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 days 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.