Be Here Now

WE'RE HAVING FULL-ON SUMMER HERE. It's been sweltering. I have behaved myself most of this week (haven't stabbed myself in the foot for a few days and am not intending to stab myself anywhere ever again).

I have switched to drinking my methadone in the morning rather than at night. This seems to prevent excessive sweating. I'm less "peeved" with methadone than I was a few days ago. That was depression talking. I find it hard to accept that it's supposedly "better" to drink a sticky gloop to get off street heroin, when the gloop's a lot more addictive than the heroin.

Knowing that heroin is used extensively in British hospitals as a first-line treatment for serious pain and that a small number of addicts (and a larger number in central Europe; Switzerland being the only country prescribing heroin to addicts as a matter of course) muddies the waters. It would be far easier to convince myself that heroin is pure evil and I'm better off without it. I console myself that I'm better off without it, and whether or not heroin is evil, or how evil it is, doesn't matter. Because I don't want it any more.

I believe it's better to be off heroin than on it and I want to get off it. The practicalities of heroin involve placing your wellbeing in the hands of ruthless criminals and being treated as a social pariah ~ especially by the medical profession. It's true that most of the damage caused by heroin is a direct result of "prohibition"; but as I say, I'm moving on from wanting anything to do with heroin at all. So the ins and outs of legalization and heroin prescription to addicts concern me no longer.

As Shane of MemoiresOfAHeroinHead fame pointed out, methadone clinics are no more "caring" (or reliable, for that matter) than your friendly neighbourhood drug dealer. They're often little more supportive. Shuttling "clients" at whom from worker to worker. Motivated more by box-ticking than any true measure of your personal welfare. My fellow blogger Sid has run up against the NHS's predictable "one size fits all" mentality in drug treatment clinics. He's worked for years and feels the system is set up for "junkies". I would say it's worse even than this. I shambled into my old clinic for years with pretty obvious "mental health" symptoms that were never, ever addressed. Nobody ever asked how I was. They were totally obsessed with drugs. Only interested in what drugs I had and hadn't been using. Never asked about me or my history. One was surprised to learn I'd "only" been a heroin addict since 2000. I'd had depression for many, many years before I ever got involved in heroin.

I used to marvel at the fables some of my friends told down the drug clinic. About how little they were drinking. About how little they used. People on the gear and crack constantly, who the clinic appeared to believe were doing ever so well. Until the Heroin Drought last year, in fact, everybody I knew used heroin at every opportunity. Most of my own circle had given up on crack or never really been into it. That drought gave a lot of us the option, at long last, of putting our weariness into practice and finally giving gear a miss. I know at least three people who are still clean to this day. One is in her fifties. The other two are in their sixties.

I was always pretty frank down the clinic about my using. I wanted a bad record so when diamorphine prescription got brought in I'd be first in line.

Now I see things the way everyone else always did. You help your worker out by saying all the right things. Then they can tick the right boxes and look like a successful worker. You take your methadone scipt and go. You sort out your own life yourself. The tedious group therapy they costantly try and bully you into is yet another cosmetic exercise. Sounds good on paper. In reality I found selected fellow "service users" too exasperating for words. Parroting what they knew was expected of them. I don't remember ever going to such a meeting without drinking heavily first and hitting up smack afterwards. That's what drug-talk does to you. Makes you wanna use.

I'm fortunate in that my new worker is Africian. I'm hoping she'll be to teach me whatever mysterious language she speaks. That's the best use of our time as far as I'm concerned. Considering I'm not intending to be ON any drugs, there won't be any drugs to talk about. And I'm not considering group therapy yet again. I've had enough therapy to last a lifetime..

I think the standard of personnel these clinics take on has actually gone DOWN in recent years. When I first got scripted methadone nearly ten years ago I got the distinct impression most people working down the clinic were ex-junkies themselves. That does not seem to be the case now. My new worker didn't even know what schizoaffective disorder WAS. I wouldn't expect a normal person to know this, but I would expect it of a drugs worker. Also, they seemed obsessed by the suspicion that I must surely be using something else apart from tiny bits of heroin on top of my script, which just isn't true and which irritates me, because I'm so over cannabis, crack et al that the mere thought of them offends me. Both the doctor and the new worker pushed this point. They seem to have this expectation that the more drugs you take the less together you will be. When in actuality most opiate users (in contrast to stimulant users) take their drug to hold themselves together. So of course, when they stop taking it, they crack up big time.

I gave up on Intuitive Recovery when the course leader talked about "self-medicating" on crack. Self-medicating, as I understand it, means gaining a very real symptomatic improvement through taking an illicit drug. Not getting high or losing yourself in an excitingly new criminal lifestyle. I only accepted I had been self-medicating after I stopped doing it! The whole issue makes me angry. If they knew I was self-medicating, why the hell didn't THEY medicate me properly?! I suppose I always had low expectations of the methadone clinic. It's just that now and then I get these little flashes of what is supposed to be. And a methadone clinic is supposed to offer psychosocial therapies. Which they never did.

Anyway I'm beyond all that. And trying to STAY beyond it. And never again allow depression to mire me in such a morass of bitterness. I was getting to the state where I couldn't distract myself with anything at all. Whatever it was my mind chose to occupy itself with, something about it would irritate the hell out of me.

I have tried to focus on finding out all I can about methadone therapy ~ something I never bothered about before because I had so little enthusiasm for it. I'm going to have to wait and see whether it agrees with me in the longterm. I found it so extremely difficult to stick to the stuff before because the moods I experienced on methadone were so intensely nasty I continued to use heroin at every opportunity. Even tiny doses on top of my script produced marked "improvement".

My mood was exaggeratedly good earlier on, which is why today I'm able to view the situation with some detachment. The more I think about the whole situation the more motivated I am to just get OFF opiates of all varieties. I know heroin made me miserable. However you want to argue it, whether I was or was not self-medicating and whether or not I was successful it's a simple law of life that whatever you do, you'll get used to it. You can develop "tolerance" to rollercoasters if you ride one every day. If you marinade your brains in hard drugs, your brains come to accept such pickling as "normal".

I don't know what would have happened if I hadn't gone on heroin for over ten years. I suspect I would be a lot less messed up. To be fair, the drug gave me something I'd never really experienced before. It killed the multifarious discomforts I'd entirely got used to living with because they were parts of me. For a brief while I had the luxury of not being me. But I still don't think heroin made me happy. What I really wanted was to kill myself off ~ both literally and metaphorically. In a metaphorical sense I think I've achieved my object, because I'm a different person now to who I was then. Totally different. I'm very glad of that.

So now the truly mysterious part begins: I have to start from here, not knowing where I am. I've somehow to learn Mastery of Life. That's my goal.

I never set my sights low, except when I don't want to be doing something anyway.

I do want to live and be alive, because I have chosen life. If I hadn't, I wouldn't be here now.

I'm reminded of one of NA's sayings about accepting life on life's terms and living in the moment.

It's all about being here now ...

Just Be Here Now ...


Link of the day ~ Drug Abuse: UK Guidelines for Clinical Management

A Fate Worse than Life

AKH. I was in a BAD MOOD earlier. I wrote some crap some of y'all would find truly histrionic, if not truly upsetting. This is my problem. In my mind, opiates and death are thoroughly intertwined. To ANY established junkie, coming off Heroin is a fate worse than death. To ME, being ON methadone is a fate considerably worse than death. I want OFF methadone. O yeah and I was in such a kerfuffle earlier today I went and USED HEROIN AGAIN (straight in the vein, which is a miracle with my collapsed Blood Highways. WHOOSH it went straight in. On a dose of methadone that supposedly blockades the high. All the manifold receptor sites left uncared for and bereft by methadone were suddenly salved. The information given to methadone prescribers is patently FALSE. The criteria methadone clinics use are FALSE. You only have to check the analgesic potency of methadone compared to morphine where 1mg methadone is said to equate to 2mg morphine. Now diamorphine is typically reckoned to have a double potency to morphine, which would put pharmaceutical heroin and methadone at equal potency. Or to use the bullshit on the website they are "equianalgesic". If this is the case, I should have been on at least 350mg methadone. Not 150mg. Last time a doctor spouted the usual crap about 150mg
being "a big dose" (I have since reduced a small way) I shot her down in flames by quoting the average retail purity of street heroin (40-50% until late last year) and the heroin-methadone equivalence tables. She quickly shut up. These clinics underprescribe MASSIVELY then fingerpoint at the "Service User" for not being able to cope with a gargantuan reduction in their dose. Methadone is not heroin, does not substitute for heroin. Causes me mania, depression and psychosis ~ which heroin doesn't. When I do die I hope my family SUE the NHS for their negligently inflexible prescribing policy. The doctors "treating" me know very well that I get severe flare-ups in symptoms that get worse the longer I rely on methadone to "stabilize" me. Yet they have done nothing at all to address the issue.

Some American websites parrot the lie that methadone somehow quells moodswings and gives equilibrium. I have never witnessed this. Not in myself, not in anybody else.

Depression and hallucinations are listed side-effects of methadone. Google it and see.

If all this sounds like junkie whingeing, I agree with you. SHOOT 'EM ALL DEAD. That's what I say. Save the beleagred NHS some pennies. This is what I believe. Institute DEATH to all drug addicts. Not for possession of drugs. For BEING ADDICTED. And if that sounds to Fascist: make the death penalty voluntary. Junkies will line the streets waiting to die. Heroin is a fate worse than death; and methadone how much more so!




One day, when I Grow Up I will start a drug clinic of my own. It will have to be private, because of the way things run in this country and most other countries. My clinic will be like an anything-goes version of Dr Colin Brewer's. At my clinic you'll be able to get once a day dosing on oral morphine or hydromorphone (Jurnista). We will prescribe heroin amps, methadone amps, morphine amps and hydromorphone (Dilaudid) amps. Dextromoramide (Palfium). Subutex. Suboxone. Oral methadone (to the truly deranged). Rapid anaesthetic detox. Naltrexone therapy. And so on. I probably will NOT be able to open this clinic on British soil. My clinic will be a sweet shop to every famished junkie. They will come there for a true range of substitution therapies.

And I will do my bit to put the Drug Dealers out of business.

Which the government patently don't give the tiniest shit about.

"Home Detox" kits will not feature on my Fantasia of Druggie Delights Menu.


PS I'VE ANSWERED ALL YOUR COMMENTS FOR THE LAST COUPLE OF DAYS. WAS IN TOO MUCH OF A BAD MOOD EARLIER.







PS the roborovski Japanese says ケッキ食べてリリの "Kekki tabete riri no" which translates as "Lili's ardour to eat"!

Hammy's Ramblings

ANNA GRACE YOUNG'S book has come out! It's called I Hate Myself And I Want To Die. It's available from the publishers now; from Barnes and Noble and Amazon next week.

I've found a website that shows the stroke-order of Chinese characters. The one we see here says mouse, rat or rodent.

Japanese writing link.


Prescription Heroin in the UK: an addict's success story. (Erin O'Mara, editor of Black Poppy magazine.) Annie read this: the first heroin script she mentions came from the Chelsea and Westminster where they had the 210mg limit.

With British heroin having a supposed 40% average purity, that would be about half a gram a day: the very bare minimum I was ever able to get away with when I really had a habit.

(I've still got a habit now; a methadone habit!)

Last night I slept "only" 10 hours; I remember thinking, as I realized Iceland have terminated their £1.50 sweet chili chicken pizzas (grrr!) "that's good" only to find myself dozing to oblivion in front of Midsomer Murders, crawling to bed and sleeping flat out from 4:30 to 11:30pm, making 15 hours in the last 24, which is not at all good.

Last time I started sleeping a lot less I went a bit manic. That was about 2 weeks ago. I scored 17 on the Young Mania Rating Scale, using it very conservatively a fortnight after the fact. Really I should probably have scored more. Example: uproarious laughter gives you a 3 or a 4, depending on whether it is or is not "appropriate" (how am I meant to know that?) but I only scored myself a 2, because my mood was definitely higher than the bassline. In fact if I hadn't done so much laughing I think I'd probably not have noticed the other "symptoms" and would have considered myself an insomniac not a maniac. I still find it very odd that there can be a supposed "mental illness" where you're TOO happy and TOO excited. (And TOO IRRITABLE: that's the downside.) ... I have just pondered whether or not my laughter was appropriate and at the peak it was not. I ended up walking the streets at 2 or 3 in the morning laughing my head off for no particular reason. And feeling uncomfortably paranoid whenever anybody passed me by. I never noticed them till they were right there which made me jump out of my skin.

I did some pondering on "what situation am I meant to be in? I don't know" because I'm meant to have schizoaffective disorder and yet I've gone mostly sane. Well I think I'm sane. I know I still have experiences that are considered symptoms eg I woke up only yesterday with words surrounding me in the air, which is the lightest version I know of "hearing voices". But none of this really bothers me. But the upshot is even if I prove to the doctors and the world that I'm sane and "normal" I cannot wriggle out of a diagnosis of bipolar I disorder, because I had one full-blown manic episode. That alone is enough to saddle me with a lifelong diagnosis of bipolar, whether or not I ever go full-on manic ever again. (I wouldn't mind being a bit manic though.) Then there's the uncomfortable fact that whether or not I would be miserable enough to get granted access to a Victorian lunatic asylum, I most definitely do get depressed quite a lot and have been depressed to a greater or lesser extent for years and years. Even my Mum said to me "I know why you took heroin: it's because the antidepressants didn't work".

This is Emil Kraepelin's description of "delusional mania". I was never delusional, apart from when I became convinced people were coming round to kidnap me (it was then that I decided to walk to France). I didn't walk anywhere but thought if I posted online that I'd gone outside that would be enough to put the fearsome kidnappers off! Though I was only raving mad for about 5 days, the mania took weeks and weeks to wear off. And I still get low grade hallucinations.

His surroundings appear to the
patient to be changed ; he sees St Augustine, Joseph with the
shepherd's crook, the angel Gabriel, apostles, the Kaiser,
spirits, God, the Virgin Mary. Statues salute him by
nodding ; the moon falls down from the sky ; the trumpets
of the day of judgment are sounding. He hears the voice of
Jesus, speaks with God and the poor souls, is called by God
dear son. There are voices in his ears ; the creaking of the
floor, the sound of the bells take on the form of words. The
patient has telepathic connection with an aristocratic fiancee,
feels the electric current in the walls, feels himself
hypnotized ; transference of thought takes place.

This is "delirious mania", where you go at the very peak of the attack. It becomes very hard to make sense. People complained about how difficult I was to understand, seemingly unaware THEY were talking more crap than I ever did!

Their linguistic
utterances alternate between inarticulate sounds, praying,
abusing, entreating, stammering, disconnected talk, in which
clang-associations, senseless rhyming, diversion by external
impressions, persistence of individual phrases, are recognised.
Other patients only display a slight restlessness, whisper
flights of ideas to themselves, when addressed look up
astonished and without comprehension, obey simple requests,
give irrelevant answers, smile, weep, cling to people, suddenly
begin to sing a song or scream. A female patient called
out abruptly,

"I am justice ; do not touch me ; I am
omniscient ; away from me !"

Waxy flexibihty, echolalia,
or echopraxis can be demonstrated frequently.

These extracts are from Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia by Emil Kraepelin. It's by far the best book on bipolar disorder and recurrent depression I've ever come across. The modern resources tend to use one another as references, so they all write the same thing, referring back constantly to the DSM IV diagnostic criteria which never were meant to be a description of the condition, merely a device by which all psychiatrists might diagnose the same conditions in the same patients. Grrr.

How paradoxical that a book last published in 1921 should bring to life the experience of bipolar mood swings so very much more vividly than anything written since!

Extraordinary Distractibility of Attention certainly
plays an essential part in defective perception. The
patients gradually lose the capacity for the choice and
arrangement of impressions ; each striking sense-stimulus
obtrudes itself on them with a certain force, so that they
usually attend to it at once. Accordingly, if their attention
can for the most part be quickly attracted by the exhibition
of objects or by the calling out of words, yet it digresses
again with uncommon case to any fresh stimulus. The
picture of their surroundings and of events remains, therefore,
for them more disconnected and more incomplete than it
would be, if it suffered merely from encroachment on the
process of perception.

The outside world appears slowed down while the thought process speeds up. So that life becomes a series of disconnected impressions, like a mixed-up slide show.

I want to take drug addiction and write a text as groundbreaking as Emil Kraepelin's. That's quite a high ambition. I don't know how successful I'll be; but I will try...

I've just discovered a celebratory methadone bottle. One I forgot to drink. Which explains why I felt so ILL yesterday: dur! Well I drank it about 20 hours too late and I feel perfect now. The sweats have gone.

If I can stomach it, I'm thinking of posting something on the benefits of prescription heroin for addicts. I won't go on, but will clear up a few myths here and now:

1. if you give addicts heroin they'll just use more and more of it, not less and less not true. providing the dose is high enough, you don't WANT more once you've had a certain amount ~ If this were true then methadone users would want more and more, people on opiate bachache tablets would take them more and more and cancer patients couldn't be trusted with their own morphine (which they are: they take it home in a massive bottle of linctus)

2. people on a prescription heroin programme will just go on and on using street heroin on top and you won't be able to test for this (because it's all heroin). Pharmaceutical heroin comes in freeze-dried ampoules containing 100% pure diamorphine hydrochloride; street heroin always contains other opium alkaloids: thebaine, codeine, narcotine etc. Testing for these will reveal whether somebody has used "on top" of their script. In official trials conducted in the UK just under 80% of patients managed to stop using ANY drugs on top of their script ~ not just heroin

3. prescription heroin will just get "diverted" to the illicit market. This happend in the 1960s, when a small number of private drs prescribed heroin over-liberally to anybody claiming to be an addict. Most schemes today insist that the empty ampoules are handed back to the clinic, thus limiting the chances of "diversion".

OK those are the 3 main points covered. If only I'd been given a script that WORKED FOR ME I might have cleaned myself up years ago. Until very recently I just couldn't handle the depressed mood methadone left me in. I was a raging needle freak, so drinking a bottle of gloop just didn't satisfy me. I only managed to stick to methadone for weeks on end because I was in a manic state of elevated mood and thought heroin would bring this down. In fact I can only tolerate methadone now because something seems to have changed in me. I still feel depressed, but heroin seems not to make the difference it once did...

... I don't believe prescribed heroin would be a solution for everyone, I just believe it should be an option for everyone. Subutex is an amazing drug ~ far more appropriate for most people intent on detoxing. As I said I WOULD have wanted prescription diamorphine, if only it had been available. Now I'm more intent on getting myself CLEAN. I find taking methadone very depressing because on methadone I'm dirtier than I am on heroin! (Methadone is more toxic than heroin by a long way.) If anything has changed for me, it's probably more that heroin has stopped working than methadone has started working. When I stuck to methadone for weeks on end I was in no way more "together" than I'd been on heroin ~ probably a lot less so. My clothes were dirty and I couldn't face the procedure of washing them because I was hallucinating in the laundrette. I ate the same food for days on end and just did not engage with life the way you're seemingly supposed miraculously to do as soon as you stick to your methadone. I've heard that when you do clean up off opiates the feelings you've damped down leap up vividly. My ex said she used to watch nature programmes and cry. She was a lot less whimsical over furry animals than I. Lots of people at NA say in the first year off heroin you feel shit. The rehab I emailed told me the methadone I'm on may well be acting as a mood stabilizer. So the best result I can expect from going Clean would be a really Elevated Mood. I feel I've been depressed enough On Opiates (even though I was using them as antidepressants) so I'm hoping going clean might kick some life into me.

My big project while I'm still on methadone has to be to write this book about drug addiction. Strangely my motivation has changed from making loads of money (I probably won't make anything) to Explaining Myself. It's not what I did I want to tell the world, it's WHY. Now that might be helpful.

Is this post really badly written. Probably. Am I gonna post it? Definitely.

HAMMY GOES FISHING
I just love the way he can't resist nibbling his fishing rod, the furry swine!



THE WORLD'S GONE MAD
This has been on my random blog for some time. Listen closely to what Peter is saying. He makes about as much sense as YOU all did when I was supposedly "mad"!!!
Anna said this is what some of my comments sounded like at the time. You wonder why I have the troubles I do? My mind somehow got really addled! I don't know how, but it most certainly did....

崩すKuzusu

I AM IN A SOUR MOOD. I'm sitting here, flicking through lists of Japanese characters, thinking about food I would like to eat (except I don't really wanna eat any). Wondering what I'm doing alive.

Do you know I only need learn 2100 characters to be fluent in Japanese. Kanji are about as difficult to remember and to distinguish one from another as highway code signs. If you know nothing about far eastern writing, you'd assume Chinese characters are uniquely bizarre, each and every one. But they're not. A small number of elements corresponding to the sun 日, the moon 月, women 女, mouths 口, water 水, fire 火, trees 木 and mountains 山, etc crop up again and again combinging together eg as two moons under a mountain 崩 kuzu(su す) (kuzusu) 崩す "to demolish", so it's possible for Chinese and Japanese people to dictate unfamiliar characters to one another over the phone by spelling out the radicals. A character's radical is the unit of meaning, usually on the left hand side, under which it's looked up in a Chinese dictionary. I used my Japanese dictionary to look up the sign outside my local Chinese takeaway. They were most surprised when I came in telling them what it meant (it means a tower of wealth and prestige: in fact you'll see the sign 金 ~ "gold" or money again and again. 金魚 (goldfish) appear in Chinese takeaways time and again, because they're supposed to draw money into the shop. 鮭 this sign says "salmon" in Japanese. Note the fish radical 魚 down the lefthand side. The character is pronounced sake, like the drink 酒 sake. The three drops down the left side are the water radical. Anything with those three droplets down the side is watery, fluid or drink.

I really wish I hadn't slept last night. I slept all day as well and lay there with the telly booming, wishing I didn't have to get up for methadone before 6pm.

I did some research into sleep that confirmed what I already know. Now this only applies to people with bipolar and bipolar-type disorders (as far as I know) ~ because in normal depression people tend to complain of insomnia. But when I'm depressed I nearly always oversleep ~ once it gets going I can easily do 16 hours or more a day, every day. Not sleeping is said to be both a symptom and a cause of mania. In the past when I've really got going I would stay awake for over 40 hours, then sleep for a mere 5. Then carry on going higher and higher, more and more irritable, more and more excitable and so on. I wish I was dead when I think about this. I would rather be hyper than depressed, but I'd rather be happy than hyper. I'm not surprised I turned to drugs, namely heroin. It's by far the most reliable thing I've ever encountered in life. The problems surrounding heroin are problems in getting the stuff and enough of it. Even the Australian nurse down the druggyclinic told me "people feel better on heroin than off it, which is why people go on and on taking it once they start" so I said, why not sell it with the cigarettes in corner shops, and she just smiled wryly. I am thinking of going back on heroin until I die. Heroin is the only thing that ever made sense in my life.

I wouldn't need to kill myself until every vein in my body is done in and I can't take it any more (I wouldn't smoke it; I can't feel anything at all from smoking it and no it's not bad technique: I take heroin for the intravenous rush; the residual high, that lasts all day, is just a bargainacious by product. If I did want to take heroin for another 10 years I'd need to inject in the femoral, which I don't want to do. Most people I know who inject there walk with limps and/or have holes big enough to stick fingers in up the crook of their thighs. I only know 2 people who actually lost legs. It's all nasty.

Well this is miserable crap. Does anyone read this any more? I doubt it. I think my blog has degenerated to a series of protracted death-bed rantings.

Whenever I think about life in former times I think how lucky people were. Half of all people died before reaching a year of age, so the true horror of life was never revealed to them. Those who lived longer knew however healthy they were, they need only catch an infectious disease to die away. Now those illnesses are wiped out and only nasty ones remain.

The modern concept of mental illness, by the way, has expanded immensely. I read a book by the head doctor at a Victorian lunatic asylum. It's titled Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia by Emil Kraepelin. The descriptions of my "school report" were also by Emil Kraepelin, but they come from Dementia Praecox and Paraphrenia.

Back to Manic-Depressive Insanity and Paranoia, almost nobody I know would qualify as depressed under Kraepelin's descriptions of profound melancholic psychosis. To be hospitalzed for depression in the 19th century you needed to be in depressive stupor, which means you had lost, or nearly lost the power of speech. Most depressives hallucinated and were delusional, believing they had committed trecherous crimes and brought poverty on their families. The worst depression was the agitated type where patients were reduced to screaming and banging their heads on the wall.

I asked somebody I know whether she had ever been so depressed her head was literally devoid of any thought at all (as the book describes) and she said yes, for weeks on end. That was when they ECTd her. I've only been severely depressed for a very short time. I remember afterwards realizing I had gone beyond suicidal. To be suicidal you need a life to terminate. Once you get to the very end, no life is left. Hey but I did come back.

Then I got to the descriptions of mania which were an exact match of mine. Thoughts flying through the head in vast numbers only to evaporate as quickly as they appeared. Walls and floor talking. Fantastical sights everywhere. Great excitement. Yeah I matched that one all right.

And just like drugs, it leaves you with nothing. From what I see the choics in life are: to have happiness without foundation through drugs and/or insanity. Or money without happiness.

To have everything you want in life you need only adjust what you want.

Anyway how did I get on this subject? Who cares.

When I think of all the suffering in the world I wonder whether anyone wants to live at all. I think most people are just conning themselves that their lives mean anything at all. Most people are arrogant, puffed up with emptiness. Think back to the times you were wonderful. In actuality you probably looked shit and people were laughing at you. When I was younger all I wanted was to take a great big bite out of the world. Now I know how sick the world actually is I'm almost glad I didn't. I only regret not making loads of money when I might have done. Because I would use that money to lock myself away from the world. If I were a multi-billionaire I'd live behind 40ft high walls and never ever go outside. I used to want to be clean, but I don't think there's any chance of that now. Darkness surrounds us.

Akkkh I'm starving. I've got to go. If I read this back I know I won't post it.

Giant Bouncy Balls... etc

THE CHIEF INSPECTOR OF SCHOOLS' final report into goings-on at my former educational emporium continues. Here we come to vivid descriptions of psychedelic drug-taking amongst the students. Who, I must point out for the benefit of overseas readers, are called pupils in the UK...) The school was closed down shortly after this report was made public. Our acid-tripping headmaster was dragged off to prison. The games teacher was deported. Oh, and the tut-tutting in the village shop!

As for the pupils, most of them ended up mad and shipped off to the Broadmoor Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Bloody bunch of tripheads!

Hallucinations usually appear very soon. The pupils
see figures, people with little red caps, black men, cows,
Christ, angels and saints at the altar, " little figures and little
souls," God, the Virgin Mary. The tripping headmaster saw a man in green
bathing-drawers, who was playing with his penis ; a female
pupil saw her supposed loved one lying on her bed at
night. By far the most frequent are auditory hallucinations,
whispering, signals from the air, exclamations, abusive names.
Voices are heard in the sound of the bell, in the chirping of
the birds, in the sounds which animals make ; people speak
about the headmaster and his wife ; there is whispering and
ringing in the walls ; at night there is loud talking in the
room. Sometimes the voices seem to have completely the
character of real perceptions ; the tripper can give their sub-
stance in words and also recognize their supposed author.
Thousands of people threaten and abuse him from the wall,
said a pupil ; another stated that he had got his hearing
from his father and mother ; a third said when he was
brought to the hospital, " The devils of fellows speak here
too!"

In other cases the illusions are more or less sharply dis-
tinguished from sense-impressions. The pupil hears the
voice of God, invisible beings speak, evil spirits let him have
no rest, grossly abuse him : he hears all sorts of things " in
thoughts," has voices for the whole of Europe by the appar-
atus or current ; " Nature speaks to me," said a pupil. The
voices are referred to different places. " There is something
in my ears," declared a pupil ; another heard " memorial "
all day long in her head. *' The words have come out of my
stomach," asserted a male pupil, while a female pupil
heard speaking in her genitals, and another thought she had
a telephone in her feet.

What the voices say is usually unpleasant ; " If I could
only get rid of my hearing ! " exclaimed a pupil on this
account. The pupil hears everything that one says or
thinks about him, that he is going to be executed, beheaded,
that he has committed lese-majeste ; " He is to be got rid of,"
it is said ; there is a war going on. A pupil heard " a mur-
muring," that his brother was dead. Female pupils hear
"immoral stuff"," sexual accusations; forest-whore, married
man's whore, strolling whore; they have committed abortion,
killed a child. Sometimes the voices forbid the pupils to
work. One pupil heard that he was God.

Frequently the pupils' own thoughts are perceived by
others. The people know by the voice-telegraph what the
pupil is thinking ; they speak of his thoughts ; what he
thinks and reads is repeated after him. The pupil answers
silently, speaks with the voices the whole day, converses with
Kaiser Wilhelm, with spirits, carries on dialogues " on the
thought-way through the nostrils." Sometimes also the
thoughts are made ; the pupils must think what others
think ; transference of thought takes place ; " These are
things, they flow to one, and one says them," said a pupil.

Occasionally also other kinds of hallucinations come under
observation, the smell of corpses, the taste .of sulphur in the
food, mephitic air, the feeling of being electrified, pulled at,
of being doubled. " Something wanders about in a wonder-
ful way in my body," said a pupil ; another felt a machine
in her teeth and in her breast ; the taking of the temperature
caused another one pains. A pupil had pain in- his heart
when the post drove by ; another complained, " The cover
smells so loud " ; a third felt " chinks of pain."

Sexual Influences usually play a large part in these
complaints, especially in female pupils. At night women
come ; the pupils feel themselves used sexually from
behind ; their nature is driven off, thrown in their faces.
Women are tormented by " seductive stories," violated at
night, turned into whores ; people wish to practise obscenity
with them. The games teacher has given them desire in their bath ;
they feel it sometimes in their back, sometimes in their head,
sometimes in their hands. At night there are seventeen or
eighteen teachers in their bed ; the school is a brothel ; a
female pupil declared that the obscene practices with the
three and four must now cease. The abdomen has no resist-
ance, is not right, the periods are hindered ; the motherly
feelings have been torn out, the maternal parts have been
turned outside ; the patients feel themselves " made nature-
less." The womb has never been loved, is rotting, sways
about in the hinder parts ; the ovary is to be operated on,
pepper is to be put into the mouth of the uterus...

Bloody hell! You'd almost suspect I'd gone to school with a bunch of paranoid schizophrenics in a Victorian lunatic asylum!

I was wondering why I felt tired just now and do you know, I just realized: I haven't actually been to bed for three or four days. I have slept. Slept in the armchair. Ain't been to bed though. My sleep cycle is so disrupted I decided to stay awake all last night and all today so I can sleep at a respectable hour tonight.

Hey talking of tripheads: I had a wonderful modern-art illusion this morning. I saw the most incredible stop-motion collection of fantasticated faces upon the wooden panels facing the high road. For several minutes I was entranced. Then I went down teh bouncy ball shop and spent £1.20 on a crappy tiny green one that barely bounces (20p) (you can't choose colours by the way; they tumble at random out of the machine) then a huge red one with coloured dots all over it for 50p that bounces so high I nearly lost it on somebody's roof. Then the urge to feed in just 50p more to get a really jazzy one overcame me and sure enough: TRANSPARENT WITH MULTICOLOURED SHINY STARS INSIDE! How amazing is that??!! I'm saving that one for the mental hospital.

Talking of mental hospitals I met a crackhead paranoid schizophrenic on Heroin Corner. He was trying to bed £3 off me and would I go in with him. No point taking £3 worth of heroin, specially not nowadays. Barely any point doing a tenner bag. I usually hit up £20 worth in one go now, even then I wish I'd put £40 worth in the works so I could really feel it. I'm on over 100 mg of methadone so my tolerance is high. The current standard of the street heroin does NOT impress me ~ hence my desire to detoxify. Also I have this recurring nightmare fantasy that one day I'll desperately need opiate pain relief and the evil nurses will leave me in agony because I'm a smackhead. And they'll lie and deceive and pretend that just because you have opiate tolerance you can't get effective analgesia. Diamorphine ~ the VAST majority of which goes to pain patients not to addicts in this country, comes in ampoules of 5, 30 and 100mg. Now the starting dose for pain relief is 5mg intravenously. If 5mg sufficed for all patients, why on earth are 100mg amps churned out by the hundred thousand? About 600,000 diamorphine amps ~ yes, little bottles of pharmaceutical heroin ~ are used by the British NHS annually. Yeah, there are thousands of patients out there with legitimate (or should I say respectible, because medically speaking addiction is just as legitimate a need for opiates as pain) need for painkillers in enormous doses, which is why there are diamorph amps containing 20 times the ordinary analgesic dose. That line they spin that "you're taking heroin, the strongest painkiller there is so there's nothing I can do for you so just shut up and suffer" is yet another medical lie. It's twinned with the one about your body getting all the sleep it needs. (So you don't need sleeping pills.) When any psychiatrist can tell you that acute mania, where you do not sleep at all for days on end, is the one psychiatric condition that can actually kill you. Maniacs drop dead from sheer exhaustion.

Anyway, back to the paranoid schizophrenic, I asked him if he's still on olanzopine (Zyprexa) (see ain't my memory retentive: I haven't been hospital with him in about 7 years and yet I still remember his antipsychotic. EVERYONE was on olanzopine in my ward. My boring old risperidone is highly passé in psychotic circles, I'll have you know. But I specifically asked for an antipsycho drug that didn't induce weight gain, which olanzopine is notorious for. Plus olanzopine can cause type II diabetes, which I really don't want. It's bad enough having type 1 bipolar differential diagnosis without type II diabetes on top.

Anyway, back to Paraboy "the most prang (paranoid) smoker I've ever met", in the words of one dealer... He was saying the Heroin Corner dealer won't meet him anymore because he introduced somebody who promptly attacked S**thead, the dealer and attempted to grab da man's stash baggie off him. O I'd so love to have seen that. I hope my dealer looked really undignified being robbed and I hope he fell over and grazed the tip of his nose. I also hope he suffered a catastrophic financial loss. Which is hardly likely, since Paraboy says his mate just grabbed 3 Bs and pinged off...

Well, Paraboy was doing no better or worse than when I last saw him. He seems less paranoid, but that's probably because he was just a crackhead when I first met him. Now he's hopelessly addicted to heroin, which soothes just about every psychiatric condition while crack inflames just about every psychiatric condition. I keep telling him he's a silly boy for taking gear and I did warn him ... but his eyes glaze over and he asks me if I can spare £2. So I drop the lecture now, and he asks for the money up front as he's more desperate these days.

This Mr Paraboy is the same one I once stayed up with all night in the midst of a psychotic paranoid episode on his part. I took him to the mental hospital, where a homeless man nearly poked out my eye with an umbrella (long story)... waited and waited and waited for hours and hours and finally when he got led off by a friendly nurse straight to the bright lights of the breakfast hall. And I went home to nothing but a collection of rubbish and no heroin because we'd spent all night in the nuthouse reception, instead of begging up money off drunk passers by, as we were supposed to. I have to admit I felt a faint twinge of envy as I watched him leave this mortal coil and depart into the light. Breakfast at the mental hospital is really yummy: you get loads of free toast.

Life is simple in the nuthouse. You never have to make any decision more consequential than what flavour jam to spread on your toast. Or whether to have soup or salad. You're woken up by an irritable Jamaican nurse with deceptively good kung fu skills, herded down to breakfast, packed back upstairs for a lovely morning of TV and cigarettes, back downstairs to a slap up free lunch... more cigarettes. Lots of talk about psychic powers and the spirit realm. Lots of talk about aliens and UFOs. Lots of talk about the Security Services, spy agencies and underground government departments. (I hung out with the paranoid posse and the bipolar maniacs ~ the depressives barely say anything, generalized anxiety is the worst thing to come in with as they probably won't medicate it. Personality disorders were the bunch I really couldn't figure out. They come across like nothing's wrong with them, then come over all weird at random opportunities. There was one guy, as chirpy as a bluetit at dawn, who slashed his wrists deeply with a samurai sword and professed to wanting to die, although he never seemed in the slightest bit depressed. I remember remarking on the very obvious and high anti-jump security stairguard on the route down to lunch and he cheerily chirped up that he hadn't even noticed it! A truely suicidal person will spend most of the day staring at ceilings looking for hooks, pipeworks/etc suitable to hang off, sharp objects to gash himself with... etc)... anyway. Yet judging by this heavily bandaged man's demeanour, you'd think it was Christmas. O yeah and there was a barking mad Chinese guy from the local takeaway whose only English was "Merry Christmas and a happy new year" which didn't half sound entertaining in early September. Yeah so it's not too bad in the nuthouse. It's very sociable in there. I got a crush on a black woman with purple lipstick who thought she was the Virgin Mary. Sometimes I think I'd quite like to go back, you know, instead of taking a City Break to Paris or Brussels. But when I'm severely over-excited or suicidal and the spectre of hospital looms up more seriously ~ suddenly I don't wanna go in. I get convinced I'll be made homeless for one thing. And the trauma of actually going into the place does my head in. Being in there doesn't bother me at all. Why do you think I've bought a sparkly bouncy ball specially for the occasion? (Because it's really boring, unless you have some mischief to get up to...)

Why am I talking about nuthouses? O yeah my sparkly bouncy ball paranoid schizophrenic experience. Yeah, poor guy. Still mad as a hatter. He's got a missing front tooth now. I'm sure it wasn't tooth decay that knocked that out! His last girlfriend looked like a psychotic petrol tanker with period pains. Her gold teeth made her reminiscent of Jaws from James Bond in drag. And they did glint pleasantly in the early morning sun as she and Paraboy trudged bleakly from crackhouse to crackhouse. And no I don't "want" to go in the nuthouse. Really I want to go to Paris. But that costs over £150 for three nights including Eurostar train travel and 3-star hotel. The nuthouse is nearer and free, and they do corned beef salads. And you don't get free Rapid Tranquillization with a needle when you misbehave in a Paris hotel. You just get arrested. Ho-hum... maybe Berlin would be a better idea.

On a more important note I'm seriously into this bouncy ball collection of mine. I'm half tempted to change my second last £5 note into 50ps and buy ten of the massive really boingy ones from the dispenser that spat out that amazing sparkly one. I could do with another one of those: one to keep pristine by my television; the other to bounce. I keep running through the procedure of balancing 50p on the turny-wheel in my mind... turn, turn, turning and ~~ byoiiiing! Out pops a giant new bouncy ball of fabulosity in amazing new hues.

The machine above the giant bouncy balls does 20p exploding fart bombs, which I sometimes let off in our hallway when the miserable git downstairs has his girlfriend round. She's one of those ultra-fastidious lower class people who can't stand the idea of even being near dirt, let alone ever touching it. Which is ever so declassé. The upper classes are always wallowing in horse shit and everyone knows they sleep in beds full of stinky old bloodhounds. An aversion to muck is considered very vulgar indeed in England.

Well on that note I've got to go. I'm not at all hugry but I'm going out of my head craving something to eat. Also this bouncy ball craving is eating into me. Next time I want a fluorescent green one. That's the ultimate in quality bouncy ball entertainment. Imagine giving that one a mega-boing down the park!!!

Right I'm off. Hope y'all had a pleasant day. ANNA GRACE, PEE PEE FACE, GET OUT OF BED AND GET IN TOUCH WI ME

Oh I've got to go: Antiques Roadshow is on and they've DROPPED THE BIT WHERE THEY TELL THE ANXIOUS OWNERS THE PRICES ~ absolutely defeating the entire ******* point of the show!!


Illustrated: I'd luurve a bouncy ball like this one...


NICOLE KIDMAN, MOULIN ROUGE: ONE DAY I'LL FLY AWAY
this is one of my favourite songs of all
"why live life from dream to dream...?"
why? it's all i know how to do

Back on the pills and still confused...

ON MONDAY NIGHT I didn't sleep for a very long time. Tonkie Ears the mouse was pinging about the kitchen like crazy. I eventually went to bed after it had got light. Then I was up before midday.

On Tuesday night I finally caved in and took my antischizophrenia pills. My head has been going increasingly crazed ~ in the literal sense of cracked into zigzaggy shards, like crazy paving. I don't "hear" many "voices" nowadays in the way you might expect: that someone is talking when nobody is there. These days I hear random syllables, and they push and pull through my brains shaking them up as they go in a pneumatic kind of way. They feel sometimes distract me quite a lot. Sometimes I hear my name over and over. Sometimes they say "doo-doo-daa-be-do"; or random things like "trotter donkey". Sometimes they sound like something muttered, and I only catch the last word or two. I also heard my own thoughts spoken by strange voices in my head. Sometimes they echo around, as if I think them and somebody else repeats the last. The "hallucinations" if I can call them that, are much lower grade than they used to be. It took a few weeks off the antipsychotic pills to get as loud and as distinct as they are now. The longer I continued not taking them the more the voices came back. Which is depressing when I think about it in my rational self as it means I'm still mad and I don't like being crazy. I don't like having to take pills just to be more sane than mad (they never worked 100%). And I don't know when I would ever get a life back; on them or off them.

The pills are so powerful I was in bed before 11pm. I slept right through and woke up feeling like it was 6 or 7am; but it was half past eleven. But I did't feel any saner than normal. Random syllables were echoing around and I sat in my blue velvet armchair and pondered where on earth my life is going.

I don't feel so terribly depressed now (or manic). I feel a kind of scattered distraction. If my dr hadn't told me I had a schizophrenic sort of thing going on I'm not sure I'd have been able to match what he told me with what I've read with what I've experienced. I don't think I'd be able to explain. I was never quite sure that what happens doesn't happen to everyone. I don't remember it ever happening to me before some point in my mid 20s, when Prozac originally set it off. A psychiatric person told me that one of the phenomena is a common symptom in certain mental states; it's called "thought echo".

No illicit drugs have ever caused anything like that, by the way. I only "heard voices" on drugs three times that I know of (you can only know that happeed by reviewing your experience and realizing that something you took to be real at the time could only have been a hallucination, which takes quite some concentration and insight to achieve).

So this is what's been happening. I've given in and taken psychiatric meds again. I know at least one person in NA would consider that "using" if I told them. NA can take a hike. In their collective experience hallucinations only occur when you're on drugs but in the past years I've hallucinated much more off drugs than on them, and the hallucinations have a different quality. LSD, for example, typically evokes intricate geometric designs, not voices. It makes you see abstract things, not actual objects, as I did in my manic swings. It's mania that made me hallucinate floridly. Mania lights up the brain like a christmas tree ~ brain scans have shown this. In that state just about anything that happens happens to you more vividly. I say "just about" because in that state I was impervious to cold. I never noticed my windows were wide open in January until my hands seized up enough to cause difficulties typing.

I got up too late to go to NA last night. I got to my methadone chemist just minutes before they closed. The post office was shut already so I couldn't have withdrawn "B money" (gear money) even if I'd wanted to.

Those antipsychotic tablets have really done me in. I feel heavy-limbed and unsteady and I very nearly got the bus 2 stops to my methadone chemists because I couldn't handle the thought of walking there.

So that's today for ya. I just want to go to bed again. I hate being on pills. It's bad enough being on methadone which keeps me physically OK, without having to take something else to be mentally OK. Most people are mentally fine on methadone ~ so why I shouldn't be too..? Does anybody know enough about this to comment? I don't get why I of all people should be more sane on heroin than off it.

I've got to go now. That awful game show where people pick boxes with random amounts of money inside is on and I've got to change channels. Cheery-bye now...

;-)


THE ROYLE FAMILY: Baby David's Christening Party
This is my favourite Royle FAmily episode of all. Everyone is drunk:





PSYCHOPHARMACOLOGY OF RISPERIDONE
by a risperidone-prescriber



RISPERIDONE
by a risperidone-taker; she describes 4mg as far too much ~ 4mg is my dose!
also she does look a bit manic, despite all those meds she talks about...

Back on the (legal) drugs ...(!)

I DECIDED to go back on antipsychotics tonight.

I keep hearing voices in my head jabbering in Northern accents. Jim Royle saying "my arse!" over and over. They're not hallucinations, they're kind of really loud thoughts from outside. But they didn't happen when I was sane. And I know they're supposed to mean I'm mentally deranged. The pills can block them out.

Also the risperidone has some sort of blockading effect on the heroin hit. It doesn't stop the nasty stuff working but it somehow makes taking it not seem worthwhile. So that's a good thing for me.

The reason I stopped taking it was that I was feeling incredibly flat and I thought risperidone was responsible. Then I began feeling depressed on top of that and risperidone is not a mood stabilizer as such. It did make me feel a lot less manic, but I'm not manic any more. So I wasn't sure whether or not to continue with risperidone. So I stopped it. And slumped into a pit of depression.

I was remembering what happened in full-on mania. My brain did everything bar melt on me and drip out of my ears down my neck, hissing, popping and fizzing as it drooled in luminous fingers down my back! Not good. The in-between hypomanic stage was good. That went on for several weeks and prompted my doctor to write to my GP telling of my "elevated mood". The only other detail I remember from that letter was "paranoid ideation".

My Mum wrote to me threatening that I'd get chucked out on the streets. My head was confused enough that I kept thinking she wanted me out on the streets. Or thought I was supposed to go and live there. She thinks that because my doctor mentioned schizophrenia I must have at least 2 personalities. She says some course she went on many years ago taught her this. Whoever taught that course needs shooting between the eyes. I only have one personality. That person might be quite warped and I don't like it very much. But it's only one person. If I could turn myself into somebody else I'd be overjoyed.

Originally I wanted a manic episode back. This had as much to do with being depressed and despairing of ever being "normal" as actually wanting to be so-called "ill". I didn't see much choice in the matter. So I wished the mania would hurry up and come back.

But now I'm feeling out some dimly-lit middle way that might somehow lead to happiness.

I woke up this morning with my head still dreaming. The Royle Family were having a loud conversation in between my ears as I wondered what on earth I was supposed to do. Life seemed so overwhelming. Then I told myself I just had to keep clearing and cleaning my house. Every day. Do a bit, every day. Don't think. Don't think too much. Don't think about it. I only think when I'm unhappy. Unhappy thoughts. So don't think. Just do it. Then when it's done you can think up something else.

So that's my plan. I've been spending hours asleep. Yes the sleep pattern has come back. I slept all afternoon, then went to bed around ten at night and slept through till nine in the morning.

So here's my plan for today. I'm still fighting unhappiness (if the truth be told). And if the truth be told further, I could do with some of that hypomania back: heightened mood and energy. Trust me to get it back only for one bloody day! That has happened before. I costed out how much it would've cost me to go that long on cocaine: £2-300. So that's a good coupleof hundred pounds worth of free high. You've got to look on the bright side.

I'm wondering how Anna Grace is. She was detoxing off heroin in her parents' empty home last I heard. Only her tiny terrier Elle for company. Then she started going manic. But her mood cycles quickly so she's either stuck to the ceiling or feeling a bit down or very down by now. Being as no post has appeared since Friday I'd assume she's down rather than up.

She's taking all these meds for bipolar disorder and they still don't seem to sort her out. Taking an Addreall (dexamphetamine) prescription from another doctor might have somethig to do with this. My own doctor said taking speed on top of bipolar was highly unadvisable. (I only asked this purely for Anna's sake; I haven't bought any speed since 1993). O yeah apart from Dexedrines purchased on the street in 1999. But I'm not into speed. It never agreed with me. Sent a clinically depressed me into comedowns so bad I could barely function at all, at the worst of it. Then the last time I did it, having found a great lump of it at a bus stop, a few lines taken on Monday evening had me speeding away into Wednesday and beyond! That was several years ago when I was still living in a crackhouse. Drugs like that and me don't mix so I stay away from them. So I don't know why Anna takes it. Something to do with an attention-deficit diagnosis as a child. ADHD and bipolar are said to present fairly similarly in children, with bipolar being more severe. She was taking uppers in her childhood (amphetamine and ritalin are supposed to calm down hyperactive children)... then surprise surprise had severe mood swings in adulthood. In fact 50% of bipolar 1s have a known history of substance use disorders. As do 50% of schizophrenics. So drug-use and mental illness are inextricably intertwined. You're only diagnosed after several weeks of symptoms while drug-free.

Well it's my goal to break away from all of this. I'm fed up of being arguably mentally unwell. And unarguably a drug addict. I'm trying to focus my head on more positive things. I'm pondering how I might make a book out of Valerie, the China White Heroin Queen of Australia. She has plenty to say for herself. If I can get a 300 page manuscript out of her, I'm sure Harper Collins would be delighted... wish me and Valerie luck with the inspiration..!

PS I just read this back and it looks like I don't know what the hell I want. I want to be OK and I want to write some amazing books that make me a fortune. And I don't want to be addicted to any substance at all. So those are my goals in life.

PPS I just went down Morrisons for corned beef and cheese coleslaw. It’s my first tin of corned beef in three or four days so I’m doing really well on that score. I was hoping for the Royle Family to accompany me down in my head. But they didn’t. Deserted me just when I wanted them most? Does anyone else get that? Voices in their head repeating catchphrases, telling jokes? I only remember it happening to me after I’d been in the nuthouse at least once. The first 2 times I only stayed in a week, then they chucked me out. I’m scared if I ever go in again they won’t want to let me go. But I could do with a little holiday sometimes. “A retreat” as Bipolar Becky once called it. I don’t want to go in the nuthouse now, but if I get offered it again I think I’m going back in. My head is too confused about what I’m doing with my life. That “breakdown”, if you want to call it that, really threw me on my head. I only use phrases like “mental illness” because it sounds so insightful and grown-up. Really I didn’t feel ill at all. I felt like finally I was in touch with my real self. I was in a really good mood. And the world felt unreal. Which is all, if you think about it, a pretty idyllic state to be in. You could argue that medication has ruined my life and brought me back to a sallow reality. Like waking up in the bath of near-freezing cold water you tried to drown yourself in, floating in a white haze, miserable and still alive. That’s how I see reality. And I want a better life than that.

SO COME ON you nutters! (Or normal people. I heard normal people hear voices too, there's even an international Voice Hearers movement for those who do; link given below...) I want to know whether you get voices in your heads? Or outside your heads? Or both? If so where and how loud? Do they come in from outside? Or do they hover in the air floating? What do they say? What do they sound like? When did they start? How often do they come to you? And is it supposed to be to do with any sort of so-called illness? If so what label? And do you wear the label round your neck like a Jim’ll Fix It medal? Someone I knew with a borderline personality disorder used to do that and I saw other people seemingly confusing diagnosis with identity. Put me off divulging anything of note to a psychiatrist for years, did that.
ANSWERS PLEASE!! + Y'ALL CAN TAKE PART IN MY NOSEY SURVEY (ABOVE)...


LINKS:~~~~~~~
Hearing voices movement: Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_Voices_Movement ~ with links to national orgaizations
Hearing Voices Network (UK) http://www.hearing-voices.org
Interational Movement: http://www.intervoiceonline.org

01:01 hrs. I hope Anna Grace is all right. Not a peep from her since Friday....

My Experience With Bipolar Schizoaffective Disorder: Mental Situation Explained

LOOKING BACK OVER MY LAST FEW POSTS, how miserable was I?! Misery and suicidal ideation left, right and centre. Yes I have been very unhappy of late. I basically feel ill all the time. And yet I don't feel I'm depressed. I feel like nothing is wrong with me, that I'm a time-waster, a malingerer and a fraud and I don't deserve help. Yet looking at my life I'm in desperate need of something. Most people would call it "help". But how can I accept it?

I question why on earth I ran to a doctor in my "elevated mood" of yore.

But that isn't true. I didn't run to any doctor while manic. What happened was I went manic-depressed ~ BOTH in the same week. The walls started talking to me LOUD. I had the most severely mislaid lost weekend of my life. My sense of hearing suddenly went ten times more acute than normal. It was like living in a house without walls. Everything anyone said or did in any room I heard full-on, like the bizarrest radio play. Everybody on the street. My next door neighbours even. I heard conversations, chatter, sex and a sawing noise like somebody constantly going at a piece of wood. When cars rushed down the street they whooshed echoing into a cyberdelic vortex of sound. And I was hallucinating auditorily vividly. At one point I heard voices speaking Spanish and Chinese. At another it was as if somebody had strewn fifty or so radios all on different channels spewing music, spouting speech all babbling and jangling at once. My mood zoomed and soared and I saw visual spectaculars: the northern lights in full colour in my own living room. This is the most floridly psychotic I have ever been. Although I'd woken up feeling so dire I lay on the floor for four hours before eventually mustering energy to get out of bed, have a cursory shower and heave myself up the road to collect methadone.



I couldn't sleep all weekend. Neither could I eat. I remember drinking tomato soup straight from the tin, cold. Something that looked like a cross between fur and grass was growing out of the top. I knew it wasn't actually there, but that didn't help it go away.

Up and down, twisting in and out my moods dipped and soared. I was cycling in what psychiatrists call a type of mixed bipolar state. And I wasn't on drugs. I was NOT on drugs, this is how my brain reacted to "normality". This is what kept me using for so many years. Untoward mental symptoms, only now they'd gone truly spectacular.

The next few days I felt not only down but injured. I curled up in a chair by day seeing visions of myself in prison, full of guilt, imprisoned for the rest of my life. I didn't want to die: my life was over already.

One day I was perfectly blank. Another day I was depressed. Some friends came round wanting to score. I was totally averse to drugs by this time. They used my dealer and I partook nothing. But I got into their car and experienced a rush like suddenly coming up on Ecstasy full-on. I couldn't stop babbling.The more stressed I got ~ and I got very stressed indeed ~ the higher my mood soared. Nothing this intense had ever happened to me before.

I knew that first weekend that something had gone drastically wrong. I phoned my Mum who was already shocked, having seen me bombed out of my head on dodgy benzoated heroin. She had phoned my druggieworker in horror so they had a dialogue going. I told my Mum to tell my Worker I had been hearing voices. The worker called me on Monday morning. I got a psychiatrist's appointment that Thursday. Seeing a psychiatrist is always stressful. I was particularly stressed. On the ride down a black girl was very obviously talking about me and insulting me repeatedly. I was very angry and kept my hands to myself though I felt like throwing her downstairs. I paced back and forth in the medical building, knowing it would hype me up but destroy anxiety. By the time the doctor saw me I was more hyper than I realized. If you want to see the state I was in watch the video on my sidebar "manic episode: Trisch goes nuts" ~ I was in that type of state. A markedly elevated mood, racing thoughts, rapid speech. Knowing the doctor wanted to know what happened, how much, how long, how intense, what it felt like, how I felt, I told him all this in one uninterrupted stream of consciousness. He only asked three questions in the entire session. To my ranting banging "you can't say I'm manic; I've only been like this six days and the diagnostic criteria say seven" he replied "what do you know about schizophrenia?" I answered "it's not caused by a mood and it's a psychosis"... At home his question came back to haunt me and I wondered whether I did have schizophrenia. And I cried.

I stayed off heroin, went down into a depression. Went back on heroin for a week. Wasn't impressed. Back to methadone. My mood was still cycling. One Sunday I was depressed, hearing voices and wandering aimlessly on the streets, too unhappy to enter my own front door. I went home, slept and woke up the next day in a markedly elevated mood. I remember queueing for my money in the post office. By the till they have shiny bags covered in rainbow holograms. One had acid-smiley faces. I was transfixed by the bright colours and depth of texture. I felt wonderful and sensual, the way I used to on Ecstasy. Though I would never in a million years have dropped an E in order to appreciate goods in the post office!

I'm not sure I slept that night. Next morning my hearing had gone hyper-acute again. A man turned up on our garden path jabbering into a mobile phone about having moved my bed around. I lay there thinking WHAT??! All day, I felt irritable, angry. As I was about to leave for NA I heard two voices. In one ear "nervous breakdown"; in the other "schizophrenia". Schizophrenia again. This put me on a real downer. I stomped down the road, caught the bus and endured loud conversations about my background, my reputation, my school records from other passengers. At this time I was getting well meaning but off-beam comments telling me to go to NA or AA every single day. I don't think anyone realized what I was actually going through. One person even said "I used to hear voices too on my way to meetings" this same person criticized me for sitting in a meeting for five minutes then upping and leaving. Maybe their mental condition was markedly different from mine. But hallucinating floridly and poor attentionspan tend to go hand in hand. We were cooped together in this meeting. Everyone smelled of periods and semen. I thought the man next to me was going to pick my pocket. The man giving the chair kept staring at me. And the meeting was so packed there was a chair in the way of the door. I couldn't stuck this out for nearly 20 minutes and eventually left, causing marked disturbance. But I didn't care. I just needed fresh air.

I didn't sleep at all that night. My mood soared higher and higher. My house was a mess and I was supposed to be cleaning it but I couldn't focus myself enough to clean anything. There used to be a dual-diagnosis meeting I always referred to as Nutter Club. It took place once a week. Naomi, the lady who runs it is expert at dealing with people with severe mental health issues. Most people there seemed to be bipolar. A couple of schizophrenics turned up, but they say far less. Naomi had met me and we'd spoken in depth a few times over the previous couple of years. She knew that I believed I had something bipolar going on. Not necessarily bipolar disorder. But I was definitely on the so-called "bipolar spectrum" as it's very trendily known nowadays.



I remember her saying one time between the florid stage of my condition and my actually getting a diagnosis "you know and I know that it's not drug-related but you've got to stay away from everything so the doctor knows that too". This particular comment came back to haunt me. On the one hand I didn't want to be thought of as a druggie timewaster, going nuts because I'd used too much. On the other I was terrified of the term "bipolar disorder" I didn't want the label slapped across my forehead. I didn't even consider that it could have been something else, something worse...

I was in such a state this day I went to the nutter club. I had been dancing about my kitchen in a state of disarray. My clothes were dirty, my hair unwashed; I was thoroughly unkempt. I had great difficulty getting myself and my keys and my Oyster card (for the bus) and a little bit of money and my phone all in my pockets with my brain flying all over the place at several thousand miles per hour, on no sleep (which I didn't really need, though it felt strange to someone used to sleeping sixteen hours or more a day in my depressions...) I arrived at the nutter club thinking my mood was fairly normal, that I was just a bit hyped up. In a group with three other nutters I was unable to contain myself from laughing hysterically. People tried to talk and I kept stopping them saying WHAT??! They might as well have been talking backwards: gibberish. Naomi said "look I think you need to be seen by a doctor" so the meeting closed early and she took me to the mental hospital which was just down the road. I kept asking "do I have to speak as slowly as possible and not wave my arms about?" (ie not act manic) she said "oh no they're so full you don't have to worry about being sectioned" (involuntarily committed). The only thing that could have got me sectioned, as I understand it, would be direct, focused threats of violence or active suicidal behaviour with a specific plan. I was seeing this doctor because I had known for years that something was wrong, that I'd had bipolar symptoms and nobody listened. Nobody took me seriously. i got the distinct impression they thought I was lying. Trying to make myself seem more interesting.

In the mental reception my mood soared higher than ever before. Naomi introduced me to a colleague who looked just like a woman off the television. I peed in a cup and sure enough: no speed, no crack, no cannabis. Nothing except heroin METHADONE and benzos, both of which are downers, not uppers. The benzos were from my attempt a week earlier to give up alcohol for once and for all. But I never managed it.

Naomi and TV Girl said goodbye and I was left with a depressed middle aged man and a depressed black girl who kept phoning someone and screaming her boring personal problems down the phone.

Meanwhile my head was going more manic than it had ever gone before. I went through double doors to a corridor where the walls and doors and ceiling were echoing with scores of conversations. My head went from racing into complete overdrive. The words in my head broke off. So that "I'm going too fast" might stop with "going", the "-ing" broke off: ing-ing-ing-ing-in-in-in-INININININ" whooshing round with spectacular speed.I was losing my mind and the only way I could keep a grip was by yelling these syllables as my head disintegrated into random noise.

I calmed myself down by running through the alphabet out loud ABCDEFGHIJKLMNO.... over and over again. Pacing back and forth avoiding the bad letters. A is for acid, that's bad. B is for brown ~ heroin. That's bad. C is like the sea. It's brilliant in the sun; it's calm. That's good. I flew through them quickly and the black girl was staring at me. I didn't care. And I knew the nurses wouldn't be observing me.

Eventually I saw a kindly man who introduced himself as a psychiatric social worker. He pointed out, very patiently, that we had 45 minutes to take my entire psychiatric history. This was quite some challenge. When was I first depressed? In childhood. In my teens. It first became a major problem at university. Suicide? Yes twice. This got me raging about tetracyclic antidepressants. I took 8 pills and a bottle of vodka. Then I thought "fuck it" and downed a bottle of sixty heavy strength lofepramine. I puked them up almost straight away. The coating was still on the pills in the vomit which was everywhere. All over the floor. On my clothing. Down my hair.

If only I'd gone for Prothiaden/dothiepin I might be dead now. Merely touching on this subject sent me crazy with pent up anger, self-hatred, frustration and rage. I had to enumerate every upsetting, depressing experience. Being yelled at on railway station platforms by people who thought I was going to jump. Being waved at BY THE DRIVER of a high speed train. I've mentioned this before but it gets me to this day. How did he see me? How did he know at close to one hundred miles per hour that I, acting as normally as anybody in such a situation could, wanted to kill myself under a train?

When my depression reached one of its all-time lows I had a persistent idea that the train would hit me and I wouldn't really die. I'd just lie on the trackside in the cold, in the rain, in agony forever, trains rushing past and nobody ever healing me.

Having to dredge through this psychiatric history in the highly impressionable manic state was traumatic beyond words. Now that I FINALLY have a psychiatrist and proper notes and a diagnosis etc etc etc I should never ever have to go through this again. If I ever had to do it in an emergency situation I think I would walk out rather than seek treatment. It's just not worth recalling all that. People seem to assume that I dwell on my past. But I don't. I only dwell as I write. Then I'm in another zone.

Mild thought echo: age 23. Mild antidepressant-induced hypomania: age 23. Natural hypomania: age 27. First heard voices: early 30s.

A long, slow, slide downwards.

The psychiatrist looked stunningly beautiful. Her legs were shiny. The lights outside looked amazing. She asked more questions; this time about the present: how fast was I? How high? How irritated? How many voices? What did they say? How little sleep? She prescribed zopiclone 7.5mg ~ the best sleeping pill I've ever tried.

I walked for two hours then took the bus home. This night I slept for all of five hours. I hadn't slept this long in days. Next day I was even more euphoric. I felt grandiose and grand. I was out of this world. The world was left behind. I hate this world in both phases of my "illness" I never want to be in it.

The mania intensified until I felt like a tiger roaring. I swaggered up and down the streets. When people crossed me, as they often did, it was sufficient merely to glare at them. They seemed to spring backwards. People seemed to make way, clear paths, back off. Yes they looked terrified, but that was a new thing and it felt fantastic. A confirmation of my higher power.

I was obsessed by energy and power. My willingness to drop drugs turned into an aversion for drugs of all kinds. Taking crack or E or speed was the saddest thing you could do. By this time I'd gone higher than I'd ever been on any drug. The drugs seemed a pale imitation of reality. I tried heroin towards the end of the mania and it did little except make me sleepy and racy at the same time.

Over the weeks my mood went through a roughly seven day cycle. Seven days flying high; seven days lower. Sometimes hypomanic, sometimes vaguely depressed. Then up again. I thought this would never end.

My first few days of mania were by far the most intense. My psychiatrist prescribed the antipsychotic risperidone. As I came down gradually over the weeks it began to eat away at me that I didn't even know the name of this very obvious mental condition. I thought it was bipolar. I could see that I was high sometimes; low at other times. Surely that was bipolar disorder? No. The S-word returned to haunt me. SCHIZOAFFECTIVE. That's what my doctor, a consultant psychiatrist, thinks I am. Meaning I matched the full diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia and mania simultaneously. He said my psychosis was more florid than most manic psychosis. I think he also recognized my longstanding issues of self-care. People have long been deceived because I'm articulate, that because I'm able to talk and to touch type that it somehow follows that my house will be in order, my life will be in order that all will be perfect. it's not perfect; it's a mess. During the worst of my illness I couldn't even handle money. I just lost it. Keeping track of my housekeys was a major hassle.

Most people who go manic feel sociable and sexy. I felt neither. I was just as reclusive manic as depressed. I tried to use my hyperosity and energy to clear up my scruffy house, but I couldn't stick with it. Unsociability and avolition are key characteristics of schizophrenia. If you can be manic and still have these things going on they're extremely deep seated. Realizing this has done nothing to help my recent depression. I know I can't choose my illness from a psychiatric Chinese takeaway menu. Though I cried because I had schizophrenia, there are still a thousand physical illnesses I'd less rather have. By itself schizophrenia isn't necessarily a horrible condition. It makes me feel dissociated, unreal, bizarre and poetic. Occasionally I feel paranoid, but nearly always in public places. When I'm on my own I'm OK. It's a big reason why I keep myself to myself. Other people only bring me down.

I've been feeling depressed for several weeks now; it's not the worst depression in the world but it will not shift. It won't go away. It's eroding my self-esteem, making me feel worthless and guilty. Making me want to be dead. I've spent years in this state, so it's like Welcome Home.

This is the state that kept me using heroin for so long. I used every day I could afford to last week. Which puts me into desperation. Addicted and stuck, not coping, back on heroin a drug that I gave up for weeks on end during mania... back in the morass. I can't cope. I don't want to go on. I really can't cope, I'm not coping at all. I'm thoroughly dirty, living in a mess that the council send a sterm lady once a month to complain about. I'm waiting to be housed in a mental health hostel because my coping skills are so bad. I'm 39 years old yet life is reelling backwards. I've done the exact opposite of scrounging. None of the help that was meant to be out there for me came until I had a full-blown psychotic break. I know of people who have faked schizophrenia and psychosis to get housed, to get sick benefit and DLA and they make me so angry because even getting to my appointments feels like a major stress, yet these people are acting, they're quite capable. That's why I feel like I should be dead, I'm only a drain on society. If they cut off my money I couldn't work because there's no job you can do at your own pace. No job that accommodates someone who sleeps more than sixteen hours and NEEDS that sleep, every single day when the depression intensifies. I'd have to keep myself clean and tidy and get there on time. I can't handle looking people in the eye. I deceive people on the phone because I modulate my voice, but I can't do face to face when Im sick.

The jobs I'd most like to do are writer of novels which I'd be able to do even when quite sick. Even when I can't focus to follow a book by another person, I'm able to write ~ as you see from my blog. I don't believe I'm the greatest but I do have a uniqueness and that's what I'd aim to harness.

In more down-to-earth jobs painter-decorator is one I'd like to do. Many years ago I had an intuition that whatever career I went for, it'd have to be low stress. This coincides with all the advice I've read about schizoaffective disorder. Stress makes my condition very much worse. In mania I literally feel something like an accelerator, foot to the floor and a WHOOOSH!! In a normal mood, which I'm hardly ever in, I get horrible anxiety. And I still can have psychotic experiences when I'm in a normal mood. This is how my condition differs from bipolar disorder, where the psychosis occurs only at the polar extremes of mood. In depression everything feels like too much and I can't take it on.

Anna Grace and I have a lot in common. Anna has several years' history of intravenous opiate abuse. Tar heroin, white heroin and Dilaudid (prescription hydromorphone) being her favourite drugs. Her mental diagnosis is bipolar disorder but she's like me. Nearly always noticably up or down. Hardly ever "normal".



Most people with bipolar have episodes, which last weeks. But they end and the mood between episodes is neither low nor high: it's totally normal. But Anna and I are always depressed and when we're not depressed we're manic or at least hyper. We've both had psychosis. Neither of us function very well off opiates. Only problem is, Anna lives 3851 miles away in Green Bay, Wisconsin. We would like to live together in New York City, but short of a massive lottery win, whats going to make that happen?

Anna is my cyberwife. She's cheating on me with some guy called Jess who does bootycalls, as she calls them. Of course this isn't unfaithfulness, there can be no chastity or commitment over 3851 miles' distance. Still, if I meet Jess in a manic episode I will punch his lights out.

Now you've read some of the story of my mental health. I'm not always sure I'm ill. When guilt gets me bad I can feel like I deserve unhappiness. When I really get severely depressed, which is rare for me, I believe I'm in spiritual crisis rather than depression as such. In the lowest of the lows life is over; there is no life. My highs took me higher than drugs. A feeling of connectedness, of spirituality as my thoughts exploded in starbursts. Impervious to weariness, my body seemed to be turning from physical flesh into spirit. That's what I wanted most of all: to be out of this world. As I say, I hate this world at all times. I don't want to be in it, I want to be out of it. It's the only way of coping I know of.

MANIC EPISODE: "TRISCH GOES NUTS"
Knowing she was going to spend all day cooped up in a car, she was letting off steam before a road trip... The comments at Youtube contain a lot of doubters but this is the only film I've seen captures true manic behaviour:~


FUN WITH BIRDS ON THE BEACH
... and here's the sane Trisch with some very entertaining birds



PS: I've found a new blog by Jane, the mother of a freshly detoxed addict who's troubled by anxiety, depression and insomnia. He's opiate-clean but in a very vulnerable situation. Check out her blog and give Jane some moral support: http://janeinsearchofsanity.blogspot.com.

Done In

I WOKE UP THIS MORNING WISHING I WAS DEAD. I have been thinking about myself self self constantly. Because I am in a mess I somehow need to climb out of without the use of a noose (for myself) and a flame-thrower (to clean my house). My back is hurting now so I'm even more done-in than before. The more stressed I get the more random my head goes. Which is better than feeling anxious, so I'm not knocking it. What would you prefer? Your head to constantly tune out? Or to tune into something too negative for words? So I'm quite happy to be tuned out. In fact I might actually to tuning into the true reality. I always did have this impression that life was just a dream.

Well I'm FAR TOO SOBER as I write this. I've had my daily tin of corned beef (been eating little else). Too disorganized to get in shopping. Disorganized, disorganized. I'm having a bash at washing clothes. I need clean clothes but don't feel up to washing them (by hand) I rarely do.

This is why I'm so unhappy. I'm drowning in laziness and the only cure I know for it is a gun to the head. I heard they can give selegeline (an MAOI) and possibly other MAOIs. But monoamine oxidase inhibitors (VERY oldfashioned antidepressants) can tend to provoke mania in susceptible individuals. Hey what am I worried about? I could quite do with a bit of mania. I had so much energy it was unreal. In fact most things felt unreal while I was manic, including myself and the world. Best thing about that was NO DESIRE OR NEED FOR ILLICIT DRUGS. I'm fed up of drugs. But the mere thought of going totally off my head again is exhausting. Best cure I know of for laziness is a GUN TO THE HEAD. If only handguns were legal in this country, I'd probably have shot myself long ago. Better still those oldfashioned barbiturates. Or old coal gas ovens. All good ways of dying. No I'm not suicidal. I don't want to kill myself I just WANT TO BE DEAD. Different thing.

AFTERNOON: I'm not in a much better mood. I had some of the lousy heroin. I can barely feel it. My back is killing me when I try and get up/move. Tomorrow I'm going to have to go everywhere by bus. Im not up for walking very far. I hate being ill. That's why when the psychiatrist told me I had a severe mental illness, I thought the matter over and realized there were about 1000 physical illnesses I'd less rather have.

I was going to ask for suicide advice. Anyone who knows a good method can leave me an email hammynutter@lycos.com, title it SUICIDE so I won't miss it. What I really need is what they use in the Dignitas clinic, Switzerland: 10,000 mg neat barbiturates dissolved in orange juice.

Hanging and cutting really gross me out. I'd shoot myself if I could. There's always the option of an express train but I'm scared of it going wrong. The best option I can think of is to do an opiate detox which will bring my tolerance down to zero, then to deliberately overdose on as much of the best heroin I can get my hands on. I went years hoping I would just die in my sleep. How come it's always someone else who gets to die? I've been told I was meant to be alive. Well if I was meant to live I wouldn't have schizoaffective disorder, would I?

I'm not sure I really am schizoaffective. I think I'm just really lazy. Everything I try and do is a huge great deal for me. It all feels too much. Even going down the road for a pint of milk. I hate picking up my methadone. Once I've done that I crowd straight home and barracade myself behind closed doors. Tomorrow I have to do not only that; I must take my festering body down the drugs clinic, which I really don't want to do. I haven't a single clean stitch of clothing to wear and am not up for complicated handwashing. The stuff is in the sink, soaking. I couldn't take it down the launderette if I wanted to: too heavy for my bad back.

I don't know what else to say. I just wish I had the courage to do myself in and properly. I'm lucky in that I can't really brood on my situation the way you might assume I'm doing. If I tried to brood I would think of Newcastle, forks, balls of string, motorbike outriders... my mind is randomized not obsessionalized, so I'm saved from my own illness. "Suicidal ideation" of course, being a symptom.

Somebody asked me why I don't go help another person. I don't know anybody individually who needs help. So I would have to help via a charity. I did put this idea forward when I was being interviewed to find out what support I needed in my daily life. The lady told me it sounded like a really good idea but "not yet". I wasn't even mentally ill back then, just a bit moody.

I wanted to work in a hospice with the dying. Another job I would like to do is work in an intensive care ward. If I could take furry animals into hospitals to delight the patients I'd be well up for that. Or working with Undercover Customs on multimillion pound white heroin hauls. Rubbishy drugs like cocaine, grass etc I'd hand straight back in. But I couldn't guarantee I wouldn't tax a couple of keys Thai White for mysself. You could go several years on two kilos pure white heroin.

I want to detoxify anyhow. Be clean. That was the hospice problem. The patients are off their heads on my favourite sort of drugs. That's why they're all so happy (at least they always look like they're having a ball, singing and dancing, etc on the hospice documentaris I've seen on TV.

I was wondering what job I could possibly do with my constantly circling mental problems. At the end of my manic phase I had bad troubles with memory. Trouble co-ordinating my hands (typing; I typed out a lot of words perfectly BACKWARDS). I have bad troubles with what Deshane my personal help person who I haven't seen in over a month, calls "selfcare". I'm always broke, I literally lose money, even when I'm off drugs. My doctor said this is because I am ill.

This is my problem: I'd have to perform a miracle to be together enough even to be considered for voluntary work. This is why I'm so depressed. My head is in a mess just as my life is. If this gets any worse I'm going in the hospital I cannot go on like this; I feel ill. The best I'm ever going to get is "sane" but totally run down, unmotivated, dull, drab and lazy.That's a psychiatrist's idea of a good outcome from psychosis. Some people of course do make a full recovery and turn back into a normal functioning person. But that's people who suddenly became ill, who hadn't had years of trouble functioning in life before they became floridly ill. I had mini-episodes going back years. I was depressed for 20 years (arguably since childhood. My family say it wasn't as bad as I say it was. What I do remember was obsessing over the idea that I had cancer, feeling like I was sick and WANTING to die. Then developing an OCD-type situation where I indulged in excessive handwashing because I felt contaminated. That went on, on and off, for two years or more.

When I went to university aged 19 I rapidly went downhill. On the one hadn I wanted to experiment with cannabis and LSD. Contrary to rumour, I barely took any acid, but the effect it had on me was so terrifying to watch it put certain people off ever experimenting with anything stronger than hash. It was hash ironically that caused the deepest damage of all. I haven't scored cannabis since 1993 or 1994. So long ago that the vogue was still for hash, not grass.

I got given a psychiatrist's appointment because I was very down and not sleeping well at all. I'd barely touched drugs incidentally, when I first saw this man. He said "I understand you've been suffering from low mood". Every single appointment he seemed to ask me whether I heard voices. I didn't hear voices back then. When I did start hearing them years later nobody seemed to want to know!

Anyway I went to see this doctor, he did very little for me. I was at university, supposedly having the time of my life, but all the time I was profoundly miserable. My grades were low. One time I wrote an expletive across an exam paper and just walked out. In the second year I did no work at all. My GP gave me a medical certificate signing meoff for the entire term. Eventually I was faced with the prospect of a year in Berlin, which I would have loved. But I wasn't up for it. So I had to drop out of the course.

I worked for about two years until I got struck down with something that made me feel weird and tired and dizzy. This was diagnosed as chronic fatigue syndrome. It mutated into depression. I went on heroin. It appeared to cure my troubles.

Maybe I had two years without anything too bad happening. A mad woman I'd met on the street let me move in with her when I got chucked out of my house. But she stalked me and wouldn't let me alone. Eventually I moved out and went to live in an empty building. Here I started having visions in the night. I heard voices calling my name over and over. One evening on the bus everyone had mystical symbols in their eyes. I went to see my mad friend, the one who had taken me in off the street. She looked like an ancient Egyptian princess. I remember looking in the mirror one night, seeing myself transforming into a dragon. I didn't have money for crack at this point. Heroin was very much my drug of choice.

After some short stays in the mental hospital, which had more to do with avoiding this Stalker-Friend than anything else, I eventually found my way into Emergency Accommodation. My mental health wasn't eerrible at this time. You have to bear in mind the weird things I've just told you took place intermittently over months and months. I wasn't seeing visions every minute of every day. But it carried on and in this new house I got introduced to regular crack smokers. The DSS gave me a year's money in one go and I had a binge on gear and crack. This within a week I was hearing the Devil's voice threatening me from the corner of the room. A prostitute and her crackhead boyfriend moved into the room next door and insulted me through the walls. It took me months to realize that although we genuinely didn't get on, the walls were actually far thicker than they appeared to be and what I'd actually heard had been "voices".

So I knew crack was bad for me. Over the months I cut down my usage to once a week. Then strictly once a week on Mondays only. Then I gave up heroin and went mad. Then that doctor said I had schizoaffective disorder. It wasn't a new thing. So I'm stuck with residual symptoms of this disorder and I know what they are now. Before, I didn't realize what was going on, but I looked this disorder up. You have active and residual phases, mood swings going up and down (mostly down). There is psychosis as well but it doesn't necessarily phase in with the mood problems (otherwise it would be called bipolar disorder with psychotic features). So this is why I feel so depressed. Because of this. I can't shake it. And being "ill" isn't always the worst part of it. It's not how it makes me feel as such, more what it does to me. It's turned me into a wreck of a person, who doesn't like engaging with anything much. When I push myself I get weird symptoms back. When I don't push myself I feel miserable. I feel miserable anyway. I looked up various forums. There's no advice, except "keep taking the pills" which I can't do. They're the wrong pills. Apart from taking medication you're seemingly supposed to just be mentally ill, do nothing and not have a life. I can't do that. So here we go again. This is why I'm stuck.

I don't think like this in the day. I think about the Tonkie Ears mouse, who is an avatar of Little Trotter Donkey. And I think randomness. I don't always feel like me. I don't feel real. They say merrily merrily down the stream; life is but a dream. I just wish the dream could be happier.

If I shouldn't post this then I shouldn't tell the truth. I cannot think through the ins and outs and could bes and should bes. I'm too tired, my back hurts. The TV is babbling at me. I have to go.