This is a story about counterintuitive results...

Conventional wisdom tells us that sobriety is the route to salvation. If you're being treated for substance dependency, most approaches are abstinence-based. But what if these approaches are totally wrong?

I had 'too much' to drink last night, but yet this morning I was on time to work for the first time in ages. I was also on top form during a 2 hour meeting that was highly pressured and intense. Clearly my work performance, my productivity, was improved by alcohol, rather than hindered.

Alcohol works for me as a substance that I can titrate the dose of to control my mood fluctuations. When I quit drinking last year, my anxiety levels became unbearable after 30 days sober, and I had to go into hospital and be on suicide watch. I then went hypomanic and quit a well paid job, and did a bunch of other mad shit, before finally relapsing onto hard drugs and slashing my forearms with a razor blade, after 101 days sober. Hardly an encouraging result.

The fact of the matter is: my job is boring and shit. My life is empty, unfulfilling and stressful. Of course I need something to help me cope with an intolerable daily existence. How the hell am I supposed to get through the crap I'm going through without a chemical crutch.

Just about everybody you know has some kind of substance that they depend upon to cope with modern life. Maybe it's antidepressants, sleeping pills, tranquillisers, opiates. Maybe it's cigarettes, tea, coffee, coca-cola, Red Bull, beer, wine, spirits. Maybe it's cannabis, cocaine, amphetamines, heroin, MDMA, GHB, M-CAT or any one of the myriad other legal and illegal drugs. Humans love drugs.

Clearly, I know what my 'drug of choice' is, and I know that there's no way that I can use it in moderation. Thankfully, alcohol is not something that I've struggled to live without, except where life choices that are forced upon me - such as having to work a shitty job - demand that I find some kind of coping mechanism.

I don't have any kids or pets, so I get no natural endorphins. I don't have any time or money to pursue sports or go to the gym, so I get no natural endorphins and adrenalin boosts. My job is dull as ditch water, so I don't even get any kind of thrill from my work.

But, good news! I've found a formula that worked for me for years & years & years & years: self-medication with alcohol.

Yes! Hurrah for alcohol. It kept the lid on my hypomanic episodes for years.

Basically, the reality that we must all face up to, is that modern life is so fucking shit that we've all got to be drugged up and drunk to get through it.

I could get my cat back from my parents, and get some plants to water and care for. I can soon get a car and some new kites, and go and get my adrenalin and endorphin fix at the beach. However, without those things, I'm forced into puting chemicals into my body, to allow me to keep my shitty job and keep functioning in this crazy society that values corporate profits more than mental health.

My life really sucks, but I'd rather drink a few bottles of wine and keep my highly lucrative contract, so I can escape the rat race at some point, rather than have another repeat of last year's failed experiment.

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

This is a story about speaking to the audience...

Acknowledging the reader is not a great literary device, when overused. I think I have pushed most people away, by writing with a very lecturing tone. When I address my readers as "you" I normally have somebody in mind. I tend to be using this blog as a passive-aggressive device, to attack those who have wronged or offended me.

When I write about "get a job" idiots, it's because I'm highly offended, when I've had a 20 year career and been in full time education or employment since age 4. When my hackles are raised because somebody says "everybody has to work" it's because I've probably put up with more shitty boring jobs than most people, and racked up more hours. Investment Banking is not known as a career for slackers. IT projects always demand you to pull some epic hours to get things over the line.

When I write about the hypocrisy of my parents, it's because they epitomise everything I would never want to become: lazy, underachieving, highly critical and negative people, who have always put their own selfish wants ahead of their children's needs. When I look at the general decline in living standards of the younger generation, it triggers my deep sense of having had an enjoyable time as a child and young adult robbed from me. And for what? So I can now have a miserable boring job?

There's a Frank Zappa quote that I like, though:

If you end up with a boring miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it

But, in the words of my Dad: "you've got to pay to play". Of course, he forgets that his Dad was a wealthy accountant who very much paid for him to play.

So, I'm working a job that I hate, because I needed money and I needed it fast. Here in London I can get an IT contract very quickly and easily, and earn 5 or 6 times more than the average wage. You might think it's ungrateful, spoilt, to take this for granted and to even be unhappy, but after 20 years of playing the same game, using the same tried-and-trusted formula, there is no novelty, no surprises.

When I was 20 years old, I was earning £400/day working for Lloyds TSB in Canary Wharf. I was doing exactly the same work that I do today. It might seem vulgar to talk about money, but maybe you need to know why I'm not exactly thrilled to get out of bed in the morning.

There's a high-water mark: an expectation, set by your experiences. I really don't live any kind of jet-set life. I shop in regular supermarkets, I rarely eat out, I drink wine that costs less than £10 a bottle. I don't pay for satellite television, luxury gym membership or in any way indulge expensive tastes. Even my suit is threadbare and worn out, and I wear cheap shoes.

Some people need the status symbols, the trappings of wealth. Sure, I could plough my income into having a Ferrari, a speedboat, but you're missing the point: I completely rejected the rat race, made myself destitute, and I loved it. The feeling of liberation from monthly downpayments on some material object, or mortgage payments on bricks & mortar, brought joy back to my soul.

The highlight of my week was talking to the guy who shone my shoes. Under the grand arches of Leadenhall Market, by the futuristic Lloyds building in the City, this chap told me that he had quit his job as an auditor for Ernst & Young, and had become an actor. Sure, he was poor - having to shine shoes for £5 a pop - but you could see he was clearly in love with his life again.

You might see pictures of my fancy apartment, with its river views and think "flash bastard" and "that must cost a pretty penny". However, you have simply been fooled by the image that I wish to project... in fact, I need to project. I get paid a lot of money because I'm successfully hiding the fact that I'm a desperate man on the ragged limit of control. Only the semicolon tattoo behind my ear slightly gives away the fact that I'm living a life of quiet desperation.

In actual fact, the rent on my apartment comes to roughly double what it cost me to live in a hostel. Instead of living in a 14-bed dormitory with people who are on the very bottom rung of society, and having to share a bathroom and protect my few possessions from theft and spoil, instead I have an ample sized ensuite bedroom, storage cupboard and expansive reception rooms in which to relax in comfort.

You would think that living in a hostel would be cheap, so paying twice as much does not sound unreasonable, correct? When you consider that I can safely keep my bicycle in my hallway, I have a central London parking space, and amazing views over the River Thames from my balcony, you must surely recognise the value for money that I'm getting.

My one threadbare suit I only use for interviews, and the rest of the time I wear £50 trousers from John Lewis, no jacket and no tie. Somebody complemented me on my sharp attire the other day, and asked if my clothes had been tailored to fit me. I could only chuckle to myself, knowing that my outfit is entirely cheap off the peg stuff.

My accountant must despair of me, as I always cut things mighty fine. There is no profligacy - every penny I spend is calculated, right down to the few bits of bling that are necessary to indicate that you have attained a certain social status. It's just going to look a bit weird if you're an IT professional with a cheap shit laptop.

The really frustrating thing is how easy it is to fool people. Everybody assumes that under the surface, everything is just fine. If you dress yourself up in the right clothes and pretend like everything is tickety-boo, people have no reason to suspect that you are one negative event away from killing yourself.

I have no idea how I'm going to sustain the charade. Just because you're settled into your little rut, and figured out a system to keep turning the pedals, doesn't mean that I can do it. Smile and take the money, right? But what if it's too easy? What if the formula has been so perfected, that life is a paint-by-numbers?

I tried to teach a friend how to blag and hustle. I tried to show him the magic formula. I busted my balls to transfer as much knowledge as possible about how to play the game. He's no fool, and knew a few of the tricks of the trade already. However, ultimately he let himself down, because of the subtle detail.

There must be something that sets people apart. What is it that shatters the illusion? It could be something as simple as not noticing that your suit has still got the slit in the back of the jacket held together by a stitch of thread that you are supposed to cut yourself. It could be as simple as a cheap pen, or umbrella. It could be a single moment of self-doubt, or an answer to a question that clearly betrays the fact you're blagging, because you fail to one-up the interviewer and blind them with things they don't understand.

It might sound like snobbery, but it's actually the very essence of how people get into positions of authority. Having a shirt monogrammed with your initials, wearing an expensive wristwatch, carrying a Moleskine notebook, writing with a Mont Blanc pen, wearing the correct style suit and shirt and shoes. It's all so shallow, but sadly it works.

I'm part of a boys club, and there's no way I can show my hand. There's no way that my colleagues would be able to process the fact that I'm barely coping with mental health problems, the threat of relapse into drug addiction, and a desire to return to a simpler life when I didn't have to grind just to pay taxes, rent and maintain a fake image of having my shit together.

If I address the audience, it's because I'm so lonely in the little stage-play of my daily life. From Monday to Friday, I'm putting on a poker face, and looking busy at my desk. I face the threat of being found out as a blagger, a hustler, at any moment. The homeless guy is not welcome in the club. There's no room for anybody with a weakness, in the corporate dog-eat-dog world.

My colleagues tell me I'm doing a good job, and they like working with me, but I feel like a fraud when I submit my invoice for the week, and I think about how much time I spent on Facebook, writing blog posts, tweeting, reading the news and hiding in the toilet. I look at my timesheet, and it doesn't reconcile with the amount of work I have actually done. Sure, I was present in the office. My bum was on the seat for the hours I declare, but I don't feel productive or even useful.

So, I cast out into the world, looking for a connection, desperate for somebody to acknowledge my existence. Even when I rub somebody up the wrong way, at least it means some of what I say is hitting home somewhere. Most of the time, I'm alone with my thoughts and lonely as hell.

Every time I address "you" it seems to fall on deaf ears. I quickly forget that people have reached out, gotten in contact, because the conversation is so sporadic, unpredictable. This is such an unusual mechanism of communication, but what would I do without it? Friends have literally threatened to unfriend me on Facebook, because of the disproportionate amount of space I have consumed on 'their' wall.

I'm rambling, but I don't want this to end. It feels like I'm talking to "you". It feels like "you're" listening. It feels like I have a human connection, an honest relationship, that I just don't get for all those lonely, lonely office hours, where my whole focus is on trying to hide my depression, anxiety, boredom and desperate lack of purpose.

Without this blog, I'd be stuffed. There's a temptation to adapt my writing to be more appealing again. There's a desire to drive up the number of readers, by writing things that I know will be like clickbait, and nice to read.

However, that's not my style, not my purpose. We're having an intimate conversation, you & I. You might not realise it, but I'm thinking about hundreds of different potential audience members, as I write... trying to engage you... trying to connect.

Even if this isn't being read by the people I intended, at least it's there. There's something comforting, knowing that a little piece of me has been captured somewhere, in my own words. It feels like I'm at least winning, in the battle to leave a true account of who I was, and not become a convenient dumping ground for those who seek to abstain from any blame, for the part they did, or did not play in somebody's life.

I live in London. I'm practically an expert in turning a blind eye: ignoring the Big Issue seller, the clipboard-wielding survey taker, the collection tin rattling charity worker, the beggar, the pavement evangelist, and every other undesirable member of society who has fallen on hard times. I know what it's like to have your head down because you're so wrapped up in your own struggle, and so fixated on the rat race.

I've considered the question many times: am I a melodramatic attention seeker? Are my cries for help completely unnecessary? Is my lot in life no worse than anybody else's?

Frankly, who gives a shit? I'm just about scraping through every day by the skin of my teeth. Not only walking out on a boring job, but potentially leaving this shitty life altogether. I know how decisive I am. I know how bold and brave I can be, once I have decided to do something. I know I could easily snuff out my life, in the blink of an eye.

Doth I protest too much? Why take the chance?

Isn't this somebody else's problem? Aren't there pills for this?

Yes, try clinging onto those pathetic get-out-of-jail-free cards, once the person has gone.

Perhaps I'm dredging up emotions that could be suppressed? Perhaps the very act of writing is prodding at raw nerves, and actually keeping feelings on the surface that could easily sink back into my subconscious. Am I, in the very act of writing this blog, talking myself into depression and suicide? Well, the journal charts my moods, so you have all the data you need for the postmortem.

I live for writing. I live for my browsing stats and my Twitter followers. I live for those few moments when somebody emails out of the blue, and acknowledges my existence. You would be surprised how few and far between those precious events are.

Moan, moan, moan, right? Poor me, poor me, pour me another drink?

Perhaps Alcoholics Anonymous is the place for this, even though I'm not an alcoholic? Dylan Thomas wrote that an alcoholic is somebody who drinks just as much as you, but you don't like them very much.

Why do we push people to the fringes, the periphery? Why do we want the people who wail in distress to just shut up and go away? Do you think it completely meaningless, when somebody goes to great effort to explain how they're feeling, and attempt to communicate with you, by whatever means they can?

How long have I been doing this for? Shut up! Give up! Go away! Right?

If something doesn't immediately work, just quit, right?

Hasn't the message been received from you, loud and clear? You don't care. You're busy with your own life.

Is it the bystander effect? Surely somebody else is going to do something? Not me, I'm not going to be first. I don't want to get involved!

What do you think's going to happen? Are you going to catch my mental illness? Are you going to be made responsible for my life? Are you going to be shackled to me, forced to live with me, with me stealing food from your children's mouths? Am I out to ruin you and your family?

I feel like a dirty leper. I feel contagious. I feel a huge amount of pressure to pretend like I'm capable of just conforming, complying... when the truth is that things are getting worse, not better. My patience is worn thin. My energy levels have been exhausted. I'm later and later getting to work. I can no longer even pretend to be busy, and keep up the charade.

Join a gym. Eat some kale. Go to a book club. Get a girlfriend.

Can I chase away the existential dread with trivial frivolities, when the bulk of my waking hours are filled with such utter bullshit? Having a taste of freedom has perhaps ruined me. Knowing how the game is rigged, and how to play the system has left me reeling, with the shocking revelation of the pointlessness of it all.

Even if - for the sake of argument - I'm a dimwitted fool, it still doesn't take away the fact that my brain is in overdrive. I'm bombarded with thoughts in the empty hours where I am so unchallenged, so bored.

You educate a person. You train them for a job. You stretch them and challenge them and titillate their interests, and then what? You put them into a corporate machine where independent thought is undesirable? You put them into a bland business environment where creativity is discouraged? You put them into the straightjacket of the working world, where innovation and ingenuity are unnecessary?

Yes, I'm compliant, because I had a tax bill to pay, and debts to pay down. But every day is a simple test of patience. What's going to win: am I going to commit suicide, run away from my pointless responsibilities, or simply sit mute in my chair trying not to scream for long enough that I have built up another nest egg to fritter away on more life-affirming pursuits?

Life's too fucking short for all this. The clock ticks down to the day I die, and what can I say I did with my life? I didn't tell the boss to go fuck himself? I didn't storm out of the office, yelling at the top of my voice that everyone is wasting their precious existence on pushing paper around their desk? I didn't let the bank, the landlord, repossess their precious property and go live somewhere off-grid, to get away from the constant pressure to run just to stand still.

I'm writing and writing, because there is no end until going home time. How do I fill these empty hours where I'm 'working'. Does anybody even care that I've churned out tens of thousands of words, at the expense of the companies I'm contracted to work for? Does anybody even notice, that it makes not a jot of difference, whether I'm fulfilling my job description or not?

You're going to look at the length of this essay and think "what the actual fuck, who has the time for this?". I could put a cork in my mouth. I could curtail this bout of verbal diarrhoea. But what else would I do with my time? At least this wall of words - this tidal wave - records for posterity, the angst that might drive me to my early grave. At least people can see the kind of torture that my soul was subjected to.

Suffer in silence? Fuck off.

Tags: #writing #socialmedia #suicide #depression #mentalhealth

This is a story about bouncing a dead cat...

How does one break an addiction to supercrack and benzodiazepines? How does one go from certain bankruptcy, destitution, madness... back to normal life, complete with 9 to 5, Monday to Friday office routine and all the outward appearance of having one's shit together?

Well, it's not through abstinence.

I tapered off the benzos, using a combination of, Zopiclone, Diazepam, Nitrazepam, Mirtazepine, Valerian and bucketloads of wine.

Getting off the supercrack meant simply hitting a brick wall of depression, lethargy and anhedonia. I could have used weaker stimulants to stop myself from going off a cliff edge, but I just sucked up the cognitive impairment, extreme exhaustion, and rebound depression.

Because I abstained from all stimulants for nearly 3 months, I've been able to re-addict myself to caffeine in the last couple of weeks, in order to limp myself through the difficult period of getting back into the working routine.

I now have a flat white coffee every morning, pre 10am, and I sometimes have wine in the evenings, although I have pretty much managed to cut out midweek drinking. Ideally, I'd just like to drink on a Wednesday night when I meet up with a friend at the pub, and on Friday & Saturday nights.

However, it's not adequate. I'm struggling to get up in the mornings, even though I addicted myself to coffee with the idea that it would be a 'treat' for getting up and going to work, and incorporating addiction into my routine would mean that I'm kinda addicting myself to work. But it hasn't worked.

In the evenings, I could easily polish off one, two bottles of wine. Bizarrely, I find it easier to get up in the morning with a stinking hangover than I do when I'm stone cold sober. However, alcohol is a horrendous drug for your health. I hope that perhaps my brain is still getting used to life without tranquillisers. Coming off benzos is the most horrible thing that can happen to anybody, ever. Imagine just feeling on edge, anxious, the whole frigging time.

I'm not sure what I can do to lift my mood. I've flipped my suicidal thoughts from being something I felt all day, when I was at work, to now being something that I feel as I repeatedly press the 'snooze' button and hide under the duvet, putting off the start of the day.

I literally feel in two minds whether I'm going to get up and have a shower, or get up, run a hot bath and go fetch a sharp knife in order to slit my veins.

Things are supposed to get easier, aren't they? I keep waiting for my mood to lift, for the anxiety to dissipate, for the days to go quicker, for the routine to feel sustainable, for the demotivation and lack of enthusiasm to subside, for energy to return, to start enjoying things again. I'm still waiting.

I've tried to give myself some things to look forward to, to give me some light at the end of the tunnel, but perhaps I've been too ambitious in putting them way off in the future. My perception of time is totally warped. Weeks seem like months, years even.

I keep telling myself I gave my brain a hell of a beating, and it will recover in time. I'm so close to giving in and marching to the doctor for some happy pills, and some medically sanctioned tranquillisers, as opposed to just continuing to drink far too much alcohol.

This is the difference with this recovery: I've decided to do whatever works, and ignore the bad advice of people who've never been there, never done it, don't know what it's like. I'm ignoring all the failures - the pill-poppers and alcohol abusers - who hypocritically tell me that I'm doing it wrong, despite their own substance dependencies.

Complacency is a big danger, and I keep having scary moments where I become aware that addictions don't die easily, they just hide in your subconscious and try to tell you that life is terrible and you should just give up and relapse.

I found myself having dreams about using drugs, and thinking about how I could maybe employ strategies to use drugs in moderation, but I've been around the block enough times now to know that those are just addict's lies we tell ourselves, as we backslide into addiction.

It feels like cravings have well and truly gone, but what's left instead is a miserable life of quiet desperation, where I'm barely able to get through the day without thoughts of suicide or running away to Timbuktu.

It's all too much to bear, rebuilding your life. It takes so long. There are so many things you take for granted, in your ordered existence. Rehabilitation is just that: so many things are neglected, broken.

Something as simple as changing your address on all your post might seem simple to you, but when you've also got to get a job, a place to live, reconnect with friends, get back into a hobby/sport, fix broken stuff, replace lost stuff, get back into a routine... plus all the things that got neglected: the unpaid bills that piled up, the passport that needs renewing, the zillion and one little bits of admin that didn't get done, which include everything from a tax return to a request to tell some bureaucrat the name of my first pet, so that they can justify their pointless job.

One day at a time the idiots say. Fuck the hell off. I can extrapolate. If every day is going to be as hard, and it's going to take a zillion of them before I'm getting anywhere, how am I ever going to sustain it? Counting the days is so disheartening - not that I do it - when you think, jeez, I should be feeling a lot better than I do, after 101 days already.

Perhaps there's a simple desire for a time when I had abandoned all responsibility, and knew I was on a collision course with disaster, destitution. I enjoyed the fatalism of it. I enjoyed being relieved of the relentless struggle to get, where? Where did all that struggle get me anyway? What was the point in struggling, in stressing?

The current plan is to tidy up my affairs, and then leave this shitty lifestyle behind. Not the drug taking, but the wage slavery, the working to simply pay rent and consume crap, get fat and die of old age or stress/obesity-related illness.

It's strange, when your fantasies revolve around being destitute, homeless, penniless again.

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

This is a story about respecting your elders...

Who's the responsible one round here? Who's got to carry the can, at the end of the day? Who's got to live with the consequences of bad decisions, and clean up other people's mess?

There isn't a class war going on. There's a generation war.

The baby boomers drove around in gas-guzzling cars, burnt dolphins to stay warm, dynamited the glaciers, blew up nuclear weapons under the polar ice caps, and generally whizzed around the globe spraying deadly chemicals on everything and saying "FUCK YOU GRANDCHILDREN, HA! HA! HA!".

I remember at school, when I was 10 or 11 years old, me and my friend Ben used to write long rhymes about saving the environment, and read them out at school events. We basically urged a modicum of control over the unmitigated climate disaster we saw all around us.

Growing up in the Thames Valley, huge numbers of my friends were asthmatic. Particulate emissions from internal combustion engines, gathered in the river valley, and in central Oxford the percentage of kids suffering from respiratory conditions was at the highest level in the country.

My friend Ben's parents had responsibly given up smoking for the health of their children, but mine would not listen to my pleas to stop wasting a significant proportion of the family income on something that was destructive to the health of us all. It was selfishness, plain and simple.

I still vividly remember one time when I begged my Dad to stop taking drugs. "Do you expect me to be a boring old fart?" he asked, incredulously. The tragic thing is, that I didn't need him to take drugs to look 'cool'. It was his own insecurity and pathetic attempt to impress young family members like my cousin Sue, that meant that he thought he was some kind of counter-culture hero, just because he took addictive drugs.

My Dad was adamant that I should not get to go to University, nor my sister, even though him and my Mum both enjoyed a free University eduction. My sister and I were both educated in state schools, even though my parents enjoyed the option of private/selective schooling.

My parents had substantial financial help from my grandparents to purchase their first home. No such help has been forthcoming from our parents, and indeed I bought my house without any financial support from my parents, as well as paying for my wedding & honeymoon out of my own pocket. My sister has - as a percentage of her income - possibly been even more financially independent than me.

As kids and adults, my sister and I have certainly been very economical, responsible, mature, in ways that my parents don't even come close to. We've paid our own way in life. We've grafted harder than my parents could possibly imagine.

And for what? So that my parents' generation can tell us that we're profligate, reckless with money, irresponsible, lazy? My parents' generation tell us we should save money for a rainy day, when the pensions that they draw bear no relation to the actual amount of money that they've saved up. The baby boomers are hoping to have hefty final salary pensions that far outstrip the amount of money they've paid into the schemes, to the point of causing a massive black hole in the nation's finances.

The upper-class Victorians used to say "children should be seen and not heard" but those children were reared by wet-nurses, nannies and au pairs, plus all the other servants. If you don't have servants to rear your children, you don't get to say such obnoxious things, because you're the only person in your child's life.

Infant mortality used to be very high, so ordinary Victorians cherished their children. Having a healthy child was a blessing, and something to be celebrated. There wasn't this strange culture of worshipping people with old-fashioned ideas, who sat idle for 30, 40 years, just criticising everything. Yes, we'd all like to retire and just sit around in our favourite chair reading shit newspapers and being mean to everybody, but the retirement age was always supposed to be just 1 year more than the average life expectancy.

Our economy is structured around the 'grey pound'. After the banks, the most powerful institutions in the country are the pension funds. These massive piles of money, managed by asset managers and institutional investors, for the benefit of their pension-drawing clients, decide everything about how this country is run. When we talk about things being run for the benefit of shareholders, those shareholders are mostly pension funds.

If anybody ever says to me "what have you given back to your parents?" or  "be grateful your parents gave you the gift of life" I'm going to struggle not to scream in their face with rage.

My whole life has been generating value for shareholders. Every penny and pound of profit that I have generated for my masters has gone into dividends and higher stock prices, to inflate the asset value of a pension fund somewhere. My whole life has been toiling to allow the baby boomers to have a life of idle luxury, not that they're fucking grateful.

But you know what? Things have gone way too far.

The older generation has fucked up the environment, fucked up the economy and demanded that young people suffer austerity, University tuition fees, job insecurity, wage stagnation, eye-watering rent, impossibly over-inflated house prices and listen to a sneering arrogant bunch of lazy grey-haired cunts telling them they're lazy and stupid the whole fucking time.

They say you should be nice to your kids because they'll choose your nursing home. Damn fucking straight, but you don't get to have 20 years of idle luxury before you go so damn senile that you have to be put in a home, so that your hard-pressed children can continue working all hours to pay for your profligacy, laziness and arrogance.

Yes, it's true that a huge proportion of wealth has been diverted into the hands of a few eye-wateringly rich families. However, WHO THE FUCK WAS ASLEEP ON THE JOB WHEN THAT HAPPENED?

Why the hell is it me who has to go on political marches, to demand that wealth is more fairly redistributed? My parents were too busy sat on their fucking arse taking drugs and reading books and newspapers to actually get off their lazy backsides and engage in the political process, for the good of the country and the good of us kids and grandkids.

Don't pretend like voting to leave the EU is somehow in the best interests of the country and future generations. One lazy pencil cross in a box doesn't make up for the idle years spent enjoying a free University education, job security, high pay, reckless drug taking, low cost of living, great housing, foreign holidays, new cars, superb pension and lots and lots of disposable income. YOU HAD IT FUCKING EASY, YOU STUPID OLD CUNTS.

As you can tell, this is a fairly calm and measured response to being sold down the river, and having my future destroyed by a bunch of people who won't be around to suffer the global warming and economic depression.

Literally, almost everybody I know my age or younger suffers from depression and/or anxiety. What a legacy!

We used to sing "he's got the whole world in his hands" but where is your fucking God now?

Tags: #parents #childhood #oxford #family #politics #capitalism

This is a story about jobs for the boys...

Do you feel like you earn your salary? What is it that makes you think you're worth your wages? How do you value your contribution?

If you work a physical job, you're likely to feel pretty exhausted at the end of the day. Maybe your feet hurt, your back, your muscles. Perhaps you judge your working day based on how much energy you've expended. Perhaps your job involves standing up, walking around, even running around. Perhaps your job involves lifting, stacking, moving, shifting. Can your value therefore be considered a function of how many things you physically move? For example: boxes of stuff from the storeroom, products on shelves, patients from beds, or children from perilous situations.

Maybe you work an academic job, or something you have to be highly qualified for. Perhaps you judge your working day based on how hard you worked in the past. You maybe had to really concentrate at school and do all your homework. Perhaps you had to go to University and at least turn up for some of the lectures. You're probably pretty pleased with yourself that you beat the competition to those limited places, and got the necessary grades. Can your value be considered a function of how stressful your exams were, and how hard it was to write your disseration, your thesis?

Maybe you work a high pressure job, something you really have to concentrate on. Perhaps you have no time to judge your day, because you're just so busy that you don't have time to think about it. You maybe have to take sales calls all day long to meet your targets. You're always talking to people. Or maybe you have to watch a computer screen all day, like a stock-market trader or an air-traffic controller. Can your value be considered a function of your ability to concentrate, and keep busy with the task in hand for the whole working day?

Maybe you work a caring job, or something that delivers service directly to people. Perhaps you judge your working day based on how many people you deliver satisfactory outcomes for. Perhaps you have had to work on a caring bedside manner. Perhaps you have had to develop diplomatic skills for dealing with people. Can your value be considered to be a function of how many smiles you get each day, how many thank yous?

Maybe you work a repetitive job, or something that requires very little problem solving. Perhaps you have plenty of time to think and it's quite clear what needs to be done, but there are only a limited number of hours in the day. Perhaps you enter data in spreadsheets. Perhaps you type the answers that are written down on forms. Perhaps you work on a factory production line. Perhaps you deliver widgets. Can your value be considered a function of how many of these repetitive functions you can perform in a fixed period of time? Do you take pride in the tiny efficiency gains you can make in a job that has been easily mastered?

Maybe your job is to educate, inform, inspire, entertain. Your job is to titillate the attentions of other people. Your job is to spoon feed culture to the masses. Perhaps you had wide-eyed ambitions about bringing song and dance to the people. Perhaps you thought you were going to be a war journalist. Perhaps you thought you were going to set the minds of young people alight. Can your value be considered a function of your reach, your influence? Do you know how many followers you have? How many viewers? How many readers? How many listeners?

But what happens when your purpose is cloudy, unclear? What happens when you can't see what difference you're making, either to other people or to yourself?

Why do you do what you do? Is it possible to work a job, just because it puts food on the table and shoes on the children? Is it possible to work a job just because?

Everybody needs to work, right? But what if your job is makework? What if your job is made up, just to justify the salary of your manager, who has to have a certain headcount in order to get their promotion? What if your whole industry can't justify its existence? What if everything that your company does, and companies like it, is completely superfluous to human existence?

What do we need? Food, water, shelter, warmth, social bonds. Where does insurance fit in that world? Where does a law firm fit? Where does a bank fit? Where do technology companies fit?

If you woke up tomorrow, and your company didn't exist, and neither did any of its competitors, would the human race keel over and die? If you work for an agricultural business, then quite possibly. We need grains, we need vegetables. If you work for an accountancy firm, I think we'll all be just fine.

I've got nothing against the people who work in the service sector per se but should we value those industries more than, say, fishing, farming, building & caring?

Do you think I give a shit about the protection of intellectual property rights of a wealthy corporation? Do you think that I respect the instruments of capitalism as an efficient means to do more with less?

Fundamentally, how many people are living miserably? We might point to increases in life expectancy as an indicator of progress, but what if those lives are filled with stress, anxiety, depression? What if those lives are miserable and isolated, unfulfilled, unhappy?

Official statistics say that more than 1 in 4 of us are battling mental health problems. In truth, the real number must be much higher, because there are so many people who have undiagnosed problems. We know from suicide rates and prescriptions of psychiatric medications - such as antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs - that problems are growing at an alarming rate.

There's a direct correlation between my lack of job satisfaction, and my poor mental health. When I've been happy in my job, I've been overworked. When I've stopped to think about what I've been doing, I've realised that I've been building systems that perpetuate human misery.

It's said that for every 1% that unemployment increases, over 40,000 people will commit suicide. I built a system for JPMorgan that processed the equivalent of $163,000 for every man, woman and child on the planet, in Credit Default Swaps. You think that money is better off locked up in the banking system rather than being in people's pockets?

If I'm building banking systems that process $37 million a second, why the hell are people living in poverty? Why the hell has the National Health Service got to be left underfunded? Why the hell is science underfunded? Why the hell have I got to work a crappy job that I hate, in order to make thousands of people redundant?

Rational self-interest, and the philosophy of Ayn Rand has led us down a very dark path. It's actually in our rational self-interest to smash the systems that take us on a race to the bottom.

Perhaps it's time to throw our clogs into the loom?

You think that you want an A-list celebrity life, with all the trimmings and bling. However, collectively wanting this is leading us all down a path that makes humanity miserable, depressed, stressed, anxious, lonely and isolated.

Tags: #depression #mentalhealth #suicide #career #banking #capitalism

This is a story about what happened next...

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

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

For the record, my own diagnoses have included:

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

I've been treated with:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a story about viewing the world through the lens of a mood disorder...

When I'm hypomanic, nothing seems impossible. Hypomania brings big ideas and grand ambitions, and the only thing standing in my way is the stupidity and myopia of other people. Nobody seems to have the guts to go for the glory, and nobody seems to be able to keep up with me. I get frustrated at a sense of dragging other people along in my wake, having to dumb things down and spoon-feed people at a painfully slow pace.

Obviously, when I'm hypomanic, I over-estimate my abilities and I'm rather rude and obnoxious about other people. Not exactly a team player. I tend to be pretty disrespectful of other people's opinions, believing that they've had their chance, and have failed to make any significant impact. Why should I listen to such gutless wimps? Why should I listen to anybody not firing on all cylinders, like I am, when I'm riding that hypomanic high?

Another thing that I overestimate when hypomanic is my stamina. I assume that I can continue at breakneck pace indefinitely. I feel like the enthusiasm and passion that I'm feeling will carry me along, despite the huge amount of energy that is being expended. I don't walk, I run. I don't speak, I shout. I don't discuss, I decide and act. It's a blur of activity, in single-minded pursuit of a goal, to the exclusion of everything else. There's no balance. There's no downtime. There isn't a second to spare: rush! rush! rush!

But, I'm not stupid. I've been through enough episodes of hypomania now to know what's happening. So why don't I modify my behaviour? Well, part of the big rush is the fact that I know that I'll hit a wall, and almost overnight, I'll hate everything and everybody, and I'll just want to curl up and die. I will have run out of energy, and suddenly be overwhelmed by the enormity of the task ahead, and with no gas left in the tank, I'll realise there's no way I can continue without sleeping off the work binge and catching up on those lost hours of rest.

Instead of trying to work at a steady pace that could last for years, instead I try to pack work into frantic periods of rushed and hectic activity, before I run out of steam and depression hits me like a sledgehammer. Instead of being discouraged from milking hypomania for all its creativity and productivity, I feel encouraged to try to achieve Herculean tasks.

When I'm in one of these moods, lots of stuff gets done, but there's lots of wastage. Instead of planning ahead or hesitating for a single moment, I'll just do whatever I can to minimise downtime and delays. If I unexpectedly need to work through the night, I'll do that and go out and buy a fresh shirt for the following day. If I need to get some rest, I'll book whichever hotel is quickest and easiest to book. If the project I'm working on needs something, I'll buy whatever I need, whatever the price, on the assumption that it would be a waste of time trying to penny pinch.

Can you spot the pattern in my activity? Can you see any trend that would suggest ups & downs? This is actual movement data that has been gathered over a whole year. I would never have thought my mood fluctuations would look this obvious, with hard data.

I used to keep a mood diary, but of course, when you're hypomanic you can't be bothered with the faff of it, and besides, you're not sick when you're hypomanic... at least you're convinced that you're not anyway.

I'm not sure whether I'm mostly suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) or whether my Type II Bipolar Disorder has simply become aligned to the seasons. It's virtually impossible to unpick cause and effect anyway. There are so many seasonal factors, such as the stress of Christmas and the fact that nothing much gets done at work during the holiday season between late December and mid-January.

Anyway, I'm locked into this cycle, where I start to emerge from hibernation around March/April time. In May I start to begin to do normal things again, rather than just being completely decimated by a sense of malaise, exhaustion, demotivation and feelings of being totally overwhelmed by mundane trivial shit. By June time, I'm about ready to work again, but in danger of tipping into hypomania at any moment.

At the moment, I struggle to get out of bed in the morning. I have a feeling of dread throughout the working day. The continuous anxiety is matched only by crushing boredom and an inability to concentrate. I flit between looking at my phone and making trips to the toilet to look at Facebook and message my friends. I read documents, but the words don't sink into my head. The phrase "what the fuck am I doing here?" is on repeat in my head. I'm struck with regular impulses to commit suicide and end the relentless monotony and unending pursuit of a seemingly impossibly distant goal of my next potential holiday.

By contrast to my hypomanic state, I assume that something is going to go wrong, and I'm going to be plunged back into the stress and pressure of looking for some more work, while the bills pile up and imminent deadlines to pay my taxes and deal with debts that have built up during my winter depression. Everything looks impossible, and boring, and pointless.

When I'm depressed, I'm absolutely convinced that my skills and abilities and experience count for nothing, and that I'm only good for the scrap heap. Even when I get a job, I feel like a fraud and that I'm going to be found out. When I make a mistake, I beat myself up about it for days, weeks even. I grimace and groan at my desk as I replay something stupid I said, over and over and over again.

I sit at my desk, watching the clock, wishing I was busy, wishing I felt useful, wishing that the feeling that life was completely pointless would go away, and feeling like death wouldn't be so bad, because there's no way I'll be able to put up with months and years of just turning the pedals, over and over and over again. The same commute, the same routine, the same colleagues, the same game, the same formula.

How on earth am I going to cope with feeling so bored and unchallenged, and so uninspired and so lacking in passion and like such a fraud and like I'm wasting away, and like there's no way I can stand even the next few minutes, let alone the next few hours, let alone the whole day, let alone the whole week, let alone the whole project and the whole contract, and the whole career? How the hell am I supposed to keep doing what I do?

I could drink coffee, which aids my concentration and motivation, but as soon as I do that I'll start getting big ideas and getting really bossy and overconfident, and before you know it, I'll be hypomanic again. Coffee always stokes my hypomania up. Also coffee stops me from sleeping, so I start drinking alcohol to get to sleep... and before you know it I'm knocking back copious amounts of both caffeine and alcohol to get through the shitty work.

Once I start drinking alcohol, I start having days where I wake up massively hungover, but weirdly I can get up and go to work. I find it easier to get up with a massive hangover, and easier to sit quietly at my desk getting on with my work, when I'm just about holding down my breakfast and I've got a pounding headache.

I think that drinking lots of alcohol regularly means that I've always got booze in my system, and it works like a kind of anti-anxiety drug. I feel super sick and stuff, but it gets rid of that sense of dread. By the afternoons, I start to sober up and my hangover goes, and I'm really happy and productive. When I get home, then I start to get the sense of dread about going to work again the next day, so I start boozing all over again, and end up going to bed pissed again. The whole cycle repeats itself.

Alcohol and work seem to go hand in hand for me, and it seems to stop me from being such an obnoxious prick and pissing everybody off before finally chucking in the towel on a perfectly good job. I've gotten used to using alcohol to bring my hypomania and anxiety under control. It's a massive crutch for me, and the temptation to use it is massive, when there's such pressure on me to perform and earn money and not fuck up yet another job.

I know that I could quite easily return to a tried-and-trusted form of mood stabilisation, using caffeine to get me moving when I'm deep in an exhausted depression, and alcohol to bring my hypomania under control when my brain is starting to get a bit over-excited, or anxiety and boredom are threatening to make life unliveable. However, these things led me to a massive breakdown eventually, which I'm sure was caused in part by massive amounts of these two innocuous chemicals.

When you're drinking 12 espresso shots during the day and two bottles of wine at night, everybody's chuffed to bits with your work, but surely you're just screwing your body up for the sake of making some money while you're young enough to cope with that kind of beating.

I value my liver and my mental health now, not that I have much of the latter. I'm struggling virtually all year round with a mind that tends towards either suicidal depression or self-sabotaging and career-wrecking hypomania. I've trashed my financial security, meaning I now have extra added stress and hassle that I could really do without, but I don't think resorting to self-medication will be good in the long run.

So, I remain caffeine free and I'm trying to wean myself off alcohol. Today is my 3rd consecutive day without booze. It might not sound like much, but you probably can't imagine the kind of pressure I'm under, with life very much hanging by a slender thread.

My days pretty much start with deciding whether to kill myself or not, and they don't improve much from there. The evenings and weekends are good, when I can see friends, but possibly it's also been the excuse to drink that's also played a part.

I need to get a handle on booze, but I also want my moods to be manageable. However, I also need to earn money and be able to cope with work. It's a Catch 22.

My gut feel is that I'm just going to stick with my harsh regimen of zero caffeine and very moderate booze consumption - ideally no booze at all except on a Friday & Saturday night.

Clearly, I'm just emerging from under the cloud of a very severe depression, especially as I slashed my own arm with a kitchen knife because the sense of hopelessness and relentless anxiety in the face of overwhelming odds stacked against me, was just so unbearable. Things look a little brighter, but now I'm starting to worry that hypomania will suddenly rear its ugly head, and I'll sabotage everything, like usual.

However, I do still refuse to medicate myself, merely to cope with the bullshit life that we're expected to live. I'll play the game as best as I can, but my brain is not for sale. Hopefully one day, I'll be able to better align my needs and my values with my work, but for now, I have to do some stuff that's pretty incompatible with good mental health.

One big thing I've learned from this rollercoaster ride, is to not expect change to happen quickly. Thinking things will change overnight has led to frustration and disappointment, which has either triggered further depression or has spurred me into regrettable actions. Thinking that I can use the blunt instruments of medication, drugs, legal highs, caffeine and alcohol to force my moods to bend to my will, has been very hard on my body and mind, and has only achieved very temporary effects, for horrific long-term costs.

Unfortunately, returning to stable mental health, a sense of wellbeing, comfort, happiness, security and an acceptable standard of living, has always required more luck, more time, more favourable conditions than I've ever been granted. I'm not complaining - we all face the same harsh and uncaring world, after all - but I recognise that modern society does little to allow people who get sick to ever re-enter the game.

Stop the world, I want to get off.

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

This is a story about golden handcuffs...

You would think that riding the Wall of Death would not be an attractive prospect, but once you've started, you can't back off the throttle and slow down, or else you will crash. Round and round you go, and people say "why did he even start?" and "why doesn't he stop?" but they're fundamentally not understanding what drives a person to take risks in the first place.

Adrenalin 'extreme' sports give some kind of thrill, but in a controlled environment. There are brakes on your mountain bike, ropes for rock climbing, and reserve parachutes for skydiving. We try and mitigate the risks, and stay within a 'comfort zone' where we don't end up out of our depths.

I ended up out of my depth, but the thrill of surviving can't be denied. Why do you think so many movies get made about drugs and crime? I think it's because we want to experience a more exciting life, vicariously. We would never dare to take the risks that these screen antiheroes take, but there's a little part of us that wants to be the gangster, the hustler, or to know what it feels like to take powerful narcotics.

There's a lot of romanticism, glorification, of risk takers. Increasingly, there's an amorality in Hollywood, where bad guys get away with stuff and the drug takers don't always get locked up behind bars, just to teach us - the audience - some trite moral lesson. There is even the occasional movie where the antihero is fighting the system. Modern day Robin Hoods, stealing from the rich and corrupt, with us cheering them on in their lawbreaking activities.

I should say, upfront, that I don't believe I'm above the law. I don't think I'm special, and deserve any special treatment. I don't think rules don't apply to me.

However, it's undeniable that I have received special treatment and rules have been bent. The full force of the law has not been brought to bear on me. I've been in a police cell a few times, but yet I've retained my liberty and a clean criminal record. Other people in similar circumstances have not been so lucky.

The fact is, that I've been trying for a while to get back on the straight and narrow, but circumstances have not exactly been favourable. When things start going wrong, it tends to cause other things to start going wrong too. You might lose your job, and because of that you get into rent arrears or default on your mortgage payments, which impacts your credit score, so you can no longer cheaply refinance your debts or borrow in order to pay your bills while you look for a new job. Now, you start getting fines and paying punitive interest rates, and before you know it you're in a death spiral.

Is it right that the punishment for not having any money, is penalty charges and higher interest rates? Maybe you sell your car and your laptop in order to raise money to cover the shortfall, but now you can't look for work or travel to a job that's inaccessible by public transport.

It's a modern-day Merchant of Venice, where we extract our pound of flesh, but the cost is the entire society.

The cost to me of the last couple of years should have been my right to work. Had a criminal record and a bankruptcy been forced upon me, I would be virtually unemployable in the field I'm highly qualified and experienced to work in. As an added ironic twist, it only took a couple of months of employment to rectify my deficit and satisfy my creditors. If they'd been allowed to get what they thought they wanted, they would have had to write off a big chunk of debt.

When we come to criminal justice, would justice have been served if I now found my employment options curtailed, because I had a black mark against my name? The UK system at least has some safeguards, where convictions become 'spent' and are therefore not supposed to affect your employment prospects after a few years, but what are you supposed to do during those years where you're a leper, shunned by mainstream society?

We say "if you don't want to do the time, don't do the crime" but what if you're trapped by circumstances? Do you think somebody wakes up in the morning and decides to become a drug addict, with full consideration of the consequences? Do you think it was a rational decision made with completely free will?

About drug addicts, Dr Gabor Maté writes "a person driven largely by unconscious forces and automatic brain mechanisms is only poorly able to exercise any meaningful freedom of choice". Do these people sound like they should be treated as criminals, or as patients?

But what about pleasure, what about the 'thrill' of scraping together the money for drugs, scoring and then taking them? Yes, it's true... drug addiction is an alternative lifestyle.

The problem is, the man who has nothing has nothing to lose. I found it immensely liberating being suddenly bottom of the pile, not caring about keeping up appearances, no longer harbouring unrealistic aspirations and living with the daily threat of redundancy, eviction and destitution. When you're already destitute, there's no way you can fall any further... for the first time, you are free from relentless crushing fear and anxiety.

My family decided that cutting me off, showing me 'tough love' and me hitting 'rock bottom' would be some kind of 'cure'. They were wrong.

Frankly, there is no rock bottom. Rock bottom is something somebody else thinks they'd find intolerable, but no matter how bad things get, when it's you who's going through that shit, you find a way to adjust to it... you find a way to cope. I can laugh about some of the shit that happened to me now... that's not supposed to happen.

The fact is, that stick doesn't work. You can't beat someone into submission. You can't truly break a man's spirit, their soul, crush them completely... if they're actually not doing anything wrong. Is it wrong to want to survive? Is it wrong to want some dignity? Is it wrong to expect to live without debilitating stress, to expect more than a miserable depressing existence?

Yes, it looks like I have choices, opportunities, but I've also tasted freedom. Freedom from boredom, freedom from oppression, freedom from stress, freedom from relentless exhausting pressure. Is it any wonder that I consider my forays back into the rat race and so-called 'civilised' society to be the real prison? A prison for my soul.

I'm not the first to rattle the bars of the cage and rage about being trapped into mechanisms of societal control. I'm not special, I'm not different. I just know what I've experienced

Tags: #career #drugs #addiction #police #politics #capitalism

This is a story about being an open book...

I'm having a crisis of confidence. I've written the best part of a quarter of a million words, but now I'm starting to feel like it's all garbage. I'm losing my audience, and I'm losing my way... where am I going with this?

I've got experience of writing every day. I used to do it on a forum, and it brought very positive things to my life. Having that connection with a group of people formed the basis for friendships that later developed in to proper face-to-face relationships. It was also really confidence inspiring, finding out that people had read my stuff and found it interesting.

So, this could be seen as something immature. I've gone back to the things that I was doing in my early twenties, in an attempt to recapture some long-lost happiness and security. I've moved back to London, I'm working back in banking IT, I aspire to get back into kitesurfing and I'm writing every day... albeit in isolation.

When I started writing on the British KiteSurfing Association (BKSA) forum, the internet was a very different place. There was no Facebook. There was no Twitter. The internet had not yet been colonised by an army of bloggers, churning out a banal wall of white noise, as they attempted to fill the void in their boring isolated lives.

It was interesting that a friend said he had to take down his forum website because it was simply killed by spammers, trying to generate links to their crappy sites, in an attempt to push up their Google ranking. In an article he shared yesterday, a woman wrote about most of the comments in her blog being other bloggers trying to do the same: to generate traffic on their sites.

Fundamentally, the message is clear: nobody reads your boring shit. Stop writing. Don't bother.

However, I'm not writing because I want the advertising revenue or product sponsorship deals. I'm writing because some crazy shit happened to me in recent years, and I want people to empathise. I can no longer carry the burden of having all these secrets. I can no longer handle having a load of experiences that I've never told to my friends and family.

A year ago, I was paranoid about being 'found out' as somebody who came off the rails and had a tough time. I felt that my professional reputation would be ruined. I felt that people would recoil in horror, and that I would lose friendships, respect. The jury is still out, and I've pushed pretty hard into territory that makes me look really really bad, but I'm still here... pushing through it.

There is a kind of catharsis in sharing some stuff that's eating you up inside. I guess it doesn't have to be done so publicly, but my attempts to discuss this stuff over email fell on deaf ears. My attempts to discuss this stuff with my parents ended with them just wanting to avoid the topics. I don't really see any friends on a regular basis, so I've been trapped all alone with my thoughts.

What I know about stuff online is that there are a lot more 'lurkers' than you're aware of. Far more people are reading than writing. People struggle to find the words of their own, and instead they try and find voices that echo their own sentiments. We find it much less scary to share something that was written by somebody else, that matches our own opinion, than to write down our own opinion. We almost feel as if our own opinion isn't worthy, isn't valid.

I guess I don't really have that problem. I'm outspoken in any area that takes my interest. If I don't have an opinion on something, I'll think about it and then develop an opinion of my own. I like to think that my opinions have not been easily swayed, but are instead the rational conclusions drawn from the available evidence.

When I write some pieces which are pure opinion - like my rants about the pensions crisis, or how shitty young people's prospects are - then I do kind of feel like I'm writing garbage. I don't treat it as an academic exercise, and put in loads of references and quotes. I simply set out my opinion in strongly emotive language, because I obviously care deeply enough to write about it.

However, when I think about why I wrote something, it's often because I'm bitter and angry about something else. It's been quite clear from my writing that I'm pretty pissed off with my parents, and so these strong emotions start to express themselves in thinly veiled attacks on their politics and lifestyle choices. The fact that they sit in wealthy comfort while my sister and I struggle turns into an attack on rich Cotswold-dwelling upper middle class Conservative twits, like David Cameron... completely ignorant of the struggles of inner city and suburban ordinary people.

Why I have chosen to shame myself, and write about deeply embarrassing personal stuff and mistakes that I have made, is somewhat more complicated.

There's a huge risk that I'm going to slip backwards into the traps that threatened to destroy my life, during the last few years. I'm scared about how chaotic my life was, how close I came to death, life-changing injury and permanent madness. I want to have some kind of record of my ups and downs, to put things into my own words and demystify what's been going on.

My perception is that I'm currently fairly healthy. I'm struggling with depression and anxiety, but all my feelings of paranoia, my jumbled up disordered thoughts and the really strange ideas and terrible plans or schemes... they've all subsided. Now, I feel quite practical, quite realistic, quite sane. I feel mostly normal.

It's not healthy to regard yourself with suspicion, to think of yourself as unwell. I'm pretty sure I'm not unwell, but it's taking time to get back on my feet. Repairing the damage caused by traumatic events in your life is not quick and it's not easy. If you've read any of my story, you'll know that I've had a remarkable turnaround from where I was, at my lowest ebb.

I've got no idea who's still reading this, and what their perception is of me, but my objective now is to try and demonstrate that I'm stabilising, that I'm getting back to normal. I want to try and reassure people that I'm not a lost cause, and that I'm on top of the scary things that threatened to consume me. I want people to see me as somebody worthwhile, somebody worth being friends with, somebody interesting, not just as a gruesome jester, not just as a fizzing, bubbling, seething mass of self-destructive insanity.

It would be nice if I can write a new, happier, more normal chapter in my story. It would be nice if that chapter included some supporters, but I appreciate that my story has been very hard to follow. I've been hard work, but I hope I'm worth it in the end.

Fundamentally, I'm humbled, even if it doesn't come across very well.

I'm starting to get a bit paranoid about my employers finding this blog, but if I keep writing, all the madness is going to get buried under far too much text for them to bother reading

Tags: #writing #mentalhealth #career

This is a story about worthy causes...

How do you decide who is worth helping, and who has made their own problems? It's easy, right? People who drink and take drugs are the architects of their own misery, or so we think. Homeless people have to be clean & sober before they're worthy of our help and support. Alcoholism and addiction aren't symptoms, they're the root cause of problems, we believe.

But what if we got it wrong? What if people drink and take drugs to escape problems? What if people's lives are so miserable and hopeless that they need something to anaesthetise the pain, the discomfort and the fact they're treated like dirt, shunned by society and even their own friends and family.

Once somebody has the label attached to them as a waste of space, a lost cause, it's hard to shake it off. We don't like to see our own shortcomings, our own demons, reflected back to us in the eyes of the suffering addict, alcoholic. We'd sooner that the person just disappears into obscurity or dies, so that we can repaint them in some kind of idealistic light. We want to remember them as an innocent child, and having them hanging around as a living adult is rather inconvenient. The living embodiment tarnishes this false image we want to remember.

Some homeless people have poked fun at the ridiculous notion that giving them money will only 'enable' them to continue with their habits. We see images splashed all over the internet of signs begging for money to spend on drink & drugs "but at least I'm not bullshitting you" the signs say. This is confirmation bias. We have preconceived notions about a homeless person, a bum, a junkie... we find it hilarious, and pleasing, to see a sign that confirms our prejudices.

When I met Frank, he was keen to tell me that he wasn't an opiate addict. Because almost all of us have an innate fear of needles, the heroin addict is very bottom of the pile. Almost every non injecting drug addict will tell you "at least I'm not a junkie" as if it somehow makes them a better person. Every stoner will tell you "at least I don't take hard drugs". Every alkie will tell you "at least I don't take drugs". Every person on antidepressants or anxiety medication will tell you "at least I don't drink". There is a clear hierarchy here, but it's no different than a bullied person finding somebody weaker than themselves in order to bully, in order to make themself feel better.

This infighting amongst humans is uncivilised, inhumane. Where did the empathy go? Where did the sympathy go? Where did all this ignorance come from?

You really think you could make things any worse by helping? In actual fact, charitable giving is far more likely to make you feel smug about yourself, and feel like you've done your bit for society, so you don't need to feel guilty about your comfortable existence. The fact of the matter is though that going on a sponsored fun run was something you wanted to do anyway. The fact is, that the coins in your pocket aren't amounting to even 1% of your wealth. You're buying a clean conscience very cheaply.

To actually sit down with people, hear their story, get involved in their lives, take a risk... that's a big deal. We all have busy lives, so who has the time to do that, and aren't charities so much better, more qualified? Well, no, not really. Charities have salaries to pay. Charities have offices and need to pay bills. The amount of money that actually reaches the front line, through charitable giving, is clearly not making any difference. The levels of poverty and deprivation are bigger than ever. The rich:poor gap is the widest it's ever been.

Economists trumpet the fact that a large number of people who were living on $1 a day are now living on $2 a day. An increase of 100% in somebody's wealth sounds like a lot in percentage terms, but would you honestly feel happy if your pay rise for the last 10 years was just $365?

Perhaps we should just be happy and content to even have a job. But why? Why should we be content to live with insecurity? Why should we "count ourselves lucky" to have a job where we're exploited, and we don't even have enough money to comfortably pay our rent and bills and have anything left over in case the car breaks down?

Don't you think that living with Damocles Sword dangling over us is unhealthy? Worrying about unemployment, and the ensuing rent arrears or mortgage defaults is not a healthy way to live. The stress and anxiety of working all hours, commuting for long distances, being away from our families, the uncertainty over our finances and the security of our homes and livelihoods... surely it's this constant stress that's destroying countless numbers of people's mental health.

We can't shy away from the fact that there's a mental health epidemic. 5 million Prozac prescriptions get written in London alone, every year. A quarter of Londoners feel like crying on public transport at least once a week.

City living can be isolating and lonely, but it doesn't get any better outside of London. There are less jobs and wages are lower outside the capital. Rents are a bit lower, but bills are just as high, and public transport isn't as good so you probably need to own a car to get to work. Food costs much the same wherever you are in the country. Many towns and suburbs can be just as isolating, and there's always the fear that you don't want your friends and neighbours finding out how unhappy you are, how stressed and anxious, how depressed.

If you live in some poxy little town with only a few major employers in the area, you can't risk burning your bridges. If you get sacked because your mental health got unmanageable, you can potentially make yourself unemployable in the place where you live. You can potentially end up labelled amongst people. If it gets really bad, you can be known to friends and neighbours as a "troubled" individual. You'll be a joke, a laughing stock.

London offers some anonymity at least, and a much bigger pool of jobs, to compensate for the fact that you can feel totally overwhelmed by the impersonal and seemingly uncaring nature of the dog-eat-dog rat race. People do stop and listen, and can be very kind and compassionate. Sometimes, it feels like we're all clinging onto the pieces of our wrecked ship in a storm. There is gratitude when you connect with another person who understands the sheer terror of facing a hostile world, out to label you, to shun you, to try and trample you.

In a way, London has led the way for the country to adopt a kind of blinkered attitude, where we're all working too hard, and our communities have been destroyed, families pulled apart by the need to spend hours at work, commute long distances and live with unbearable stress. However, London has passed the point where it was completely unable to continue any more, and I actually find it far friendlier and caring than anywhere else I've been.

London has provided, where even my own family has failed me.

Many homeless and addicts are fleeing a life of blah

Tags: #homeless #frank #addiction #alcohol #drugs #london #mentalhealth