Non fiction

Sixes and Eights

Since I was diagnosed in 2005 I have received a great deal of sympathy, understanding and tolerance from my friends and family, yet I have also been exposed to verbal abuse, antipathy, intolerance, hate, physical violence, disgust and ridicule. The experience of a mental health disorder is a highly personal and varied thing and no two people ever experience the same condition in quite the same way. All I can do is lay down here in words, as best I can, the broken and refracted impressions of my time outside of the normal spectrum of perceived reality, as experienced through the spectacle of my illness.

We all know that feeling you get when you've forgotten something important you were just about to say. It's like that but constant, a blank in which you are continually trying a dig up that key idea that made your entire train of thought make sense. But once the train is derailed it never quite fits back on the track. You will find that your mind is whirring so fast that you can't hold on to your own thoughts, it's like clutching at grains in a sandstorm while it is choking you.

That frog in your throat that you felt when you tried to talk to your upper school crush, it's similar to that except every time you think you have swallowed it, another frog leaps right back up in its place until you feel like you are shitting amphibians, and well you could be, because you no longer have a handle upon what is quantifiably true.

It's a space you get lost in where simultaneously nothing seems possible and yet you can't quite believe anything to be impossible. You are unsure whether or not you did actually once go into space, or unearthed the fundamental truth of existence that could put an end to all philosophical discussion once and for all, and yet the task of getting out of bed and getting dressed is beyond daunting. Life in the ordinary is bizarre enough, but when you are ill it's like you are embroiled in a grand conspiracy, which you and only you will be able to bring to the light of day if you can just shake off your persecutors and unearth the clue that links these seemingly unrelated but, as you well know, far from fortuitous events, which you have divined as being at the heart of it all.

According to the mental health charity Mind, one in four people will experience some form of mental health problem each year, which means it has probably happened to someone close to you. Maybe you have experienced mental health problems yourself. I was diagnosed with Bipolar Affective Disorder, more commonly known as Manic Depression, in 2005 when I was eighteen years old. Bipolar is a serious and at times debilitating condition in which sufferers oscillate from extremes of depression and inertia to those of mania and hyperactivity. In its extreme form, Bipolar can even lead to psychosis, a state in which the sufferer loses touch with reality. Bipolar, according to Mind, will affect as many as 3 in 100 people during their lifetime, a statistic that surprised me: even I didn't realise how common my condition is. People famously dislike talking about their mental health. There is a stigma that hangs around these issues. We absurdly carry our issues around like some private shame and often avoid seeking the support and treatment that could help us. I want to give a clearer picture of what it means to have a mental health condition. As inadequate as the written word is, I want to provide a glimmer of what it is like to live with an illness like this.

You can still be, at times, remarkably lucid and/or functional. During one manic spell, I told the ski company who were refusing to pay me overtime, that I had fulfilled my contractual hours and that they could take their group of sixteen, snotty, unruly, over-privileged teenagers (four more than the number of snotty, unruly, over-privileged teenagers allowed by Swiss law) and teach them to ski themselves. I managed to arrange and pack my belongings, order coffees and pastries, charm a Swiss family returning to Geneva in broken French and buy tickets to travel (merci monsieur, vous avez une bonne après-midi). I quite competently made my way back, some 1155km, by means of hiking, hitch-hiking, high speed train, coach and Eurotunnel. I befriended a group of American tourists staying at the same youth hostel and even conducted a brief love affair with an Iranian artist in Paris, before finally producing my papers when prompted at the border without arousing any suspicion to make it back to old Blighty.

Less than a week later I was institutionalised, an incarceration that would last several months.

While it may not always be the case that you cannot function and can appear to be well in control of your faculties during these times, behind the eyes your system of feedback is slowly corrupting, your ability to interpret and respond to people and events is working on a totally different loop to the one occupied by others. This means that at some point the information feeding back and forth between you and others is going to miscompute. At this point you are going to feel like a string of sixes and eights in a binary system, and while you recognise that you bear a relation to all those zeros and ones, your values just won't correlate in any meaningful sort of way. You are, as it were, a bug in the system.

The most destructive thing about mental health disorders is the way they move in self-fulfilling cycles. Firstly you are fine and interact normally with others. Then your perception becomes steadily skewed and you start to act more eccentrically. This eccentricity makes people look at you oddly or become wary of you. When you notice this change in attitude, you yourself become wary of how other people are being, which in turn accentuates your existing eccentricities. This goes on until you find yourself in a paranoid state, unable to interact with people in a functional way, ultimately alienating yourself from those around you and vice versa. And there is no greater boon to insecurity than being alone.

There is an inevitable chain of events set in motion when you end up in this paranoid state. You have this clawing suspicion of anything and everything, attributing significance to minor events or objects, arbitrarily and spuriously. This suspicion wrings your heart with an anxiety that seems so acute as to be physically painful. It can become so severe that you feel like you want to pluck your heart out. You turn away from the outer world and begin to feel the problem inside you, internalising your obsession, interring your thoughts and turning your suspicion for the outside world in upon yourself.

Imagine then, with this anxiety and paranoia running through you that three or four burly men or policemen, fetch you out of your home, or pick you up off the street as may be the case, and bundle you into the back of a van (with varying degrees of force depending on how much you struggle). You are then taken to an unfamiliar clinical looking building where you are robbed of your shoe laces and belt or, at worst, all of your clothes altogether. In the latter case, you are dressed instead in a sort of apron with sleeves that leaves your backside exposed to a room full of strangers. You are then subjected to a physical assessment, which may include (but is not limited to), being poked and prodded, having your knee tapped with a rubber hammer, having things waved in front of your face, having a light shone in your eye and having your genitals rudimentarily inspected (though this may have been an eccentricity of the Canadian system in which I was once interred). You are then presented with some oddly coloured little pills which could be dragon' s teeth and told to swallow them on the proviso that if you don't there can be others found that will fit your anus.

You are then told that either a) you are sectioned under the Mental Health Act, which means you can't leave (whether you are in a fit state to understand this is immaterial), or b) that you are here of your own free will but that if you try to leave without the approval of a consultant psychiatrist you will be instantly sectioned (see above).

In the cold sober light of day these memories are unpleasant at best but when feeling vulnerable, anxious and paranoid they are tantamount to torture. They feed the paranoia. Like the man already far gone who feels compelled to drink more without really considering why and without having the cognitive faculties to know what's best for his health, you drink in this tide of events that only seem to affirm all your worst fears. As a result, you feel a great sense of vindication. You were right about them.

Things usually get a lot worse before they get any better.

There is the endless frustration and sterile boredom that oozes out of every inch of the beige walls, linoleum floor, tasteless meals and harm-proofed furnishing on what we euphemistically call a mental ‘health’ ward.

You are exempt from the law which applies to those deemed sane. You can be detained for an indeterminate length of time, deprived of possessions, forcibly medicated and in some cases violently electrocuted. This is still considered therapy in some institutions. Other countries go further and surgically remove large sections of the brain, even today. India I'm looking at you!

Despite the beginnings of a shift in the stigma surrounding mental health, there are many unhelpful stereotypes which permeate our culture today. Just the word ‘psycho’ produces a Hitchcock movie, or the chainsaw wielding, prostitute butchering Patrick Bateman of American Psycho. I have even been guilty of calling someone a psycho myself when they have acted unreasonably or irrationally. For some reason this sort of epithet seems to have remained socially acceptable to bandy about whilst it would raise eyebrows if someone were to refer to another as a ‘spastic’ owing to their physical ineptitudes. While there is certainly an ignorance of the distinction between psychosis and psychopathy, ultimately those who are mentally ill are more often a danger to themselves than they ever are to anyone else. They are more likely to be the victims of violent crime than they are to be the perpetrators.

So what do you do when you meet your real life psycho? We're all out there, working surreptitiously in secluded motels, playing the financial institutions of Wall Street, and yes, even writing in reputable Russell Group universities. Don't scream or run a mile, or kindle some form of primitive witch hunt. Say hi, go for coffee or a drink, catch a film, walk with a picnic to the top of Bole Hill with us, play Frisbee in the summer with us, have a snowball fight in the winter with us and take a hike to the Peaks in the spring with us. Treat me as you would anyone else you are building an acquaintance with, just appreciate that extra degree of difficulty it has taken for me to become your friend.

William Watts