This is a story about paralysis...

I'm never really unsure of what to do. I generally have a very certain idea of what I want to do and how I'm going to do it. I have a really big problem when I can see all the way to the end, and life seems to be a bit of a paint-by-numbers exercise. I really struggle when life is predictable and routine.

I went to see a psychiatrist on Wednesday. I knew what I wanted from the psychiatrist: to see a clinical psychologist. I also knew what the likely outcomes were if I was honest: to have pills thrown at me and put myself at risk of being locked up on a psych ward. It was a situation that was so predictable, that I was able to forecast exactly which medication the psychiatrist would suggest.

Instead of allowing myself to be sectioned and swallowing the prescribed medication, I ran away. I'm currently 1,200 miles away from home and by the time I get back the system will have forgotten all about me. If I really wanted to get what I need - which is some talk therapy - then I'd have played a completely different strategy. Frankly, I can't really afford to be sitting on a therapist's couch - I've nearly run out of money.

So, I find myself away from my friends and my new home, in a strange city, in a new job. It's very stressful. I'm very anxious. However, it's also novel and therefore a little exciting. Even though I've done similar work a million times before, I'm still a little challenged by meeting new people and learning the particular nuances of the organisation I've just joined. There's a little novelty in the experience, even if ultimately I'll realise that it's the same old shit, and I'll be on cruise control until the end of the assignment.

I'm presently thinking about eating pasta from a plastic pot, having poured boiling water over it from a miniature kettle in my hotel room. I will need to stir and eat the pasta with a shoehorn, in the absence of any cutlery. This is the glamorous life I live.

You may wonder whether the stress of homelessness, near-bankruptcy, drug addiction, brushes with the law and general dysfunction in every area of my life, is something that I regret. No. No I don't regret it. Having been an adrenalin-junkie extreme-sports enthusiast all my life, you can't get more of a rush than playing "go for broke" in real life. It seems inevitable that I would push everything to the limit, including taking life-or-death chances.

It is a little hard to see where the reward is, when my life seems mostly miserable. I've had unbearable anxiety and depression for long periods during the last couple of years. However, I'm not rushing to the doctor and begging for a miracle cure. The deeply distressing feelings I'm having are doing very little to change my behaviour. I almost guarantee that I'll find the urge to self-destruct almost irresistible, if I pull through my latest episode of adversity.

Having lived in a bush in a park, it seems rather more preferable to be living in a hotel like I am now. Having nearly run out of money, it seems preferable to have a well-paid job, like I do now. However, I can't make any sense of life when I swing between impending doom and intolerable boredom. What's the point of living if it all ends in misery and disaster? I'm too busy moving from certain destitution to probable financial stability at the moment, to stop and have suicidal thoughts, but I know that the absurdity of the rat-race existence is already something that I'm not able to ignore - I'm completely unable to relax and enjoy trivial distractions.

Existential angst paralyses me. I wake up and I want to go back to sleep, but I can't because I have to go to work. I get to work and I want to walk out, but I can't because I can't lose this job. I should work but I want to scream "THIS IS ALL JUST UTTER BULLSHIT". Everywhere I look, I see needless complexity; makework. Existence itself is just killing time before our eventual death. Why go through the stressful and exhausting bit in the middle? Why not take the short-cut and just commit suicide?

It's strange to write like this, given that I've overcome the incredible stress of getting this job, travelling over a thousand miles and facing my first nervous couple of days in the office. Given that I'll avoid bankruptcy if I just keep turning up and keeping my mouth shut, why would I be writing about suicide? I'm not even suicidal at the moment. I've entered a strange kind of state, where I'm incredibly anxious, but I know that suicide doesn't make sense anymore. I know that I've gone to strange cities, started new jobs and rescued myself from financial ruin enough times. Why am I even writing about death and disaster?

January.

It's been a very, very long time since I had a stable January. Potentially, I'll still have well-paid work in the New Year. Potentially, I don't have to start job hunting and worrying about money during the absolute shittest time of year. Potentially, I start 2018 with prospects rather than worries.

On the flip side, you might say that I'm stuck in a cyclical pattern and that I keep trying the same thing but expecting different results, except you'd be wrong. I'm trying something that's been staggeringly successful, and the circumstances are different each time. One of these days, there's going to be a combination of favourable factors, as opposed to badly-timed clusterfucks.

Money is a 'trigger' for self-sabotage, one might say. Also, finding myself trapped on a rainy miserable island in the middle of winter is also a 'trigger'. My coping strategy in the past was to jet off to Venezuela or Brazil for a couple of weeks. I had a long successful career doing that.

In order to survive, I'm going to have to orchestrate friends, work, money, a place to live, a passion and a girlfriend. You might scream with frustration at your screen, because we're all trying to get that perfect balance, and there's always one area of our life that's not going as well as we'd like it to. Erm, well... you don't know how good you've got it, actually. Try living in a bush in a park with none of the things I listed, then get back to me. This is not a boo-hoo story - I'm just explaining how dysfunctional my life got. If it helps you to say it's all my fault for making bad life choices or whatever, then knock yourself out, but I'm far too busy figuring out whether there's some way I can rediscover a reason to live to worry about shit like that.

I'm just writing now. I'm brain dumping. I'm trying to write without a filter.

It's possible that I got caught in some thought loops before, and I needed to take a break from my usual blogging topics. It's possible that my blog wasn't helping me at all. It's possible that I'd lost perspective, because I'd been doing too much navel gazing. I took a break and now I've come back.

Now, I'm writing mindful of the fact that I have friends who I've been living with in Wales. I'm mindful of the fact that I've got a friend who helped me get this job. I'm mindful of the fact that I can't afford to put a foot wrong. I'm mindful of the precarity of my situation. I'm mindful of the fact that writing is actually pretty exhausting, and I need to devote quite a lot of my energies into doing a good job and impressing the people I'm working with. I'm mindful of the fact that I have repeated the pattern of boom and bust, and it looks pretty obviously cyclical to a casual observer. I'm mindful of the fact that my consistent perseverance in the face of a headwind might look a bloody-minded and stubborn refusal to acknowledge reality. That's not the case.

There's a prescription for an antidepressant waiting for me at my doctor's surgery back in Wales. Given the chance, I would be institutionalised by the mental health services. Instead, I'm pursuing a ridiculously optimistic and hopeful, yet extremely risky strategy, of attempting to avoid medication and the dead-end of financial ruin and the mire of pathetically paid jobs that're just as soul-destroying as the very well paid job I've got. I'm not happy about being unmedicated, but I wouldn't be happy popping pills either. I'm not happy about having to work a bullshit job, but I wouldn't be happy doing a so-called 'fulfilling' one either (there are none).

"What if you're still depressed and anxious in 6 weeks time?" the psychiatrist asked me. "Wouldn't you regret not having started taking medication sooner?" he asked. What happens if I don't give up though? Wouldn't I regret never finding out what happens if I stick to my guns and persevere? What am I going to find out, that nobody else ever would, because it's too hard?

I didn't mean to write so much, but I've uncorked some of the stuff I've been holding back. I've never regretted writing, despite the seemingly dreadful consequences. Writing has been financially disastrous for me, but yet it's got to be a healthier coping strategy than drink or drugs, or even going to the gym excessively, where I'll strain my heart and give myself arthritic joints.

I imagine that I'll meet a nice girl soon enough, and the pleasure of tactile affection will change my mood. I imagine that my lengthy abstinence from mind-altering substances will pay dividends soon. Already, some feeling has returned to my nerve-damaged foot/ankle. I must surely be somewhat more sharp-witted, now that I'm not taking heaps of pills every day. I must surely be on course to return to a more normal life, since kicking my addiction to stimulants.

I'm going to give myself a big pat on the back for reducing my alcohol consumption to a moderate level, breaking my physical benzodiazepine dependence, reducing my sleeping pill habit to almost nothing, getting off powerful prescription painkillers, staying 'clean' from supercrack for 6 months and otherwise living a pretty damn healthy life. It might not seem like I've done very much this year, apart from work three contracts, survive double kidney failure, survive a suicide attempt and survive a bunch of very traumatic events, but I'm damn well going to go ahead and congratulate myself on having spent a couple of days in my new job in what must be the very best mental health that I've enjoyed all year, even if I'm diabolically depressed and anxious.

Thinking about my achievements a little more, I'm going to give myself an imaginary medal for 30 days of not drinking, 30 days of writing a novel and spending more days clean and sober than I've spent intoxicated by medications, drugs and alcohol. Quitting a whole host of highly addictive drugs and medications, while in the throes of depression and anxiety, is something I'm going to go ahead and actually feel really proud of - sorry, not sorry. While I'm at it, I'm going to give myself another imaginary medal for not writing my blog for 30 days too. That was harder than you'd think.

My verbal diarrea is pretty bad, so I'm going to stop now, but I hope you can see that I'm not idle, even if you think I've been unproductive, lazy and self-sabotaging all year. It pisses me off that anybody might think I don't have a work ethic.

I'm not going to give up on my crazy experiment to see how my mental health is affected by my circumstances by just damn well being patient, consistent and relentless. I'm controlling the variables.

Tags: #mentalhealth #suicide #medication

This is a story about being gainfully employed...

Follow your dreams, as long as your dream is punching made-up numbers into a spreadsheet, trapped inside a depressing office with no natural light in the middle of an overcrowded polluted concrete jungle, with a horrible commute every morning and evening.

I started a new job this morning. I'm 1,200 miles from home. I had to take a train, a plane and an automobile to get here.

For a whole month, I wrote. That's a lie... I had some days off. I had to get my stuff from London, I had to get my passport from Manchester and I had some days when I just didn't feel up to writing, but I pretty much spent a month as a writer.

In order to indulge my artistic ambitions, I've had to give up a couple of months when I should really have been job hunting. My writing has also lost me lucrative contracts, when my Twitter/blog has been discovered by bosses. As a hobby, it's been incredibly expensive. As a job, it's been financially ruinous.

A friend of mine had two job options when he graduated: writer or computer programmer. He chose the latter, because the salary was five times as much and he wanted to be able to afford luxuries like food and rent. Another friend had the choice between an electric guitar and a computer. He chose the latter, knowing that it would pave the way for a lucrative career. I too have forgone opportunities to pursue academic interests, because of economic incentives.

In fact, we are strongly economically disincentivised from pursuing art. There can only be a handful of Damien Hirsts in the world, while there are millions of penniless artists.

They say that if you're good at something, you should never do it for free. However, how are you going to ever get good at something unless somebody's going to bankroll you while you're bad at it? Nobody is born with prodigious talent. There are also vast numbers of negative people who'll criticise, tell you that you're going to fail and tell you to give up and do something else. There are vast numbers of people who have a vested interest in seeing you fail - they don't want to see you succeed when they're too much of a gutless, spineless, miserable moaning, pathetic, uninspiring and otherwise wimpy excuse for a human being, to actually ever try to follow their dream or support somebody else in following theirs.

Given that it's rewarding to fuck about with paint or clay, stand in front of people singing or playing an instrument, act, play sports and otherwise pursue the performing and creative arts, one might argue that we're never going to be short of people who want to turn these hobbies into jobs. Wouldn't we all be artists if we could?

Here is the present paradigm: given an oversupply of people who'd like to do something more rewarding than the bullshit McJobs on offer, we have fierce competition for just a few slots. Only those who are prepared to go to extraordinary lengths, or those who are lucky enough to have been born into a family that already possesses wealth and fame, will be able to do a job that's fun rather than fucking awful.

Is capitalism working? Isn't capitalism supposed to reward those who work hard? Isn't the whole reason why capitalism's better than other systems of wealth distribution, because it incentivises hard work? What happens when that's no longer true?

The way I see it, we give up our childhoods to study hard, in the hope of getting better jobs. We give up our prime healthy years so that we can have a good retirement. What happens when the pension system is about to collapse and we can't hang on to the money that we've squirrelled away because our children can't afford houses? What happens when we bust a gut to get top exam grades and go to good universities, but there aren't any jobs and the ones there are wouldn't even allow us to afford the cost of living anyway?

Why are we working so hard? Why are we competing?

The competitive element of capitalism seems to have failed to deliver our most brilliant minds into productive endeavours. All those miserable hours of homework don't seem to be benefitting anybody. All those miserable hours spent in a traffic jam or otherwise in the rat race don't seem to be benefitting anybody. All I see is people chasing a dream that seems to slip ever further out of reach. What the hell are we doing, working so hard so that we might be able to one day stop and catch our breath, except we never can?

What happened to the age of leisure?

Of course, I see the irony and hypocrisy of writing this when I've been lucky enough to enjoy career breaks that have enabled me to write a couple of novels. "When do I get to write my book?" some might ask. Yes. I refer you to my previous question.

Something's gone horribly wrong and the prospect of a comfortable retirement is sailing over the horizon. Extrapolating, the prospect of any dreams being realised is an absolute one-in-a-million shot. As opposed to the buy-now-pay-later bogyman that we're all supposed to be afraid of, it seems to me as if we've sleepwalked into a kind of pay-now-never-get-the-benefit kind of dystopia. I really don't understand why people aren't chucking in the towel on their bullshit jobs and writing that fucking book. Why don't students say no to homework, and enjoy their youth? From what I can see, the stress and anxiety of modern life is ruining the vast majority of people's mental health.

I guess there are going to be growing pains, while we shift from a productivity-based capitalist global economy, back to a kind of life where we value human things like staying near our families, seeing our kids grow up and having what we want and need NOW not LATER. I mean, for fuck's sake we're not asking for much and we don't need much. Since agricultural mechanisation, we've been able to feed vast numbers with very little effort. Only about 1% of the UK's income comes from farming and fishing. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?

So, as I beaver away in an office working Monday to Friday yet again, I wonder how close we are to that day when we all suddenly decide that enough is enough and we really don't need any more exotic and arcane ways of disguising the fact that what we do all day for 'work' is absolute total and utter horse-shit, for most of us. Why can't we all be artists?

Tags: #art #economics #capitalism

This is a story about obstacles...

Today is my 5th day without medication for neuropathic pain. I'm not in too much physical discomfort, although my foot/ankle is painful due to nerve damage, but anxiety has been a terrible problem. I thought things would be improving by now. I've been OK in my comfort zone, avoiding stress and responsibilities. I decided to take on a technical task - akin to the kind of paid work I usually do - but every time that something went wrong I found myself becoming unpleasantly anxious.

My confidence is a little shattered to be honest. Negative thoughts like "oh my God this is harder than I remember" and "I can't overcome this problem; it's too hard" popped into my head. My stomach leapt into my throat. I felt a kind of fear and frustration that I would never normally feel when dealing with technical challenges.

It's shocking to me that I'm feeling like this, having done the hard work of getting myself off alcohol, benzodiazepines and pregabalin. It's upsetting that I don't feel better, but I guess recovery is going to take longer than I thought.

I really want to go back to some kind of moderate drinking. I don't think I was designed to not have something to "take the edge off" the general stress and anxiety of life.

The thought of walking to the pub for a pint of beer is something I'm highly motivated to do. I don't crave alcohol; I crave the absence of the incredible amount of anxiety I'm suffering. I would also just like to taste some beer.

I'm not going to start drinking again this week, and maybe not even next week - I'm not going to rush anything. Any changes that I do make, I'll be making slowly. It's remarkable just how difficult I'm still finding simple tasks I've done a million times before, now that I'm debilitated by medication-withdrawal-induced anxiety.

Getting off these damn pills is bloody awful.

Tags: #anxiety #alcohol #medication

This is a story about aide-memoires...

I've been blogging for 779 days, including a period of 120 consecutive sober days and the current stretch of 45 sober days, which totals 165 days. I worked for approximately 300 days (including weekends). I spent circa 60 days in hospital. I had two major periods of drug abuse, six girlfriends, wrote a novel and I attempted suicide seriously once. I've written 702,412 words on the pages of this website.

So, where's it gotten me?

Nowhere and everywhere.

I had no idea I had so much to say; so much stuff that I needed to write about. When I uncorked the bottle, all this stuff just came flooding out - bitterness, resentment, bad memories, as well as strong opinions on myriad subjects. Of course, there was a lot of toxic filth which spewed from my mouth - not everything I've written has been kind and eloquently put. Do I regret what I've written? Sometimes, yes, but on the whole I feel glad I spoke up. I feel ashamed that I wrote some absolute gibberish when I was messed up, but there it is: my soul laid bare for all to see.

To have poured time and effort into sharing stuff on Facebook or Twitter would have left me horribly invested in those walled gardens. To have ingratiated myself with another online community - a discussion forum - would have perhaps been a useful exercise, to give me social contact and a clear purpose, but in some ways I'm glad that I've learned how to work in isolation; to keep up the discipline and routine even when I don't know why I'm writing or what good will come of it.

If nothing else, I can proudly say I'm a writer, of a sort: I'm an eccentric hermit who's lost in his own thoughts. I've got 200 blog posts planned and my next novel to write in November - my mind buzzes with ideas. I'd write long rambling posts that jump around from topic to topic, running to many thousands of words, except that I feel like I've had enough practice of sentence construction and finding my natural voice. Now I'm starting to enjoy a kind of delicious frustration, knowing that I only allow myself to write once a day, and I aim to keep my daily word count to around 700.

As a barometer of my mood, there is nothing finer than writing. I can see all my insecurities, anxieties and my propensity to become obsessive or consumed by things, as clear as day. Of course I fear egocentricity, narcissism, navel gazing and other undesirable labels that might be hurled at me, but frankly the process of writing is an essential pressure-release. Not having this blog made me unspeakably frustrated, because I was grotesquely misunderstood. "Oh, bless you poppet... so full of teenaged angst!" you might patronise me. LOL says I.

My maturing process has been unorthodox, due to relentless bullying and a generally unpleasant start to life that robbed me of my self-esteem and opportunities to be a child, a teenager and a student. I now take my chances where I find them, and delight in acting like a great big kid. Being a late starter in life has its advantages, even if there is a general presumption that I should be better at handling life events, when I actually have not had the benefit of experience - how was I supposed to, for example, get any good at relationships if I didn't have stable friendships, childhood sweethearts or good role models in my parents?

Entering my third year of daily writing, this could be considered my "finals". I've had a few jobs which have stretched to the 4+ year mark, and enjoyed a little more stability with friends and homes in my adult life, than I did through the 8 different schools I had the misfortune of attending. This writing project has provided stability and structure, when my world was blown to bits by divorce.

While the backdrop to my story has changed from hostel to hotel room, to a few different apartments, hospital wards and psychiatric institutions, I've somehow managed to keep writing on a regular basis. I feel like the same person, when I sit down in front of the keyboard, even if there has been a huge variation in the state of my mental health. I know that I have written during periods stimulant & sleep-deprivation induced mania, causing me to pour out thousands upon thousands of words in a confused jumble. However, my mind still makes a surprising amount of sense, despite circumstances which should have tipped me into out-and-out insanity.

I am fearful that the pages of this blog might chart my final decline into a state where I'm rendered permanently useless to the world. I often wonder if I have caused so much trauma to my fragile brain, that it can never recover. If I'm at all paranoid, it's that I'm talking complete nonsense, and everybody is just humouring me while snickering behind my back. "Why didn't anybody tell me I'm writing utter crap?" I sometimes think.

Watching a friend or a stranger careen towards imminent disaster, in a slow-motion car-crash, is something that holds our gaze while also somehow stunning us into silence. I'm vaguely aware that many will be thinking "what can I do?" and be paralysed, without a clear cry for help or call to action. Not only is this the world's longest suicide note, but it's also the world's slowest ongoing crisis, for anybody following along in real-time. It took me a long time to find the guts to finally make a decent attempt at killing myself.

I'm aware now that the burden of responsibility shifts back to me, having received an outpouring of support from unexpected corners, in the wake of my suicide attempt. To resort to self-murder again, would be churlish.

As my mind begins to un-fog from the painkillers I had been taking for most of this year, I wonder whether I have learned anything from the events of the past. I hope I have developed and I'm in a better position than I was, when I was rather trapped in some most unpleasant circumstances, although I find myself in a never-ending cycle - rushing back to work before I'm fully recovered, in order to service debts and otherwise line the pockets of the rich.

Stress keeps me wired, and I wonder when the last time I cried was. Surely, there's a lot of tears that I'm holding back.

I'm tense; agitated; nervous; anxious; hypervigilant.

Tags: #writing #anxiety

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 relapse...

I've downed a whole pint of cold crisp refreshing lager before I've even realised I've done it. How I came to be in the bar in the first place is unclear, but I've greedily drained the contents of the pint glass and replaced it on the tabletop. A sense of "what have I done?" sweeps over me. Although I feel guilty - I have let people down; I have failed - I immediately decide to have another pint, and another, and another... until I wake up.

This morning was the first morning all year - more or less - that I didn't wake up and immediately think about reaching for a packet of pills.

"Addict!"

Hold your horses - things are a little bit more complicated. What would you do if you suffered from chronic pain? Would you just grin and bear it?

Perhaps the medication I have been taking for pain has inadvertently helped me to stay off the booze. Now that I only have one more day before I stop taking pain medication, a subconscious desire to get drunk has returned with a vengeance.

Every time I see beer & wine, I imagine that it would taste amazing and I get a mild craving to consume some. However, thankfully I can remember that alcohol didn't taste very nice after I stopped drinking for a period of over 4 months.

There's no reason why I'd stop taking my prescribed pain medication and become a teetotaller, except that I want to clear my head - I'm desperate to see what my brain is like, without the intoxicating chemicals I've been putting into my body.

My dream last night was very vivid, and the feeling that I had accidentally failed in my mission to temporarily abstain from mind-altering substances, was the strongest feeling: I was devastated. Then, in my dream I decided that if I was going to fail, I was going to fail spectacularly.

The fact of the matter is that I haven't failed at all. I'm spectacularly successful. Very few people are able to beat the demon drink, and especially not at the same time as quitting physically addictive medications and overcoming a heap of other shit too. I'm a motherfucking world-leading expert on sobriety and getting clean.

Skin-crawling anxiety, suicidal depression and a warped perception of time, means that the hands of the clock barely move as I wait for my brain to recover sufficiently, so that I can feel slightly better.

I wait. I wait and I wait and I wait.

To say that I'm white-knuckling the journey to being totally clean from all substances, is cruel and unkind. To accuse me of being some kind of "dry drunk" or to suggest that I'll always be an alcoholic and an addict is ridiculous. If labels and stigmas are going to follow me around forever, I'll be more than happy to return to substance abuse. I aim to confound prejudices - there's no point in suffering pointlessly.

Trust me - I'm suffering a million times worse than I ever did before, even when I was in the depths of stimulant psychosis. Even when I was in deep shit and completely messed up, that lasted for the blink-of-an-eye versus the round-the-clock awfulness I'm having to endure at the moment. I might've thought I was going to die at times, but now I really wish I had died.

Tomorrow I have 24 little hours to endure and then my recovery starts properly - every day after tomorrow takes me a little bit closer to normal brain chemistry. Every day that I manage to stay clean & sober after tomorrow will allow my body to restore itself to its natural state of homeostasis.

It's going to be like the world's shittest Christmas Eve.

Tags: #addiction #alcohol #drugs

This is a story about unintended consequences...

The UK's notorious tabloid rag, The Sun interviewed a grieving father & husband and quoted him as saying "I should never have let the bastard near my family" with reference to a homeless man who had been taken in by his wife. The British press variously reported that the woman - later murdered by the homeless man she'd tried to help - had given "her husband's dinner" to her killer, who also killed her son and badly injured her husband.

Quite unbeknownst to me, this news story had received widespread coverage at exactly the same time as I was taken in by a Good Samaritan - what risk, one wonders, to her children & husband if this is any kind of precedent?

Scanning the column inches for similarities between myself and the perpetrator of the double murder, the newspapers reported mental illness and drug abuse. My Good Samaritan collected me from a secure psychiatric institution on the day when the crescendo of media coverage reached its peak. During the car ride to the family home I explained that I had seen illegal drugs used by my parents on a daily basis, and we agreed that to do that in front of children is not normal, right or proper.

Perhaps my gracious hosts have been hoodwinked. Perhaps I have fabricated a story about my sweet innocence and a set of unfortunate circumstances that have come about through no fault of my own. Given the extraordinary amount that I have written, it seems like a rather elaborate ruse, to write extensively about my chequered past, even when it has clearly caused me more harm than good. Is it not true that I've left my readers in no uncertain doubt about my every misdemeanour?

Further digging through the archives of the internet, I found a newspaper which reported that the aforementioned homeless murderer had been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder (BPD). BPD was casually tossed into the mix by one psychiatrist that I met, as a possible additional diagnosis for my own mental health problems. The only official diagnoses I've received are clinical depression and bipolar disorder, but adjustment disorder also featured in some of my recent paperwork, although this did not appear on my hospital discharge summary.

I'm mindful that further comparison is not at all useful, and I find myself to be extremely stressed about what the kind family who has taken me in, might think about the fact that this matter has been on my mind. When I read the grieving husband's words "I wish my wife had never set eyes on him" I do worry that I never asked my own Good Samaritan "what does your husband think?" but then wouldn't the atmosphere now be a little strange if the reply had been "he's got some reservations"?

I would say that I have never searched my soul for any kind of malice, as extensively as I have done knowing that I would be residing under the same roof as a happy family with several kids. If I had the slightest suspicion that my behaviour could be erratic, then I would not find it conscionable to expose a family to any danger that I might pose.

That said, I'm aware that bonding with the family is taking place. I'm still deeply troubled by almost unbearable levels of anxiety, and suicidal thoughts intrude whenever I consider what the future holds. I'm hopeful that my state of mind will improve when my medication changes are done. I am however mindful that in the worst-case scenario, I do pose a risk to my own life, and although I would put some time & distance between myself and the family, it would be incorrect to say that it would have no effect on them if I were to end my life prematurely.

The question of whether to accept help is as difficult as that of whether to offer assistance to those who are in need. I'm incredibly lucky to not only receive aid, but also to be able to openly discuss the obstacles and difficulties involved.

You may be surprised to learn that these 700 or so words are some of the most carefully chosen I have written, out of over 700,000. I have been shown a great deal of love, care, respect and trust, and this is why the anger, bitterness, rejection and hurt of the past, that usually flows out from me onto these pages, has been replaced with a daunting sense of responsibility towards those who I am now close with.

I'm going to publish now, because it's been agonisingly difficult to write this.

Tags: #homeless #mentalhealth #addiction #depression #suicide #family

This is a story about breaking the cycle...

Two of these medications are addictive. Half of these tablets are dietary supplements that can be bought from a health food store. As I stop taking three prescribed medications, withdrawal side effects that I'm suffering from include: insomnia, anxiety and panic attacks. Why stop?

If you're doing something that seemingly provides no benefit to your life, but is hard to stop, then why are you doing it?

The list of things that I could be said to have enjoyed habitually has grown to an extensive list that includes sex, spending money, alcohol, stimulant drugs, benzodiazepines, sleeping pills, painkillers, pornography, computer games, reading, arguing with people, work, masturbation, driving fast, junk food, music and just about anything else that makes life liveable. Strangely, my current day-to-day life includes almost none of these things.

Given my natural tendency to binge on anything I enjoy, perhaps it is abstinence that I am now taking perverse pleasure in the over-indulgence of. I barely have the words to describe how truly dreadful it is to be withdrawing from the most addictive chemicals on the planet - abstaining from alcohol & benzodiazepines can be so hard on your body and mind, that you will die from seizures. Why on earth would I choose to go without the things that would salve the aching that my body has for anxiety & stress alleviating substances?

It was suggested to me that my choice to go without all the things that would help me feel better, is akin to a kind of self-harm. Writing this now, I'm inclined to agree. All the stress and anxiety that I have avoided for years is all hitting me like a sledgehammer. Everything I've ever enjoyed and seen as a reason for living, is barred from me for reasons of self-denial.

Perhaps this is a kind of meditation. Like a monk who takes a vow of celibacy, through this difficult period maybe I will learn something that I would not be able to whilst indulging in the terrestrial temptations.

There is a deliberate alteration of my behaviour, of course. I have decided to deny myself alcohol and my prescribed medications (yes, this is in agreement with my doctor, yawn). I could very easily continue to drink alcohol and take pregabalin, not to mention illegal narcotics and prescription drugs which I could obtain through the black market, but I choose not to. I do not stop because I have an incentive to do so; I stop because it is hard and it is interesting - I'd gotten a little bored of my wanton excesses.

I could write and write and write - perhaps the armchair psychologists amongst you will speculate that I have simply transferred all of my multiple addictions into an addiction to writing.

Tags: #addiction #socialmedia #alcohol #drugs #writing

This is a story about justification...

What do you suppose this stack of laundry baskets and boxes full of clothes is? Perhaps this is a new modern art installation at the Saachi Gallery?

200 days ago - April Fools' Day - I was so paranoid that I believed that somebody was going to break into my ensuite bathroom on the 4th floor, and invade my bedroom. I was also so unwell that I believed I could secure my bedroom by tying my dirty laundry baskets to the door handle.

Paranoia does not generally trouble me during my day-to-day life: nothing to hide, nothing to fear.

I'm about to make a factual declaration that might shock and disgust you.

Men's libido will drive them to relieve themselves - through sex or masturbation - on a relatively frequent basis, depending on each individual. You might consider a man who masturbates every day to be a twisted pervert. You might consider a monk who has taken a vow of celibacy having undesired nocturnal emissions - he ejaculates in his sleep - to be the finest example of a man that is biologically possible, without castration.

Let's just re-iterate this for emphasis: biologically, the human race has evolved a reproductive imperative that is as strong as breathing, sleeping, shitting, pissing, drinking and eating. If you can stop doing all of the latter for a few years, then you're welcome to then argue the point with me.

If you consider the unpleasant combination of being so horny that you need to masturbate, with the belief that you're being watched at all times, then you might understand that it's an impossible situation, assuming that you value your dignity and your privacy. At present there are at least 3 webcams watching me and 2 microphones listening to me. Of course, I presume that no ransomware is recording me without my permission, but such software exists in the wild. How much do you trust the manufacturer of your phone and your laptop, to not co-operate with your government, giving them the ability to spy on you?

Nothing to hide, nothing to fear?

I'm guessing that you wouldn't want your family, friends and work colleagues, or even complete strangers, to see you tugging your todger; yanking your chain; bashing your bishop, or whatever your preferred euphemism is for masturbating to orgasm. I'm guessing that you'd find such voyeurism to be unacceptably compromising and distressing enough to destroy your mental wellbeing.

Do you note that I'm leaving aside any discussion of anything 'kinky' or not otherwise in accordance with plain vanilla biological imperatives?

Of course, we could all just have sex, and then we've got a partner in crime - we have safety in numbers; at least there's somebody else who's looking ridiculous with us, as we make the beast with two backs. However, this is not always practicable. Natural urges do not always align with the competing demands of the world around us. Sometimes, we are horny and single.

If you're thinking "eeeewww" or otherwise troubled by an undesirable mental image, you understand perfectly that the vast majority of us wish to maintain some privacy around this particular activity. I cannot relate to men who take a thrill from masturbating at somebody, flashing their genitals or sending unsolicited dick pics. I am not writing about the exceptional cases, where men act in an antisocial or illegal way - these matters are excluded from the discussion, because they are unusual and those men do not think and behave like I do.

In short, the only way that my behaviour seems at all unusual, is the exceptional lengths that I will occasionally go to in order to not be spied upon while masturbating. If we consider our desire for privacy, it doesn't seem odd. If we think about the fear of the indignity and shame of having explicit images and videos of us masturbating, shown to other people, that fear is not irrational - it would be extremely distressing, for almost everybody.

Just over 6 months ago my mind was shattered. Today I'm barely troubled by paranoia.

My paranoia doesn't come from nowhere - of course it needs a seed. The internal source of my paranoia is sleep deprivation, hunger, thirst and mind-altering substances: I have a choice over whether I disturb my mind with these things or not. The external source of my paranoia could be explained simply in this way: do you imagine that men in psychiatric hospitals no longer need to masturbate?

Ask yourself where it would be appropriate to masturbate, when you're being checked on regularly by nurses and support workers. Ask yourself whether you think you could quietly do the deed in a dormitory with other men. Presumably, you'd go to the toilet or the shower, wouldn't you? If you're masturbating in an institutional environment, with the noise of staff and patients all around you, does that make you a twisted pervert?

This topic is the most sensitive that I could write about. Nothing could shame me more than you knowing these deeply troubling things, which is why I write about them - I'm grasping the nettle.

If you care to read back through what I've written, you'll see that I stop short of painting an explicit picture - the images in your head are entirely from your own imagination. I'm not attempting to upset anybody, nor am I discussing matters that have no place outside of a basic human biology lesson.

I believe that honesty is the best policy, and I'm taking that to its extreme conclusion, despite the detrimental effect it seems to be having on me and my life. I started the questionable experiment, to publish my inner monologue, and I'm compelled to continue, even though it causes me a great deal of anxiety.

Why do I need to live in fear of people learning who I am and how I feel? Why would I need to wear a mask? Why do I need privacy, when so many are determined to sneak a peek behind the curtain anyway?

What happens when a person lays themselves bare, instead of letting paranoia destroy them?

Tags: #paranoia #writing

This is a story about picking on an easy target...

Has anybody ever died of shame and embarrassment? I feel horribly exposed all of a sudden, having published my entire psyche into the public domain - all the inner-workings of my mind; every dark secret is out on display.

I'm acutely aware that I've kept writing and publishing throughout periods where I was incredibly unwell. I'm acutely aware that I've published unedited things, despite being exhausted, stressed and unable to make a sound and rational judgement call on whether or not to publicise private matters.

It's quite apparent that my rather strange and questionable mission - to submit my private journal to public scrutiny - has been incredibly costly.

Have I made a mistake?

Clearly, I've made a whole string of mistakes. Every day, I think about millions of mistakes I've made that I could write about. Even the process of exploring all my feelings and admitting my fault, is somewhat of a mistake.

Racked with self-doubt and feeling a mounting sense of vulnerability, I've thought about back-pedalling - haven't I made myself look like a buffoon in front of enough friends, family and strangers? Shouldn't I now clam up with shame and regret that I ever opened my mouth? Shouldn't I bury this blog and hope that nobody ever brings up the matters I've made public?

It would be so easy to press the "delete" button and destroy the digital identity which I've created. It would be so easy to deny all knowledge of ever sharing extremely personal matters. Don't believe everything you read online.

If I loaded a gun with bullets and handed it to you, I turned around and you shot me in the back, would you feel victorious?

I don't understand why anybody would take the ammunition which I give them and use it against me. I don't understand why anybody would take the opportunity to sucker-punch me, when I'm making myself so vulnerable; such an easy target. Is there really any pleasure in picking on somebody who's laid wide open to attack? Where's the sport?

I've started to wonder what happens to the people who pick my pocket, blame things on me or thump me in the face, knowing that I won't defend myself or retaliate. Do they feel pleased with themselves? Do they feel happy and are they able to sleep soundly at night?

If I'm starting to sound like I think of myself as sweet and innocent and free from all sin, that's not the case. There's more than enough admission of wrongdoing on these pages, if you want to go digging. I'm not some butter-wouldn't-melt, holier-than-thou, whiter-than-white person who claims to never have said boo to a goose. I admit that I'm a deeply flawed individual.

I'm struggling with a cloudy brain. I feel like my wits are dulled and my thoughts swim through treacle. I feel run-down; unwell. I feel like I'm not well enough to be writing. I regret things I wrote when I was sick, in the past.

As the truest version of myself - free from drink and drugs - emerges from under a dark storm-cloud, I struggle to reconcile the way I feel now with how I felt when I had the protective armour of intoxication. I'm full of stress, nervous tension and anxiety, while my brain is raw and damaged from abuse - I'll recover, but it's taking time.

I'm defensive, because I can't afford to lose any more opportunities. I can't afford to have my reputation tarnished anymore, even if it appears to be me who's doing the tarnishing. I can't afford to have influential people leaping to the wrong conclusions. Why continue to write so honestly? Why take the risk? Why not shut down this crazy experiment?

The fact you're reading this means that you're either going to use it against me - shooting me in the back with the weapon I handed to you - or you'll dig a little deeper; try a little harder. It's all too tempting to kick a man when he's down though, isn't it?

It's too obvious and easy to shut down; shut up. I've come this far, so why shouldn't I keep writing? What does it matter if I make myself unemployable? What does it matter if I can never return to the part of society that routinely lies and wears a mask of insincerity? Why the fuck do I want to live in a world full of absolute arseholes, who stab each other in the back?

Come; come and beat up on me; come and put the boot in; come and strike me with sticks and stones and whatever weapon you can grab, while I lay battered and bruised, unarmed on the floor, naked, afraid, defenceless, outnumbered and in pain.

I invite you to martyr me.

Tags: #writing