I don't know what insanity means to you, but the concept of mental illness is distasteful to mose people. It conjures up images of people in secure wards, shuffiling along, mumbling to themselves and drooling slightly. Having gone thorough mental illness, and currently living with it, I can say that although that may be an accurate description of a few people with mental illness, it is not an accurate picture of today's mentally ill. Of course medical science has come a long way, and that does explain why more people with mental illness are able to function almost normally, but that doesn't take away the stigma attached to those who need to go into 'mental institutions'.

But hold on. I'm sure you all know that Kate Moss went into the Meadows, The Priory has been host to Kate Moss, Gail Porter and Paul Gascoigne, and I'm sure that there are a similar number of so-called celebraties who have walked through the doors of private mental hospitals the world over. Having been an 'inmate' at the Priory, I can say it's more like a hotel than a hospital. There are nurses, and they are very nice indeed, and the food is great. You do get a lot of therapy and help, but that is for later on. So celebraties suffer from mental illness, addiction, and so on, but these people aren't mentally ill. They are just not well. But if you are not a starlet, and don't make headlines when you check in, you are just another mad person who it's better that you are locked up than on the street threatening normal people.

So, what makes someone mad? What is the integral piece of the puzzle that either they are missing, or they have, which separates them from the rest of humanity? What is wrong with them? Why can't they just be normal, or if they aren't normal isn't it better for everyone if they are locked away? I can't answer these question, I wish I could. I can say that some of them are the wrong questions to be asking. But one thing I can answer is what happened to my, why I am classified as mentally ill, how it affected my life, and the lives of those around me.

My childhood was marked by separation and isolation. Firstly I appeared on the scene about two years after I was first thought of. My conception came as a surprise as my parents had stopped trying - well, not trying, but - you know.

When I was born I was a very ill child. I kept throwing up, and there was no apparent reason why this happened. The doctors changed my food about four times, before they decided to take me into hospital to run some tests. Those were the days when the child was handed over to a nurse, and the parents were sent home. I obviously can't remember this, but it has had an effect on me. One of the tests they wanted to run was a barium meal. This consists of providing some food laced with barium, that can be tracked as it goes through the system using radiation detectors. The normal way of getting someone to take it is to tell them it tastes dreadful, but they have got to eat it, and they will make it as palitable as possible. You can't really explain that to a baby, so to ensure they eat it, they don't feed you for a day. For a whole day I was kept without food. Most of you might say "That's ok, I could go without food for a day". Some of you might even fast as part of your religion. But you see, at that point I was not weaned, I couldn't understand why my needs weren't being met. All I knew was my food was being withheld, and my cries for help studiously ignored. I might have received a cuddle, but it wasn't from my mother, but a total stranger to me. They eventually sorted out the problem, I was a ruminant - I liked to chew my food. When I had finished eating it, I would put my stomach into spasms to bring it up so I could chew it again. To this day I like crunchy, chewy food, although I only tend to eat the same food once.

The next time I was in hospital I had been weaned. My GP said that I was just a bit ill with a cold. My mother say I was gray and went to the A&E (ER for our America cousins) where I was diagnosed as extremely dehydrated. Again the "we'll take the baby, you go home" routine while they hydrated me. Another separation from my mother, and to this day I don't drink as much as I should. I don't actually think I've drunk anything at all today, and its almost 6pm as I write this. I'll be right back after I have some liquid.

Going to school is a separation that almost all of us go through. I will admit, my first day is one that I can remember. My parents dropped me off, and told me that I was going to stay here for a bit. The morning went ok, but the I was told it was lunch time. I had never eaten lunch outside my home unless my parents were there, so I assumed that I had to go home to eat lunch. Off I walked, down the road to where I lived (it was just a few minutes away). Luckily for me it was one of the days that my father, who worked a 16 day shift pattern, was in. He woke up (he was on nights at the time), fed me a fried egg and then took me back to school. I never made that mistake again. However, something happened at the school which was to drive a much wider gulf between me and my parents than most, and one which to this day I find it hard to bridge.

During my first year at school I was noticed, partly for my inteligence, I was able to read before I got to the school, to quite a high standard, and so I was asked to help the other children how to read, but also because I was young, female, and had something. I don't know what it was, I wish I didn't have it, but for some reason, one of my teachers chose me for some special attention. In case you haven't worked it out, I was sexually abused by them. At, or around, the age of five one of my teachers took me into the lavatories and made me touch his penis, while telling me I had to be very quiet, and not make a sound. I was strictly told that I couldn't tell anyone because if I did they would be angry with me, and my parents would throw me out. I am sure you can understand how that would affect me to this day. Whenever my parents got angry I got afraid. Even now I can't be in the same room with them if they argue. But it didn't make me insane, just broken.

I got very ill at the school, and this time the doctors could not find anything wrong with me. There was nothing physiological that my GP could find, so I was kicked upstairs to a specialist at a children's hospital. I remember being taken into the ward, and being put in an isolation area. I was in my own little room, with glass windows, and everyone who came in to see me wore a mask. I was convinced I'd caught the lurgy. I remember one nurse who sat by me and took her mask off, to this day her kindness to me makes me want to cry. I hope she understood how much that comforted me at the time.

After they had taken blood, x-rayed my inside, and discussed with various other doctors, they came to the conclusion that I was under stress. This was probably an understatement, but it did get me out of the situation, as they said I should move schools. So I moved schools, in the middle of a year.

Again, another separation, and another isolation, which would last my entire schooltime. I joined a class where friendships had already been established, and I was the outsider. What's more I was damaged. I was different. I was not accepted. I became a total outsider. My memories of that school start out with me trying to join in, and being either rejected or accepted grudgingly. It went from bad to worse. I was the outsider, I had no-one to stick up for me, so I became the target for bullying. By the time I left that school I went through one time when the boy sitting to my left spent all day, every day, kicking me in my left leg. My teacher refused to believe it, despite the bruises up and down my leg. I had a pencil thrown at my eye, and I even had a brick thrown at my parents car while we drove through a particular estate. The fact that I was different, bad, unaccepted and unacceptable was ground into me at school. As I went up through the school system the bullying became worse. I was thrown to the ground and kicked by a group of other children, who then ran off laughing. I tried to tell my parents, but even then that warning that the would get angry caused problems. The school did all they could, but their protection ended at the school gates. I knew three different routes to school, and rotated them regularly.

At one point my sister intervened. She told me that she would be following, but I would not see her. I remember one of the regular culprits come up, and start the regular build up to a beating. Then from nowhere my sister appeared, lifted the surprised bully up by her neck, and taught me some swearwords I had never heard before. For a while this held off most of the physical bullies, but you can still put someone down with just words.

I also joined the church youth group, which had a great idea of giving the parents a Friday evening off by taking the kids off their hands and dropping them in a huge mansion that they owned. I spent most of my time there failing to learn how to player snooker - on my own - and crying - on my own. It's not a time I enjoyed in any way at all.

As I was a christian I had another problem which plagued me severly, I heard voices. I would hear voices in the evening, when I was in bed, shouting at me, swearing at me, cursing at me, and taunting me. It was frightening, and I could not deal with it. I asked my dad to pray for me, and that did seem to do the trick, the babel went away, and to this day I have never had that problem, but I still occasionaly hear voices. This was the first true symptom of my disorder that I can pinpoint, but I can't give you an age when it happened. It must have been before I went to university, at 18, and after 12, when we changed churches.

So did this all make me mad? Possibly it might have kicked a possibility into a certainty. It did make it harder to spot my madness in amongst all my other problems.

Round about the age of 12 I had certain ways of thinking which were different. I remember spending a time writing a story which involved someone saving up money. I spent half of the story concentrating on the saving up of the money, how much they had saved, how much they needed, how long it would take them to get the rest. It seems to stike me that that is not the way a child of that age would normally think. But I'm looking at the world from my own persepective, I think that it's up to you to judge that.

By the age of 15 I found myself going through various periods when I would feel great, and feel that people were beginnning to accept me, and then through periods where every wrong way to take something someone else said was the way I took it. It drove yet another wedge between me and my peers.

When I was 18 I left to go to University. It was totally the wrong thing to do, but there was no way of knowing that. I had a really wierd set of things happen. I became convinced I didn't need to go to the exams, I knew all the things they were trying to teach. I don't think I attended more than 1/4 of the lectures during my first year, if that. I was very confident, very physically fit (I cycled to and from Uni up a very steep hill). I had no problem spending money, and I had my first sexual, and indeed any, relationship with a 'boyfriend'. It didn't involve penatrative sex, but it did involve almost everything else. I was a christian, still am, and I felt that sex before marriage was wrong. Really heavy petting however... Dave, if you're reading this, the following might explain why it all happened the way it did.

I then left to go home for the summer holidays. I went into a deep depression, spending a lot of time crying, and a lot of time trying to work out what the hell was going on. This was my first manic-depressive cycle. The first time the real symptoms started to show their ugly head.

The next year at university was even worse. I met another guy - Chris you were right, there was something wrong with me, and I apologise for all the stuff I put you through. I moved in with him, and started having sex. I wasn't totally stupid - well, not after the first time. I had a post-sex contraception device put in the day after (they didn't have the morning after pill then). I started to have some really wierd stuff go on. I was convinced that I could hear the electricty in the pylons buzzing and trying to get me. I knew something really bad was happening at the campus, and had to stay away from it. I assisted with the blood donor system, and typed out invitations to each and every one of the donors personally. I spent money like it was going out of fashion, and I became convinced I was the re-incarnation of the goddess Ishtar. (Chris, at this point I would like to direct you to the wikipedia article on Ishtar.)

Now, most of you would admit that the above does seem to describe someone who is mad. I can't disagree. The technical term is bi-polar psychosis. Psychosis is the thing which most people associate with madness, it covers such things as auditory and visual hallucinations, delusions (believing one is Napolean, that sort of thing; except I was more grandeous than that), irrational thoughts and fears.

So all of a sudden I went from a troubled and damaged teen, to totally out of control. I had no idea what was going on. My GP at that time, who I went to to ask him to refer me to a psychiatrist, said there was nothing wrong with me. I can't remember the exact wording, but he didn't help. I ended up self-referring to a psychatric nurse. Unfortuantely, although she did see some symptoms she didn't pass me up the chain of command.

Then it all suddenly went away. Everything became normal again. Chris and I continued to go out, but the relationship was doomed. As was the relationships I had forged with other people. Suddenly I had gone through this wierd set of changes, and either I drove them away, or they were concerned it might happen again, and pulled away. But I had not changed. That's the real problem with madness. I wasn't mad, and I hadn't changed. All through the highs and the lows, I was the same person.

I wasn't. When I look back at a manic episode, or a depressed one, I can clearly see that my personality changes, and I became like someone else. I must admit, I don't like the people I am during these phases, I can't fault other people for not liking me at these times. In fact when I'm going through an episode I even have times when I can say - this isn't me. I don't really feel like this, I'm not really doing this. I'm still trying to come up with a vocabulary which can explain it in my head, so don't be too concerned if you can't understand it. And to make it all worse, I had no idea why it had happened, what had happened exactly, or whether it would happen again.

I left Uni and got a job, and even here I had another cycle. I can remember getting up at 6am every day, going to the swimming baths and doing a dozen or so laps, getting to work before everyone else, getting my work done, and doing other stuff, and then leaving after everyone else. Then I started to go too high. I can't remember any psychosis at this time, but I do know that I walked out on my job and never went back to that company - not the only time that has happened.

(I'll continue this later.)