Extremes of emotional affect are familiar to me now. When I was younger,
I could go from ecstatic jubilation and supreme confidence to howling,
death-wishing floods of tears and crippling feelings of self-doubt in
the space of a few hours. As time has passed, the transitions have
become more gradual, but even now they can still take me by surprise on
occasion. The periods of high or low can last from a few hours to months
on end. Sometimes other symptoms are present, like hallucinations and
hearing voices, especially during a spell of low mood. When I’m high,
the voices are there less and the ones that do visit are the “good
guys”. When I’m high, I have an incredible amount of energy and feel
like I could do anything. The first few times, my thoughts would be like
stampeding wild horses and it was difficult to actually focus my mind,
but over the years I’ve come to have a little more control over them,
although they can still be pretty unruly. 

In my early 20s, depression and anxiety hit me so hard I sought
professional help. Before the low, I’d been feeling fantastic and it
wasn’t until much later that I realised that I’d been experiencing my
first high. My GP prescribed anti-depressants and referred me to Park
Clinic day hospital, and I became a patient there for the first time.
The patients were a complete mix of just about every kind of mental
illness, age and backgrounds. I wasn’t feeling particularly sociable at
that time, and settling in took a while, and was a bit like starting at a
new school or job, but even harder. After a few weeks, the meds began
to have a slight effect, and it became slightly easier to interact with
the people there. I was still plagued by thoughts of suicide and
feelings of worthlessness, but I also felt less isolated and began to
talk about what was on my mind more, both to other patients and the
medical staff. I was assigned a keyworker, and had regular sessions with
a psychiatrist. I didn’t tell anyone about the voices I was hearing, as
I was terrified of being sectioned. This had happened to some of my
fellow patients, and their stories scared me shitless. I only told the
psychiatrist about the hallucinations I was having, as they were
actually more disturbing to me than the voices, and that was when I was
first given an anti-psychotic medication. I was lucky, and it helped
with both the voices and the visions after a while. It wasn’t without
side effects though, and made me feel a bit spaced out, and sometimes
when walking I felt like I was floating a few inches above the ground.
Not entirely unpleasant, and I was prepared to put up with the weirdness
in exchange for the benefits.

The depression was more resistant to pharmaceutical intervention than
the other symptoms, and I continued to feel really low. There was great
pressure from the medical staff and my keyworker to undergo ECT to deal
with my stubborn condition, but despite finding it hard to be assertive
at that time, I resisted them. I was especially determined after seeing
the effect it had on a friend who’d been given the treatment. One day
he was acting and talking quite normally (as normal as any of us could
be described as being), and the next he was talking in monosyllables and
staring vacantly into space, barely aware of the rest of us. I was
reminded of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest when McMurphy gets shock
treatment. Fuck that. I continued to say no, but they kept on at me for
weeks until finally realising that they were wasting their time. 

I love spending money when I’m high, it’s just a pity that I’ve never
had much. In the noughties, credit was easy and I had no problem getting
a couple of credit cards which I proceeded to max out within a couple
of months. Mandy egged me on (she always welcomed one of my high
periods, especially if it followed a low one) and we accumulated an
abundance of things which we didn’t really need but wanted badly. The
end result was that I declared bankruptcy a couple of years later, which
taught me a valuable lesson. Now, I don’t spend what I haven’t got.

I’ve been asked if I ever think about the way my life might have turned
out if I hadn’t been struck by mental illness and I have on occasion
thought I could have been a punk rock star fighting off rampant
groupies, or a millionaire entrepreneur cruising the Caribbean in a
luxury yacht with gold bidets and a helipad, but I don’t like travelling
too far down Regret Road – it ultimately leads nowhere except perhaps
to a tendency to wallow in self-pity, and I’ve no time for that. I’m
just thankful to still be here, I’ve known plenty of people along the
way who had it a lot worse than me. Some of them didn’t make it, but I’m
still breathing.