Hello! My name is Henry, though I am often called Henners 🙂

I’m a bright-eyed, yet discerning, basket case, currently writing from my office desk in London. I am over three years in recovery and in the process of shaping my future, the path has not been easy, so I hope that my journey and adventures to come, which I’d like you to be a part of, will help somebody who has known darkness to live in the light!

Where to begin?

My name is Henry. I come from a privileged background and attended the finest schools in the country, won a music scholarship and studied biosciences. I also found myself under Section 2 of the mental health act, with a drug-induced psychosis, at the age of 21.

My best friend, Adam, died of brain cancer at age 13 and that really affected me. I became lost at sea and suffered intense physical and psychological bullying at boarding school, where I went about developing coping mechanisms like self-harm, isolation and other self-defeating behaviours.

At age 18; It appeared that I had found my feet. I was head boy at my school and I went off to teach English in southern India, touring solo on a motorcycle and coaching sailing in Minorca. (All in all a fairly standard Gap-yah!)

Except that on the 18th June 2012, I was told that my Father had shot himself in our back garden on the phone to my Mother.

I put on a brave face and flew home immediately. I enjoyed the attention from friends and loved ones. Surreality protecting me from the gaping hole in our family.

Once the hustle and bustle of proceedings had quietened; The darkness crept in. It sat on the end of my bed and leaked out of the furthest recesses of my mind.

I started using legal-highs to help me sleep, though I soon fell into a torturous and full-time habit.

I dropped out of university and lived with a group of, primarily Nigerian, friends. We produced rap music and lived vicariously, as I morphed into the antithesis of my upbringing. I altered my dress, behaviour, accent, and vocabulary. Going as far as to learn some pidgin. I immersed myself in rouge behavior and drugs, which moved alphabetically in reverse order until found myself slammed down against the hard floor of Prospect Park Mental Hospital, repeatedly injected, until the darkness closed in.

I spent 6 weeks in a locked ward, familiarising myself with the intimacies of a desperately underfunded NHS and came out a vegetable. One of our neighbours had bipolar, in fact, she had been in the same ward, not two months before. It gave me hope that I would mentally recover. A week later her body was found strewn across the train tracks and her children were reported missing a week later. I saw no escape from that dark abyss, and remember feeling grateful to be taken out of my mind while my brother and I searched for them. They were found in the woods nearby.

I want to thank my mother for looking after me. I cannot imagine what it must have been like to lose Dad. I cannot imagine what it’s like to see your child fall into ruin and madness, desperate to die. She also lost a close friend when our neighbor died and it looked likely that I would share a similar fate.

I could manage 50 yards down the road to start with and I eventually managed to wash dishes at the local pub.

But I couldn’t stop using drugs and knew what awaited me if I were to continue. I tried many options, though it became increasingly apparent from my situation that I had 3 options:

1. Keep going on the current path and end-up permanently in care, or dead.

2. CO or First GW.

3.Go to the Priory.

Well I’m still here… And very much alive!

With all my love

Henry