I didn't know at first how I came to be sectioned under the Mental Health Act last week. I had to find out for myself afterwards. The memories that I do have are difficult to deal with because they seem impossible yet I know they happened. I saw the marriage of heaven and hell. I saw myself descending into the underworld and meeting a dead girl who I arranged to meet the next day. I saw myself again, destroying three mobile phones by dropping them into the Thames. My east European housemate beat me up when I dropped her phone down the toilet. There was a green flash when it exploded. She knows martial arts and did karate on my eye, torso and legs. I've still got the bruises…For me it all began when I told this one Spanish waitress I was leaving her all the money she should've been left in tips in that week if people weren't so mean. I left the £70 tip for a £20 meal under the tablecloth and told her not to look until I'd gone. I walked out swiftly without looking behind me. As I stepped out of the door I heard someone thank me by my name. I didn't want to look round in case it wasn't her that had said it. That way I wouldn't know if she had broken her promise or I were imagining things.Outside the place I threw up four times consecutively. I went to a pub and ordered a double whiskey. I thought I was in hell and all the people in the pub were dead. On the pub's jukebox The Beach Boys were playing. "Too many good vibrations'", I said to a man. The landlady told the barmaid not to let me buy drinks for the girl I was with, yet I wasn't with anyone.When I eventually made it home I got beaten up by my flatmate. So I took her two-sizes-too-small shoes and walked along Seven Sisters Road with them on. I think I left them on a bus ticket machine. I also posted my keys through a Blockbuster video drop-off. It was about 4am. I got home on a bus by telling the driver it was my stag night. That wasn't a lie because I believed at the time I was going to get married at dawn.The next day I left a message for my flatmate on a Polaroid she had taken of me once, except she misinterpreted it as a suicide note. This was because I had written my year of birth and the current date on it and she read it like a tombstone. She told my brother and one of them told the police who came round to search my room for clues as to my whereabouts. I was in a pub in Knightsbridge.Later, my sister and housemate persuaded me to go to the hospital with them. I thought it was they who were going to be sectioned. I was quite surprised when I was left alone there. I ended up on a locked ward, which is where I write this. I have met some of the funniest and brightest people here.They've rescinded the section now and I can go home and then go back to work in a couple of weeks. I figure that I was going a little bit crazy and the doctors helped calm me down, but essentially I am here because of a communication problem. If you find yourself thinking you don't want to wake up in a psychiatric hospital it's too late: having thought that, you're going to end up here sooner or later.JAMES MCCUSKERMore: The Mentally Ill Issue
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