The Mental Health Thread - (Help Contacts in First Post).

[mushy]

Nice one Bubbs, you've always struck me as a measured and considerate poster.
On a totally different subject there was an interesting article in yesterday's Athletic with Brian McDermott (ex Reading manager) and his battles with Imposter syndrome , alcoholism and general mental health issues. Imposter syndrome is more common then we may think.
It's well written and he comes across as amazingly open and honest.
Will cut and paste if there's any interest.

[hessa]

Nice one Bubbs, you've always struck me as a measured and considerate poster.
On a totally different subject there was an interesting article in yesterday's Athletic with Brian McDermott (ex Reading manager) and his battles with Imposter syndrome , alcoholism and general mental health issues. Imposter syndrome is more common then we may think.
It's well written and he comes across as amazingly open and honest.
Will cut and paste if there's any interest.

Hi Mushy,
Yeah, that sounds interesting, I'd like to read it if you can share. Thanks

[S-H]

Wise words Bubbs (as per) I for one should take a leaf out of your book.

[mushy]

“I’ve never felt so lonely in my life,” Brian McDermott says, casting his mind back to the afternoon of May 30, 2011.

In his mind, he had built that day into his crowning glory, the moment when the boy from a council house in Slough would cast off his insecurities and finally find happiness. It was his first full season managing at professional level and he had led Reading to the Championship play-off final — 90 minutes from promotion, 90 minutes from the Premier League, 90 minutes from escaping the impostor syndrome that had haunted him for years, first as a player and now as a manager.

And after 40 minutes, they were 3-0 down to Swansea City. “I’m on the touchline at Wembley, 86,000 people there, and it’s raining and I can’t even see because my glasses are steamed up and the players are having a go at each other and I need to get to half-time just to try and get some sense of order,” he says.

Whatever McDermott said at half-time worked. Within 12 minutes of the restart, Reading had pulled it back to 3-2, but the equaliser didn’t come. Instead, with 10 minutes left, Swansea scored again and McDermott’s world collapsed.

“I just thought I’d let everyone down,” he says at his home in Buckinghamshire. “Players, staff, the fans, my family, everyone. And that’s when that low self-esteem really kicks in. That voice: ‘Told you you weren’t good enough. Told you you wouldn’t do it. And you’re never going to be in this position again and no one knows who you are and no one cares about you’.”

McDermott only knew one way to numb the pain. He drank. And he drank. He had always liked a drink and he always felt alcohol “gave me a sense of ease and made me feel more comfortable within myself”, but in the weeks that followed that Wembley defeat he says he “crossed the line”. He was drinking to forget, drinking to numb the pain, drinking to silence that voice in his head.



“And I never spoke to anybody,” he says. “I went to a counsellor a few times, but I just talked generally. I never mentioned alcohol. I never mentioned how I felt. It was a waste of time because I wasn’t telling the truth. I was in denial because I thought alcohol was my friend.

“And it was so self-centred because I had a family that’s amazing to me, friends who are amazing, a great staff full of fantastic people, the Reading fans who were always brilliant for me. I should have been grateful for what I had. But at the time, I couldn’t see anything. What was inside my head was causing me so much grief.

“So what was the question? Is football management lonely? Incredibly lonely at times.

“But I could feel lonely in a crowded room.”

It’s more than seven years since McDermott touched a drop of alcohol. At the time, he was scouting for Arsenal, the club where he began his playing career. He will recall his final drinking session, beginning in the directors’ lounge at West Bromwich Albion, in excruciating detail, but he wants to talk about more than addiction. He wants to talk about mental well-being.

When he was in charge of Reading and Leeds United, McDermott always came across as affable, a breath of fresh air, happy-go-lucky. But that wasn’t how he felt. He felt like an impostor, just as he had his entire adult life.

McDermott was 17 when he made his debut for Arsenal in March 1979, but he never felt like he belonged. “I remember moving up to the first-team dressing room and I was so nervous I could hardly speak,” he says. “There was that feeling of angst, that feeling of, ‘Look at all these big-hitters. I don’t belong here’.”

He made 72 appearances for Arsenal over a five-year period, scoring 13 goals, but he never truly established himself. “It was probably because of my personality,” he says. “I was shy and I found it quite hostile. Whether it was hostile or not, that was the narrative in my head.”



It was exacerbated, he feels, by a crisis of identity. Both his parents were Irish and he felt 100 per cent Irish — and still does — yet he felt pressurised to commit to his native England at under-18 level and regretted it immediately. He says it left him with a “lack of identity” and became a bigger issue in his mind than people could possibly imagine.

“I know now that I’m Irish,” he says. “That’s no disrespect to England, but it’s more how my heart is. My blood is Irish and I feel Irish to my core, but I had to live with that for a long, long time. Would my journey have been any different if I’d played for Ireland? I don’t know. Because there’s a part of me that always wanted something more, thinking that something else would be my answer. And it never was.”

He moved on to Oxford United, a bigger fish in a smaller pond, and helped them win promotion to the top flight. It didn’t fulfil him. Further promotions followed with Cardiff City and Exeter City, but again the achievements brought an empty feeling rather than the euphoria he thought he was building towards.

“You know you have those bus tours around the city when you get promoted?” he says. “I didn’t go on either of them, with Cardiff or Exeter. I played virtually every game, both seasons, and I should be able to look back on those days with fondness. But I didn’t feel good enough to go on the bus with my team-mates. How sad is it that I felt that way as a man in my twenties?”

But what was stopping him? “I had this impostor syndrome going on, no self-esteem, this part of me saying to myself, ‘You’re no good’,” he says. “I was constantly fighting with it.

“People talk about resilience. Would I say I’m resilient? Yes, I’m resilient. But did I have resilience and well-being? No, I didn’t. I was getting up, being miserable, living in this population of one in my own head, trying to deal with it all. And I convinced myself that the one way to stop my head going around like that was by drinking.”

The more McDermott agonised over that play-off final defeat at Wembley, the more he convinced himself that leading Reading to the Premier League was the only thing that would bring him fulfilment.

“There was always something,” he says. “Get a new job, get more money, that will be the answer. It wasn’t. Get a better car. That’s the answer. It wasn’t. Extend my house. That’s the answer. It wasn’t. ‘Oh, I know what it is. Managing in the Premier League. People will recognise you. People will want to know you. That’s the answer’.

“That next season, we lost five of our first seven games (in all competitions). I’m thinking, ‘I’m on the edge here’. We got to November, lost at Nottingham Forest. We were 16th in the league and we were miles off it. At one point I woke up and said to my wife, ‘I can’t do this. I don’t know what to do’. She said, ‘Win the next game’. ‘Win the next game! Why I didn’t think of that?’.”

But they did win the next game and they kept winning. By April they were top of the Championship, on the verge of promotion. “Big crowd at the Madejski, big game against Forest, Mikele Leigertwood puts it in the net, 81 minutes, and I’m thinking, ‘Wow, we’re actually going to do this’,” he says. “The whistle goes, Nigel (Gibbs, his assistant) gives me a hug and I breathe out. We’ve won promotion.”

That was a long, late, boozy night. McDermott cringes at the memory of slurring through a celebration speech in which he was too eager to remind Reading’s supporters he had proved them wrong. He went to bed at 3.30am and woke up four hours later, devoid of the blissful feeling he was anticipating.

“And I’m thinking, ‘Is that it?”’ he says. “‘Why don’t I feel any different? Why is that void still there…? I know what is. We’ve got to win the league’.”

You know what’s coming next. Reading were confirmed as champions three days later and McDermott enjoyed the celebration party, but when he woke up the next morning, “it was still no different. And it’s just this enormous void, this enormous sense of ‘not enough’ and I’m saying to myself, ‘What is happening? Why is this going on? This should be the greatest time ever’.”

It wasn’t his lack of self-assurance that made McDermott an unlikely addition to the cast of Premier League managers in 2012. Almost three decades had passed since he left Arsenal. It is fair to say it was not his name or his reputation as a player that earned him a shot at the big time.

As his playing career wound down, McDermott spent a year selling insurance. He recalls going for an interview for another job selling ****ing machines.

“I don’t even know why I was there,” he says. “This guy said, ‘Where do you see yourself in five years?’ I didn’t have a clue, so I just said, ‘I want to be doing what you’re doing’. To be honest, I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. Where did I see myself in five years? If I’d been honest, I would have said, ‘I’m struggling to get through the day, mate, never mind five years’.

“Seriously, what do I know? I’m not being funny. I didn’t have a clue about ****ing machines or how to sell them. I just needed a job. I had a wife and two kids.”

Salvation came at non-League Slough Town, initially working for their community scheme and then as manager.

As a player, he always wanted a manager who would put an arm around his shoulder like Terry Cooper did at Exeter. As a rookie manager, he briefly lost sight of that, bawling at one player in an attempt to assert his authority. “One player’s wife told me, ‘You’re making his life a misery’,” he says, “I look back and I’m ashamed at that.

“There was a part of me that treated that lad the way I was treated by certain managers. Maybe I thought, ‘That must be the way you’ve got to do it’. But I learned from it and said I wouldn’t manage like that ever again. I hope I didn’t. I did raise my voice at times of course, but generally, I didn’t do that. To me, that wasn’t the way forward.”



He led Slough to the FA Trophy semi-final but lost his job due to financial constraints. He lasted just over a year in charge of Woking. It was inconceivable at that point that his next managerial job, nearly 10 years later, would see him lead Reading to the Premier League.

He initially joined Reading as chief scout and youth-team coach. He loved scouting in particular, trawling Ireland to find players like Kevin Doyle and Shane Long at Cork City. Both would make big contributions to the Reading team that won promotion under Steve Coppell in 2006 and finished eighth in the Premier League the next season. “That was probably as happy as I’ve been in any job,” he says.

McDermott was perfectly content working in the background as a scout under Alan Pardew, Coppell and briefly Brendan Rodgers. But when Rodgers was sacked in December 2009 with Reading 21st in the Championship, McDermott found himself thrust into the spotlight as caretaker manager.

“I wasn’t looking for a manager’s job at all, but I had been there nine years and felt I had a duty to the staff and the players,” he says. “My league form in those first five games was hopeless and I don’t think the fans were too exuberant about me as manager. But then we got a good result at Anfield (beating Liverpool 2-1 in the FA Cup fourth round). That gave me a bit of credibility and I got the job.”

Did he enjoy management? Aspects of it, certainly, particularly at the training ground, but he says he is unsure how exactly a manager can be expected to enjoy the job.

Surely he had to enjoy beating Liverpool at Anfield. “I wouldn’t call it joy,” he says. “The final minutes, I just remember watching the referee, saying, ‘Blow the whistle. Blow it now’. Then the ref blows and you go, ‘Thank God’. (He exhales and his shoulders sag). It’s not joy or elation. It’s relief. I can sleep tonight. To a point.”

And defeats? “A horrible sinking feeling,” he says, “which in my case could last for days. What do you do with that sinking feeling? I only knew one way to try to get rid of it.

“But I was one of these people who, if I had one drink, I’d drink too much and I wouldn’t stop. I had been like that since I was a player. As a manager, it got worse. If we lost a game, I’d drink to numb the pain. But it was the same win, lose or draw. It numbed everything, including any happiness I might have had.”

It was a remarkable period in McDermott’s life — suddenly a Premier League manager, taking his unfancied team to Stamford Bridge and Anfield and putting up a good fight — but he didn’t feel like someone riding on the crest of a wave.

He admits to enjoying the limelight, sharing a touchline with Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger, and he says that being recognised in public gave him an ego boost. “And I would try to get off on that,” he says. “But there were different things. As far as my job was concerned, I always had this ego which told me we could win at Anfield or Old Trafford. But then I had this small self-esteem where I felt I wasn’t good enough. It’s the two things. I’m fighting them both: that (points to one shoulder) and that (points to the other).”

Reading were adrift at the bottom of the table on Boxing Day with just one win in 19 games, but then something clicked and they won five games out of seven. McDermott was manager of the month for January — another brief ego boost — and he was told his job would be safe even if they were relegated. But then they sank back into the bottom three and, after four consecutive defeats, he was sacked.

The strange thing is that job insecurity had been the least of McDermott’s worries. “I never had that,” he says. “I didn’t worry about losing my job. It was a shock when it happened, but it’s fine, I get it.”

Within a month, McDermott was back at work at Leeds, who were facing the threat of relegation to League One. He quickly won over the dressing room and led a struggling team to three wins in the last five games. They finished 13th, the fans liked him and, despite uncertainty at boardroom level under GFH Capital’s ownership, things felt good. As they approached the halfway point of the following season, they were in the play-off places, pushing for promotion.

Then came a crushing 6-0 defeat at Sheffield Wednesday in January 2014. “Horrific,” he says. “Every single game, I would think, ‘We’re going to win, we’re going to win’. That’s my ego. And then this other voice would say, ‘No you’re not. You’re going to lose 6-0 and it’s going to be so embarrassing’. That had never actually happened. Then that day it did. Horrific.”

A couple of weeks later, Italian businessman Massimo Cellino turned up and, even though his takeover had yet to go through, McDermott was informed he was no longer the manager. The Athletic’s Phil Hay has devoted an entire podcast to the farcical events of “Mad Friday”. The upshot was that, although McDermott held on in the short term, the writing was on the wall.



McDermott is diplomatic about Cellino, saying only that it was “very difficult” to work with an owner who felt he knew better than any manager or coach. Given the nature of their working relationship and their inevitable parting at the end of that season — Cellino castigated him publicly for taking a holiday (“Where’s Brian?”) when the manager was looking after his sick mother — it is surprising to learn that they still talk.

That’s the thing about McDermott. There is introspection, a lot of it, but he doesn’t blame anyone else for anything. “I’ve never been bitter,” he says. “If I was resentful or bitter, I know it could only hurt me.”

Living alone during his time at Leeds didn’t help McDermott’s issues with alcohol. But he says he was “always professional” and that it never affected his work. “It was always in the evenings or after games,” he says. “I had a rule. I didn’t pick a drink up before 6pm.”

But then the clock would strike six and the floodgates opened. “Guinness, lager, red wine. I didn’t drink spirits, but I was obsessed,” he says. “If you don’t have a problem, you can drink or not drink and it won’t really matter. But I would get obsessed about wanting to give up — and then not drink for a week or two — and then I would get obsessed about having a drink. And when I drank I drank too much.

“If someone has got a drink problem, it’s not always the way people think of it. Most of the time it’s not someone drinking on a park bench. Of course, sometimes it is, but there are a lot of professional people — doctors, you name it — with a drink problem. I was a professional person with a drink problem. I’d had this problem for years with self-esteem and impostor syndrome and that had built up into a drink problem.”

By this stage, McDermott could no longer ascribe his drinking to the pressures of management. He had re-joined Arsenal as senior international scout in late 2014 and though there was still pressure, the job was not nearly as intense. He was travelling a lot and, after the solitude of management, he enjoyed the more social aspect of scouting.

It came to a head in February 2015. “It was an FA Cup game at West Brom (against West Ham), Saturday lunchtime and I was there as a guest,” he says. “I’d been out the night before and as I got to the boardroom, I said to myself, ‘Definitely not drinking today’. I went in and asked for a sparkling water, sat down. ‘That’s good. I can do this’. Then the waiter came over. ‘Red or white wine?’. I’m supposed to say, ‘Diet Coke’. I said red. I had half a bottle of red wine and then watched the game.”

The rest of the day brought a series of moments — on the train home, at Marylebone station, at Beaconsfield station — where he found himself fighting with his urge to have another drink. At Beaconsfield station, he just about found the will to get into a taxi. “And I’m thinking, ‘I just need to get home’,” he says. “‘Don’t stop at the pub. Go straight home’.

“As we reach the end of my street, I say to the driver, ‘No need to take me to the door. Just leave me here. It’s fine. Thank you’. So I get out and I’ve given myself a choice. I can go left to the pub or right to my house. ‘Don’t go to the pub’. I go to the pub. ‘I’ll only stay until nine’. I stay until one. Then I come back here. ‘Go straight to bed. Don’t go to the kitchen’. I go to the kitchen and I stay there drinking until three.

“I woke up the next morning and I’d just had enough. I said to my wife, ‘I can’t do this anymore. Please can you help me?’. She put her arms around me. She called the doctor, I went to the doctor, I chatted to him and I went to a recovery programme, opened up in front of a group of people, and worked through it. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done. I haven’t had a drink since.”

In December 2015, McDermott was offered another shot at management at Reading. It wasn’t like the first time — results were up and down and he was moved on at the end of the season. “And that’s fine,” he says. “I probably needed more time to do what I wanted to do — get good people through the door, create the right culture and environment — but it’s fine. I was 10 months without a drink when I went back, but I was still a bit rocky.”

Arsenal were happy to take him back. He plays down his influence, saying he was part of a big network of scouts led by Francis Cagigao and Steve Rowley and that, while the job of identifying talent fell to the specialists in each region, “it was my job to have a view and give an opinion. I was involved in William Saliba, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, all those. But we were a team.”

Did Saliba stand out? “Absolutely,” McDermott says. “(Arsenal scout) Ty Gooden had spotted him at Saint-Etienne and I was asked to go and give my opinion. I watched him a number of times. He played right-back the first game I saw him. I could see he wasn’t a right-back, but he was absolutely nailed on to be a top player.”

McDermott picks up his phone, opens a file and reels off a list of players he recommended in 2018. As well as Saliba, it includes Francisco Trincao (then at Braga, now at Wolves), Elif Elmas (then at Fenerbahce, now at Napoli) and… Erling Haaland (then at Molde, now threatening to break all Premier League goalscoring records at Manchester City).



John Vik, Molde’s former chief scout, recently told The Athletic that Arsenal and Liverpool “could have got” Haaland before he joined Red Bull Salzburg in 2019. McDermott is less sure. He recommended Haaland to Arsenal, but his conversations with the player’s father Alfie left him feeling it was a non-starter.

“People can say such-and-such a club could have had him, but a lot of it is pie in the sky,” McDermott says. “I watched Haaland three times and I was, like, ‘Blimey, who is this kid?’. I met his dad and we had really good conversations, but I felt they knew the path they wanted for him.

“You can go to a massive club at that age and you can get lost. I’m not saying he would have done, because he was outstanding, but I just sensed he and his dad wanted to do it differently. It was already written. He went to Salzburg and, yes, I get that. Borussia Dortmund, yes, I get that. From there you can go to Manchester City, Real Madrid, wherever. They had it worked out.”

McDermott loved his time scouting — “It’s my thing, I’m passionate about it” — and he was shocked when he, Cagigao, Gooden and others were made redundant in 2020 in an overhaul of the recruitment operation.

“I was devastated,” he says. “Amazing club, brilliant people, I loved it and I thought I was doing a good job. I was very sad, but they made a choice and I’m so pleased to see them flying at the moment because it’s a wonderful football club. Sometimes in life, you get the bad stuff and you feel it — and I felt it. I was disappointed, it was painful, but that’s life.”

McDermott, now 61, hasn’t managed for six years and hasn’t been employed as a scout for the past two. But he is enjoying working as a consultant, quietly offering advice to various clubs, as well as conducting seminars for the League Managers Association and various other organisations.

That newfound willingness to share his experiences in full, speaking freely and openly about his drink problem and his struggle for self-esteem, has made his insights all the more valuable.

Are other managers struggling with addiction, turning to alcohol? “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t speculate. All I can do is tell my story. That way, no one can say, ‘Well that’s b*llocks’. It’s not b*llocks because it’s what happened to me.

“When I do my presentations, it’s not just about addiction. It’s about not feeling good enough. It’s about success, failure, finding balance. That is the most important thing. All those managers in the Premier League, Championship, League One, League Two, they’ve all got resilience — because you couldn’t do that job without resilience — but if you haven’t got mental well-being and if you haven’t got the balance to go with it, it really isn’t a great place to be.

“And it is lonely, football management. I don’t want to sound extreme, but when you lose a game it feels like a grieving process. It’s only a game of football, but it hits you so hard. Even if you win, you can’t enjoy the highs. It’s just non-stop. It’s constant. There’s no time to breathe.”

McDermott has time to breathe now. “One of my main ambitions in life was to get a good night’s kip,” he says. “I couldn’t do that until I stopped drinking. In the past, I would be lonely if I was on my own. Now I can be alone but not lonely. I can sit comfortably. If I get negative thoughts, I can let them go. They’re only thoughts.”

There was a rare moment of panic recently after he agreed to a two-night booking speaking to an audience at Blue Collar Corner in Reading. “I thought, ‘No one’s going to turn up. Why would they?’,” he says. “But both nights sold out and now they’re doing a third and I’m so grateful. It will be lovely to share my story with those Reading fans. They’ll know every step of that journey, but this is how it was from my perspective. It’s a different story.”

And it feels like it has a happy ending. “I don’t have that void anymore,” he says. “I’ve come to terms with the Ireland/England thing. I’m happy when I look back at my career. I’m a good husband, a good grandad, a good friend. I’m all right.

“I make sure I have peace in my day, start it the right way. If I’m struggling, I talk to someone. And that’s the thing. Nothing changed until I reached out and told my wife I was struggling. It took me a long time. I don’t recommend waiting until you’re 53.”

[WHU Independent]

Great post Mushy! Fantastic read. Top posting!

[Cockneyboy311]

Great post Mushy! Fantastic read. Top posting!

I concur Indy. I can certainly resonate with parts of that, especially imposter syndrome.

[btajim - mcfc]

So I finally went back to work today. I haven’t seen the entire office for six weeks and received nothing but “Ooh, you’ve lost so much weight!” I reply with “I’d thoroughly recommend the nil by mouth diet. They hook you up to a drip and everything.” I’m a usual 32 inch waist so I must look gaunt to them.

Out of respect, nobody was told what was wrong with me but I sat down with two and explained the ileostomy / bowel issue / stoma bag situation. They like to gossip so it’ll get round and I don’t mind that.

Just glad for a return to normality.

[hessa]

“I’ve never felt so lonely in my life,” Brian McDermott says, casting his mind back to the afternoon of May 30, 2011.

Thanks for posting mushy, much appreciated

[ageing hammer]

Phew read all that Mushy, it's really good thanks for posting it.

[rigoberts song]

That was a great read Mushy thanks for posting.

[Eggchaser]

A really good read that Mushy thanks for sharing.

Had my appointment today, psa reading up slightly but nothing to worry about.
Plan is to do blood tests every 6 months and maybe another MRI in 18 months.

[mushy]

Good news eggchaser (I think!).
Hope it goes well for you.

[btajim - mcfc]

Does anyone ever have minor depression attacks? My plan yesterday was the Bundesliga match, your match v that lot, food then maybe a pint or two to wind the weekend down. I lasted until half time and then felt the urge to go to bed where I drifted in and out of sleep with some disturbing thoughts in between. I'm ok now (mostly) but it was horrible. The worst I've felt for ages. I didn't even undress and slept fully clothed.

Hopefully it's nothing major. Typical to get an attack like that after recovering from three trips to hospital and major surgery.

[Tenbury]

Take a look at BPD, Jim, but maybe concentrate on your physical rehab first

I seem to recall there was a thread about quitting the booze, and maybe this is the wrong place, so mods please move /delete as you will.
Following an incident in my local last month, when I was bladdered, I've been off the booze for 5weeks, in fact I haven't even been out('cept to take son to training/matches/etc). Apart from saving about 500 quid ( much needed), I' ve come to realise that I don't miss it at all.
But, in truth, that's really not a good thing at all. The pub (I've never been one to drink at home much) was where I met up with the few people I get on with, and I really don't miss that(or them) either.
There's always, In my experience, loads of glib talk in MH circles about alcohol and 'self medicating', but I think it must be true. I know myself well enough to realise that in MH terms I'm heading down into a bad place (it always starts with a stream of lucidity) and it's the booze that's been masking this. I won't go back to it, not least cos I need the cash, but having always been a serious drinker, I'm wondering if just about anything I've done was truly of any value... or were the 'good bits' just good fortune.

[btajim - mcfc]

What do you mean by BPD? Borderline Personality or Bi Polar?

I’m certainly not trouble after a good drinking session but I perhaps do go out a little too much. People round here are very friendly so there’s much pestering to go out. I can think of two matches I’d like to watch this week and the karaoke night tonight is always brilliant. It’s an inclusive evening organised by a local group working with people with disabilities and health issues.

Can I go out and enjoy myself with Diet Coke? Yes.

[Tenbury]

You've got me wrong, Jim, the drinking thing was all about my idiocy and not related to you at all(I'm just too lazy to do two separate posts).Please forgive me.

OK, totally separate, I'm, they tell me, Bipolar(mood swings /pain in the ar*e/etc) but I've met (in therapy, hospital, etc) individuals who have been diagnosed as BPD (Borderline Personality Disorder) which seems quite similar, but the mood changes are much swifter and generally shortlived.
[ I've pointed out that this often happens to me, but then the shrinks always say I'm `rapid cycling' which is basically Bipolar on speed.... you just can't win]
So with you talking mood swings, it rang a bell with me. It wasn't meant to p*ss you off!

[btajim - mcfc]

It didn't. It was the worst I've felt in some time so I'm just putting it down as one of those things. For the moment, certainly. Any repetition and I'll seek help because that was not nice.

[btajim - mcfc]

Nevertheless, I’m out tonight at accessible karaoke with a few pints and feel a million times better than I did on Sunday.

That was horrible. I wouldn’t wish bouts of depression on anybody.

[Tenbury]

5 weeks without a drink, and you'd think I'd be feeling pretty pleased. I'm a few hundred less in debt, and I don't miss the 'social life', but what's the point? Just feel a bit empty, Thing is when the balloon's popped, that's it, no going back.

[btajim - mcfc]

Will people miss you? Eugene and Frank are always pleased to see me when I’m out and, when I got out of hospital, Laura migrated from one side of the bar to the other to hug me. I bet you have more friends than you realise.

When I was heavily medicated, I was happy enough on Diet Coke all night.