I remember the first - thus far only - time that 'they' ever admitted me for psychiatric evaluation.
I'd been struggling to get out of bed for a few mornings; then a few mornings became several weeks, and the sleepless pressure was becoming enough to blow my head apart.
So I went and begged the doctor for pills: please, give me anything to stop my very life leaking through my synapses. Some months ago, I reported the recollection that these 20mg pellets - the anti-depressive equivalent of shandy - turned everything flat and white and featureless. I existed in cloud, in mist, in snow.
Easily, a gift, I passed from one side of the wall to the other, ghosting through solid objects and people like steam. Abracadabra! Like some cosmological mind-trick, a feat which seemed to take a matter of seconds had erased four hours from my life, and I would wake up shaking. Like one of Pac-Man's ghosts, the pills let me travel wherever I wanted for a while, uninhibited.
The pills didn't fix me. Being a modern, impatient child of my time, I expected that I should be fixed. This is how I wound up in the waiting room of a South Yorkshire psychiatrist, hostile eyes following the cleaner as she swept around my feet.
When I was invited into my consultation, I pushed angrily into the room and demanded to know why the psychiatrist had a spy in the waiting room, watching my every move. What had she reported back, and what was the thinking behind it? Is it because you know my answers in here are rehearsed, while the ones outwith your confines are natural and unhesitant?
It was without pills, and without profession infringement, that I re-established some sort of normality. The difficulty in waking up subsided, for no apparent reason, and I ultimately threw the pills in the bin. I wished that the bin was the deepest mine-shaft on the face of the earth, or the Mariana Trench. I wanted them to be irretrievable.
Now the same stirrings which precipitated the deepening of the misery I had are happening again. Lethargic, and falling fast from the high of three weeks ago. The financial markets have taught us the difficult lesson that for every boom there is a bust. Regretfully, I anticipate that the cycle will soon have completed another one of its inevitable circles, and it so happens that I must soon start from the bottom again.
