BY ANDREW MOODY

Some people still find it hard to understand that I am a vulnerable person. After all this time as a journalist and film critic, my former enfant terrible persona has changed. I am 39 years old. I have been in the NHS psychiatric system since the age of 19 in 2002. I have lived all of my adult life in one form of cash poverty or another. I live in a rehab unit in South East London, and take nightly medication. There is a meal provided, good, nutritious, healthy food in the evening. Coffee and tea is free, as is the WiFi. I have lived here for almost two years, now. All of the other residents have dual diagnoses of drug use and mental illness, we all have histories of violence and incarceration. I can now concede that I am a paranoid schizophrenic, despite a long diagnosis of Bipolar, which after a career made from criticising the NHS psychiatric system, I believe is typically more of an alcohol problem. There are staff here at all times. Next to my room, two labourers are refitting the communal showers, I am sitting on my (self-appointed) Michael Corleone chair, listening to Smooth FM. I haven’t smoked even one cigarette in here in two years, and this article is the first online work I’ve written after my own deliberate retirement from the internet which began shortly before the death of Queen Elizabeth II. In that time I have written 80 or 90 handwritten pages of an A4 binder I am calling THIS IS HARDCORE. It is the most honest writing I’ve ever done. Also in that time I have been building a comprehensive collection of DVDs and Nintendo 64 games.

Having written so much about psychiatry in my career, I feel I have developed a reasonably accurate understanding of psychiatric medicine. The Clozapine I take every night is specifically designed to combat night terrors. I was eventually prescribed it back in mid 2020 in the forth or fifth month of an excruciating 17 months inside various secure units in England and Scotland. Ironically, the 17 months coordinated perfectly with the Covid pandemic, meaning that after my release, I had had no real experience of it. Whatever critics of mine still operational should understand is that whatever trick it is was they think I have as my ace card, is really just a clear sightedness and authentic experience of the realities of poverty, mental illness and the criminal justice system. For unknown (to me) reasons, the emotional rapists in Hollywood have denied me the money I have clearly been making for other people, if not myself. But that seems to be the game, and I’m too old now to be angry.

As far as I am concerned, to conclude the personal thesis put forward in my written work on psychiatry, ethical psychiatry works every time, to do it any other way is medical Nazism. It has always upset me when rude, obnoxious people work in vocational industries like medicine for selfish or abusive reasons.

Like many people who have been sectioned under the Mental Health Act, I have been legally homeless several times in my adult life, and for many agonising years I was stuck in a world of crack and heroin addiction and even shoplifting, which saw me arrested on a pretty regular basis. I have been clean for five full years.

As for smoking cigarettes itself? I’m too old and too savvy to waste money on cigarettes. I buy a big pouch of tobacco every time my benefit money is paid into my account. After the 17 months inside, I stopped smoking indoors. If you do that as a smoker, you’re basically sweet. As for anything else? It’s Christmas, guys, love each other. You can’t bully schizophrenic patients into sanity. It’s a process. Utopia is a state of mind. I want every homeless person on the streets of London who get a chance to read this article to know I can sympathise. I understand that hard drug use and poverty don’t make good bedfellows, and I can definitely say it’s worth trying to fight it. Every morning I wake up sober, and that alone is enough to keep moving forward. The fear of unethical psychiatry I believe has directly been contributing to the homeless population. Mental health is a fragile thing, and mental illness can be common. At the end of the day, gently does it, because the war we all fight with ourselves and our weaknesses is still always winnable.

Andrew Moody is a film and literary critic and the author of SMOKING IS COOL and YOUR ONLY FRIENDS ARE MAKE BELIEVE