The trouble with drugs

I was attacked last night. I was at an open air event that went very well, no trouble that I could see - apart from this one isolated incident of me being attacked (of course). I had never seen the woman before but she looked possessed. She grabbed hold of me, dug her nails into my arms and started shaking me. The most disconcerting bit (and I don't often get disconcerted) was that she had her face inches away from mine and stared at me with a look that told me she was in the grip of something terrifying.

ABOUT TO BE TRAMPLED ...

I think she had taken some kind of drugs but there must have been an underlying psychosis there. At first I thought she was an actress but she was hurting me and trying to push me over and I realised that couldn't possibly be part of the entertainment. She was so strong that I started to worry that she'd succeed and I'd be trampled in the crowd. My friend managed to pull her off me but when he reached over to alert a steward, the girl lunged at me again. Again she stared at me with such an intensity that I had to look away. And she was incredibly strong, I just couldn't get her to release her grip. I asked if she was okay and the look in her eyes changed ~ it was like she was trying to tell me something and this time she was close to tears but because she still trying to force me to the ground, it was difficult to do much to help her.

IT CAN HAPPEN TO ONE IN FOUR OF US ...

My friend got out his shining armour again and pulled her off and eventually the stewards took her away. I was fine but you wonder what happens to people to make them like that. One in four of us will suffer a mental health problem at some point in our lifetime and of course many will get better and back to normal. But for many their lives are plagued for years. Lots of folk have an underlying psychosis that nobody is aware of, not even them, until something happens eg they hit their head in an accident, they suffer trauma of some sort. Even taking hallucinogenic drugs just once can be enough to spark it off.

IN TERROR OF BEING KILLED ...

My parents were both psychiatric nurses and when I was 17 I worked in my mum's ward. There was a girl in the locked part of this ward. She was 19 and stunningly beautiful. She was admitted a week after finishing her Highers where she got good enough grades to get into medical school. She had everything going for her. When I met her she was as stunning as she'd always been but she was in the habit of running naked round the ward screaming in terror that the other patients were trying to kill her. It didn't matter that she was wrong, she was terrified because she believed it.

SPLIT SECOND LIFE-CHANGING DECISION ...

So how did it get to that? She'd been very excited about the possibility of becoming a student doctor and had gone along to a party to celebrate. It seems that she either willingly took LSD or someone slipped it into a drink. Anyway it turned out she had had this latent psychosis. She could've gone her whole life with that never rearing its ugly head. She could have gone her whole life avoiding knocks to the head and being protected from severe trauma. She could have lead a happy, fulfilling life. But that decision (either hers or someone else's), that split second decision to pop one "harmless" little pill in celebration of the exams being over, that changed her life forever. Her life became one of terror and all that promise disappeared in that split second decision. As far as I know she's still there in that locked ward. I heard she had months, sometimes even years where she wasn't terrified, where she was simply confused and deeply depressed. I never heard any tales of fulfillment or happiness. She had been so beautiful, so intelligent, so normal.

ILLEGAL DRUGS ...

It's one of the reasons I've always been against illegal drugs. Nobody knows exactly what's in each batch and they certainly don't know how it's going to affect them. You may take ACID, for example, 99 times and on the 100th consumption it kicks of this latent psychosis, or it may happen the first time. Those who argue for the legalisation of all drugs will no doubt point out that you have to have the psychosis there in the first place. This is true but the trouble with that argument is that nobody knows whether they have or not. There are no tests for it that I'm aware of, there are rarely any warning signs. So as well as not knowing exactly what's in the drug you're taking, you just do not know what's hiding in your brain.

I think it's one of the most under used and most powerful arguments against illegal drugs. I bet you most young people would be more scared of that happening to them than of dying - because when you're young, you never think you'll die anyway. I can understand why people are tempted and some of you may argue that the risks of what I'm talking about happening are low (maybe they are, I don't know & I bet you don't either) but whatever the risk, the consequences are so terrifying that even if it's a one-in-a-million chance, why would you risk being that one? If only the girl I knew in the locked ward had known. If only ...

That argument worked on me and I never, even when I was tempted, took anything at all. Not that I think it's particularly relevant whether I have or not. It's not a moral thing for me, it's a sense thing! Anyone who knows me will agree that with my track record of one in a million chance things happening to me ALL THE TIME, I probably made the right decision there. Look at last night if you want evidence of that. I just hope I'm wrong about that poor girl and that whatever was happening to her was a one off.