Addiction and Bipolar Disorder

The only thing on your mind when you are suffering from mental anguish is how to subdue the pain and find some welcome relief. These days it is all too easy for young people to find drugs. Even at school drug pushers hang around the school gates as pupils leave, hoping to make a sale and get them addicted when they’re young. 

Both of my sons have had considerable experience of drugs. The youngest, Nicky, was a pupil at an expensive and highly esteemed public school in Hammersmith, where they were delighted to take him at the age of nine because of his proficiency in maths. It was as a result of his friendship with the grandson of a well-known Lord of the realm that, at around the age of 15, he was introduced to an Iranian drug dealer who, from then on, was only too happy to supply all the boys’ needs. Public schools educate many of the scions of aristocratic families so, coming from wealthy families, they are deemed to be low hanging fruit, and suitable for cultivation. Eventually the other boys gave up their habit but it was harder for my son to do the same because he was suffering from an undiagnosed disorder. He carried on taking drugs – self-medicating for nearly thirty-five years; becoming an addict in the process.

It was a long time before I realised Nicky was taking drugs, as was his older brother, Leon, who had been smoking marijuana for some time (something I had recognised for some years, hoping it was just a passing phase). By then neither of my sons was living at home, and, for six months of the year, I was living out of the country on another continent – somewhere I hoped I could finally follow my dream to become an artist.

Nicky had been a sensible as well as an academic child; one that I felt would become responsible regarding his health and welfare. In hindsight, knowing his older brother was taking drugs perhaps should have alerted me to the fact that it might have encouraged him to follow suit, but for a long time he was clever enough to hide his dependence. It had always been Leon who I had worried about because of his apparent vulnerability and his overly high IQ. While Nicky also had an above average IQ, he appeared to have a preternatural maturity. Perhaps I simply couldn’t face another of my brilliant sons suffering from any kind of mental affliction.

In the mid-1990s, I was divorced and free, travelling back and forth to my lakeside house in Canada which I had renovated and extended to contain a studio where I could paint. Then on one of my trips back to the UK, I became aware that my youngest son was in trouble. He insisted his father, who had recently died, had agreed to have both our boys groomed for higher purposes by certain powerful people because of their outstanding IQs. Both myself and Leon initially accepted the story (as it was presented in such a convincing manner), but in due course it became obvious it was false and typical of the ‘grandiose’ stage of what was to be diagnosed as his hypo-bipolar disorder, aided no doubt by his drug addiction.

In 2005, after Nicky sold his flat in London, it was fifteen years of trying to keep up with news of his peregrinations by car around the country, from as far afield as a hospital in South Wales to the Scottish Highlands. The police, meanwhile, were keeping tabs on him and eventually managed to track him down by attaching an electronic device onto his car. There were many occasions when I’d receive calls from the police to say they had my son in custody, refusing to give me any further information. By law, they are now required to place anyone they suspect of suffering from a mental disorder into the nearest hospital. Although in hospital he was not beaten up or physically manhandled, to him it’s like being imprisoned.

In hospital my son would be immediately, and painfully, detoxed overnight from his self-medication and then be forced to take whatever anti-psychotic drugs (which have not been updated for years because of the expense and difficulties of trials) were felt suitable at the time for his mental state. Such drugs are not entirely dissimilar from the ones he had been made to give up and, to this day, their effect on the brain is still not understood. Research has now been funded to measure the effect of cannabis and psilocybin drugs on mental disorders and, known to be effective if used responsibly, so far can only be prescribed to epilepsy sufferers. 

Nicky would generally be sectioned for either three or six months – whatever was felt appropriate by a psychiatrist at the time. Suffering from a loss of human dignity, a loss of liberty during his humiliating incarceration, and his experience of forced medication, he would then be released early in a ragged and raw state, suffering from chronic and life-threatening depression. Determined to avoid officious bureaucracy and ready for the next mind-blowing brew which could be guaranteed to bring some balm to his mind – the cycle would continue.

by Mum from Wiltshire