In 1988 Ecstasy saturated the streets of London, they were very strong when they first came out and I was able to get pills that were pretty pure but as the years went by dealers were contaminating pills, I didn’t care what I was taking as I became so addicted to the euphoria. I was a Raver and that’s all I wanted to be. I was completely taken over by the music, the scene and the drugs. The trouble was I was continually trying to get the same high that I had at the beginning but the pills got weaker over the years I was taking it. Like many people it was a culture that you wanted to be part of. It was like the 1960’s happening again. The Underground parties and raves were exciting, huge convoys of Raver’s travelling to unknown events that the police knew nothing about. It was fun for a young girl of 22, and I never wanted to stop partying.
John Lennon & Yoko Ono did an interview during his Peace Campaign, speaking about drugs, he said,
“It’s no good preaching at people and saying don’t take them because that doesn’t work. It’s like the church telling you not to drink and not to have sex when you’re a kid, there’s nothing on earth that’s gonna stop them doing it. But if people take any notice of what we say. We say we’ve been through the drug scene “man” and there’s nothing like being straight, you need hope and hope is something that you build up within yourself”.
I guess I was pretty naïve just going along with everyone else around me but it was my choice to try this drug, and my friends that tried it too were young, creative people just experimenting and having a laugh. I didn’t know what was going to happen to me. The friends I hung around with were Raver's too and my other friends who didn’t take pills slowly walked away as they could see that I was changing as a person. I just lived for my weekends and getting Ecstasy was all I was interested in I just had to get that buzz again. I tried other drugs like speed and did quite a lot of LSD and smoked cannabis but for me Ecstasy was the one that I enjoyed going to clubs too because I loved to dance so much. I was always the one on the biggest podium. I used to go to a mixed gay club called Heaven in Charing Cross. I used to go by my self a lot of the time as I knew people in there and felt very safe. I used to wear a pendant with a daisy on it and people used to call me Daisy. It was a lot of fun and I had the most incredible experiences on drugs at that time, but I was naive to where this fun was leading to. The clubs in London is just where I wanted to be. I just went everywhere, Shoom, Labryinth, The Crypt, Troll, Trade. Raving became my only reason for existing. Which looking back now is a completely unrealistic way to be. But I was addicted and running away from my self in the oblivion of the rave scene.
I guess I should have been scared but I wasn’t …well not at that time anyway. One day I was lying in my bed with my boyfriend and I heard wings flapping next to me I couldn’t turn around to see but their presence felt huge. In the morning I told him what I had heard and he just said “Hey don’t worry it’s just an angel watching over you”.
It actually scared me to death. It felt huge and it was if something was trying to tell me something. I wondered if it was some kind of warning and I guess it must have been, because this is where my faith began. My boyfriend was a spiritualist and he gave me some spiritual books on past life regression and the afterlife, but at the same time we were using drugs and getting high. I thought it was ok! I mean look at all the people that have experienced drugs and have been amazing artists, musicians, poets and actors. In my own little fantasy world being high made me feel on top of the world, I didn’t need to do anything else to be happy. I was just high and that is all that mattered. It was a very self indulgent, self destructive path. I was like a lost sheep following the crowd.
At that time everyone I knew was using Ecstasy, my sister, my friends. It seemed to be to be the only way to live. I felt everyone should try it as in a way it did give me great insight into how to live in a more loving way. Really I should have been living without it but I was using this drug to feel love and to love others. I thought I was in control but I was losing control and totally unaware of it alongside an underlying knowing, that what I was doing was not right for me. I ignored this part of myself and at that time I did not realize that it was my soul speaking to me. My inner light, my inner truth was telling me to stop. I was on a rollercoaster of highs and lows and I was a ticking time bomb just waiting to go off.
Chapter 4
For four years I raved every weekend, me and my boyfriend split up and then I lost my job at the Advertising Agency due to redundancy. I was given quite a bit of money, but of course I was just too high to notice. I should have tried to get help financially at the time from the benefit system which I was entitled too, even though I had had a payout. I just went partying with it, my sister and my friend came to stay and one night we went out and met some guys at Spectrum on a night out at the club Heaven. It was a Monday night and they ended up staying with me for three weeks. We were doing drugs nearly everyday. I did not realise that I was spiraling out of control.
It was Christmas 1990 and a group of friends, my sister and me went to a party in Liverpool a club called Quadrant Park. It was Christmas. We had been to the Quad before but this time I decided to go straight because I was beginning to feel rather odd and after seeing people in the clubs looking really ill I started questioning what I was actually doing. I began thinking “oh my god I’ve been on this stuff for 4 years and I haven’t even bothered about what I’ve been taking”. I began to get concerned about what it was actually doing to me. But by this time it was way too late. I felt really weird going clubbing straight. I felt really anxious and paranoid. I didn’t feel well. I was getting scared and I didn’t want to do drugs anymore. It was Christmas Eve and I decided take some. They were called “Disco Biscuits” and very strong. I met someone new that night and it was the most incredible meeting I had ever had. He just smiled at me in the middle of this huge rave and came over and kissed me. It was awesome. It was a total love at first sight experience for me. And the crazy thing was he lived in London. It was definitely meant to be. We decided that he would take me home when Christmas was over.
My redundancy money ran out and it took the council months to give me my housing benefit. I had been on the soul destroying path of trying to find a job without success. I knew that I wasn’t right as when I tried to write my name at a job agency I couldn’t remember how to spell it. I started getting really freaked out. Reality was hitting me hard. I had been told as a child it was so important to have a career, to do well. I was so conditioned in my thinking that if I couldn’t work that I was a failure and at this moment I realized that I was also a drug addict. I needed to take Ecstasy just to feel normal. I wasn’t even getting high anymore it was just leveling me out where I actually felt straight but with immense paranoia. My boyfriend had only been taking it for six months so to him it was all new and wonderful. It was so sad because he had no idea of what I was going through and despite being totally in love with him I was losing it.
That moment of realization was the most frightening moment of my life as the people around me, my sister, my boyfriend and all my friends were also using drugs and I was in the middle of this ocean and I was drowning in fear, paranoia and addiction but I also began to hear voices and see spirits. I couldn’t tell anybody I thought they would think I was crazy, so I was living in a world that other people could not see. I was in Hell.
The voices were loud and intense and pure evil telling me to kill my self. I was in total darkness and little did I realize it but I was suffering with extreme psychosis but spiritually speaking I was suffering within spiritual possession. Psychiatrists might think very different and call it something else. They have many labels that they give to people. They gave me the label of manic depression. People hold onto these labels and believe that it is a permanent state but it is not. Many people have been on the NHS drugs for years and are unable to get themselves back onto the road of recovery, because they do not believe that they can get better again. Mental health diagnosis is not a permanent condition. Unfortunately at this time I did not see the light at the end of the tunnel. I just saw only one way out of it. I told my sister and my boyfriend that I couldn’t cope with hearing the voices and they found it very difficult to understand and deal with.
I was so ill that suicide seemed like the only option. I did not want to end my life I just wanted the voices to go away. But in the end that is all I could think of. I could not handle the lifestyle any longer and I just wanted to get away from everything that was going on around me. I decided that was it and when everyone was out I took a huge overdose on my local park. I was found by a man who was walking his dog, the next day. I had been lying in the bushes for 24 hours. He shouted at me “you stupid cow”. He knocked on someone’s door and asked to phone an ambulance. They took me to hospital and the ambulance man, as he was wheeling me in, said “You bastard after all the people we could be rescuing and we had to come and get you”. But I was in no fit state to even be bothered about his comment. My parents had to come down to London and they had no idea that I had been using drugs. My father sat beside me and said “I will never forgive you for what you have done to this family”. But I was used to his degrading comments and just ignored him. He had no idea of what I was going through. Yes my addiction was self inflicted but an understanding and compassionate reaction would have helped me more.
I was admitted into a psychiatric hospital after the overdose. I couldn’t bear it. I was locked up with all these people that to me seemed very scary. They seemed far crazier than me and I had to get out. They put me on anti-depressants and I discharged myself. My boyfriend asked me to move in with him to keep an eye on me and I even got a new job where I had to have 3 interviews. I was putting on this huge act that I was ok. My sister and I were dancing for a singer at a rave and I had to take something as the paranoia was just too unbearable to go on stage and dance in front of all those people. I remember saying to my boyfriend “please I don’t want to go” but he kept insisting, “It will be good for you to go and enjoy yourself”.
When I took the Ecstasy it made me feel straight and it took the edge of the paranoia away. But when I came back down again, it was worse than before, much worse. I fooled everyone until I was told that I had to be in charge of the section I was working on while my boss went on holiday. The voices were worse than ever and when my friends asked me to meet them in the dining area I followed them later and noticed a ladder heading towards the roof, it was an emergency exit which was open. In this moment I just sensed that this could be my way out. This could be the end. I just wanted out. I scrambled up the ladder onto the roof. It was a sunny day and all I could think of was getting rid of these terrible voices and yet there were kind voices telling me to lie down and evil voices telling me to jump. So I lay down and I threw myself off the top of the building. I did not experience any impact in fact it was like two huge hands catching me into an ocean of total bliss and peace. In certain religions they say you go to hell if you commit suicide but I did not experience anything like that. The addiction was Hell.
The first waking memory I experienced I remember opening my eyes and not being able to move, there were beautiful women standing around me and I was lying on what seemed like a warm rock and my body felt like it had molded into it and I was being comforted by it. I could feel the warmth of the rock underneath my fingers and I sensed that there were torches burning on the walls. I looked down and I was wearing the same clothes. All I felt was the most incredible sense of wellbeing and total love. The women started to speak to me in unison telepathically “We are sending you back, we are sending you back, it is not you’re time yet”. My next waking moment, I was lying in intensive care with my aunt singing next to me. It had not worked. I was in Hell with suffering and pain.
My injuries were terrible I had landed on my face and broken both my legs. I had been on a life support machine for nine days, and they weren’t sure that I would make it, but then a miracle happened and I began to breathe on my own. I had a lot of surgery done to my face and the surgeon had to look at photographs of me to see how I looked as I was so badly injured. It took me months to get physically well enough to get out and I ended up back in the same psychiatric hospital that I had been admitted to before after my overdose.
I cannot imagine what my friends went through and my family. And also what I put my boyfriend through because that day he lost me and I lost him. I know that people at work had to have counseling. I remember one particular man who I had confessed to about the way I was feeling was a Buddhist and he gave me a mantra to chant on. But it seemed really odd and I did try and do it in the toilet at work, but I was too sick to do it properly. He was trying to help me and I wish I could thank him.
My sister told me she knew when I said goodbye to her a few days before, as she was leaving to go to Ibiza, that she knew something was going happen.
It wasn’t a cry for help I just had to try and stop the voices that were attacking me. I had developed extreme psychosis and the paranoia was just too much. Psychic healers would say that I had extreme spiritual attachments in my aura which were causing me to hear things.
I could not believe what had happened to me after spending four years living in a whirlwind of raving that it could lead to this. Why had it happened to me? People around me just couldn’t understand where my head was at and some even said it was me and not the drugs that had caused this to happen. Everyone is different some people are more sensitive to drugs than others. I met one girl who smoked one joint and it sent her crazy and she ended up with psychosis and put in hospital.
I met one boy who had taken LSD and he was unable to communicate with me at all he couldn’t string two words together , he didn’t make any sense to me at all and yet here I was being able to communicate but hearing voices. I was in hospital with all kinds of people with all kinds of mental health problems. Many of them talking to themselves (or were they). There was one guy who thought he was Napoleon walking around with his arm inside his coat, marching about the place and there was a lady crawling around the room singing “The Sun has got his hat on” and another who thought that she was a radio DJ who was constantly talking very fast to everyone in the room, as if she was presenting on the radio. There were depressives and schizophrenics and men and women all in the same room together. It was like being in the movie “Girl Interrupted” and I was playing the part of Winona Ryder. How ironic. I felt like I was a freak. It was not the right place for me to be at all. One day my friend Kay came to see me and I was in the main living room where everyone was together. We were watching “One Flies over the Cukcoos Nest “ with Jack Nicholson. I couldn’t believe here I was sitting in a mental institution watching this classic movie when I was actually in one my self. My friend and I laughed at the irony of the situation. She said “You shouldn’t be in here, you can’t even talk to half of these people”. The movie is about a guy pretending to be crazy rallying with the other patients and taking on the dictator Nurse Ratched . The situation was not far from that movie at all. Accept men and women were in together, which for me was even worse. And the nurses? Yes! dictators some of them!! but there were kind ones too.
Chapter 5
The nurses tried to give me different types of drugs one being Haloperidol. It was insane. My head and neck was thrown backwards into a spasm and my tongue swelled up and I was screaming for help. I had a terrible reaction to it and they rushed around trying to get the antidote as I was in such a terrible state. When they leveled me out again I realized that most people in the living room area were all on this drug. I just couldn’t believe it. It was like we were guinea pigs being tested on. I’m sure this happens a lot in Psychiatric situations that new drugs are just used on people to see the effects. Haloperidol is an anti-psychotic drug. I wasn’t even suffering with being psychotic. I could barely walk and I was catatonically depressed. I didn’t know about the after effects of using Ecstasy but now I know that I was on a huge come down from the overdose and one of the side effects of stopping ecstasy is depression. I had messed up my own natural rhythm of serotonin and caused an extreme chemical imbalance in my body that it was only natural for me to be suffering such a heavy depression.
I spent months in this hospital but then my parents had me moved up to a hospital near them. My mother used to come and visit often and she kept telling me that I would be well again but I just didn’t believe her, I saw no way out. She came to see me nearly everyday and sometimes when I used to get really upset about my situation she would be quite stern, telling me that I didn’t have enough faith and belief, and that so many people were praying for me and that I would get better. I didn’t really believe her at the time as I was in the depths of such darkness and despair. Mum came to see me almost everyday and her support now looking back was just amazing. I put my mother and father through a very difficult time. My mother was far more understanding and supportive. She loved me so much. She contacted several people to come and see me and give me support while I was in hospital. They decided to put me on Lithium, a drug for manic depressives and people suffering with bipolar disorder. More chemicals to try and get me better. They didn’t do anything. One day a very loud woman shouting her head off at her self was pacing up and down the aisle near my bed. She came up to me she was suffering with Mania and started shouting at me “Do you pray!!” I told her I did not. She shouted back “Well you should!!” It really startled me and as she walked away, she got me thinking maybe she’s right, maybe that’s my only choice now. So that’s what I started to do. I started chanting “Please help me”. I didn’t know who I was praying to but I had read so much about the spiritual world, angels, people who believe in God, or Buddha or whatever faith they had. I decided that maybe it was my lack of faith that was preventing me from getting well again. I mean what did I have to lose, maybe this woman shouting at me was someone speaking through her. I remembered the beating of the wings next to me when my boyfriend at the time told me an angel was watching over me.
Even though I had spiritual beliefs before my illness I had not ever thought about prayer at all. I felt that this woman’s message was a sign, so I began to pray my little heart out. And slowly but surely things started to get lighter, and I eventually left hospital and went back to live with my parents. I began to look into meditation and healing and my voices started to go away and all I could hear were good voices guiding me. Giving me guidance and helping me. It was 1992 I was 26 years old.
