Imagine the following……

You’re nineteen years old and a successful officer cadet at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. You’ve spent two years preparing for this at an Army sixth-form college, having passed 4 A levels and have even spent time as an acting second lieutenant.

Without warning your life suddenly takes a turn for the worse. You begin to ‘lose the plot’. The next thing you know you’re locked in the guardroom awaiting your family who are coming to take you home. Eight hours later and having been deprived of food and water, they arrive. Your mother is appalled. In her words you’re ‘more animal than human’.

The journey home is a complete nightmare. Your mind is hallucinating, the car is wired, the radio is inside your head, forwards becomes reverse, passing cars contain colleagues, officers, family and friends.

Forty eight hours later and now you’re in big trouble. Unable to cope, your mother has handed you over to the authorities and home becomes a psychiatric ward and you later discover it’s grim interior was once home for those in isolation.

You’re fit and strong so to help you ‘rest’ the dosages of medication are upped to maximum levels. Now the side effects kick in. You’re constantly dribbling, your eyes involuntarily roll back in their sockets, you react to sunlight, your hands shake uncontrollably leaving you unable to feed yourself, your writing is illegible, your speech so slurred you can’t be understood and your bowels turn to water or leave you trying to pass bricks. Some friends visit and leave in tears.

In your disturbed mind you believe the army has selected you for a special mission. You’re testing the effectiveness of a new neurological weapon that’s top secret and once you’ve beaten the system into which you’ve been placed, you’ll be taken back to Sandhurst, presented with the Queen’s Sword and instantly commissioned.

How wrong you are. The army has dumped you. You’ve failed. Now get on with what’s left of your life.

Once allowed home you try to build a future if only you could manage to get up off the sofa.

The medication’s being reduced, the side-effects are just about bearable and you work for a couple of seasons as a hotel porter.

Next you’re offered a better job, confidence grows and then you decide to apply to the Fire Service.

Five medicals over eighteen months, a letter to the Home Office and you’re accepted. You spend eight years as a fireman and are awarded a Chief Fire Officer’s commendation as part of a crew who performed a life-saving rescue.

Eventually, you put your experiences to use and talk to others about life with a mental illness. After a while, even the painful times can be talked about without tears.

You talk about the times you believed you were the Messiah, even the next King of England. You talk about the escapes from hospital, the ones that worked and the ones that didn’t. You talk about the time the bomb squad wanted to blow up your car, the many times you were pinned down and forcibly injected and the time you spent in a police cell only to be escorted to hospital by an old army college friend who now is a police sergeant…..this of course fits the delusion perfectly…..the mission hasn’t stopped!

Well, this all happened to me…….

For the last twenty years I’ve lived with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and it’s been a rocky, yet in many ways, inspiring path.

Along the way I’ve met some incredibly brave people, lost a few good friends who couldn’t take the pain any longer, and yet somehow, I’ve survived.

In 2005 I embarked on a new career. I left my career in sales to go self-employed as a freelance mental health trainer/speaker/motivator.

Using the experience I’ve gained and the talents I’ve acquired I hope to take forward a message that is real and relevant to today’s society. A message that is honest, inspirational and not short of humour.

‘What happened to James’ a series on Radio Devon won a Mental Health Media award in 2003