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I’ve mentioned in general terms before about the visual hallucinations I experience at times without going into any great detail. I’ll attempt to rectify that now.

It usually (but not always – even after 35 years they can still surprise me sometimes) starts with barely perceptible departures from reality – seeing insects and rats is common – and gradually increases to a full on acid trip experience. Not that I’ve ever taken acid, but from descriptions I’ve heard from people who have, my visions are of a similar film-like nature. I’ve been offered acid in the past, but as I take medication to STOP the kind of hallucinations it induces, it would seem perverse to accept the offer, however well intentioned it may be.

From seeing the odd insect, it builds up to seeing great swarms of them, covering the walls, floor and ceilings. Sometimes, a host of cockroaches will form on the wall or ceiling, combining themselves into abusive words and phrases, like “you are a worthless cunt”, “die, you arsehole”, “wanker” and… you get the idea.

One of the most disturbing aspects is how people morph into characters from “The Evil Dead”, their faces becoming those of grotesque, semi-rotten corpses. It’s really difficult to have a conversation with someone who looks like they’ve just been eating a maggoty sandwich and has putrid flesh dripping from them. When it gets really bad, I have to withdraw from the world, as seeing people like that is unbearable. Interestingly, however bad the visions (or paranoid delusions) got, Mandy was never included in them – she always looked beautiful. It brings to mind the story of Kurt Gödel, the mathematician, who came to develop a fear of being poisoned, and would only eat food prepared for him by his wife. When she was ill in hospital, he refused to eat and died of starvation – his love for her triumphed over his psychosis, something I can relate to.

I also perceive colours differently – they become incredibly vivid, like those early Technicolor films where colours look like Daliesque exaggerations . Skies are impossibly blue as if painted by an over imaginative child and people look like someone's turned the colour control up full on the TV. Things look different – not wrong, but not entirely right either.

I could go on for ages about them, but I don’t want to get boring. Maybe I’ll sell the movie rights and retire to a sunny offshore tax haven. Who knows?

After Mandy died my already florid mental health deteriorated even further. I was already on the highest doses of risperidone and mirtazapine I’d ever taken and I needed even more. The voices and hallucinations became cinematographic and “normal” functioning was almost impossible. During an episode I sometimes develop elaborate delusional belief systems which are more resistant to meds than the other symptoms. When the meds have seen them off I recognise them for what they are – false beliefs, but when I’m in their grip they’re as real as breathing.

This one started gradually, as they usually do. I was watching the news on TV when the newsreader called me by name and said “We’re watching you”. Then he continued reading the news as usual. Over the next few days more and more figures on TV spoke to me until it got to the point where every voice that came from the TV became directed at me personally, verbally attacking me, mocking me and telling me my every move was being watched. I had to switch it off eventually, which wasn’t easy as TV had become a lifeline, a window on the world that helped me deal with being alone. After a few days I tried switching it back on, but it was just as bad. In desperation I put a DVD on and I was amazed when I managed to watch an entire film without interruption. I tried another one and the same thing, no problem. It seemed that the problem was only with broadcast TV. Over the next few weeks I worked my way through my DVD collection until I ran out of things to watch. I began downloading films and TV shows with torrents, converting them and burning them to DVD – I bought spindles of 100 blank disks online. It was a slow process with my 8 Mbps broadband connection and converting and burning took time, but it kept me busy, which I needed. It took me nearly a week to acquire the entire collection of classic Doctor Who episodes. It gave my obsessive side something to focus on. I amassed an impressive pile of DVDs which gradually took over the living room.

I’d unwillingly upped my meds and they were starting to kick in, so after a while I tried watching broadcast TV again, and the delusion seemed to have evaporated, but it didn’t have the appeal it had before, so I switched back to DVDs, only watching ordinary TV for the news and occasional programmes. Now, faster broadband has made video streaming possible and my DVD collection has stopped growing. They still take up a lot of space in my living room and I haven’t got space to put them anywhere else. I rarely watch normal TV now, preferring streaming and IPTV. Sometimes the delusions return, but I’m ready for this one now.

Someone in an online forum once asked me if I regretted my mental illness. I said no, I’ve experienced levels of consciousness that some people spend a fortune and a lifetime to achieve without success. I’ve been to places in my mind that most wouldn’t get to if they lived to be a thousand, so no regrets here. I wouldn’t change a thing.

Just had a weird time vortex experience with myself from 1977. We had quite a chat.

1977 Me : What’s that crap you’re watching?

2021 Me : Pink Floyd, the PULSE concert.

1977 Me : What the fuck? You used to wear a t-shirt slagging them off.

2021 Me : That was years ago, times have changed, mate.

1977 Me : Have they? I think you’ve just become an old wanker.

2021 Me : And you were a young one. I remember you and that Blondie calendar. You were an Orgasm Addict, always at it. Especially from April to August.

1977 Me : I bet you vote Tory now.

2021 Me : Bollocks to that, I’m still a socialist.

1977 Me : I doubt that. Listening to shite hippy tunes. You’re a revisionist prick.

2021 Me : Old punks are allowed to listen to different music now, they changed the law.

1977 Me : That’s wanker talk. You are a wanker, aren’t you?

2021 Me : Stop saying that. I can’t be as bad as you were.

1977 Me : That’s between me and my love glove. Anyway, I bet you’ve forgotten the lyrics to 1977.

2021 Me : No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones? No mention of Pink Floyd there.

1977 Me : They only left them out cos they couldn’t think of a rhyme for it. They meant them too.

2021 Me : This is pointless. There’s no reasoning with you.

1977 Me : Ha! I’ve run rings round you ideologically, you’re culturally bankrupt, pal.

2021 Me : I give up, I’m going back to bed.

A mental health diagnosis is just a label, and they keep changing. The labels they stuck on people 30 years ago are different now, and they’ll probably be different again 30 years from now. I don’t like them, and I try not to use them myself. I find them unhelpful and sometimes offensive. Labelling someone just enables people to delude themselves that they understand what a person is going through.

It’s 1987 and I’ve been a patient at Park Clinic day hospital for a few months. There’s been some suicides and the mood in the place is pretty sombre. I decided I’d had enough of it all and it was time to check out. The only question was how to do it. I knew it wasn’t going to be an overdose as I’d made an unsuccessful attempt at that when I was 14. I remember with great clarity being rushed to A&E in a panda car through rush hour traffic. The siren was knackered and it made a sound like the amplified noise of a goat being strangled. When I got there, they took me into a large room and laid me out on a table. There was a bunch of medical personnel in gowns and they put a rubber tube down my throat and pumped my stomach via a funnel for what seemed like ages. I found out later they called it gastric lavage. I definitely didn’t want to go through that again, so after much thought I decided that carbon monoxide poisoning was the way to go.

I nicked the hose from my mum’s hoover, stuck it in a carrier bag and put it in the boot of my car. I waited until dark and headed off looking for a suitable place. I eventually found a field a few miles out of town and parked up. I got my torch and took the hose out of the boot. Looking good so far. It never occurred to me that the exhaust might be hot after all my driving around, but it was, and I nearly burned the shit out of my fingers trying to attach the hose to the tail pipe. So I tried again, carefully, but the fucking hose wouldn’t fit. It was a fraction too small, but not small enough to fit inside the exhaust. It’s not like this in the movies. I had some insulating tape in my toolbox, so I got that and tried to fix the hose on without touching the tail pipe.

Odd, I meant to end it all but I didn’t want to hurt my hands. I just couldn’t manage it and I just stood there, looking at the hose. It was like that film where the guy tries to top himself, but keeps fucking it up, with hilarious results. I was never further from laughing then though. At that moment I saw approaching headlights, so I thought I’d better call it a night. Somehow, the entire episode put me off the whole killing myself idea and the next day at the clinic I gave the hose to my psychiatrist and told her to keep it from me. My mum never did find out what happened to her hoover hose.