Amongst Friends?

For many years I detested the mental health system and despised and ranted at those who ran it. I was an angry young man. But who wouldn't be after being locked up despite committing no crime? To be told over and over again this is what you must do then blamed when it didn't work? I was also a very ill young man.

My time in the mental health system was torrid to say the least. That I didn't always do myself any favours by raging against a system that I couldn't change is clear to me now with the wisdom of age. Yet the system was one based on a kind of bizarre hierarchy of need where a diagnosis right or wrong determined someone's path not his or her need. The saddest thing about my story is that they got it very wrong. And I still bear the scars of that to this day.

When I was writing A Pillar of Impotence between 2002 and 2005 I wanted vengeance and I wanted the truth about an utterly flawed system to come out. Did I achieve that? I guess you have to ask those who have read it.

By the time I wrote Charon's Ferry as a follow up my life was very different. Having sworn I would never work for the enemy I had done just that mainly because they gave me a job when no one else would. I was living in a different place and thriving in the main. Respected...so I'm told...my name is widely known in mental health circles around here. I never felt I would return to the bleak darkness that enveloped me earlier this year. But it did.

Through all that I was stunned by the response of my friends. And I have friends in many places. For the last few weeks I have been walking into the building in town that houses local mental health services as a patient.

Today I walked in with my working hat on. And I was greeted warmly by my colleagues and peers. And in fact my friends. I have come a long way from my hate and fear. Today reminded me that however little I think of myself on the days when my mind betrays me others do not though. I have made friends with the enemy and they are no longer my enemy.

So reflecting on opera night with Handel's Arminio I raise a toast to all my friends wherever they are.

I Heard a Voice.