This is off the cuff again, I have told this story many different ways, so many times.

I'll breeze over the early bits, I could but I will not blame anyone else for what happened in my life so far as drugs and mental breakdown is concerned.  I accept all that as fate, whatever that is.  My folks did their best and if I was in their situation I'm not sure I could have put up with half of what they did.  Besides the innocent teenage booze and the odd toke of pot as a lot of teens get into, I was a little different.  I was a binge drinker at 14, on acid and ecstasy at 16  and dealing by 16 also.  I was a daily user of amphetamines at 17.  I had no teenage sex life, I put that down to the drugs.  Physically, it was rather impossible to conduct the act, never mind the anxiety problems.  I had fun too, I had girlfriends and was quite popular in the groups where I mingled.  I went to rave parties most weekends and I worked full time also for a year, leading most of the way to my first lock up in hospital.  I collected records and dj'd a little at parties, nothing big, real small stuff, mostly in my bedroom.  I just loved the music.  I saved my money from work to buy all the vinyl and dj gear.  I paid my own way.  Was on a good wage.  I wheeled and dealed a little but I was no big time guy, just a kid looking for a free time and sort his friends out with the same.  Then it got out of hand...

It got to the point I had at my disposal, twenty or thirty free ecstacy pills every weekend for personal use.  Overlapping the height of that, I hit the acid trips worse than ever, really made a pig of myself.  I knew I was flipping out.  So Mr. Bright Mind thought speed would solve all that.  Amphetamines would straighten me out.  No such luck.  I got high on coke one night and half hour later I had a fit full of amphetamines in my arm and so that went.  I quit my job to save further embarressment.  I couldn't cope.  I had about 4 weeks pay spare and on the last acid trip, I never came down.  All my mates were fine, went home and slept.  I roamed the streets of my home city for I don't know how long.  It was weeks, I know that much.  I don't know where I slept, or if I slept.  I was high but this was something I had never experienced.  I was in the midst of psychoses and throwing money away at the casino.  Buying top shelf drinks in 5 star hotels and walking down highways singing to myself.  The same melancholy tune the whole way.  I was thinking about death.

Eventually, so mad that I was, somehow I knew what needed to be done.  I could no longer speak, I couldn't eat or sleep, I couldn't sit or stand or drink.  I was properly close to death.  All I could manage was to pick up the receiver and place it on the bench.  I dialled emergency and left the phone where it lay.  I continuing skitting around the house until the police and the emergency psychiatric response team showed up at the door.  Then a family friend by chance turned up, and mum and dad who were probably just glad to see me alive.

The cops interviewed me, they turned up because obviously there was something suspect about the call.  I seem to remember maybe, just maybe I said fire on the phone but I really can't be sure.  I think you understand that.  Anyway, the police escorted me down to the community psych centre and I was interviewed again.  Still mute, scared as a beaten dog and sent up the the local hospital emergency department.  Some of the following reports I know only from what I've been told.

When they took me out of the car at the emergency department, my memory is blank.  As the story is told to me by my case worker of nearly ten years now.  I hated her at times but we get along fine now.  I am not under treatment or obliged to visit her but I do sometimes because she helped me so much.  Apparently she got a call that first day we met.  An emergency department nurse called her over from the psych ward and pretty much said get your butt over, theres a patient tearing our rooms apart and he needs treatment. Now.  She darts over and said to be recently, "I got there and I was a bit scared but then I worked it out, it was you, a scrawny little guy, not even 5'7.  I laughed when she told me.

When they got me to the psych ward I still fought.  Through freedom of information I worked out the amount of drugs they put in me that day to knock me out.  I was secluded in a locked room, in a locket corridor of a locked ward.  I was given 5 different drugs in a total of 7 intramuscular injections.  Fast acting sedatives, anti-psychotic tranquillizers with each its own wonderful name.  It was all within a half hour.  They were relatively humane I suppose.  They tried one, then the second and kept giving me chances.  Hoping to put me down.  Not a chance.  I fought and fought and screamed and yelled and scratched the walls.  I ripped the rubber mattress to shreds.  Eventually, as the records read, 'the patient was nursed to sleep in his underpants,' Whatever that means.

Till next time from the Cash Cow.