An Unlikely Friendship.

Mental illness is the great leveller of men. And women. And trans, non binary and gender fluid. It doesn't care who it strikes. It doesn't care who you are. A combination of circumstance, genes, environment and the inevitable tragedies and catastrophes of human beings conspire together. I was felled by it at the age of 20. Of course the signs were all there all along. But it took a series of devastating blows to destroy what to many was a glittering and golden present and future. At 21 I had a breakdown. Nearly 30 years later I'm still living it in my work, in my life and in my interactions in at work and leisure.

Late last night I learned of the death of my friend Nigel. We met in a psychiatric day unit in the autumn of 1991. Me a 21 year old recent Cambridge graduate and Nigel a local man a few years older who was not educated who had been battling the demons of schizophrenia for more years than I knew. We made an unlikely duo brought together by the wiles of mental illness in a quiet almost forgotten part of east Kent.

Trying to describe Nigel is easy and hard. Easy in the sense that he was who he was. Hard in the sense that many adjectives one might attach to Nigel have negative and scary implications. The kindest way in the modern world might be to say he was inappropriate. To today's people he "had no filter". He was loud, rude, big, perverted. He knew no social niceties. Nor did he behave in a way that many would approve of. One of the nurses at the hospital once told me...very inappropriately...that they warned young female staff and students that they needed barbed wire in their knickers.

That however does not tell a true story of this tormented man. He never actually harmed anyone. He was kind. He had time for people. He always asked after me when he saw my dad. And he made people laugh.

Vivid but embarrassing memories of us in the greasy spoon cafe near the unit, in the pub at the bottom of the hill, of me almost kicking him out of my car and dumping him on the roadside when he shouted in my ear while I was driving. Of him as the giant in the Jack and the Beanstalk pantomime at the unit.

The product of devastating past which I certainly wouldn't go into on here what chance did he have? I can't answer that question but I know he made the most of what he could.

Statistics tell us that the life expectancy of people with schizophrenia die 20 years younger than the general population. I have lost count of the number of people I knew back then are now dead. Not many if still alive ever really got out of that trapped world. I did and I forever beat myself when struggling with the ludicrous belief that I got out so don't deserve to have dips in my mental health.

The bonds borne of such circumstances are little understood by those who have never been locked up as we were then. Part of my success in my work is I know that world and I talk openly about it.

Remembering all the dead is tempered by knowing the torments and pestilence of mental illness in life. If there is a God may he recall the lives of those I have lost and cherish them as they weren't always in life.

For now I say good night. There is another day for me tomorrow. And for you.

I Heard a Voice.