And, of course, there were different remedies. I tried the diazepam a doctor gave me. I tried the various tinctures a homeopath gave me. I tried the recommendations of friends and family. I tried St John’s Wort and lavender oil. I tried sleeping pills. I tried talking to telephone helplines. Then I stopped trying. I had a nightmarish time on diazepam and an even more nightmarish time coming off diazepam. I should probably have tried taking different pills, but – judge me if you will – I didn’t. I wasn’t thinking rationally. Complicating the situation was the fact that I was scared – I mean, terrified beyond anything I’d ever known – of trying more pills, or of seeking more help now that nothing had worked.

When I mentioned this in Reasons to Stay Alive a couple of people thought I was making a statement against pills, so I will say here, as clearly as possible: I am not against pills. Yes, there are all kinds of issues with the pharmaceutical industry and the scientific research is still a work in progress (as scientific research, by its nature, tends to be), but I also know that pills have saved many people’s lives. I know of people who say they could not survive without them. I also believe there would be medication out there that could probably have helped me, but I didn’t find it. I don’t believe pills are a total solution. I also believe certain misprescribed pills can make some people feel worse, but that is the same with anything. You could get the wrong pills for arthritis or your heart condition. And to say that pills aren’t the only answer is common sense. They rarely are. If you have arthritis, yoga and swimming and hot sunshine might be helpful and pills might also be helpful. It’s not an either/or situation. We have to find what works for us. Also, in my case, I was traumatised, and wasn’t even close to thinking straight.

At that time, trying things that didn’t work only made life worse. As I said, there may well have been the right treatment out there for me – talk or medication – but I wasn’t lucky enough to find it. I wasn’t brave enough to seek it out. The pain was as much as I could bear to just about stay alive. I couldn’t risk a gram of difference, that was my logic. Every day felt like life or death. Not because the pain wasn’t bad enough to keep going back to the doctor, but because it was too bad. Writing that down, I realise how ridiculous that sounds, but that was my reality then. Everything I had tried to combat the turmoil inside my head had failed. And, to be honest, the doctors I had encountered hadn’t been that understanding. I sincerely believe that things have moved on in lots of ways since the turn of this century.

So, anyway, I was there, in this pit, desperately trying to find a way out as every escape route seemed to be closing.

And, as many people in this situation discover, you acquire evidence like a detective trying to solve a murder. At first there were no clues, or none I could see. Every day in that pit was hell. Every day, in those first few weeks and months, contained moments of such heavy emotional pain that they stopped any hope breaking through. But the pain, I started to realise, although internal, often had external triggers. There was nothing I had found that made me feel better. Then I realised that certain things could make me feel worse: drinking alcohol, smoking, loud music, crowds. The world gets in. It always gets in, however we are doing. But until I became ill, I never knew how.

Note to self KEEP CALM. KEEP going. Keep human. Keep pushing. Keep yearning. Keep perfecting. Keep looking out the window. Keep focus. Keep free. Keep ignoring the trolls. Keep ignoring pop-up ads and pop-up thoughts. Keep risking ridicule. Keep curious. Keep hold of the truth. Keep loving. Keep allowing yourself the human privilege of mistakes. Keep a space that is you and put a fence around it. Keep reading. Keep writing. Keep your phone at arm’s length. Keep your head when all about you are losing theirs. Keep breathing. Keep inhaling life itself.

Keep remembering where stress can lead.

(Keep remembering that day in the shopping centre.)

Fear and shopping

I WAS IN a shopping centre, crying.

Me, aged 24, surrounded by crowds of people and shops and illuminated signs, unable to cope.

‘No,’ I whispered, as my breathing lost its rhythm. ‘I can’t do this.’

‘Matt?’

It had been a test. To go with Andrea, then my girlfriend, to this city near her parents’ home – Newcastle, in the north of England – and do some shopping. I had no idea what we were shopping for. My focus was simply on making it through without having a panic attack.

To be like any other normal person.

‘I’m sorry, I just can’t, I . . .’

There I was. Pathetic. A young man. In a world that had told me – everywhere from TV shows to the school sports field – that being a man means being strong and tough and silent in the face of pain, a world that showed us that being young was about having fun and being free in the bright, shining land of youth. And here I was, in the supposed prime of my life, crying about nothing in a shopping centre. Well, it wasn’t really about nothing. It was about pain. And terror. A pain and terror I had never known until a little over a month before, while working in Spain, when I had a panic attack that started and didn’t stop and then became fused with a terrible, indescribable sense of dread and malaise and hopelessness which seeped into my flesh and bones.

The despair had been so strong that it had very nearly taken my life. There had seemed no way out. However scary death was, this living terror had seemed worse. Everyone has a limit – a point at which they can’t take any more – and, almost out of nowhere, I had reached mine.

‘It’s all right,’ Andrea was saying, holding my hand. More mother or nurse than girlfriend in that moment.

‘No, it isn’t. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’

‘Did you take the diazepam this morning?’

‘Yes, but it’s not working.’

‘It’s going to be all right. It’s just panic.’

Just panic.

Her concerned eyes made it worse. I’d already put her through so much. All I had to do was walk. Walk and talk and breathe like a normal human being. It wasn’t rocket science. But right then, it might as well have been.

‘I can’t.’

Andrea’s face hardened now. Her jaw clenched and mouth tightened. Even she had limits. She was cross at me and for me. ‘You can do it.’

‘No, Andi, I really fucking can’t. You don’t understand.’

People were looking at us, casting sideways glances in our direction as they walked along weighed down with carrier bags.

‘Just breathe. Just breathe slowly.’

I tried to breathe deep, but the air could hardly make it beyond my throat.

‘I . . . I . . . I . . . There’s no air.’

Earlier in the day, I hadn’t been feeling as bad as this. Just a low-level unshiftable despair. On the bus into the city, the fear had crept over me, like being slowly wrapped in an itchy blanket.

Now my whole body was alive with terror.

I was frozen right there, standing outside Vision Express, surrounded by life yet alone. I began to swallow. To try to direct myself. Compulsive swallowing had been one of a few mild OCD symptoms I had developed. This time I was actually wanting that symptom just to distract me from a worse one. But it didn’t work.

There was no hope. There was no way out. Life was for other people.

I had held back the world, and now it was caving in. And Andrea’s voice became something far away, the last hope, trying to reach the person I no longer was.

You only have one mind

WHEN I LOOK back on the shopping centre experience – one experience among many similar ones that sometimes burst into my brain like a Vietnam flashback without the violence – I try to dissect it. I relive the past in order to accept it and learn from it. Not just to learn how not to have panic attacks, but to learn how my mind intersects with the world and work out how to be less stressed generally.

The first problem was that it took place within my earliest experience of anxiety and depression. When you have a bout of mental illness for the first time, you imagine this is how your life is going to be for ever. You will have depression punctuated by panic attacks and that is how things will stay. And that was terrifying. The claustrophobia of it. There seemed no way out.

The second problem was that I still had no idea how to deal with panic attacks. That lesson was going to take years to learn.