The BBC News website have picked me out as their favourite antipsychotic user. It is not a very happy story, alas, but sadly it is all true. After waking up with bad dreams, which just happened to be about the first time I was sectioned when I lost my marbles, I dropped by the BBC News website on my phone – I think this might be it for the night’s sleep…

There is good news, and I’m pleased they included that I find antipsychotics worth taking. Thanks to medication, some talking therapies and the support of family and friends I am a lot happier now. OK, I had a slip when I tried to kill myself on Christmas day 2010, but I’m no longer a regular guest in the loony bin. Recent medication I’ve been put on has really helped with my sleep and general anxiety levels, and I’m trying something that could help with my side effects. The medical care here in Winchester is incomparably better than the awful treatment I got in Woolwich. And the BBC included a picture of me looking dashing!

There are undoubtedly a lot of problems with antipsychotic medication. A lot have simply done nothing for me and, as I said in the piece, being un-medicated is intolerable. The drug that did me the most good, Clozapine (which, due to its rare side effects, is the last resort antipsychotic given when not much else helps), dealt with most of my symptoms but after about six weeks damaged my heart and gave me incredible chest pains. It was terrible – the drug had helped me so much and suddenly it was killing me and I had to stop. If I may crack an awful joke, I was heartbroken.

Abilify made me wildly energetic but also stopped me from sleeping entirely. After a couple of weeks I was incoherent with mania, tried to kill myself and ended up in the bin again. Amisulphride also made me incredibly anxious and I refused to leave the house until the men in the white van came calling.

Pretty much everything has made me drool, twitch and have muscle pains and stiffness. Some of this might be dealt with by the new drug I’m on but for some people these effects can continue even after they’ve stopped antipsychotics entirely. I haven’t been able to ‘raise the flagpole’ in years, which may be something to do with why this site is so completely obsessed with sex.

Despite all that, if you have a psychotic illness, as I do, the medication is definitely worth taking. Life is too horrible without it. Not everyone has to take it for long, and certainly not everyone is as sensitive as me when it comes to getting side effects. It may take a couple of attempts to find the drug that works for you, but antipsychotics can be a life-saver and help you deal with the unparalleled awfulness of mental illness.

Don’t let the horror stories put you off: take the medication – it’ll keep you alive and happier.

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Right, let me make it abundantly clear that this cracking idea for a dessert is universal copyright David Strange ad infinitum. If I find any restaurant is using this without paying me stacks of cash I shall come and wee in your fridges, write slanderously bad reviews of you and sue your arses off.

When dining at The Grill at The Montcalm I had one of the best desserts of my life: rice pudding crème brulée. There is a picture of it here, doesn’t look anywhere near as wizard as it was. It was not simply sophisticated comfort food made incredibly well, it was brilliant nursery food targeted at one’s most joyously childish sensibilities. This gave me a brilliant idea for a beezer dessert.

Perhaps more than any other food, desserts appeal to our juvenile side. They are themed on sugar and quite often dairy products; no matter how complex the construction these flavours appeal to the toddler in us all. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. It is certainly true that for the young of heart everything is fun and the simple pleasures of childhood days are accessible to all but the most drably rancid and crapulent – why not enjoy those pleasures in food?

Those of us who were blessed with guardians skilled in the culinary arts will have many memories of spiffing desserts as children. My mother was a great cook; I remember with pleasure the sheets of skin hanging down from the burned roof of my mouth caused by greedily attacking her brilliant jam and lemon curd tarts, and mince pies after too little time out of the oven when the fillings were still at global thermonuclear war temperature.

She made amazing apple crumbles with caramelised apple fillings that I’d even horse down in preference to my normal staple of unadulterated custard. These delights encouraged me to cook and I was soon making crumbles, baroque Sherry trifles and all manner of things by myself.

The thing Linda was really proud of was her sponge cakes. She always commented that when she gave them to people they said how light and fluffy they were, what a great texture they had, and how they were never dry or hard. I liked her making them for other reasons.

When she was mixing up butter, sugar, flour and occasionally lemon, lime or orange rind and juice for her fruit sponge cakes, I would hang around the kitchen with purposeful intent. Soon there would be a not-quite empty bowl used for the cake mix that I could greedily scrape clean using spatula, fingers and, if there was a really rich vein of cake mix and the bowl was big enough (or my head was still small enough) my tongue. Cake mix was an unparalleled joy.

Of course, what seemed like an interminable time after the cake mix was sucked off all implements there was cake. Hooray! My mother was right to be proud of her sponge cakes as she was extremely good at making them. A good sponge cake, possibly flavoured, with a nice filling and icing on top can be a real pleasure. If you are really childish then a big dollop of whipped cream will really enhance a sponge. They provided a totally winning experience.

So why not turn this into a topping dessert for bigger people who are in touch with their inner child?

For a start you are presented with a bowl generously larded with quality cake mix, which could easily be flavoured with some attractive combination of fruit, booze, chocolate or similar, and a tool or two with which to scrape the bowl clean of this wonderful concoction. You then get a little finger bowl to wash your mitts in case you got carried away polishing off the mix and used your hands. No shame in that!

Then, of course, you get served the finished cake! It would only have to be a little thing as presumably you’d have eaten plenty of mix, but when you eat the cake you can pretend you are all grown up and eat like a big boy/girl, even if you preferred the hedonistic delight of raw cake mix. Cracking, eh?

I admit this might not work at all but the most bleeding edge of three-stars, but at a certain kind of restaurant people would be lapping it off the bowls. Restaurants that serve food targeted at one’s primal urges and basic instincts of enjoyment would find cake mix and cake an incredible addition to their pleasure portfolio. Of the restaurants I regularly visit I think this would be a winning wheeze at Hawksmoor and probably also The Grill at The Montcalm; basically anywhere focused on raw pleasure. I can feel Heston Moomintroll preparing to swipe this cunning creation right this moment for the Corpulent Canard’s menu.

Even little deli’s and perhaps ‘oooh fancy!’-supermarkets like Waitrose would do well to sell you a little box containing a mix-smeared bowl, a little spatula and a cake for after afters. I will remind all these establishments of the first paragraph and await any contacts from executive chefs about royalty payments^[1].

More generally, unless you are aiming for high gastronomic art, this is what food should be about: enjoyment and pleasure. We are obliged to eat so it makes sense to revel and wallow in the experience and extract as much gratification from it as possible. This is what places like Hawksmoor, The Grill, The Bangkok Brasserie and Pizzeria Santa Maria do so well, serve excellent food that makes you happy. Why not make the child in you happy too? Have some corking cake mix!

1. ^[1] If anyone points me to an establishment purloining my ranking recipe I’ll pay a percentage of the damages as a finders fee. ↩

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When more morally flexible people learn I have paranoid schizophrenia they get a cheap thrill. They think they’ve found a great bit of ammunition they can use to shame, inconvenience or discredit me. Any reader of this site will know such things just won’t work. Not only am I charming and well-liked as well as being good at what I do, but also I am not the tiniest bit embarrassed about who I am, even if sometimes I am convinced the Wine Society’s finance lady (who is actually very lovely) is hunting me down with an enormous sniper rifle.

In view of this, I try to assist the excellent mental health charity Rethink, and simultaneously massage my ego, by giving talks for them on my experiences with the illness. Some may recall my sartorial brilliance when speaking in the Houses of Parliament. The talk wasn’t bad either, got me a basket of fruit! This morning was also ego-enhancing as Rethink asked me to be interviewed for BBC Radio 4′s Today program on the subject of schizophrenia. It was only a short item, but very well-constructed and covered a lot of important points succinctly. I think it would be well worth you going to this page on the BBC’s Today program website in order to have a listen. I think Rethink should be very pleased with the piece, their chief executive said (as he often does) some excellent things. The only thing that would have improved it is if they had left my jokes in.

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I’m pleased as chips today. Firstly, that august organ The Times published a big picture of me looking terribly cold in the only vaguely photogenic location in horrible, horrible Woolwich. I am more than happy to be the new face of paranoid schizophrenia.

I’ll come clean and admit that I am on page 69, so I have plenty more work to do before my visage gets slapped across the front page.

The second ego augmentation event, that I’ve just this moment found out about, is that my favourite wine discussion board, Wine Berserkers, have honoured me with joint first place in their informal tasting note of the year awards. It is particularly pleasing that my winning note, from this article on 2009 Burgundy, was an above-average bit of lewdness that reads:

“You won’t have as much fun with a bottle of Bourgogne rouge unless it ends with going to hospital to get it extracted.”

I’m rarely more satisfied with a post than when I can fit in some schoolboy-level sniggering at bodily functions.

My thanks go to Rethink (the schizophrenia charity I am a media volunteer for), who pointed The Times in my direction, and to everyone at Wine Berserkers who enjoy smirking at something a bit dirty.

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Last week I gave a talk in the House of Commons to a bunch of Members of Parliament. It was only a four minute talk with the aim of convincing them to increase access to psychological (‘talking’) therapies for people with similar mental health problems to me, yet I managed to fit in references to wine and general boozing. This only a few days after an MP got too drunk to vote; rather satirical, eh?

The charity I was representing, Rethink, were most pleased with my performance and I had a lot of positive feedback from the MPs I spoke to once the session was over. I don’t think this was just because I was hilariously well dressed (see right for the ‘good for the ego’-large picture of me, it is my site so I have licence to put up big pictures of me if I so choose), but more because my talk was a pretty good effort for a lunatic.

Rather than let my words fade in the (booze-addled) memories of some Parliamentarians I thought it not unreasonable to preserve it by re-posting here. I hope it will give anyone who has the time to read it a bit more information about me and my experiences. It is a hard old job having paranoid schizophrenia, as I hope I make clear, so do be understanding should you know anyone who suffers from the condition. Anyway, here is the talk:

Hello, my name is David Strange. I am very pleased to be able to talk here today as I hope I can have some small influence in persuading you that people with serious mental health problems need the kind of talking therapy that I was lucky enough to receive. It may have taken ten years before I got the therapy, but it turned out to be unfeasibly useful.

After I gained my undergraduate degree I felt driven to pursue an academic career. I applied for a Wellcome Trust prize scholarship and was rewarded with one of the very few given out that year. Throughout my doctoral studies I travelled the world giving invited talks about epidemiology at conferences in addition to running collaborative research projects and making progress on my own scientific inquiries. Of course, life as an Oxford student isn’t all about work: I was also an unbeaten captain of the Oxford wine tasting team, wrote about the subject in a monthly magazine column and advised colleges on their cellar management. Life was an absolute hoot and I was grasping those good times with both hands.

Then, in the closing months of my doctoral studentship and with quite fearsome rapidity, paranoid schizophrenia wretched me from this rarefied, stellar existence, utterly annihilating my life in the process. I could not even hold down a job as even leaving my flat brought unimaginable terror. When I did make it outside I experienced everyone, even strangers in the street, broadcasting their thoughts for me to receive; they were always horrible, really horrible thoughts. Every waking moment I see nasty, dirty, evilly-warped rats swarming around me; when my eyes close I feel these rats teeming across my body. With these and other similarly distressing symptoms all I could think about was suicide. My repeated attempts on my own life resulted in me being a regular guest of psych-wards. Far too many times I got thrown in the bin; in 1999 alone I was sectioned three times. Even worse, at least as far as my aesthetic well-being went, I would regularly think I didn’t deserve wine.

For a decade this hellish pattern continued. As I moved across London the local health authorities would give me yet more varieties of medication, lock me up or just leave me to fight the florid terror of psychosis with little support. It is true that when the side effects of these drugs did not result in my quality of life deteriorating, some were quite useful. However, pills can only change so much of one’s outlook on life; I needed a more fundamental change than they could deliver.

The big change came last year. I had lived in the same area and managed to survive long enough to receive a course of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy; a talking therapy designed to help people deal with difficult modes of thinking. It was damned hard work. Talking about and confronting my inner thoughts and view of myself was so arduous that I hated the sessions passionately. Indeed, it was often only the promise of a pint of quality, and reasonably strong, cider at the pub next to the hospital that would quell my fear enough to manage the sessions. Cider and a will not to prolong the course of CBT encouraged me to take all I could from the sessions and I did learn useful cognitive techniques.

I’ll give you an example of one of them. I hear a voice that constantly says horrible things about me. So when it says floridly nasty things about me I just remind myself that I don’t have to listen to such abuse and I rise above it with a little ‘No, no, no’ gesture. Another example: I often have intensely bad insomnia, and I used to get very stressed about going to bed in case it would be another endless night of tossing and no sleep. My therapist and I worked out that when I go to bed I should not try and sleep; rather than go to bed and try to sleep I should go to bed for a nice, relaxing lie-down and whether sleep comes is neither here nor there.

I am part of the lucky 16% of mental health service users who has received treatment appropriate for my condition. This percentage seems woefully low especially as the CBT has been so successful. The correct treatment has resulted in me discovering that life can be less over-whelmingly horrible all of the time and having fun is once again in my grasp. Indeed, I was in Burgundy last week and the wine tasted all the finer for knowing that I merited such pleasures.

I’m quite pleased with the talk. I don’t speak in front of an audience that often these days, but I managed to deliver this with little hesitancy and without burying my face in the script. I got some laughs too, which are a necessary component of any successful speech. I hope those who have made it this far are feeling a touch more enlightened.

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