About That Time I Went Mad
Nuts. Bonkers. Looney. Insane. Psycho.
There’s a lot of words for mental illness.
And 30 years ago, I was all of the above.
Today, mental illness is almost hip; social media is riddled with hashtags and emojis offering virtual support to those admitting battles with depression and so forth — even if the real support, funded treatment and care networks have all but vanished.
In 1989, things were different though. There was no internet, no social media and no transient slacktivism. Stigma was in — good luck getting a job, nutter — but so, too, was a healthcare system, despite the best efforts of Margaret Thatcher’s devolved ‘care-in-the-community’ mental health policies.
If you were 21 in 1989 it was a pretty cool time to be alive — at least according to those TV retro shows that rewind the years to inane commentary from millennial celebs. We had the fall of the Berlin Wall, the massacre at Tiananmen Square (and thanks to Kate Adie and her cameraman, real, authentic footage), the Hillsborough disaster and Netflix favourite Ted Bundy was executed sans podcast in Florida.
Indiana Jones went on his Last Crusade, Salman Rushdie published a book that would put him into hiding for years, Harry Met Sally and Morgan Freeman drove Miss Daisy.
Big events, turbulent times.
Not for me, though.
In July 1989, I had flunked my degree at Liverpool University and instead of picking up a career as an Army Officer in the Royal Engineers, I was in a bedsit for young homeless in Upper Parliament Street working as an actor at two theatres, the Playhouse and the Everyman, and trying to write a script on the perils of advertising.
Then I took the acid.
Or rather, I took what we now know to be MDMA. Possibly. The thing is, it had been made in a lab in Leeds in the days when dance drugs were still being worked out. This was, after all, 1989, and the media-friendly-in-hindsight Summer of Love would be a year later.
Let’s put it this way: quality control was an issue. The amount per tab was, to put it mildly, ‘excessive’. It seems the entire batch brought to us had leached into the single tab I ingested.
Now, I could tell you it was pretty trippy but if you’ve never had your mind melted it doesn’t really mean much.
In summary: I lost my sight, my core temperature rose so much my girlfriend put me in a bath of ice, my heartbeat resembled a shrew’s after drinking a can of Red Bull, and I went mad.
To be clear, when I mean mad, I mean the following: Unable to see, I could only perceive the world around me as vibrating molecular structures — and depending on how the structure resonated was how I was able to determine what it was. Salt grains, for instance, were easy to make out — NaCl is fairly simple structure; the rest, not so much. People, on the other hand, were largely elemental colours depending on their mood while time was, naturally, meaningless.
Throughout the mind’s decay, I still had an internal voice or sense of Self and as far as it was concerned, I was dying, if not dead, already. On that note, and at that point, I transcended my physical space to be absorbed into a Universal Nothingness.
Being part of the universal nothingness was quite comforting. There’s terms for this: Ego Death, Dark Night of the Soul and, so forth, and I was given the choice of staying in the Nothingness or returning to my shitty flat with the broken front door lock.
I chose the flat. That lock needed fixing.
So far, so normal. Just another bad trip for a drop-out. Every peer group has one or has heard of one.
Except, instead of stopping it got worse. Four years earlier I had been struck down with malaria and I’d taken a fair bit of liver damage in beating it. Problem was, my liver was now unable to process one of the proteins in the mystery batch from Leeds, so instead of the trip ending I was now locked into an acute acclerating psychotic episode.
I was taken to the Royal Liverpool Hospital twice, and twice told to go away — not much tolerance for trippy dropouts in 1980s Liverpool — so my girlfriend bravely decided to take me back to my parents’ home in Teesdale. We took the train and by now I was convinced I was no longer alive but transiting from life to death with the literal journey a simple metaphor. The amount of train tunnels into light on the trans-pennine route wasn’t helping.
Teesdale is the antithesis of 1980s riot-torn Liverpool. It would make an ideal location for second-home-owning hobbits on vacation. It’s sleepy.
Our home was a former temperance hotel, its heyday peaking during the 18th century for Weslyan methodism, and had lain derelict for 30 years before my parents restored it. My parents didn’t drink and drugs never went beyond aspirin so to arrive in this inchoate state didn’t really compute.
My mum made tea because a nice good cup of tea fixes most things in life — but not this. By now the chain reaction that the drug had had on my body was taking its toll. I hadn’t slept for sometime and adrenaline was surging. I thought I had hyper-senses and a simple walk in the woods with our dog to calm the nerves instead saw me trying to leap across the external spans of a bridge spanning a tributary of the mighty River Tees.
When I again attempted to show my super-powers by hanging out of the kitchen window to scale the outside of our four storey-house, my mother swapped tea and Horlicks for the village GP.
Dr Littlejohn — I never did get his first name — was an avuncular Scottish-lilting GP straight from an episode of Heartbeat. If he could have prescribed tea & biscuits and a nice chat, he would have. It was pretty much the universal solution around here. Well, that, and massive doses of anti-depressants, because 1980s rural England was not without its own issues.
I sat in front of the doctor and calmly explained how I was dead and this was all the hallucination of a dying mind so don’t worry about it. Oh, and believe in Love, because that’s a true force.
I was sectioned under the Mental Health Act shortly after.
Next Time: One Flew Into The Cuckoo’s Nest — What Life Is Really Like In A Psych Ward.
