This is a story about blowing off steam...

While the world gets on with its life, I seem to have one foot in the grave, or to be stuck in the past. Apologies for the self-absorption. I'm trying to move forwards, but it turns out there's quite a lot of stuff I needed to work through.

Many people might view me as a 'keyboard warrior'. Somebody who is far more aggressive and outspoken when protected behind a computer screen. I think you'll find that I don't really tone things down face to face, but when people read what I write they certainly interpret it as being quite angry.

It's hard to infer emotion from writing. I tend to use a mix of humour and sarcasm, as well as writing down explicitly what emotions I'm feeling, if they're strong enough to warrant recording in the text, as I write. Perhaps I'm just impervious to my emotions a lot of the time though. I'm mostly very calm when I'm writing.

I'm acutely aware just how self-absorbed I have become, and I certainly need a bit of a reality check. The fact of the matter is that I'm pretty exhausted, depressed, stressed and anxious. Writing doesn't seem to have brought any relief yet, but when suicide and drug abuse are places that your mind can wander to, it's good to have a distraction.

I reviewed what I wrote so far, and it's interesting to see a pronounced dip in quality, as I started to self-destruct over the Christmas and New Year period. I can really see my writing get sloppy and thoughts get jumbled. The writing up to that period was quite repetitive though, quite laboured.

It must be fairly obvious to any independent observer, that whatever I turn my hand to, I will get excessively involved with. If I start going to the gym, I will train far too hard and push my body too far. If I get into a new sport or hobby, I will obsessively learn everything about it and just pursue that one thing, to the exclusion of everything else in my life. If I get a new job, I will be so passionate about it that it will become very personal. I will be super dedicated to whatever I do.

Is the explanation for this behaviour simply that I am transferring my addict's habits into different kinds of activity? The repetition, the obsessiveness, the single-minded pursuit of one goal... it all smacks of addiction.

So, am I addicted to writing? Am I addicted to telling my story? Am I addicted to sensationalism and attention seeking? Am I addicted to the little dopamine hit I get for every Facebook like, Twitter retweet and Reddit upvote? Yeah. Probably.

But, at the same time, writing is immensely useful for recovery. I'm not sure I could have gone from the end of October to the end of January with no job and only one lapse, without the continuity of this blog. It's also served one its original purposes of keeping people informed, letting people know whether I'm afloat or whether I'm sinking. Even a simple "signs of life" as one caring friend put it.

I write for me, but it is meaningful who takes the time to respond. When somebody I haven't really been in contact with for a long time indicates that they've read something I've written, there is initially a gut-wrenching realisation that they've probably had their eyes opened to a side of my character that they never knew, then there is a pleasing sense that there is still an ongoing connection between us, as friends whose contact has dwindled over the difficult years.

It's interesting the responses that my writing has prompted from friends and strangers alike. People have shared some things with me, that I will keep completely confidential, but have really helped me to realise that we're all putting a brave face on things a lot of the time. Everybody has an untold tale behind their stoic exterior. The happiest, smiliest, 'life is perfect' type people have connected with something in my writing and shared some quite shocking truths about their own wayward journey through life.

Don't read a book by it's cover. Does a blog really have a cover? I suppose "manic" is quite a provocative title. It's interesting that you could dip in at any moment in time and dependent on the phase of writing, you could assume that I'm a junkie, sex addict, suicidally depressed, pissed off with my job, happy with my job, pissed off with my parents, had an unhappy childhood, had an interesting childhood, was a domestic abuse perpetrator, was a domestic abuse victim, had a shitty divorce and am completely bat shit insane, with long unintelligible monologues about some half-baked ideas in theoretical physics that don't really add up to a hill of beans.

Is it so different from the sumtotal of my Facebook status updates? I generally get the impression that the world has kids, babies, cats, dogs, cars, holidays and dubious politics, from what I can see on the Facebook walls of my friends. Who knew?

There are a lot of social commentators saying that this eruption of social media sharing of our innermost thoughts and feelings is leading to an addiction to Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat etc. etc. and that we're headed for some kind of armeggedon because of it.

Having been somebody who has written on forums under my own name for the best part of 14 years, I have only ever felt the benefit of human connection, even if it has been computer-assisted. With the kitesurfing/kiteboarding forums, we used to meet up every Tuesday and every weekend. I've made some of my very best friends through forums and the social ties that the forums enabled.

When you have to get through a long working week, your job isn't particularly challenging, you're a bit jaded and cynical and sick of the 9 to 5 drudgery, there's nothing quite like a forum to while away your 37.5 hours a week. I made it a personal mission to read every forum post, and respond whenever I could.

A life lived online is a bit strange, but I've been all over the world with people who I met online. Electronic communication is creating social cohesion where otherwise there would only be urban solitude. Unless you live in some 1950's throwback community, where you know your neighbours and you leave your doors unlocked and let your kids play with the dodgy looking guy in the raincoat, then you probably live most of your life in social isolation, beyond the members of your household, and a small group of people who you go out of your way to stay in regular contact with.

Most of us probably have a certain day or a time that we speak to our mums. Most of us probably have people that we regularly speak to online or a regular social get together. Most of us probably have a group of friends that we regularly meet up with at weekends, and see in the pattern of our daily lives: the school run, the kids birthday parties, the meals out with a network of friends, celebrating some event or other. Plus there are the people at work. You know how many kids they have, and some vague things about what's happening in each of their lives. You have an established social routine with your work colleagues.

If you're a bit of an oddball like me, you don't really fit in. For a long time, I was a lot more senior than people my age. When I started my career, I was the young kid with poor social skills and a bad dress sense. Later, I was the golden boy who was trying to do the same thing as his peers - have a nice settled little life with a family and a lovely home - but was roughly the same age as the group who were partying and generally having fun.

This disjoint has meant that as my boring old person life fell to bits, it was just about at the same time as my younger friends were all getting big houses and having babies. My older friends now have kids who are going to big school. My younger friends are up to their elbows in nappies.

I guess it happens to everybody. There are waves of engagements, marriages, house purchases, babies and then come the divorces. Thankfully, not too many of my friends have started dropping dead yet.

Everybody is so darn busy, and working so darn hard. Apparently, life is supposed to be taxing on parents with two kids. Life is optimised to bleed the parents dry, of their time, energy and money of course. If you're not flat broke, exhausted and don't have a minute to yourself to sit down and read a newspaper, you're not trying hard enough.

Sorry if that sounds condescending or anything... I have no idea what it must be like having copulated for 30 seconds and now having a screaming, shitting, vomiting thing that can't look after itself and you'll be chucked in jail if you hide it in the oven.

My views are probably quite obnoxious to many people. Certainly a recurrent theme is parenting. I'm very hard on my parents, and sure there are a lot of people who say "I'm sure they did the best they knew how to do" and I'm not going to re-iterate the fact that sitting around on your arse taking drugs is a bit stupid, when you're supposed to be childrearing. I certainly see a lot of smiles on the kids faces that get posted onto Facebook, and I know that my sister is doing a great job with my niece, so I certainly don't think that my friends and sister are doing a bad job.

It must seem very annoying and pathetic that I'm complaining about my lot in life, and being so self-absorbed and selfish, sitting around writing crap about "woe is me!" and so oh-so difficult life is for me, me, me. Sorry about that. I must be doubly difficult when you're struggling to make ends meet financially, and you're stressed about little Oliver's violin recital, and whether Hermione's going to get into that grammar school. I'm sure you hate your job too. I'm sure you'd love to have a breakdown and be in bed for 14 hours a day exhausted, shaking like a wreck.

Yes, I do claim that I don't feel entitled, but I'm certainly able to some extent, to spend some time thinking about the past and wallowing in self-pity. I have no dependents. I didn't spawn any gene cloning machines that I'm trying to protect from the wolves in the forest. I'm not being smug. I'm actually jealous. I can see that it's pretty exhausting and terrifying, having 'skin in the game' but I can also see those chests swelling with pride and those eyes lighting up with delight at your beautiful children. I don't get any cuddle time with my offspring that I don't have.

So, life looks a lot simpler for the single guy with no kids, but in a way, my life is less dictated by the demands of feeding, clothing and schooling of any infants, which means I kind of have to find a reason for living, every day.

I hope you don't hate me for saying I have to decide what I'm going to do every day. I'm sure you have a long list of things you'd love to do, if you had the time. My life is not exactly like that... I don't wake up and think "shall I learn to waterski today, or should I go to Mexico?". However, I don't wake up and think "I have to get the kids dressed and make them breakfast" just like every morning for the next 18 years.

I can't decide whether having made a rational decision to defer parenthood was a mistake. It would be interesting to compare some kind of objective quality-of-life scores with my peers who made different choices, but I suspect that things would be comparable, as I know that many of my friends have suffered with depression and anxiety just as much as me, despite being mummies and daddies. I know that many of my friends are just as cheesed off with the work they do, and it's making them unwell.

Anyway, we're all slowly inching our way to the grave, like it or not. One thing's for certain with life: death will follow hot on its heels.

Yeah that's lava going in the sea. Salt water cleanses everything, especially tears

Tags: #depression #parents

This is a story about the willing suspension of disbelief...

People think that beating drug and alcohol abuse is about abstinence, sobriety. It's not.

Are you familiar with experiments where rats were given bottles of water laced with drugs, as well as bottles of clean water and food? In cages that had a placebo, the rats obviously ate, drank, slept and lived until they died of old age. In the cages with heroin in the water, the rats would drink some heroin, fall asleep, wake up, eat, clean themselves, drink some more heroin, sleep some more... until they too died of old age. In the cages with cocaine in the water, the rats would drink and drink and drink from the cocaine laced water, until they died prematurely.

These were barren cages, with nothing to do but drink from a bottle, eat some plain food pellets, or sleep. No other rats to socialise with. Nothing to explore. Nothing to play with. No stimulation. Not really much of a life, even for a rat. What do you think you'd do, behind bars with nothing to do except drink from a bottle?

Did you know that they ran those experiments again, except this time they created Rat Park, which was packed with everything a rat could want from life. There were other rats to socialise with, and have sex with of course. There were tubes and slides and places to hide, and nice bedding and toys. The food was varied and tasty. Of course, there were still two water bottles, one of which was laced with drugs or a placebo.

Do you know what happened? The rats weren't interested in drugs. They were happy in their little ratty lives, and drugs had no place in those happy fulfilled rodenty days.

So what does that tell us about addiction? What do you think would happen if you took away somebody's self-esteem and pushed them out of society? What do you think would happen if you labelled somebody a junkie, a druggie an alkie, and demonised them? What do you think would happen if you mistreated your fellow human, your family member, your partner, your friend? Do you think that would cure them of their addiction?

Rehab is for quitters. Ha ha ha! No, not really. Rehab is a bit of a joke to be honest. The relapse rates are appalling. It's really not working. Do you know why it's not working? Because rehab is the place we send the black sheep of the family to beat themselves up, and to make us clean-living superior people feel better about ourselves.

What's the difference between an addict and a normal person? One puff on a cigarrette, one gulp of tea or coffee, or one sip of liquor.

Yes, it's true that addicts and alcoholics are on a death-spiral downwards that they can't stop on their own. The destruction of their life has begun, and they're going to ride that helter-skelter all the way to rock bottom, unless there is intervention.

Intervention means locking them away from their poison of choice, right? Wrong. Everything in that person's life that caused them to become addicted to drink or drugs is still there. Their environment, their social group, the pressures, the stresses, the broken life that they have... all those things are still there.

Finding the key that unlocks your addictive potential is not easy, luckily, but finding the key that unlocks you from the trap of addiction, that's easy: you just need a life that's better than living on the street in complete destitution, begging and stealing enough money for your next fix, while the whole of society thinks you're a piece of s**t and wouldn't p**s on you if you were on fire.

But that can't be right, can it? Lots of rich people get addicted and die young, and their lives are amazing. Well, let's examine that claim a little more carefully.

Having been down-and-out on the streets of Camden Town, London, it seems apt to talk about Amy Winehouse.

They tried to make me go to rehab but I said, 'No, no, no.'

Yes, I've been black but when I come back you'll know, know, know

I ain't got the time and if my daddy thinks I'm fine

He's tried to make me go to rehab but I won't go, go, go

Everybody wanted her to sing that song. Over and over and over again. Can you imagine that? Being a human jukebox, a human CD player, just performing the same song, over and over and over again.

Imagine being an amazingly talented creative artist, but nobody wants to hear any of your new material, they just want you to stand on stage and repeat the same old s**t, again and again and again.

Dancing bears get driven insane, and will dance and dance, even when they're not performing. How do you think the human psyche is affected by similarly being whipped and cajoled into performing the same act, repeated and repeated and repeated again.

But Amy Winehouse was rich. Tina Turner was rich. I've been relatively rich. How can these rich people complain or get messed up, when they're so rich? Rich people's lives must be amazing. Well, actually, the rich cry too. Rich people need the same emotional sustenance as anybody else. Rich people need to feel fulfilled too, and just being rich doesn't make you feel fulfilled.

It's less of a "how can they be sad" and more of a "how dare they be sad". People are incensed by the fact that they think they want the life of a wealthy person, but they haven't considered the sacrifices that that person has had to make in order to become wealthy. You haven't heard about how hard Michael Jackson and the Williams sisters fathers drove them, for them to attain success, for example? It's well documented.

This could very easily turn into a Monty Python sketch, where I implore you not to donate any money to help save the rich, so I had better re-ground things. The point is, we're all human. Wealth doesn't really touch the soul. Wealth is just a silly made up game that's external to all of us. Sure it seems to control much in our lives, but the really important thing is human connection, and money can't buy you love.

Sure, it's true that money is a major stress factor in most of our lives. I have got less than two months before I'm financially screwed, but it takes 60 days before I get paid on a contract and I don't currently have a contract anyway. Does not compute. Doesn't add up. I'm going to be out on the street whether I work or not.

Surely that's down to self-sabotage? Surely that's down to a lack of planning, of cashflow forecasting? Well, there's only so much you can do. I worked my arse off, got paid a lot of overtime, but it made me very unwell. It's a Catch 22. I can 'sing that popular song' over and over and over again in order to plump up the bank balance, but it makes me sick... literally.

Yes, mental illness is invisible and poorly understood, but you feel it just the same. You feel it in your dark thoughts, you feel it in the pit of your stomach, you feel it when you deliberately hurt yourself to try and let the pain out. Isn't suicide the ultimate in self sabotage?

My days currently consist of lying awake anxiously all night, then sleeping until I force myself to get up and have something to eat, then I try and distract myself from the anxiety until it's time to pretend to go to sleep, but just lie there anxiously all over again. Lovely life, huh?

I started to fantasise last night, not about taking drugs, but about doing a backflip off the 48th floor of a nearby building. I thought about the slow rotation of my body, head over feet, as I accelerated through the air towards the ground. I thought about the collision with the pavement below, and how it would bring instant relief. No more stress. No more anxiety. No more depression. No more isolation. No more demonisation. No more pain.

I then started to think about BASE jumping from up there, and you know what? I started to get stressed. I started to think about getting caught by security. I started to think about having line twists or colliding with a streetlamp or some hard object. I started to think about how much it would hurt, to survive. I got sweaty palms and my pulse started to race, my body became restless. The thought of staying alive, with all this stress and pain and anxiety is not a pleasant one.

That's how people get pushed into addiction. When their life becomes stress and anxiety and depression, and all of their human connection collapses. You're driven inwards by stress and anxiety when nobody is there to help you. When people who care about you start to label you, demonise you and refuse to assist you, you retreat into yourself, you have to be self-reliant and you no longer trust people around you.

I know that all I need to stay alive is the food from soup kitchens and the Hare Krishna, plus my good sleeping bag and my bivouac. Yes, there's a certain amount of pride that stops me from crawling over broken glass back to my parents. I'd rather be homeless and destitute than live with their abuse. Without any self-esteem or identity I might as well just slit my wrists now.

I knew things were going to get tight if I didn't find work right away in November, but I didn't care. I couldn't work. I was exhausted and depressed, and my mood was sinking lower and lower. With retrospect, there was no way that I was ready for another contract. I wouldn't have lasted more than a week.

Now I'm looking down the barrel of financial armageddon, but I can't care. There's literally nothing I can do about it. I'm swamped with stress, anxiety and the feeling that I might as well give up. Where do you think those feelings lead?

What do you think happens when you swamp somebody with anxiety, stress? What do you think happens when somebody has no opportunities? What do you think happens to cornered rats?

The motherf**king cycle continues.

There's my old bike at Silicon Roundabout. I could tap up Tech City for some work, but it's the last bridge left unburnt and I'm definitely not having my finest hour

Tags: #drugs #alcohol #addiction #suicide #depression #career #london

This is a story about rehab...

What's the difference between detox, rehab and inpatient treatment for mental health disorders? Very little actually. Here's my little exposé into being a patient of the UK's most notorious private drug and alcohol abuse treatment provider.

As far as my medical records show, I was admitted to The Priory for treatment for Type II Bipolar Disorder, during an episode of acute illness. My private health insurance picked up the bill and JPMorgan gave me the time and the space to get better. They're a great employer actually.

I had found a local private psychiatrist, as I was running out of ideas for how to deal with my Dual Diagnosis (Bipolar & substance abuse) and I knew that the stats weren't good. Not many people recover from such a death sentence of a diagnosis.

I was very lucky to find the psychiatrist that I did. I had been trying to get in contact with a number of specialists directly, but things were very slow going during the Xmas/New Year period, when a lot of people suffer a big decline due to the bad weather and family pressure to put a jolly face on everything during the holiday season.

I contacted a general psychiatrist at the local private hospital, and he turned out to be one of the nicest, kindest people I could ever have hoped to meet. It was pure relief to meet somebody nonjudgemental who would hear my story without leaping to immediate conclusions. The first time I met him, he simply said "we can only play the cards we are dealt" which had me in floods of tears, as it was the first time that anybody had ever said something so kind to me.

I had been taking quite a kicking from my supposed loved ones - but I'm not going to go into that anymore - and been made to feel very guilty and a total failure for having gotten sick. It should be noted that I became clinically depressed and suicidal before any substance abuse entered the picture. Bipolar symptoms had always been present in my life, but it took a further 2 years to get diagnosed. Then, finally, substance abuse reared its ugly head and became the most pressing issue.

From my point of view, I had struggled for years and years with recurrent suicidal ideation, suicide plans. I have struggled all my life with mood instability. To be simply dumped in a bucket labelled 'lost cause addict' was a bit s**t to be honest, after 30 odd years of reliable good service, despite fairly debilitating mental health problems.

Perhaps I'm complaining too much, making too much of a big thing of my struggles? Yes, yes, yes, there are people who've had it so much harder than me, blah, blah, blah. Ok, unless you've sliced your forearms multiple times, lengthways along your veins, with a razor blade, do me a favour and shut up? Some of my friends are wonderfully supportive and have gone out of their way to learn about mental health problems. Perhaps you could follow their example?

So you think this is attention seeking? Save it for the funeral.

It's true that it's taking me a while to work up the bravery to take the Final Exit. Ending your life is a big deal, and you've got to do it right, otherwise you're just going to end up in hospital in pain.

I've had cans of inert gas to suffocate myself, 2 grams of Potassium Cyanide, enough barbiturates to slip into a coma and drown in my hot tub while unconscious, travelled to the top of tall buildings, cliffs and peered over the edge of high bridges. The most serious attempt I made was trying to open my veins with a razor blade. I must admit though, I was just testing the water. You want to make sure that you open some major veins, like the jugular, if you want to die quickly.

Stupidly, I still have hope and some faith in myself. I should write myself off for dead, like those-who-shall-not-be-named have done.

So it came to pass that I went into The Priory, with a referral to one of the country's leading experts on Bipolar Disorder and Dual Diagnosis. JPMorgan were told that I was experiencing mental health problems (true) but the main objective was for me to detox for 28 days, so that there was a clearer clinical picture, and the treatment of my Bipolar and depression could begin.

That makes me an addict right? Don't need to read the rest of the story. Skip to the end. Case closed.

Well, actually, The Priory and my psychiatrists were concerned with my mental health, and saving my life, not just labelling me as an addict and sticking me into the revolving doors of mistreatment and stigma that those suffering individuals endure. The Priory is actually a private hospital, and cares primarily for those suffering with various mental health disorders that are less controversial and stigmatised than substance abuse. There were ten times as many patients who were there because of depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, eating disorders etc. etc.

It's actually all part and parcel of the same group of problems. One fellow patient had been admitted with mental health issues, but out of some drive to self-destruct, she started filling up a mug with alcohol-based hand sanitising gel and flavouring it with orange squash, and drinking it to get drunk.

One of my fellow patients tried to commit suicide by climbing a high wall and hurling herself off, while I was there. Does it matter if she was being treated for depression, or for substance abuse? The fact of the matter is that she was suicidal at that moment. Mental illness of some kind had driven her to try and take her own life.

There was a game we used to play, when a car used to roll up to the house, and out would step the worried looking family members, dragging some dishevelled son, daughter or partner out of the back seat and into a meeting about admission. We used to try and guess what they would be admitted for. Sometimes it was obvious - if they had red wine all spilt down their clothes for example - but often it was nearly impossible.

But what's it actually like, in private hospital? Are there rock stars and stuff? Well, my doctors had treated a number of high-profile sportsmen and women, but when I was there, there weren't any rock stars. Couple of millionaires but no rock stars.

Really, it's much like an NHS mental hospital, except a little more well appointed. Everything is bolted down and the windows don't open and the doors don't lock. The lights don't dangle down and there are no curtains. Mirror glass is made of plastic, and pictures are screwed to the wall, not hung. Yes, there is quite a lot of anti-hanging thought that has gone into things.

When you arrive, you will hand over your razor, scissors, tweezers, solvent containing toiletries, shoelaces, belt etc. to the nurses to keep at their station. If you want to have a shave you'll have to ask for permission, and you'll only get a short amount of time to attack your face with something sharp.

Plus, it's still a hospital, and people are very sick. One woman said to me "it's OK, your secret is safe with me" and tapped her nose with a knowing wink. It later emerged that she thought I was a royal prince, and that my presence in hospital was a state secret. She also came into my room and stole all my underwear and my books, before the nurses tracked down her hiding place.

The rooms are actually as good as any 3-star hotel, with a writing desk, nice view of the gardens, an OK single bed and an ensuite with no shower curtain or plug (drowning is frowned upon). Once you're off suicide watch, you might get to move to one of the double bedrooms that are further away from the nurse's station.

Other than the slight refinement of having a TV and a telephone in your bedroom, there is little different from NHS mental health treatment. The food was very good, I have to say, but your days are generally structured around morning and afternoon trips to the dispensary hatch for your medications, and being regularly checked on by nurses if you're not in some group activity.

Between art therapy, yoga, mindfulness, music therapy, table tennis, TV, movie night and generally socialising with the other patients, it all sounds like a thoroughly lovely spa break. There was a gym and quite big grounds that one could roam in, provided you told the nurses where you were going and how long you'd be gone for. Leaving the compound within my 28 days was forbidden.

Your partner can come and visit you, and you can give a knowing wink at the nurses station before you have sex, so that nobody barges in on you unannounced. Just don't take too long. Visiting is only on a Sunday, so you'll probably have a sack like Santa anyway. You have to hand over your mobile phone and laptop, and digitally detox, so pornography is hard to come by. Probably because sex addiction is also treated at the hospital.

We should remember that although people talk about 'rehab' we need to be quite clear about the treatment route of substance abuse. There is first a detox. It's necessary to break the body's dependence on substances, and treat the withdrawal. If you are an alcohol or a benzodiazepine abuser, there's a good chance that withdrawal could kill you, so the hospital will put you on tapered medication to get you off those substances. If you are an opiate abuser, you will get very sick from withdrawal symptoms, and these can be attenuated with substitute prescribing or by putting the patient into induced sleep. If you are a stimulant abuser, you will suffer cognitive impairment, exhaustion and suicidal depression.

After detox, which could take the whole 28 days, then comes rehabilitation. Depending on how dysfunctional a person has been, they could need 3 to 6 months of rebuilding their damaged life in a safe environment. Just breaking the cycle of chemical dependency is not enough. There's a reason why a person entered that cycle in the first place. There's a reason why that person stayed in that cycle.

We know that gambling addicts don't inject packs of cards into their veins, so addiction can't just be about chemical substances, can it?

So it was, as my time at The Priory drew to a close, the staff gave me the bad news that my treatment was incomplete. I would need another 3 months of rehab if I wanted to make the changes permanent. I flipped out. I discharged myself, went home for a day. Then I spoke to one of the staff on the phone and decided to go back for the remaining few days of treatment. She-who-shall-not-be-named decided that I had "failed" in my commitment to getting better. That's simply a lack of understanding about the commitment that is needed to support somebody in recovery.

Recovery is not about abstinence, it's about having people who love you trying to support you. Support does not mean hectoring, bullying, nitpicking and generally being obnoxious to a person. Your holier-than-thou drinking and smoking and generally behaving like it's OK to do whatever you want and laughing in the face of the abstainer is not helpful, OK?

Abstinence doesn't even work anyway. It's just a continual reminder of what people want to believe: that you're somehow a bad person, that you're faulty, defective. People want to treat you differently, want to label you. Teetotallers are ridiculed, treated with contempt. Why bother being teetotal?

Certainly, not being a smoker was a problem in hospital. There would be long periods where I was left all on my own, because everybody was outside smoking. There is no real abstinence in the world. I found the nurse's stash of caffeinated coffee in one of the more remote kitchens, and in some hospitals you are even allowed to have caffeinated drinks. 'Addicts' are encouraged to not give up smoking and tea/coffee, because they will need those things as a crutch, during those early days of abstinence.

If you look a little more closely at human behaviour, you will see that people are self medicating in one way or another. You'll see the hypocrites, dosing themselves up with stimulants in the form of caffeine. You'll hear the hypocrites, being hypocritical about addiction inbetween puffs on their cigarette. You'll suffer the hypocrites, swallowing their pills and liquids they have as government sanctioned, medically approved substitute addictions.

I could go to my doctor and get a prescription - called a script in addict parlance - for something to salve my addiction and turn it into something seemingly acceptable in society. It's OK if my pills come in boxes from the pharmacy, with my name printed on them and with a prescription from my GP or psychiatrist?

If I had to go to work at the moment I would probably need some Dexamphetamine, or at least a gallon of super strong black coffee. Because I've used so many stimulants, I can drink heaps of coffee without having the anxiety, palpitations and sweats that you would get, but it's a poor substitute for genuine amphetamines, even if the caffeine molecule is virtually identical.

There's no magic in treatment. There's no magic to recovery. It's just time & space and being treated nicely by people, being respected as a human being.

It's important to respect people.

Just respect people.

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

This is a story about patience not being a virtue...

There used to be 3 bathrooms in my old house in Oxford. I once hid in the shower for over 3 hours, waiting to step out and give some guests a tour of the facilities. That's strange behaviour for a 9 year old boy.

I'm still teetotal, and it's been 107 days since I last had an alcoholic drink. That doesn't mean that I'm not still patiently waiting though, for something. Some imaginary finishing line, some trigger, some excuse.

I kinda screwed everything up around day 90 anyway. I took 3-FPM, Mexedrone, βk-2C-B and Flubromazolam in a massive crazy binge, trying to stave off a relapse onto MDPV (Supercrack). You can't fight fire with fire, and if you're testing your patience, your patience will eventually fail.

The problem with being very patient is that people can mistake it for self control, good behaviour. People start to think you're OK. People start to think you don't need their help, their support.

Since the advent of the Dark Web, it has been possible for a respectable middle class person who doesn't know any drug dealers to obtain absolutely anything they want, through the mail. You just have to pay your money and wait for the postman.

Waiting for the man is something that you will find lots of popular cultural references to. I once waited 3 weeks for a Quaalude (or 'lude' in common vernacular) to be delivered to me from some far-flung corner of the globe. Yes, I watched the film Wolf of Wall Street and decided that I needed to add Methaqualone to my list of drugs that I had experienced. I very patiently waited for my delivery. I waited a long time for the man. The mailman.

Given enough spare time with no mission, no project, no goal, I will eventually relapse. A relapse onto a ridiculously powerful stimulant drug will not be pretty. It will be quick and destructive. There's a good chance that it will result in death or hospitalisation.

This is how you get temporarily free. You hit it with 4 powerful benzos, to kill the psychosis and get to sleep. Then the next day you hit it with 3 powerful benzos, to slay the anxiety and restlessness. Then the next day you hit it with 2 powerful benzos, to taper off the 'downers' without having rebound insomnia and unmanageable panic attacks. Then, the next day, you take your 1 remaining benzo. You have an awful night of sleep. You have rising panic and butterflies in your tummy, but you're almost free. Then the final day you're drug free again, but you're all alone and you feel like you want to die.

Monday is the first time that I would be able to re-order something to restart the whole horrid cycle of self-destruction. Tuesday is the earliest that something could be in my nasty sweaty little palms, with me eagerly tearing the packaging apart.

It might not sound like it, but to a 'conventional' drug addict, that's an unthinkable amount of time. They're used to picking up the phone to a dealer and meeting them within hours. In fact, many addicts' lives are structured around such immediacy that they know their dealers' movements intimately, and can know within a window of 15-30 minutes when they are going to get their fix.

You might think that drug addiction is about willpower. What did I demonstrate, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month, if it was not this magical 'willpower' stuff? It's not the solution to anything. I just put myself into standby mode. I just put myself into hibernation. I was just waiting.

Drug addiction is about having a life that's not worth living. "The opposite of addiction is not sobriety, it is human connection".

Human connection is important.

Tags: #addiction #drugs

This is a story about self prescribing...

If you know what medication you want, you can cut out the middlemen and just buy it yourself direct from a country that doesn't have a rigid system of prescriptions, provided it's not a controlled substance, and therefore illegal to import.

I wrote about self medication through non-pharmacological mechanisms in a previous blog post entitled Self Medication (Part One) if you wish to refresh your memory.

Going GP -> Psychiatrist -> Pharmacist is actually quite a slow process when you're trying to find a medication that works for you. Also, many medications are only licensed to treat certain illnesses, but there is sometimes a strong body of research that proves they are effective on other illnesses. Because of concerns about medical malpractice lawsuits, it's quite hard to get an 'off label' prescription, even if there is good data to support the use of a particular medication in your individual case.

So it was that I came to be experimenting with medications like Pramipexole (Mirapex), Bupropion (Wellbutrin), Cabergoline (Dostinex), Aripiprazole (Abilify) and even crazy ones like Piribedil (Trivastal). Results were a mixed bag.

The bottom line is this: you probably don't want to f**k with medication. Aripiprazole left me uncontrollably dribbling, and unable to speak without an unintended spray of saliva. Piribedil would cause me to fall asleep randomly, like a narcoleptic.

But, Bupropion works. It's a very effective, fast-acting antidepressant. However, it raises your anxiety levels, causes insomnia, panic attacks and exacerbates hypomania. It's not a good medication for somebody with Bipolar, unopposed by a mood stabiliser.

Messing around with medications was very dangerous, and I may have even put myself at risk of early-onset Parkinson's disease. Certainly, my later messing around with L-DOPA was on a trajectory leading to complete disaster.

It's about harm reduction though. Tea and coffee are on a stimulant continuum that leads to amphetamines and even stronger stimulants. Alcohol is on a depressant continuum that leads to benzodiazepines and even stronger 'downers'. If you have been using coffee & alcohol to self-medicate for your mood fluctuations, you will be driven to seek out stronger alternatives, when those substances no longer work anymore, or face a breakdown.

Eventually, you'll find that heroin is really great to help you sleep, and crystal meth is really great when you need to be awake and get stuff done. You don't want to end up there. Don't go there.

There are modern sleep aids like Zopiclone & Zolpidem, and newer wakefulness and concentration promoting agents like Methylphenidate (Ritalin) and Modafinil. Naturally, I experimented with these.

Ritalin, I found to be very much like cocaine. You want to take more but you're not sure why. You don't really feel like you're getting anything out of it, but you strangely find yourself taking loads of it. Dangerous. Elizabeth Wurtzel wrote a book called More, Now, Again which is amongst the literature that inspires my writing. However, it's simply not possible to snort 60 Ritalin pills, like she claims. That volume of powder will simply not fit into your nasal sinuses. She's right about one thing though: Ritalin is addictive.

Modafinil simply makes you awake, not happy. More time awake, unhappy, is really the very last thing that you want if you're depressed, so I discontinued its use and find no function for this wakefulness promoting agent, personally.

Zolpidem doesn't keep you asleep for long enough to be of any use. Sure, you fall asleep, but then you wake up again and spend the whole night with your usual insomnia. Useless.

Zopiclone works but it's a little too brilliant. Again, for somebody with Bipolar, waking up feeling totally refreshed simply stokes your hypomania to dangerous levels. It delays an inevitable crash, when the drug ceases to be effective at acceptable dosages, and insomnia leads to exhaustion, which leads to depression.

It's all available, out there on both the public internet and the Dark Web. It's a few clicks away for a middle class person with a computer and a postal address.

My parting advice is this: don't go there. Don't even look. Don't tempt yourself. Don't give yourself false hope. Don't experiment. I've done the experiments, and found nothing good there. The side effects just aren't worth it. The downsides outweigh the upsides.

There are no medicinal cures. There are no medications that 'fix' Unipolar Depression and Bipolar. It's an avenue not worth pursuing.

Sorry about that.

Tags: #bipolar #depression #mentalhealth

This is a story about one hundred and one days sober...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: #suicide #addiction #alcohol

This is a story about logical conclusions...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TOTAL: £64,500

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: #addiction #drugs #childhood #parents

This is a story about three types of people...

There are only 3 types of people in the world. That's it. The whole of humanity can be divided into just 3 buckets. If you want to label people, you can use one of these 3 handy labels, to judge people.

But 3 doesn't sound like very many? Aren't people way more complicated than that? Aren't there 12 buckets that people are put in, like signs of the zodiac? Yes, isn't your star sign all you need to know about a person to figure out everything you need to know about a person? If you know somebody's star sign, you just have to look at their horoscope for the day, and you can predict their future, right?

Well, maybe all that horoscope stuff is bunkum. Maybe it's New Age hippy crap that doesn't mean anything. I mean, it's not very scientific, is it? Everybody knows that horoscope writers just put generic stuff that could apply to anybody. That's the skill in writing horoscopes: writing statements that are ambiguous enough that they could apply to anybody.

So what about Myers-Briggs? Isn't 16 types of people rather than 12 the solution? Having 16 buckets to put 7 billion people into is surely the solution to the madness of believing in horoscopes. Yes, those extra 4 buckets make all the difference.

I do take some pride from the fact that I come out as an ENTJ - Field Marshal - personality type, when I'm tested, which is only 1 to 3% of the population. However, I have a way of simplifying things and making them very black & white. I'm a computer programmer, so I like binary. There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.

So, the best I can do is to categorise people into 3 buckets, so that they can be judged and mistreated accordingly. We seem to love prejudice and presumption, and bullying people, so I've developed a really simple test and a form of categorising people into just 3 categories.

Here it is...

Type I - Potential Addicts

The potential addict is somebody who has not yet tried addictive substances. An addictive substance is anything psychoactive that alters your perception of reality, with examples being:

• Alcohol
• Caffeine (as found in tea, coffee and cola)
• Nicotine (as found in cigarettes, cigars, shisha and vape)
• Medication for depression & anxiety
• Pain medication
• Legal highs
• Narcotics (illegal drugs)

The potential addict has not yet tried any of these things, so we do not yet know if this person is an addict. These people are normally children, because most adults have been exposed to one of the above substances.

Only if you have never tried any of the above substances, can you be considered to be a potential addict.

You need to be really honest when you are answering the single question that identifies you as a potential addict.

Here's the only question you need to answer:

Have you ever taken any of the substances listed above?

The next part is really easy. If the answer is no, then you are a potential addict and your capacity for addiction is as yet unknown. You should be regarded with fear and mistrust. You are a ticking time bomb of addiction. You are a potential monster. You are a menace to society.

Type II - Addicts

The addict is somebody who, at least once every 3 to 6 months, takes an addictive substance. An addictive substance is anything psychoactive that alters your perception of reality, with examples being:

• Alcohol
• Caffeine (as found in tea, coffee and cola)
• Nicotine (as found in cigarettes, cigars, shisha and vape)
• Medication for depression & anxiety
• Pain medication
• Legal highs
• Narcotics (illegal drugs)

The addict takes these substances on a regular basis. Whether that's every 3 to 6 months, or daily dosages of the demonic plant alkaloid known as caffeine. Addicts who drink steaming hot cups of addiction are littered throughout society, flagrantly parading their lack of willpower and devil-may-care attitude to the damage they're doing to themselves and others.

Addicts who smoke or vape are smelly and are setting fire to money on a regular basis and inhaling toxic combustion products, and toxic chemicals. This insanity is further evidence that they have been possessed by a demon. That demon is addiction. These people are monsters. They should be shot at dawn. Their heads should be put on a spike.

Medically sanctioned addiction is no better. Just because your doctor (a.k.a. drug dealer) gave you medication for pain, that's no different from scoring heroin on a street corner. There is zero difference between obtaining medication for depression, or injecting heroin to treat your crushing emotional damage. Zero. Nada. Exactly the same thing.

You need to be really honest when you are answering the single question that identifies you as an addict.

Here's the only question you need to answer:

Do you take any of the substances listed above (every 3 to 6 months or more regularly)?

The next part is really easy. If the answer is yes, then you are an addict and you need help. Why are you wasting money and damaging your health taking substances? There's no excuse.

Because you can't stop taking these substances, you have proven to the world that you have no self-control. You have proven to the world that you have no willpower. You have proven to the world that you're weak. You selfish monster. I hate you. Pooh you! You shitting pooh-pooh head! Stinky bum head!

You lose, addict.

Type III - Non-Addicts

The non-addict is somebody who has tried addictive substances but has not become addicted. The definition of not being addicted is having tried something, but choosing not to take addictive substance. The very process of not taking an addictive substance is what defines a non-addict.

The non-addict is aware of the effects of addictive substances, but chooses not to use them. The non-addict is somebody who demonstrates willpower and self-control. The non-addict, is by their very omission, proving that they are not addicted. They have tried, and they resist the temptations of the addictive substances.

Not taking addictive substances, having tried them, is the only way to prove that you're not a potential addict. If you haven't tried addictive substances, you simply don't know whether you're an addict or not. A non-addict can conclusively show that they are not an addict. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Non-addicts are completely abstinent from all of the following substances:

• Alcohol
• Caffeine (as found in tea, coffee and cola)
• Nicotine (as found in cigarettes, cigars, shisha and vape)
• Medication for depression & anxiety
• Pain medication
• Legal highs
• Narcotics (illegal drugs)

The non-addict has tried one or more of these substances, and proven that they are not an addict, by not taking them. If you take any of the above substances, you are an addict, not a non-addict.

It's a really easy test to see if you're an addict or not. If you drink tea, coffee or cola, you're probably an addict who is in denial. Denial is not a river in Africa. Denial is when you deliberately ignore the evidence.

Non-addicts have collected evidence that they are not addicts. Non-addicts are laughing at you when you accuse them of being addicts, in between sips from your coffee cup.

There's a simple test to see if you're a non-addict or not. You have to go for more than 6 months without having any of the addictive substances you've tried. Yes that's right: any of the substances. Because addictions can be transferred, you can't just stop taking heroin and take up drinking coffee. You can't just stop smoking cigarettes and start having cups of tea. That's just transferring your addiction.

Here's the only question you need to answer:

Do you take any of the substances listed above (every 3 to 6 months or more regularly)?

The next part is really easy. If the answer is no, then you are a non-addict and you can laugh at anybody who talks to you about addiction in between cups of coffee and puffs on cigarettes, while swallowing loads of medications etc. etc.

If you break your abstinence by taking any of the listed substances, then you are an addict. There's no cheating. There are no excuses. You are self-medicating for your untreated addiction if you take anything from the list above. You might be in denial if you're saying things like "yes, but" or fooling yourself about how regularly you are taking addictive substances.

Only a non-addict is able to go for over 6 months without any of the substances listed above. And only a non-addict can stick two fingers up at you and laugh and call you a c**t. Yes, non-addicts are allowed to be all high and mighty, and look down their nose sneeringly at you. Only a non-addict is allowed to be pious and critical of your lifestyle. Only a non-addict is allowed to act all holier-than-thou and pretend they're whiter than white.

It's an established fact that non-addicts are allowed to be as horrible as they like to Type I and Type II people, because they're inferior. The Type I and Type II people are weak and worthless, and can be treated with disdain, contempt and disrespect. Type I and Type II people are literally pieces of s**t that shouldn't be p**sed on if they're on fire.

I think you'll find that this logic is completely watertight. I think you will find that there is not a single flaw in this reasoning. I'm sure that you'll agree wholeheartedly with this new system of classification, given that it is reasoned from unquestionable base principles.

My own mother used to take heroin, but then stopped. She believes that this proves she isn't a heroin addict. Her reasoning is pretty sound. Seems to make sense to me, at least. Well done her.

Only my Mum still smokes and she's a total alcoholic. Oh, and she drinks loads of tea and coffee. So I guess she's still an addict. Oh, oops. So her stopping taking heroin really didn't prove anything, did it? No. Especially as she was still taking other illegal drugs. Yes, there seems to be a flaw in her logic.

I like my Mum, even if she's a total alcoholic junkie. She decided to have a baby (me) with another alcoholic junkie, which is a shame, but at least they never judged me, because they're aware of their own addictions.

Oh no, hang on a second. There was that time when they walked into my house and stopped me from emailing psychiatrists about a hospital admission to treat my Bipolar Disorder, and instead accused me of being a drug addict and dragged me outside where some work colleagues saw me and wondered why I wasn't at work.

Yes, it seems rather odd that a couple of drug addicts would enter the private home of a person with a mental illness, and drag him through the streets, accusing him of having a drug addiction. That would seem to be rather hypocritical to me.

I wonder what the psychological effects of such action would be. To shame your son for the guilt that you yourself carry. To blame your son for your own lack of willpower and addiction. That would be pretty shitty, wouldn't it?

Yes, my parents kinda like to pass the buck. They think they're so smart, but they're just out to cover their own guilt. They're pretty paranoid and psychotic after so many years of extensive drug and alcohol abuse. Years and years and years. It takes its toll on the body and the mind. They have lost the plot. They're fucking senile.

Oh, what about me?

Well, I've not been drinking for 82 days, but I've been abstinent from all the other substances for 6 months. I'm well on my way to non-addict status. I'm a lot more of a non-addict than anybody else I know. That's why I find it so insulting and offensive when people want to talk to me about alcohol, drugs etc.

If you want to know about being a non-addict you should be asking me, not telling me things. I can tell you about how hard it is to flush all psychoactive substances from your life. They are ubiquitous. They put caffeine in all sorts of things, so that you get hooked on those products.

I have started to hear people saying "sugar is a drug" and that's given me an idea.

When you eat food, your body will break it down and convert the carbohydrates into glucose, because glucose is what powers every cell in your body. Your human body runs on glucose and oxygen. Your body runs on sugar.

However, I accept the challenge.

I've decided that as my final challenge I will go without sugar. Given that sugar is glucose, and all food is converted to glucose, I will have to go without food. Yes, if I'm going to quit sugar, I will have to quit food.

So, I've decided to go on hunger strike. Yes, when you're all stuffing yourselves with your Christmas dinner, I think I will go and stay in a tent (houses are a drug?) and just live on fresh air. I'm going to quit food for Xmas. How's about that?

I'm just taking things to their logical conclusion. The only way to prove that you're a non-addict is to give up on food.

If you give up on food, pretty soon you give up on oxygen. Oxygen is a drug. You keep taking breath after breath, you oxygen addict!

I'm going to quit food, because food contains sugar, and sugar is a drug. By quitting food, I get to quit oxygen too.

Yes, when I'm dead from starvation, suffocation, you will be able to see just how brilliant not being addicted to anything is. Make sure you have a warm cup of tea or coffee with some sugar in it to sip at my funeral. The glucose from the sugar will help to keep you warm, and the caffeine will help you concentrate on whatever bullshit the preacher is spouting.

Hurrah for me. I'm a fucking genius. I've figured out how to not be addicted to ANYTHING.

Yes, I'm going to sit in my tent, with no food, no sex, no internet, no gambling and certainly no tea or coffee. I've never smoked and I don't take drugs, so it should be fairly easy. I just need to beat a few hunger pangs and then the pain will be over.

I'm looking forward to an eternity as a non-addict. The dead aren't addicted to anything. Hurrah for the dead. I aspire to be dead. I'm mostly there.

Have a little think about what type of person you are. Be honest. How long have you honestly done, without a single drop of any of the substances I listed? You're going to have to be super duper honest because addiction makes you lie to yourself and others

Tags: #addiction #alcohol #drugs #bipolar #mentalhealth #childhood #parents #notanonymous

This is a story about anger management...

I like to nurture. I like being with nature. I like to mow the lawn. I like to plant things and water them and watch them grow. I like to look after animals. I like knowing that I'm helping living things.

When people were shitty and mean to me, I liked to be with my cat in my garden. I liked to take care of my lawn. I liked to get rid of the dead leaves and dead flower heads, and feed the plants.

I'm a pretty simple character really. If you make me sad and anxious and afraid, I will be depressed. If you keep attacking me, I will withdraw more and more and more. You will back me into a corner.

What do we know about cornered animals, that are beaten and stressed and anxious? Well, it's time to stop being unpleasant to them and either leave them alone or be nice to them, unless you want to get bitten.

I'm not out to bite anybody. I just want a little garden and a cat. If you take those things away from me, you'll make me very sad.

I don't have a lot of opportunity to nurture anything at the moment. I don't have any plants or kids or pets. I treat my girlfriends nicely, but those relationships tend to be a lot more complicated than boy & cat.

My Dad thinks that rearing a little boy is just like owning a dog. He thinks that little boys are members of his pack, and they will respond like a pack animal would to the leader of the pack. Humans are not pack animals. Humans are advanced primates with complex social and emotional needs. You shouldn't try and 'train' them like you would with a dog. They're not performing animals, like dancing bears or dogs that roll over and play dead.

Respect is a two-way street with humans. If somebody orders me to respect them, they will lose my respect. Respect is earned. I don't respect anybody who doesn't respect me back. There is no automatic entitlement to respect. Everybody's opinion is equally valid. When my Dad's car broke down, my sister opined that it might have run out of fuel. He dismissed her opinion immediately. She was right, he was wrong. More fool him.

One of the few times that my parents came to visit London was because they had gone to go away on holiday, but then discovered that their passports were not in date. I can tell you exactly when my passport expires, and I'm not such a drug addicted disorganised lazy layabout that I would fail to be able to take my flight because of such an idiotic oversight.

Yes, this one-way-street is a source of a lot of anger. I have been disrespected a huge amount by my parents, but when we examine the evidence it becomes clear that they are hypocrites and there is no excuse for such disrespectful behaviour.

I need to be the bigger person, and vent off this anger at such injustice, mistreatment and damage to my identity, self-confidence and happiness. Ideally, I would like to forgive and forget, but it's very hard to forgive somebody who is not at all sorry.

I've had to be sorry all my life. I've had to be very sorry that I was so inconsiderate as to become a fertilised embryo, grow and eject myself into the world. What terrible poor planning on my part. How grossly irresponsible of me to not think of the impact on my parents plans for drug taking idleness.

I've come up against anger that has been misdirected against me time and time again. Recently, a girlfriend started to physically attack me and throw objects at my head, when she threw a tantrum about the fact that she had strewn rubbish all over my flat and didn't want to clean up after herself. She wanted me to 'admit' that I was the messy one, and flew into a rage when I told her the true origin of every sweet wrapper and crisp packet, that she had absentmindedly thrown on the floor.

I have an atypical reaction to stressful situations. My pulse slows and my blood pressure drops and I calm down. I get very cold and rational. I've been in life and death situations enough times to know that losing your head will get you killed.

When my ex girlfriend started hurling plates and knives at me, I didn't react, except to make sure I protected my head. When she left, I was glad she was gone. When she slammed the door of my flat on the way out, I was relieved. Obviously, I didn't want to date her any more after that. That's rational, right?

When my ex wife started getting aggressive, I would put a door in-between her and me. Some kind of physical barrier to stop me from being physically attacked. Sure, she would attack the door - punching and kicking - which only further confirmed that I was right to put some protection around myself from somebody with a streak of violence in them.

My ex wife would sometimes scream that her human rights were being infringed by her not being able to enter my prison cell, in-between beating the door with her fists. It seemed more like an infringement of my human rights, that I wasn't able to move around my home without fear of physical aggression against my person.

The psychological trauma of being trapped in a room with an angry person trying to kick the door down is not healthy for your mind. The more it happens, the more if affects you. You are attempting to retreat to safety, but some cruel and abusive person is rattling your cage, banging on the bars of your prison.

Why didn't I just leave? Well, if you're in a corner, you only tend to have one escape route, and that's right through the arena you're trying to escape. That means running the gauntlet right past your persecutor(s).

Trust me, if you want to help a person who is cornered, harassing them and being menacing and aggressive towards them is not going to coax them out of the corner.

My solution is to either wait for starvation or the police to release me from the trap. I have never called the police to come help me. I once had to threaten to call the police, in order to be allowed to be released from my cell to go to hospital for urgent treatment. That's not right.

Here's the bottom line: don't persecute people. Don't harass people. Don't stress them out and corner them with aggression and threats. Don't relentlessly bang on the door to their cell and kick and stomp and tantrum. They're in there, starving. They're in there, cornered and alone and dying.

Yes, I can tell you a lot about dying from starvation. I chose to die of starvation rather than be beaten by my abusers. That was a rational choice that I made.

A person doesn't retreat into a corner for no reason. A person doesn't starve themself to the brink of death for no reason. There is no 'carrot' or 'reward' in being trapped in a corner. It's being beaten with a 'stick' that drives them into a corner. It's verbal and physical abuse that makes a person cower in a corner.

I don't feel very safe, because my parents and my wife all abused me. They all put me in hospital and none of them give a shit. They're not sorry. They think it's my problem, not theirs. Well, isn't it strange that now that I've got away from those abusive people, my life has improved?

They will blame drug taking, but I'm not a drug addict and I'm going to show you in the coming weeks, it's them who are the drug addicts, and who act abusively. I'm going to show you conclusively that I'm not a drug addict and that their accusations are an attempt to cover their own guilt.

I'm going to show you that paranoia is not something that just exists in the mind of a sick person, but a reaction to extreme stress and mistreatment. Can you imagine being shut in a room with no food, drink or toilet, and having violent aggressive people pummelling on the door and screaming abuse night & day? Can you imagine what psychological impact that would have?

I'm going to show you every part of the psychological trauma and abuse that I sustained, and how that drove me to suicide attempts and mental illness. I'm going to show you how mental illness can be induced in somebody by mistreating them. I'm going to show you how the human mind reacts to bullying and abuse.

You're going to have to be a really clever smarty pants with a good memory, and remember that there is such a thing as cause and effect. You're going to need to remember the sequence of events, otherwise you're going to get confused. You're going to start trying to make quick and easy assumptions.

The main thing you're going to need to remember is this: abuse nearly killed me, and I was abstinent from drink & drugs. You just need to remember this one thing: I was driven to suicide, and there were no drugs involved, and I wasn't an alcoholic.

See if you can remember that, as I tell you the rest of the story. It's important that you do, because otherwise you might get confused.

It's easy to get confused when you're drinking and smoking and having tea & coffee, because you're manipulating your own mind. You're muddying the waters. You are confusing yourself and your perception of reality.

I'm able to make an accurate appraisal of reality, because I am speaking about periods where I wasn't on any medication, drugs or drinking. I'm able to rationally analyse all the facts and evidence now, because I'm completely abstinent from any psychoactive substances whatsoever, including all medications, legal drugs, illegal drugs, caffeine etc. etc.

The only time that you tend to have a clear mind in modern society is when you have kids. Becoming a parent normally sharpens the mind a little bit, and good parents decide to clean up their act (mine didn't). However, you also become filled with irrational fear, because you have children that you want to protect. You start to become afraid of the boogeyman.

Actually withdrawing from alcohol can make you very anxious. Being a parent is very tiring, and it's easy to try and compensate with tea and coffee and other wakefulness agents. However wakefulness agents make you very anxious and paranoid. You start to imagine that the world is full of dangerous people out to hurt your child.

This is the power of nightmares. You get pregnant because you're fucked up on booze. Perhaps you were so pissed that you vomited your contraceptive pill. Anyway, you end up pregnant even though you're right in the middle of being a massive binge drinker.

So you not only have the anxiousness of becoming a new parent, but you also have to give up alcohol and cigarettes. That's pretty hard on your anxiety levels, which you had been self medicating for with booze and fags. Now you don't have those crutches and you've got a kid that's going to need a stable home, but you haven't sorted your life out... you were still in party mode.

Dad has to give up on his dreams of being a footballer, Formula One driver, professional gambler or whatever idle fantasy he had been secretly harbouring. He's going to have to put on a grey suit and go to a dull concrete office until the age of 65 doing something very boring. That's stressful. He's also going to get a lot less sex, because his girlfriend/wife is going to be busy raising kids. It's an anxious time for the new Dad. He should probably show support to his partner by also quitting smoking and drinking, but he's not going to.

So, the home environment is filled with stress and anxiety before the screams of an incontinent midget have even pierced the tranquility of sitting around getting drunk. This isn't how that drunken night was supposed to turn out! What a little bastard for inseminating itself. Let's load it up with lots of blame and stress and teach it a lesson for arrogantly getting born.

It's a shame I'm so exhausted by it all. I have enough energy to finish the story, to prove the point. The point is simple: I'm good enough to achieve some cool stuff. I'm good enough to make a difference, to make a contribution. I haven't got enough energy to fight all the bullies though. I haven't got enough energy to fight the stigma and the presumptions and the lazy assumptions and the prejudice. I haven't got enough energy to be ganged up on. I'd done, I'm over.

When I've finished my story and killed myself, you can cut me open and you'll see the truth. You can dissect my body and see that I was physically healthy. I have written this text so that you can dissect my mind and see that I was mentally well, but driven to suicide by relentless abuse and a lack of apology or opportunity to beat my oppressors.

People like my Dad and ex-wife could just say sorry, but I know they never acknowledge their own guilt.

I'm guilty of lashing out. I'm guilty of reacting to stimuli. Sorry about that. Sorry for being a human being.

My parents and ex wife think they're saints, so I will be the martyr, in the hope that somebody else might get to avoid being killed for other people's sins.

I asked you to stop being mean and abusive. I asked to be set free. I asked for help. You failed me. I forgive you.

If you pile unmanageable stress and pressure on somebody, they will go wonky, they will get bent out of shape. You will put their world into a downward slope that they can't escape (1994)

Tags: #childhood #parents #divorce #addiction #drugs #alcohol #unpleasant #bipolar #suicide

This is a story about telling the truth...

I apologise for the lengthy 87,000 word preamble, but it has been in preparation for the revelation of some really shocking truths.

I'm actually still trying to psych myself up to tell some parts of the story, because I know that I'm going to be burning bridges big time, but I don't feel like they're places I'd want to go back to anyway. Those places need to be shut down with extreme prejudice. Those bridges need to be burnt.

I've effectively had an 'access all areas' back-stage pass to a lot of stuff that the public barely know exists. I've worked on gold bullion vault projects, nuclear submarine projects, cryptographic encryption projects and on the number one projects in the world's biggest banks. I've single handedly produced number one iPhone apps and been invited to speak about what I do at top academic institutions. These are my credentials.

So, I'm puffing myself up, like a blowfish. I'm like the scared cat, with its fur all stood on end and its back arched. I'm like the pompous twat, with his chest pushed out and his fake voice booming out, disturbing everybody's peace and quiet. Am I a narcissist? No, I'm just trying not to be eaten by predators.

Am I trying to make you like me? Do I think I'm likeable? Do I think I'm charming, charismatic? Do I think I'm special? Well, I have done the maths. I'm one of 7 billion people on planet earth and I'm 99.5% genetically identical to every single one of them. So I'm half a percent different from 7,000,000,000, which means I'm roughly the same as 35 million people, statistically speaking.

There are - for arguments sake - about 70 million people in the UK. I've used a higher number than the official figures for convenient maths, and because the government doesn't count the huge number of 'illegal' immigrants who live here. So I represent about half the population of the U.K: 35,000,000. I'm literally 1 in 2. There's a 50:50 chance you might meet another me, here in the UK.

So I'm really Mr Average. There you have it. I'm a straight down the middle regular Joe Bloggs. Anything I can do, you can do too. I'm not special. I'm not unique. I'm not different.

I've done a paper round, just like you. I've done washing up in a pub and a hotel, just like you. I've worked in a shop on a Saturday, just like you. I went to state comprehensive school, just like you. I went to 6th form college, just like you. I did an apprenticeship, just like you. I worked 9 to 5, just like you. I learned a skilled trade, just like you. I had a mortgage, just like you. I had a current account and a savings account, just like you. I used to mow the lawn on a Sunday, just like you. I used to spend a considerable proportion of my income on DIY and home improvements, just like you. I was making a little nest, ready to spawn some clones of myself, just like you.

Only, one day, I threw down my tools and said I'd had enough.

At first, I couldn't actually carry on working even though I wanted to. I had gotten myself a new job, and it was quite exciting, interesting and challenging. I was working with some cool people on a cool project. But for some reason I couldn't get out of bed. Maybe I was lazy? Maybe I was a spoiled brat? Maybe I was too posh and rich, and too arrogant and stuff to be bothered to go to work like everybody else?

Well, as I remember it, I just couldn't take it any more. I broke down. The machine had been pushed beyond its design tolerance, beyond its threshold, beyond its capabilities, beyond its rev limiter, and it had shaken itself to pieces. You should know that at this point, the machine was only powered by food, water, alcohol and caffeine... just like everybody else.

Was I a functional alcoholic? Well, we've explored this already, so I'm not going to go over it again, but let's just say this: I never drank alone. I always drank with colleagues and friends. I always had drinking buddies, and I never drank more than anybody else in my social sphere.

Alcohol is more than a social lubricant though. They say that money is the lubricant for capitalism, but I think that alcohol is the lubricant for capitalism. The more money, the more alcohol. It was limitless. As long as your work got done, nobody cared how pissed you were.

The thing about doing the same job for 19 years is that it gets pretty easy. It gets very monotonous and boring and paint-by-numbers. Even when you're building a banking system to process a quadrillion dollars, it looks like the same 1's and 0's in binary. All computer code looks the same, whether it's launching Tomahawk missiles or processing Credit Default Swaps.

We used to say "nobody dies if our code f**ks up" on the non-mission-critical projects. That's not strictly true though.

When a massive beast like a giant multinational corporation starts to die, rich people get pretty trigger happy. Yes, people are prepared to kill other people in order to protect their dollars. My own parents were prepared to kill me in order to protect their pot of gold, so I've seen it first hand.

The thing you don't realise, when you're watching all that 'free' TV is that you're a TV addict. If you didn't pay for something, then you are the product. Your mind is being sold to the highest bidder. Even when you do pay for something, you might still be being marketed to... you wanna be James Bond, right? Better go and buy that expensive watch you saw him wearing then.

But this conquest of your heart and mind is more subtle than just being sold a product. You are also being sold a lie. You are being told simplistic stories about good vs. evil. You are told stories about cowboy & indians, cops & robbers, earthlings & aliens, superheros & bad guys, black & white. You are being dumbed down. You are being put into a childish mindset.

Barely a few months after this photo was taken, my parents marched into my house, that I bought with my money that I earned, and called me a drug addict. They are total fucking idiots.

One of my earliest memories is waking up in a hospital bed at Oxford John Radcliffe Hospital. There were two scared looking drug addicts, going through withdrawal there looking at me. They had really dumb expressions on their faces. They had no idea what was going on in their drug addled lives. They were my parents, and they had hospitalised me because they're irresponsible cunts.

My parents have not got a clue how hard modern life is. They were gifted the deposit money to get a house, because they had failed to plan properly how to support their child. They needed their parents money, because they were too busy taking drugs and getting fucked up to act responsibly.

Do you know what I'd do if I got a girl pregnant? I'd get a fucking job.

My parents think they're special and different. They think they are entitled to not have to work hard. They think they're entitled to sit in judgement over the world, despite having achieved nothing other than to inflict misery on innocent human lives. Being the child of a pair of junkies is miserable work, I can tell you. It's hard work having to be the responsible one, because you are chaperoning a pair of losers who are too fucked up to put food on the table and a roof over the family's head.

When we come to talk about bail-outs in the coming months. We should remember that my parents had a free University education and they spent their parents money fucking about. They went travelling and had a lovely time swanning around spending other people's money. They sat around taking cocaine and doing jigsaws with their adult friends, rather than taking their kid on an outing. They took me to the pub and left me with alcoholics who worked on the US Air Force base, who told me all about nuclear war. Little boys don't really want to know about nuclear war. It kind of fucks them up.

Yes, I remember this guy Wayne, used to boast all the time about nuclear weapons destroying every living thing on the planet of the Earth. That's a lovely bedtime story for a 3 year old, isn't it? Well done mum & dad. Great parenting. Gold star. Cunts.

So, if I'm against the proliferation of nuclear armamants and I'm a vociferous supporter of nuclear disarmament... that's the reason. We should ban the bomb, because being bombed to shit by nuclear weapons is terrifying for your children. You shouldn't be sitting around taking drugs and getting drunk with your friends. If you give a shit about your kids you should be protesting about the proliferation of nukes.

Yes, my parent's were caught napping. They were asleep on the cunting job. While they were putting flowers in each others hair and taking heroin, magic mushrooms and LSD, snorting loads of cocaine and wandering round in a stoned fucked up daze, alcoholic stupor and generally dribbling like cross-eyed imbeciles, and occasionally spawning an unloved child, the world went to rack & ruin. You total cunts.

My parents never gave a shit about saving for a proper pension. Their parents had been prudent, and had put money into index-linked pensions that provided for a reasonable retirement. My parents plan was to put all their money into drugs and not give two fucks about the future, or even the present. Yes, the present was a pretty miserable time, because if there's one thing we know about drugs, it's that there's a comedown.

My parents like to boast that they were never really addicted. What absolute horse shit. If you have an expensive habit that's damaging to the entire family's health and wealth, to the point where my grandparents had to bail you the fuck out, and buy you a house, then you fucked up, you total addict fucking losers.

My mum still smokes, and has a major alcohol problem. She's self-medicating for anxiety issues. Yes... being a shit parent is supposed to make you anxious. That's called guilt. That thing you're trying to numb... that's your guilty conscience for being a shit parent.

If you don't adjust your lifestyle according to the needs of your dependents, then you're a fucking selfish cunt. If you can't even see what's going on in reality because you're too messed up by all the drink and drug abuse... you are a really sorry messed up individual.

My parents live in a kind of co-dependency, where they support each others warped worldview. The only person who's friends with them is a guy with learning difficulties, and even that is co-dependent. That poor guy is just lonely, and he likes to have a drink... my parents drink with him, because he makes them feel like they're superior. They don't like normal friends, because they remind them that they're alcoholic junkie shit parents who never adjusted their disgusting lifestyle for their kids.

My Dad's really horrible and abusive to my Mum, but she defends him, so it's hard to do anything. It's important to defend somebody's character, but don't defend the indefensible. Don't defend an abuser. Don't defend somebody who gets sent to the supermarket to buy food and comes back with drugs. Don't defend somebody who's supposed to put a roof over the family's heads but can't be bothered because they're too fucked up on drugs.

I'm supposed to support these cunts in their happy retirement, am I? Why?

This is the legacy. This is the lunacy of mortgaging your children in order to pay for your disgusting lifestyle. This is the smoking gun. This is the whodunnit for a generation that got screwed over. This is a pointed finger, that shows where the blame really lies.

So, I'm being disruptive. I'm laying the foundations. I'm laying out my stall. I'm setting out my case. I'm taking on the establishment. I'm taking on the status quo.

I live and work in glass palaces, but I'm going to throw stones, because these places need to be smashed down. People have been kept below glass ceilings for too long. People have been oppressed by a generation who have achieved nothing, for far too long. Widening the rich-poor gap and fucking over your grandchildren's future, through pollution and completely screwing the global economy is nothing to be proud of. You've got no authority and you've got no credentials.

I suggest you start giving away your hoarded wealth as fast as you can, if you want to help your family. Give it away, share, spread the wealth if you want to retain even a fraction of your standard of living.

Soon, it's not going to matter who's got the most. It's going to matter who gave the most, when you are put on trial.

Yes, the newest generations are going to put you on trial for crimes against humanity. You're all as guilty as each other, so the only way to judge people's character is based on their generosity. My parents are tight-fisted cunts.

You're economically enslaving your children. You are chaining them up. You're doing nothing, sitting on that couch watching brain-washing TV and reading rubbish newspapers. Get off your lazy arses you cunts (October 2013)

Tags: #politics #childhood #parents #capitalism #addiction