still pretty adamant that I'm going to go medication free. Actually, the psychiatrist agreed with me that something like sertraline, or even lamotrigine, could push me into hypomania. Antidepressants have always had a mood destabilising effect on me in the past. There's something to be said for feeling miserable: it does somehow make you appreciate the better times, when they eventually arrive.

So, it seems like a rather well-behaved life beckons for me. I don't relish the prospect of having to always make sensible choices, but I guess I'm not a young man who can bounce back from anything anymore.

Hardly thrilling, but the saga continues. I'll keep you posted on how it goes, doing the boring mundane stuff.

Tags: #bipolar

This is a story about doing no harm...

Imagine that somebody says to you "you're so argumentative". What could you possibly say in return? You can't say "no I'm not" because then they'll say "yes you are and the fact that you're arguing proves it". There are lots of other quirks of the English language that allow you to box people in, such as asking questions like "so when did you stop raping children?" or some other kind of fallacy.

I'm not actually against psychiatrists and psychiatric medications. Every psychiatrist is different. Most psychiatrists who work in the NHS have to deal with society's very sickest and most dysfunctional cases. Every psychiatric bed in England is filled with somebody who is being detained against their will for 28 days, or more likely for 6 months. There aren't any spare psychiatric beds for people who are merely having a crisis and who are in danger of committing suicide - the NHS will call your bluff and leave you to die, as so many do, because mental health services are overstretched and underfunded.

The kinds of treatment on offer vary from snake-oil bullshit, such as CBT and other behavioural therapies, to chemical coshes that will put you into the drugged equivalent of a straightjacket. For sure, there are some very sick people who are psychotically disturbed, but powerful antipsychotics are not a panacea for all problems of the mind. In some countries, physical restraints are more commonplace. In the UK, we dope people up to the eyeballs.

If you've never lost your liberty you won't quite be able to comprehend how terrible it is. We're free-thinking individuals who move through the world according to our whims - the illusion of free will. When locked into an overcrowded psych ward, even if you asked to be hospitalised because you feared for your own safety, you might suddenly panic that you won't be able to get back out.

Ironically, you can't say "I'm not argumentative" when somebody wrongly accuses you of being argumentative, and it's equally impossible to say "I'm not mad" when you're trapped by psychiatry. The only strategy you can play is to be calm and patient and ignore the provocation, which is easier said than done. It's a very natural reaction to want to defend ourselves against unfounded allegations. To have our character criticised by somebody who doesn't know a damn thing about us, is incredibly insulting. When somebody who hardly knows us has the ability to detain us against our will, and even to have us forcibly medicated, then the situation is unbearable.

I don't doubt that psychiatrists believe they have their patients' best interests at heart, but there's no acknowledgement of the antagonisation, frustration, anger and upset that they provoke. Nobody should have godlike powers over any other human being. The line between sane and insane, sick and healthy, right and wrong thoughts... these are completely arbitrary. There can be no ultimate arbiter who decides who's normal and who's not - it's not right that anybody should sit in judgement.

Am I arguing that we should fling open the doors to our asylums and let the mental patients roam free? It's more complicated than that. A survey of the general public revealed that the vast majority of people wouldn't want to live next door to, work with or have their children play with a schizophrenic. It seems that those paranoid delusions are not so paranoid after all - no smoke without fire. Having had my case reviewed at mental health tribunal to decide whether to give me back my freedom or not, it appalled me how six people could sit and have a discussion about me as if I wasn't even present in the room. To button my lip and remain silent through proceedings; to maintain my polite and courteous façade - this was virtually impossible when my liberty was at stake.

Another thing that's deeply upsetting is the way that the patient is often mobbed. Ward rounds consist of sitting with a whole room full of people - usually a couple of psychiatrists and a couple of nurses - who sit stroking their chins while the patient explains the same thing for the millionth time: please stop ganging up on me and let me go. Of course, there are mental heath problems present, but the set-up is antagonising. Should we just let anorexics stop eating and die? Should we just let the psychotic do what the voices tell them to do? This isn't what I'm arguing for. I'm just pointing out that even the most sane amongst us would be driven mad by a jeering crowd, licensed to torment and keep their victims in captivity.

If you imagine that you might get to spend 10 minutes with the psychiatrist who has the power to set you free, once every week or every fortnight, all the decisions are more important than I can possibly express in words. If you're on a medication which is causing you intolerable side effects, in a psych ward setting which is causing you intolerable distress, you're going to have to wait a couple of weeks before you can have another go at trying to communicate your needs to the doctor... which you'll have to do through the foggy haze of powerful antipsychotic medication. "This man is making no sense" they'll say, because you've been drugged into a dribbling mess. What further proof could be necessary to show that you're an imbecile who could never survive outside the protective walls of an institution?

Experiments were conducted by investigative journalists, who deliberately got themselves committed to institutions, only to find they couldn't get out again - the system grabbed them. The harder you fight the system, the more you're giving the system the 'proof' that you really are mad. It's maddeningly self-perpetuating.

Very few of us have the ability to bring our racing pulse back under control, to lower our respiration rate, to relax our muscles. Very few of us possess the ability to react to incredible stress, by calming ourselves and being patient. The most antagonisingly provocative situation will elicit the most predictable response: people don't like having their freedom taken away, told what to do and being judged by strangers who pry into every aspect of their private life.

To have captive creatures to toy with as we please must make those men and women who wield godlike powers feel very full of themselves. "It's for your own good" is the well-worn defence for the indefensible. The very nature of the relationship is toxic to mental health. Mental health treatment cannot be imposed by those who know best, because they don't know best - psychiatry is such a young branch of medicine. Nobody really has a clue what they're doing. Long-term outcomes are abysmal and the mental health epidemic continues to grow apace. Clearly, evidence-based medicine is not being practiced.

Of course I don't think that psychiatrists and mental health nurses and all the other people who offer medical and complementary treatments for ailments of the mind, are bad people. Of course they're not bad people. I don't believe there's a Big Pharma conspiracy. The truth is though, people are sicker than ever before and the treatments aren't working. My objection is with those who talk authoritatively as if there are useful diagnoses and accompanying medications and therapies which are making a profound impact... it's just not the case at all. What's happening is abysmal, and nobody is admitting they've got it wrong - a lot of people aren't sick, they just hate capitalism and modern society.

Good science means controlling the variables. I've aggressively cut out all psychoactive substances. Tomorrow I shall tell my psychiatrist that I'm debt-laden and forced to work a job that conflicts with my values and needs. My malaise is a function of the conflict in my heart, knowing that banking is a morally bankrupt profession, loan-sharking and taking advantage of the most vulnerable. My prescription? The end of capitalism and the return to a society where we're intimately connected to our local communities... do you think they'll stock that in the chemist?

Getting my happiness and contentment back in the current economic climate looks to be an impossible task. However, to medicate myself because I'm having a sane reaction to an insane world is not a good course of action.

Of course, my psychiatrist doesn't have the ability to cure me of my intolerable situation. I've got to work. I've got to travel to where the jobs are. I've got to pay my bills and service my debts. But, I don't need medical solutions to a non-medical problem.

Why even go to see my psychiatrist, when I don't think they can help me? Well, it's obvious isn't it? If we keep sending people away with pills, then we keep proceeding with our delusion that they're working and things are going to improve one day. How many times a year do you suppose a psychiatrist meets somebody who's foresworn ALL psychoactive substances, including caffeine and nicotine, and is a functional high-achieving member of society, to all outward appearances? To say that a medical problem - suicidal depression and debilitating anxiety - doesn't have a medical solution is heresy, but somebody has to stand up to those who dogmatically decree that they have the solutions, when they demonstrably do not.

Being unmedicated is really horrible and I feel terrible, but I'm being a bit of a martyr because I've got a point to prove. One day I will escape from the burden of debt, the soul-destruction of bullshit jobs and the need to commute long distances, preventing me from forming social bonds and having a work:life balance. One day I'll get a girlfriend and a cat and a home of my own and all the other things that humans need to feel complete, and then we can re-examine the situation and ask if I need medication. Until such time as the major problems in my life still exist, then medication looks like a dangerous option, because medication is allowing our society to develop into a grotesquely unhealthy form. Just because medication allows you to do awful things, it doen't mean you should do awful things. If it feels wrong, it probably is wrong.

A certain proportion of society will always struggle to abide by its rules, its laws and its social contract. A certain proportion of society will be criminals and parasites - anti-social. However, when the vast majority of us are struggling and unhappy, then we've made a wrong turn somewhere; we've made a mistake and we need to retrace our steps.

I refuse to be labelled and drugged.

Tags: #mentalhealth #medication

This is a story about being on the sick...

I'm regularly asked how to obtain a sick note and/or prescription for high-strength addictive medications from a GP, so I thought I'd prepare a handy guide to answer these frequently asked questions. Above you'll find a copy of a sick note that you can print out and fill in with your own details, so that you can bunk off work because you're lazy and entitled.

Of course, your doctor wants to cure you, which would be a dreadful outcome. It takes a lot of time and effort to ensure that your doctor doesn't actually give you what you need. Your GP can instantly relieve your ailments any time they want so it's important to remember what YOU want: ineffective treatment. You must always remember that you want the wrong treatment and resist any and all attempts to be persuaded to receive the correct treatment. If you do that then you should be fine. I mean, not actually fine... I mean sick, which is obviously what you want.

Proper preparation is essential. Make sure you have extensively researched your chosen ailment and know what all the likely treatments are so that you can refuse or say that you've already tried the ones that work. This is important. Your doctor will try to fob you off with something which has an overwhelming body of evidence that conclusively proves that it will cure you instantly, so you should be fully prepared to absolutely flatly refuse any of those treatments. Be careful, because your doctor will obviously try to trick you into becoming well again, which isn't what you want at all.

When demanding dangerous addictive medications, it's a good idea to scream, yell and aggressively and insistently dictate that you must be given what you want immediately. Obviously your GP may be alerted to your blatant intention of doing yourself harm with the "fun stuff" and your desire to remain sick and incapacitated, so it's important that you get irate and use ill manners in order to better communicate your want for large quantities of deadly pills.

While you're spending time with your GP, it might be a good idea to ask if the pills you're getting are the kind that are easily crushed and snorted. Ask if the pills contain an excipient or other additive which would make intravenous injection less pleasurable, and demand brands which have no such so-called 'safety' formulations. Find out if you'll get a bigger rush by combining medications and make sure your GP knows you don't care about any so-called contraindications. Your GP is an expert in the most fun ways to abuse prescription drugs. Generally, the less willing your GP is to give you a particular medication, the more desirable it is.

GPs often talk about the "analgesic ladder". Say for example you are hoping to obtain a prescription for codeine, which you can extract from co-codamol tablets using water that has been cooled to 5 degrees celcius or lower - filter the chilled liquid to get rid of all that pesky paracetamol. If your GP refuses to give you co-codamol, then you should climb the analgesic ladder and demand tramadol. If your GP refuses to give you tramadol, then you should continue up the rungs of the ladder, demanding buprenorphine, then morphine, then diacetylmorphine. Do not leave the GP's consultation room until you have obtained your prescription for pure diacetylmorphine. It's your right to have pure heroin dispensed to you via the NHS, because you want it and it's nice.

When demanding your sick note, make sure your GP knows it's yours and they should return it to you immediately. Make your displeasure loudly known that you were inconvenienced by having to visit your GP to get it back.

It's a commonly held misconception that you would have to feign illness in order to get a sick note, but it's a well-known fact that sick notes are in fact a certificate of bone idleness and it would look very odd if a sick person were to ask to be signed off work. It's imperative that you demonstrate that you're quite capable of performing a range of work-related activities and you have absolutely no reason at all to not be hard at work down a f**king coal mine or something. Take some heavy weights and a computer keyboard with you and repeatedly lift the weight up and down while doing star jumps and typing at 100 words per minute, to absolutely convince your GP that you're capable of doing any physical or mental task that would take place in the workplace, such that you're obviously urgently in need of YOUR sick note.

Did I mention eating deep fried battered lard cakes, smoking a thousand fags and drinking flagons of mead? It's important to demonstrate all the unhealthiest lifestyle choices that you can, in order to show your commitment to being unwell, otherwise your GP might mistakenly believe that you want to be cured or helped in some way. Leave your GP under no illusion that you have not even the slightest glimmer of desire to in any way help yourself.

Remember, it's you versus them. Seeing your GP is an adversarial conflict, where you want completely opposing things and you absolutely should not never under any circumstances not never no way agree or co-operate in any way whatsoever, or listen, or heed any advice or in any way allow yourself to be corrupted by your GP's intentions, which are completely out of alignment with your own firm decision to be sick and die. If you even listen to your GP a teeny tiny bit, you could be accidentally cured beyond your worst possible nightmares, to the point of being healthy and happy - disaster!

It's important to remember at all times just how much you love being miserable, sick, anxious, depressed, overweight, unfit, in pain and on your way to a premature and painful death. It's important to hang on to your main objective - remaining unwell at all costs - if you want to avoid your GP's devious attempts to cure you of all your ills and send you on your merry way as a productive, healthy and content member of society. It will take all your wits and cunning to outsmart every attempt to make you better.

By following this prescriptive guide, I hope you're able to obtain YOUR sick note and a prescription for vast quantities of dangerously powerful, fiendishly addictive and deadly medications which can be mixed to make you sick, dying and dead in horrendously toxic combinations. It's a difficult challenge to obtain the wrong treatment, but given that the reward is pain, suffering and death, it's worth the effort.

Just remember: your GP is not on your side. You and your GP want different things, and you should stick resolutely to your desire to have the WRONG treatment and remain sick and dying. Every time you trick your GP into giving you the wrong treatment, or refuse the right treatment, you're winning.

Good luck and STAY SICK!

[P.S. apologies to my GP if they should read this for some reason]

Tags: #medication

This is a story about losing my way...

I've kind of screwed everything up since my suicide attempt. Why did I tweet when I was really sick? Why did I piss my readers off by live-publishing the draft manuscript of my dreadful second novel? Why am I struggling to find my voice again, and reconnect with people?

It feels like there's a lot of pressure to write very profound and meaningful things, having cheated death. It feels like whatever I write should be a decent contribution to society. However, I'm missing the mark. I'm falling short of my own expectations. I feel like I'm letting everybody down.

I feel considerable embarrassment that my story does not have a nice linear progression. Why doesn't the tale read like a straightforward rags to riches fairytale? Why are there flies in the ointment? Why is there bad stuff in there, mixed in with what I dearly desired to be good? What's my message anyway? Where am I going with this?

Writing another novel took me down a peg or two. It was hard, and my arrogant belief that I'd be able to just sit down in front of the keyboard and crank out something decent, was a delusion that was shattered. I've had to face the very real conclusion that I've still got a long way to go if I want to produce anything decent. I'll need to pre-plan more. I can't just shoot from the hip and expect everything to go my way.

Writing these stream-of-consciousness blogs has become quite easy. If you do aspire to be a writer, writing needs to become a daily habit. I've developed the habit, but writing a journal, a diary or a stream-of-consciousness blog is probably the easiest option. Writing short stories is fun and not that hard. Dedicating even a mere 30 days to a single work of fiction, turned out to be very hard. I thought it would be easy, because my first novel came with little effort and I've managed to write this blog for two and a half years, but the construction of characters, plot, scenes... it's tough going when you get up to and beyond the 30,000 to 35,000 word point. It's not about the word count, of course. You have to write the right words, naturally. However, I can't understand why anybody would write the wrong ones. Just edit as you go.... except that's hard when you're doing creative writing.

I'm trying to recover my raw and uncensored voice. I'm trying to rediscover myself; my identity. I briefly thought I would own the moniker: novelist. I wrote "thinker" on my bio because I thought it would piss people off. Aren't we all thinkers? How dare I declare myself to be some kind of intellectual philosopher type chap. "Show me your certificate immediately!" people demanded. "Show me your credentials!" they screamed.

I'm backing down.

Although I hold a balanced set of opinions, have lived a varied life that's given me first-hand experience of almost every aspect of human society, and I can string a sentence together, I'm surely not entitled to write on whatever topic takes my whimsical fancy, and expect people to read it? Who the hell am I? What's my job title? What position of authority do I hold?

I think my readers are figuring out that I'm just a guy; just an ordinary person. These are not the words of a superstar celebrity CEO chairman chief lord god. These are merely words. Where are my citations? Why am I not quoting people you've heard of? Who the hell am I to hold my own reasonable opinions, and dare to express them as if I'm somebody of any import?

There isn't enough room in this world for the rich and famous, and the likes of us. Make room for the celebs. "SILENCE, PLEB!" scream those who are entitled to an opinion, because of their superior status.

It would be OK, but what the hell am I going on about anyway?

I feel like I missed my chance. The spotlight was on me briefly, but I choked. When I had the attention I craved, what did I do with it? I screwed up. I wasted my opportunity. When that chance came, I didn't have anything profound to say. It's time to shuffle red-faced back into the audience. It's time to shut up and let the stars of the show resume their performance, isn't it? Make room for the celebs!

I lost 2,000 Twitter followers in the weeks following my suicide attempt. I've lost 500 Twitter followers since getting a job. If I was cynical, I could argue that it's not very interesting to read about somebody who's succeeding; somebody who's safe and is probably going to be OK. Where's the drama? Where's the jeopardy? Where's the suspense? I'm not cynical though, so I take it personally: my message must be wrong. It must be something unlikeable about me. I must have changed. I failed to say anything profound and interesting when I was passed the microphone. I had my moment of fame and I've screwed it up. Next!

What frustrates me is that I know there is something profound to be found in my writing. I know that my story does contain an interesting and exceptional tale. I know that there's a message that can be teased out, and it might prove useful for other people who are going through hell. The odds were stacked against me - as they're stacked against so many - but what's different about me that's allowed me to pull through? Why am I alive when so many others would have died? I certainly don't want to piss anybody off by smugly declaring myself a success story - it's a different message from that... it's about what lessons can be learned, even if that's not an original thought or idea at all.

I've had to sit and listen to cult-leader type characters, while they talked about their spiritual awakenings in sweat lodges or in South American jungles, intoxicated with ayahuasca. I've had to listen to endless amounts of people who've wanted to share their stories of recovery. Nobody who's listened has been able to emulate them though. It's all well and good going on about your own success in recovery, but it's not helping anybody, is it?

There are a lot of very desperate people out there. My website is visited by the suicidal, alcoholics and drug addicts. There are millions of people out there who are looking for solutions to their problems. There's a temptation for me to start writing as if I've got the answers. I know that there's an eager audience for any kind of self-help material. I know that it would be incredibly popular, if I was to start writing a prescriptive guide for how to cure yourself of your depression, anxiety, drug and alcohol abuse. I know that people are desperate and they haven't found anything that works.

Nobody's a done deal. Nobody is a finished article. It would be dishonest and misleading for anybody to write as if they've got the answers; they've found the cure.

During my treatment for mental health problems and addiction, I discovered a world of non-judgemental people, and people who will listen to your story. Your story is interesting. You deserve the chance to recover - every saint has a past and every sinner has a future. It seems as if there's a monopoly on storytelling - only the celebs get to tell their stories, and the rest of us should silently cower in a dark corner, filled with shame and regret; convinced that we're worthless sinners; eternally damned. I wouldn't be surprised if we discover that the secret to recovery is to allow people to recover, by allowing them to no longer feel as if they must pay a lifelong price for their shortcomings; by allowing people to revel in their own identities and their actions, rather than apologising and thinking of themselves as useless and flawed.

You may notice that there's rather a different code of morality applied to celebrities, than is applied to the general populace. You will see a great outpouring of sympathy for celebrities who are affected by mental health, alcohol and drug addiction issues. You will see that celebrities are celebrated for their faults - it makes them more relatable. However, the ordinary likes of you and me will become black sheep - scapegoats for the ills of society - if we stumble and err. Nobody's going to forgive our sins because we're not celebrities. Nobody wants to hear your story.

However, you should write like you're already famous. You should own your story. You should tell your story, because nobody else is going to tell it correctly. Nobody but you should own your identity. You decide who you are; you decide how your story gets told.

I'm having a wobble. Why are people disengaging? Why are fewer people connecting with me and my story? Why am I losing Twitter followers? Why do all my graphs trend downwards?

I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know where the hell I'm going with this. If I was going to be a writer, why am I not punting my novel manuscripts to every literary agent I can find? If I was going to be a writer, why am I not relentlessly pursuing a writing job? If I was going to be a writer, why am I not promoting myself through every avenue? It must be clear to my audience that I'm confused; directionless.

Often times when we're consuming content on the internet, we wonder what the commercial angle is. All those lovely webcomics that you read have usually got associated merchandise - T-shirts, coffee mugs etc. - and all those silly Buzzfeed lists that you love, are paid for by the advertising that's plastered all over the website. The deal you've struck is pretty clear - your eyeballs are being traded. However, what's my angle? What do I want from you?

I guess I need attention to feel valued; worthwhile as a human being. Without an audience; with nobody listening, who the hell am I? Who really cares whether I live or die?

My social media success is inversely proportional to my real-world connections. As I've made new friends, reconnected with old ones and impressed my new work colleagues, my social media identity has suffered. As my health, wealth and prospects have improved, my digital footprint has declined. I suppose I should be happy, but this blog and my Twitter followers provide me with a comforting safety net. If all else fails, this blog is something that would be hard to take away from me. This website - and my writing - is something that's inexpensive and provides stability; support; self-esteem. I suppose I could dismiss my virtual life as unimportant, and concentrate on real face-to-face human relationships, but I'm loathe to do that when I'm fragile; delicate. Why would I cut off one of my biggest sources of security?

A blogger friend has recently completed a year of sobriety, got herself a regular spot as a guest blogger and now has a boyfriend. Writing has been staggeringly successful for her, as a healthy coping mechanism. Blogging has been her constant companion, and she's proud of what she's produced. She's buzzing with the excitement of getting noticed. She's thrilled that she's achieved so much.

I remember when I started writing this blog, I suffered the usual thing that most bloggers do, which is to believe that I was writing amazing stuff that needed to be shared. I was a blogospammer. I would share my content as far and wide as I could. I exhausted every avenue, trying to get exposure. I wanted readers, like a junkie wants drugs. I obsessed over my stats; my metrics. I quickly came to believe that I was a serious writer, and that I'd produced a significant contribution to the literature.

Now, I beaver away in relative obscurity. I put very little effort into self-promotion. I cringe a little when I think about how I spammed every social media site I could, trying to get readers. Now, I'm passive - read if you want to... you know where to find me.

I'm still a bit hooked on my stats though. It upsets me when I have fewer readers this week than last week; fewer followers.

I imagine that I'm going through an important developmental phase though. To write every day for a year is necessary to develop the writing habit. To write for a second year is to prove that the first wasn't just a fluke. To write for a third year is to discover why you're really writing. What is it that I'm getting out of this? Where am I going with this?

It's incredible that there are some people who've read everything I've written here. I've written 770,000 words, which is the same amount as in the King James Bible, more or less - it's my next milestone, to have written as much as is in the Bible. Then, I want to write a million words, just because it's a cool number. How cool would that be, to say you've written a million words?

So, I don't really know what I'm writing about. I don't really know why I want followers; readers. I don't really know what I've got to say that's profound and interesting and useful and entertaining and moving and helpful and original and all the other things that I vainly want my writing to be. Why am I doing this? I don't know yet.

I imagine that people reach the end of these sometimes lengthy brain-dumps, and they think "that's 10 minutes of my life I just wasted". What knowledge have I imparted? How have I improved anybody's life?

I am going to find out where this is going. There is a purpose, I promise. I just don't know what it is yet.

Tags: #writing #socialmedia

This is a story about time...

It was Saturday the 9th. I was behind that door, dying. I assumed that nobody knew where I lived. I assumed nobody cared. I was wrong.

I'm still pretty unclear how exactly the emergency services got to me so quickly.

The thing about activated charcoal and gastric lavage is that they only work during the first hour or so of an overdose. I knew this, so I'd set a timer on my phone to stop myself from being tempted to send any "goodbye cruel world" type messages, which could have triggered efforts to save my life before I reached the point of no return.

Saturday nights are pretty hectic for the emergency services. I'm surprised they got to me so quickly. I'm surprised they got me to hospital so swiftly. If they hadn't I wouldn't be writing this.

Maybe social media is addictive, it "isn't real life" and it's causing the collapse of normal healthy face-to-face relationships, but I'm pretty sure I'd have sunk without a trace if it wasn't for my digital connection to the world. It was kinda inevitable that the author of "the world's longest suicide note" was going to do the deed at some point. My suicide attempt wasn't a cry for help; it wasn't attention-seeking. I don't believe that my suicide attempt was avoidable either - circumstances were too hostile to allow my mental health to improve.

Back on that Saturday the 9th - and today - I found myself in a strange city, far from friends and family. I was isolated and alone. Stress, anxiety and depression all conspired to make life feel totally unliveable.

Tonight, I'm in a hotel room near an airport 1,200 miles from home. Language and cultural differences make it additionally obvious that I'm out of place here. I'm doing a rewarding but stressful job. My mental health has been pretty bad. There are lots of similar features to that previous Saturday the 9th. However, there's unlikely to be a "straw that broke the camel's back" type trigger tonight.

I'm mindful that I wrote a blog post called The Closest I've Come to Suicide back on Saturday 9th September, merely hours before I actually tried to kill myself. Things can change. I'm a little superstitious and unwilling to tempt fate... I don't want to jinx anything.

I sometimes feel like I'm trolling my friends - giving them a lot of stress and worry about me. I sometimes feel like it's bad behaviour, to talk about my suicidal feelings. What's the alternative though? Should I just bottle it all up and leave everybody wondering what the fuck happened to me and wondering if there was anything they could have done to help, once I'm dead?

Having written this provocative blog for over two years, I hear from a lot of people who've lost loved ones to suicide. The impact on those who lose a relative or a friend is devastating. People are left wondering "what could I have done differently?" and beat themselves up about it.

There are quite a few well-worn platitudes that are trotted out whenever a suicidal person is brave enough to share how they're feeling. Generally, the suicidal person is guilt-tripped into thinking about the consequences of their suicide. I imagine this is the reason why more people don't speak up when they're feeling suicidal, because the presumption is that they're selfish, cowardly and don't care about the pain they're going to cause for other people. These accusations are unhelpful and untrue - suicidal people know that they're going to cause pain and suffering, but life is so horrible for them that it's not enough to keep them alive. Guilting people is not the way to keep them alive.

I sometimes wonder if there's a difference between me and those who've succeeded in killing themselves. I'm afraid that it's pure blind luck. Even with 20,000 Twitter followers, I'm still subject to the same human physiology as anybody else - the massive overdose I took should have been fatal. You can have all the fame and wealth in the world, but you're just as mortal as the next man or woman.

I talk about the inevitability of my suicide attempt, and the worry that I'm trolling my friends. In a way, I'm embarrassed to have survived, because it makes it look like it was some half-arsed botched attempt where I didn't really want to die anyway. I'm embarrassed that I put my friends through the horror of thinking I might've succeeded, but I also know that I told hospital staff not to resuscitate me - I refused treatment, because I wanted to die. I can say with my hand on my heart, that I wasn't trolling anybody. It wasn't a cry for help. It wasn't attention seeking or a publicity stunt. My suicide attempt was premeditated and my method was extensively researched in preparation.

So what about all those deaths from suicide? Suicide kills more men under the age of 45 than cancer and other diseases, road traffic accidents, drugs, alcohol and everything else. Suicide is the biggest killer of them all. What is it about suicide?

Well, there are a lot of greedy, selfish, horrible men in the world, who just want to get rich at any cost - they don't care who they trample on. I emerged from hospital to find out that the wannabe Labour MP who I was working for, was sacking me for not turning up at work for a couple of days - it should be noted that those two days I was in a coma on an intensive care ward, with a machine breathing for me. This wannabe politician was completely unconcerned with the fact that I'd nearly died. This guy professes to be a Labour politician, no less - in theory, his values are all about protecting workers from unscrupulous bosses. What a liar. What an awful, awful person.

The world is a desperately competitive place. People will commit suicide because of pressure to attain good exam grades, to get ahead in their careers and generally because life relentlessly batters us with horrible uncertainty about financial and housing security. Of course people are going to commit suicide when life's so stressful. I attempted suicide and immediately lost my job and my apartment - isn't that awful? If that's what a wannabe Labour MP is prepared to do to a fellow human being, the problems in society clearly come right from the top. If our politicians are arseholes who don't value human life, of course we're going to see vast numbers of people committing suicide.

What happened after my suicide attempt is that things got worse. Things got a lot worse.

Then things got a bit better.

Friends who I haven't spoken to in years got in contact.

I made new friends. I got a new place to live. I got a new job.

Writing this blog has caused me to lose my job and my home, and has made me an easy target for discrimination. Writing this blog leaves me exposed to cyber-stalkers who want to find out what my weaknesses are, and exploit me. Writing this blog leaves me open to criticism from those who say that my message about suicide, mental health and homelessness is contrived - that I somehow pre-planned everything that happened to me, and that my opinion is therefore invalid; that my story is unrepresentative.

If you prick me, do I not bleed? Do I not feel lonely like other people? Do I not find the burden of debt and financial worries to be unbearable? Do I not need a roof over my head?

My blog begins two years ago, with me living in a hotel and working for a bank. That's exactly the situation I find myself in today. Was it necessary to have been hospitalised three times? Was it necessary to have become homeless? Was it necessary to nearly be bankrupted? Was it necessary to lose my job? All of the hardship I've been through might look avoidable, to a casual observer. A BBC journalist even accused me of having planned the whole thing.

I genuinely believe that if I hadn't lived my life in the public eye, I wouldn't be alive to tell the tale. Of course, some concerned friends saw my final Tweets on that Saturday night - the 9th - and they raised the alarm along with a bunch of other followers. Somehow, the emergency services were swiftly delivered to my door. A friend told me that my phone had been traced, but that's improbable, given that I lived in a dense urban area - signal triangulation is highly unlikely to have been accurate enough. It's a bit of a mystery, who gave the emergency services my address in time for them to save me.

I've written about a lot of this before, so I'm aware that I'm repeating myself, but it seems apt because it's Saturday the 9th. So much has happened in the intervening time, including a 3-week stay on a psych ward and me emigrating from England to Wales. So much has happened, in terms of having space and time to digest the traumatic events and trying to figure out what I'm living for. So much has happened, in terms of friends who've been kind enough to get back in contact and even offer practical help. So much has happened, with new friends and a new home, and healthy human relationships.

I'm still stressed and single and broke. My job is 1,200 miles from home. There is still a whole load of shit to go through before I have everything I need for a liveable life. You might be screaming "OTHER PEOPLE HAVE IT SO MUCH HARDER THAN YOU" at the top of your lungs, but fuck you. As my guardian angel once said: there's only one person on the whole planet who has it harder than anybody else. Are they the only person in the whole wide entire world who's allowed to feel depressed, stressed and anxious? If the "think about the starving African children" platitude had any value, we could just blast that message through megaphones and all depression and suicide would be cured overnight.

If you think I'm self-centred, self-pitying, selfish, self-absorbed or any other criticism you want to level at me, then perhaps it's you who completely lacks any empathy. Do you not care that suicide is the biggest killer of men under 45? Do you not care about this very real problem, that's only getting worse and worse? Do you not care about the epidemic of mental health issues?

I will vociferously defend my decision to blog about my mental health problems and suicide attempt(s) because I believe that my social media presence has been a major reason why my life hasn't been claimed by suicide. For sure, there have been lots of high-profile suicides. Fame and notoriety are not protective factors. However, in the face of a mental health epidemic, it's clear that pressure, guilt, shame and stigma are not working in anybody's favour. It's only through an honest and candid examination of how we're really feeling, that we might be able to save those who are on the brink of killing themselves, in the nick of time.

I think that even my harshest critic would be hard-pressed to deny that my navel-gazing suicide note blog played a major part in saving my life. Without my blog, how would I have made a new friend who offered to let me live with her and her family? How would I have reconnected with an old friend who helped me get another job? How would I have coped, through homelessness, hospitalisation and without any money? My blog is the consistent thread throughout all the traumatic experiences of the last few years.

It might sound like I'm giving my blog credit, when really credit belongs to those who took practical steps to help me - those who phoned the emergency services, those who phoned me when I was in hospital, those who helped re-house me and those friends who have made a concerted effort to re-enter my life. Of course, I'm incredibly grateful to those who've gone to great lengths to assist me, to reassure me that I am loved and that my life does matter.

There's a lot of pressure now to sort myself out. I have a pretty good opportunity to get back on my feet. I have support. I often wonder if it's time to change the name of my blog from "the world's longest suicide note" to something else. However, it was back on Saturday the 9th that I wrote about how close I was to suicide, before then being tipped over the edge later that same day. If I'm reluctant to declare myself safe, then tough titties - I know how fragile things are, so it would be foolish to prematurely take myself off the endangered species list.

Perhaps you - dear reader - feel a little led-on by the whole thing. Perhaps you feel a little cheated that I didn't die. Who knows. All I know is that it doesn't feel like it was very long ago that I was dying on Saturday the 9th.

Tags: #suicide

This is a story about intolerable stress levels...

On the 9th of September 2017, I was in possession of a wallet containing my driving license, two debit cards and two credit cards, as well as my keys and some cash. I had prescribed medication. I had my smartphone, a laptop and a digital camera. On the 13th of September 2017, I had none of these things, and nobody could tell me where they'd gone - to all intents and purposes, they had been lost or stolen. Don't ask me whether they'd been lost or stolen, because I didn't know, despite asking anybody and everyone I could.

Then, I was muscled out of my office.

I was in a city where I didn't know anybody, with no wallet, phone or internet capable device. My work colleagues were avoiding the office. You know those films where the person's identity has been erased, and men in black suits are hunting them... that's what happened to me: I was locked out from my life.

I'm not sure if you've ever tried to kill yourself, but you have to be in a pretty desperate situation, to decide to end your own life. Dying is a big deal: you only get to make that decision once. If you're successful, there's no coming back from a suicide. How do you think you'd feel if you survived?

I came to be wandering around an alien city, with no friends, family or work colleagues who'd help me or even speak to me; without cash or bank cards; without my phone or laptop; without my ID card - my driving license. What the actual fuck?

"Phone your parents".

Yeah. Right.

Which is it? Am I mad or am I bad? My parents have made up their mind: I've been successfully faking a diagnosed mental illness as an excuse for my behaviour, apparently. It's all in my head. It's all made up. The quote above is what my dad really thinks - he was interviewed.

So, did I or did I not try to kill myself? Did I or did I not get admitted to the Intensive Treatment Unit (ITU) in a critical condition? Did I or did I not find myself in an alien city, without bank cards, cash, phone, laptop or any means of contacting anybody? Did I or did I not get muscled out of my office? Did I or did I not get turfed onto the street, and was expected to just deal with this clusterfuck?

Luckily, I'm an evidence gatherer, so I have all kinds of documents and other things - like the plastic bag pictured above - which are helping me to piece together the picture of what exactly happened during a period where I went from having a girlfriend, friends, apartment, job and an identity, to suddenly being completely destitute - no fixed abode, no nothing. My world fell apart in the blink of an eye.

If it can happen to me, it can happen to anybody.

If you're looking for a trite oversimplification, here it is: I tried to kill myself.

I can't make this any easier for anybody to understand. The only thing that I did wrong was that I tried to end my life. When I survived, there was no life to go back to. My apartment was ransacked; my most valuable possessions were missing; my whole existence crumbled to nothingness.

If my guardian angel hadn't travelled up from London; if I hadn't managed to appoint a couple of solicitors... how on earth would I have coped? There was so much work to be done, to track down what the heck had happened to my life, since I'd been lying unconscious in a coma, with a machine breathing for me. Only an idiot would suggest that I could have sabotaged my life so spectacularly, when I was flat on my back with my eyes taped shut; tubes coming out of me. There is absolutely no doubt about my movements during the period when my world exploded, because it's all been thoroughly documented by those who had a duty of care to look after me - I was incapacitated; vulnerable.

Today, I find myself having to trawl through the jumble of papers and emails that have flown around, which essentially constitute a smoking gun. Circumstances conspired to cause me to become so stressed that I chose to attempt to end my life; I couldn't deal with the shitstorm around me; I couldn't cope. Having been discharged from hospital, things are not much better. I very much want to kill myself right now.

There's a reason why I haven't poked the hornet's nest: all this shit which was too much for me to handle when I was hospitalised. Why the fuck have I got to deal with it now? All of this bullshit is making me suicidal again.

I just want to live in peace and quiet. I didn't sign up for the shit I'm going through. It's unjust.

I'm being hounded to death.

Tags: #suicide

This is a story about missed connections...

Like many people, I have a large collection of digital photos. My library starts in 2005, when a group of friends and I pooled our holiday snaps from a trip to Venezuela. Travel photography is the main thing that featured until my life started getting erratic. I have an increasingly random muddle of photos and screenshots, like a breadcrumb trail leading back to saner and more stable times.

2008 was the beginning of a much more exciting life than I had led before. I quit my investment banking career, developed some iPhone apps, retrained as an electrician, called off my wedding and went back to IT consultancy work. Having lived under the dark storm-cloud of an abusive relationship for far too long, I finally decided I'd had enough and broke up with my fiancée. I made a new group of friends and rebooted my life - as a prescription for depression, that shock treatment worked perfectly.

Fast-forward to 2011 and I knew that my relationship - back together with the girl who my friends call "the poison dwarf" - was destroying my world and ruining my happiness. I spent 3 amazing months in Cambridge and I'd fallen in love with somebody else, but I was too loyal; too faithful; too committed to give up on a failing relationship and go for what I really wanted.

In 2012 I capitulated and tried to follow doctor's orders - I started taking medication - and went back to the life I hated. I returned to the investment bank I'd previously worked for and tried to pretend like I was OK with that. I even got married to "the poison dwarf". I tried my very hardest to put on the boring grey suit and pretend like I was able to work doing the 9 to 5 office routine that I'd done for years and years, but my heart was broken.

I guess I never really got over the fact that I hadn't followed my dreams; followed my heart.

2013 brought the inevitable divorce, which necessitated selling my house and figuring out what to do with all my worldly possessions. In short, I didn't want anything to do with my toxic old life: the place and the things and the pain of everything getting ripped to shreds was just too much to bear. I wanted the whole lot to burn to the ground so I could start over. I wanted a fresh start.

I tried to court that girl from Cambridge who I'd fallen in love with - she liked me too and things were going well. It looked like I was going to break free from the gravity that tried to pull me back into a black hole. Despite me telling "the poison dwarf" that she could take as much as she wanted, she tried to destroy me. She just needed to leave me alone to get on with my new life, but she made the process of divorce into an unbelievably horrible disaster. Despite my attempts to make things quick and painless and give her a big cash settlement, she sabotaged my every effort.

In the midst of the acrimonious divorce, I tried to get away from the worsening British weather and get some rest and relaxation before Christmas. I was going to go to Florida and do some skydiving, and then I was going to go to San Francisco to see my friends in the Bay Area. The house should have been sold; the cash should have been in the bank - it wasn't, because "the poison dwarf" had screwed up the easy house sale that I'd worked so hard to make happen.

I was too sick to take my flight to America.

I think of 2014 as my annus horribilis given that I spent about 11 weeks receiving inpatient treatment, essentially for the problems caused by getting screwed over as a vulnerable person, by my ex-wife. She'd demanded a quick divorce and I'd said "take whatever you want" but then she made it unspeakably awful. After a rotten birthday where I found myself well and truly homeless, I repeated my magic trick of 2008: I got myself back into IT consultancy and made a load of new friends; I flew off to Tenerife with my new girlfriend and went kitesurfing. From the depths of despair and near destruction, I rose up and rebuilt myself.

What happened in 2015, 2016 and 2017, combined a winning formula of highly paid IT consultancy work and my ability to make new friends and rebuild my life, with the sensation-seeking desire to maintain a novel lifestyle: if nothing else, my life has been very exciting for the past few years.

Whereas most people live in fear of tarnishing their professional reputation and losing everything they own and hold dear, I found those things became incredibly cumbersome when I was unwell. To maintain appearances and pretend like everything is just fine, is immensely energy-draining. It's almost driven me insane, worrying about what former work colleagues and bosses think about me; what people know about my chequered past. Far, far, far more than the abuse my body has suffered, and the mental health problems I've been through, the biggest problem in my life has been worrying about people finding out the very things that I've catalogued on the pages of this blog, quite publicly.

We are now approaching a third San Francisco flight that has been booked, but there is a great deal of uncertainty regarding whether I will be going or not. I dearly wish to see an old schoolfriend who was pivotal in raising the alarm on social media, to the fact that I was in the process of killing myself - in essence, he was the last person I spoke to while still alive, telling him that I was sorry I wouldn't be seeing him in November [because I'd be dead].

It fucking horrifies me that the managing director of the company who I was working for at the time - who booked my flights out to San Francisco - was in the process of attempting to terminate my employment while I was on life support in intensive care... because he'd read this on Twitter!

Given that I've stubbornly refused to die, I feel like taking the trip to San Francisco in defiance of the arsehole who didn't care whether I lived or died. That gobsmackingly awful human being deserves to have to see me alive and well, taking a trans-Atlantic flight to go and see an old friend who actually cared about my life.

I feel like I might be calling on you - my social media friends - to help me raise Hell to show that vulnerable people shouldn't get screwed over by unscrupulous arseholes.

So, this is my call to action: I'd like to speak to you and I'd like your support in turning up the heat on people who put personal profit ahead of human lives. I've been wondering what to do with myself, and this feels like an important point; this feels like something symbolic.

Whether it's my ex-wife who literally said "I'd rather be a widow than a divorcee" or my ex-boss who literally fired me for being dead, I want to stand up to these fucking arseholes.

Tags: #career

This is a story about medical notes...

My ex-wife - a biochemist by way of undergraduate degree - once screamed at me in an incoherent rage because I had innocently asked her "how big is a protein?" having wondered how many nanometers across, the average protein molecule measured. The sheer audacity of me asking such a question enraged her, perhaps because free thinking is expressly forbidden in an academic world which promotes rote-learning of facts and examinations graded to a marking scheme, ahead of learning.

(The answer, by the way, is roughly 3 nanometres in radius).

When I attempt to answer a difficult question, I sometimes pause and chuckle. "What is consciousness?" came one question. Although I was desperate to talk about weakly interacting subatomic particles, General Relativity and nuclear fusion, I somehow managed to constrain myself to a meaningless analogy, while keeping quiet about my "mind's eye" which could picture every piece of information that captured my entire existence, smeared out in a infinitely thin sphere at the event horizon of a singularity, across all meaningful spacetime for the entire universe that I will ever perceive, which would have been rather a mouthful to express.

Just as one may cram for an exam the night before, I've attempted to only ever amass the prerequisite knowledge that may be considered the minimum viable to navigate whatever situations I have had to endure to reach my goals. Education has never seemed like an end in and of itself, given that our understanding of the fundmental nature of reality is evolving, and the Standard Model of particle physics is rather long in the tooth. Although I find it quite delightful that there are quarks named strange, charm and beauty in the particle zoo, I would find it rather frustrating to dedicate years of my life, obtaining a degree and writing a thesis using tools which may soon look as clunky and outdated as Newton's inverse-square law of gravity.

The mathematicians will mock physics as simply being applied mathematics. The physicists will mock chemistry as simply being applied physics. The chemists will mock biology as simply being applied chemistry, and so on.

Computers are now capable of solving equations and modelling real-world phenomena, potentially making algebra and calculus into dying arts, along with handwriting and long-division. The Fractal Geometry of Nature has revealed that cold rational calculating machines can produce simulations that imitate reality, through repeating patterns. Massive computational power does not only aid human discovery of hidden algebraic equations.

Amid much fanfare, computer software is touted as potentiating new drug discovery by simulating molecular binding, protein folding, rapid gene sequencing and personalised medicine. However, we seem to have forgotten that half the planet is impoverished & hungry, and vast numbers of those who are fortunate enough to live in advanced, wealthy & technologically advanced societies, are suffering from an epidemic of anxiety, depression and other mental health issues that is bad enough to drive vast numbers of men in the prime of their life to commit suicide: the biggest killer of males under the age of 45 in the UK - more than road traffic accidents, drug-related deaths, physical disease, murder, accidents and all the other causes of death.

One should consider that I took leave of my senses in 2008, but since that time I have only managed to attract two clinical diagnoses - convenient medical short-hand - although I have acquired a third which is perhaps the bluntest instrument of the three, and much more of a pejorative than a diagnosis.

"Substance abuse" is a catch-all term which serves me well when I haven't the time & energy to go into detail. Given humanity's long history of self-intoxication, some physicians would consider themselves to be well-versed in the matter. Even the most insulated amongst us, will have struggled to escape contact with a drunk in our lives. We quickly forget, of course, that psychiatry is an extremely young discipline. The isolation, refinement and synthesis of molecules which can short-circuit brain mechanisms, is something that dates back only 70 or 80 years, along with the branch of medicine chiefly concerned with treatment of matters of the mind.

The brain: the most complicated organ in the human body - estimated to have up to a quadrillion neuronal synapses - is often considered only in terms of its vital function as central nervous system, insofar as the same fatty grey matter helps other species to fuck, fight, flee and feed. This does not, however, tell us much about human consciousness, and even less still about pathological thought.

I once sat down and hand-wrote 12 pages of notes, from memory, of every General Practice doctor, psychiatrist and hospital, which I had attended during a 7 year period. Although I kept things as brief as I could, with names, dates and locations, as well as diagnoses and medications, there was a great deal to write. I'm not a complete hypochondriac - there were important notes about my episodes of depression and hypomania, where my mental health had caused me to become significantly dysfunctional.

Perhaps your mind is now skipping ahead - as mine often does - and you're attempting to finish my sentences. Presumably, you're trying to guess the punchline of the joke. I assume you've already got more than enough information to diagnose and treat me.

I'm second-guessing myself here, and I'm struck by the egotism and "navel gazing" of the very act of being sufficiently appraised of my own medical history that I should remember such a level of detail. Who the hell am I to take an interest in my own diagnosis and treatment? Where's my certificate, framed on the wall? Where's the photo of me wearing a mortar board & gown, and clutching a scroll of parchment with a red ribbon tied around it?

When I think about where I should spend my precious time and effort, I'm not motivated by the prospect of being an understudy to a failure. While psychiatry continues to produce dismal outcomes for humanity, in terms of the epidemic of mental health problems, addiction and general societal collapse under the weight of stress and burnout, I'm reluctant to follow in the path of those who are not succeeding in improving the human condition. It should however be noted that I do not for a single moment, criticise the well-meaning intent of those in the healthcare professions, nor do I mean to discredit the lifesaving work that takes place every single day.

The idea of using myself as a case study seems quite ridiculous, but one must consider that it would be unethical to - for example - risk a person's life when there is a treatment available that has been proven to be more effective than placebo.

With a sample size of one, perhaps nothing useful can be gleaned from my first-hand experiences, but I have attempted to corroborate my findings with other evidence wherever possible. I have deliberately avoided areas where another data point would make no difference: what use would it be if I too experienced anorgasmia as a result of SSRI medication, for example?

A great deal of our knowledge regarding the anatomy of the human brain has been gleaned from unethical experiments on unconsenting psychiatric patients - lobotomies, testing of medications and induced seizures. Animal studies have been gratuitously gruesome, with a great deal of unnecessary suffering inflicted upon primates. I'm not an anti-vivisection nutcase, but there must be very tangible goals to justify the means of obtaining the results.

To bathe a brain in psychoactive molecules that will cross the blood-brain barrier, is barbaric when we consider that the theoretical reasons why drugs have the effect that they do - the theories have so often been disproven. The 'chemical imbalance' theory that said that depressed brains had lower levels of serotonin, and that SSRIs would increase levels of synaptic serotonin, has been conclusively disproven, yet it is still a widely-circulated myth.

The much-vaunted sequencing of the human genome looks like a ridiculous white elephant of a project, when we consider that epigenetic gene expression had been discovered to allow genetically identical animals to exhibit completely different physical characteristics, depending on the environment that they have been exposed to.

In a collapsing global economy, education is one of the few sectors that's not feeling the pinch, and good solid science is getting drowned out in a sea of noise: pointless research. There are already excellent animal models which demonstrate that overpopulation and otherwise horrible living conditions, will produce a "behavioural sink" and addiction, in individuals who would otherwise lead happy healthy lives.

It has seemed fairly obvious to me from the start, that my mental health problems have stemmed from the ethical objections I had to the conduct of financial services organisations, and the role of global capitalism in ruining billions of human lives, in pursuit of unrestrained, unregulated and immoral profits, to the exclusion of any and all consideration of long-term consequences. In short: my problems should not be medicalised. I'm having a sane reaction to an insane world.

While this essay goes well beyond the "answer A, B or C" multiple-choice options on the prescriptive menu that is on offer, I feel that this does not invalidate the points I am making.

To have invested heavily in a mainstream education, would be to risk becoming incoherent with rage whenever somebody was so impertinent as to ask a thoughtful question - questions that spring into a mind that's unconstrained by the narrow status quo viewpoint, rote-learned while kowtowing to those with the necessary credentials to approve clones of themselves.

This is not "my ignorance is as good as your knowledge" anti-intellectualism, but instead a suggestion that we don't need so many people who've all read exactly the same books and sat more-or-less exactly the same tests. Moving towards intellectual homogeny is as dangerous as book burning, in my opinion.

In conclusion: this is a convoluted way of saying that you're unqualified to judge me, although you're possibly technically correct if you say that my problems are mostly of my own making.

Tags: #mentalhealth #suicide #addiction

This is a story about pill popping...

If you're unfortunate enough to find yourself on a psych ward, you might be surprised to discover that you don't have a choice about whether you take your medication or not - you can be treated against your will. That's worth repeating one last time: you can't refuse your treatment.

At the moment, I'm effectively unmedicated. I'm taking pregabalin for neuropathic pain, but I'm reducing my dose by 50mg every 4 days, so I will stop taking it altogether in just 12 days time. I'm taking zopiclone for insomnia, but I will halve the dose in 7 days time and stop taking it altogether in 21 days time. Meanwhile, I've been taking a tiny dose of lamotrogine - just 25mg - which is too little for it to have any effect.

But, presumably I was on some heavy medications while I was in hospital?

No. No I was not.

Since the 9th of September 2017, I've stopped drinking altogether - I'm teetotal - and I've stopped abusing benzodiazepines (Xanax and Valium). I've also not taken anything other than pregabalin and zopiclone. It was less than 3 weeks ago that I started taking a tiny dose of lamotrogine, which is not capable of controlling any mood disorder that might be troubling me.

I must admit that I rather toyed with the poor psychiatrists who saw me. I casually dropped olanzapine and sodium valproate into conversation, and their faces lit up like a Christmas tree. My fellow patients were acutely unwell, and injections of Depakote - colloquially known as "depo" - were dished out to anybody who exhibited troublesome behaviour. It's a sad sight to see somebody who's just had their injection, shuffling along the corridor like a zombie.

Although strictly speaking this is not supposed to happen, I dictated the medication I wanted. My notes from my psychiatrist in London had not travelled up to the North of England with me, and my new doctor (General Pracititioner) knew nothing about me. The clinical team had to take my word as gospel.

I'm now wondering whether to be compliant with the medication that I decided I wanted, or not.

tags: #mentalhealth #bipolar #medication