The Bastard Noose: Introduction

I'm not in a crisis.

Yes you are. You tried to die.

Introduction

A very good friend used to refer to pretty much everyone with mental health or sanity issues as “nut nuts”. I am sure he meant it affectionately and knowingly, as he fit his own criteria. He was more self aware than he cared to admit. I will use his term in places throughout; please don't be offended by it. I'd ask him to clarify, but he's dead. That has a lot to do with this too.

Nut nut. Never thought it'd be me but it is, by a lot more people's definition than I am really very happy about. Even if they don't use the same phrase as Matty. I am not going to go into every specific detail of my experience as some of that is private to me. Not all, though. Please remember that this is something I am still dealing with and remains very raw.

A lifetime of confusion thrown into a month in a mental health ward and spat out the back end to where I am now. I can not offer you the salacious intrigue of fame. I am no celebrity. I am not well known, even to my friends. All I have are words and experiences. Words with which I will attempt to portray and dissect my recent time in the tumult of the NHS mental health services.

I hope to write about what I have been through in a way that tries to help others understand the nut nuts around them, or even themselves. Perhaps something which while doing even helps me do the same.

I am writing as I go, it's off the cuff, emotional and poorly written. As an irrepressible writer and talker, I have nonetheless found it incredibly hard to power through the personal and find a way of connecting the mangled words and feelings which shoot out of me, with you.

I want to speak for more people than just me, but I can't use their voices. Only mine.

I don't want to get this wrong. 

Pitching (upselling) what is to come tonally, I'd say it is somewhere between William Styron's Darkness Visible and Russell Brand‘s My Booky Wook. In short: I don’t fucking know. There'll be talk of that hidden horror, some uplifting moments when I was allowed out for a fag, and I will try to squeeze in a crude joke or two.

If I sound flippant, disengaged or even somewhat upbeat at any point, it is because I have to be. I have had to have be for most of my adult life when facing things in public. Call it a defence mechanism, call it whatever. It is how I deal with things and if I wasn't as I am I wouldn't have been able to write this. Frankly I probably wouldn’t be alive to write this.

The currently approved NHS term is “crisis”. I never felt like I was in a crisis, I was tired, fed up and didn't see tomorrow being any better. I am not clear of that entirely, but what follows concerns my time in hospital, a little before that and I assume what will be an ongoing joy dealing with a severely overstretched and underfunded NHS Mental Health service.

Please, if you read this story, try to see through the fickle, flimsy and flippant. See the people around me. Not me. No matter how much I try to make it about me.

There is a lot of love coming, a story still unfolding.