2.1
Take Control: Glasgow operated from a small grey building on Paisley Road that had originally been a doctors’ surgery. Four years ago, a new health centre had been built a couple of hundred yards away, and the doctors had lost no time in decamping to the upgraded facility. Take Control lived up to their name and took control, turning the examination rooms into small offices that were ideal for one-to-one counselling. Everything – the reception area, the private rooms, the coffee bar – was painted in soothing earth tones: harvest browns and spring yellows and forest greens. Pamphlets covered every available surface in the reception area – Coping With Loss, Dealing with Depression, So You Think You Might Be Gay? As I sat in the waiting area, I flicked through something called Positively Positive, only to find it was aimed at people who had been diagnosed with HIV.
As soon as I was fit, the police had made me attend mandatory counselling sessions. They didn’t help much. Most of the coppers I know would rather chew their own leg off than admit that they were having difficulty dealing with the nasty things they see in the course of the job, and the force itself is still dominated by stereotyped attitudes to mental health. Rather than talk something through, we’d rather keep it to ourselves and hope it goes away on its own. Most of us, including myself at the time, believed that the best way to deal with mental trauma was to buy it a drink. To actually admit we needed help not only defined us as headcases but could actively harm our careers.
The counselling ended when I quit the police force. It was scary. In a few short months I had lost nearly everything. I had been reviled in the media, and when I walked down the street I could feel people staring and talking about me from behind cupped hands. I was completely alone, a social pariah. The worst incident was when an elderly woman spat on me while I was queuing to pay for a loaf of bread in my local supermarket. She grabbed my arm, told me that she had something to say to me, and unloaded right in my face. I just stood there, her saliva on my cheek, saying nothing as she told everybody what I had done. There was nothing I could say; everything she said was technically true. I had been driving too fast. I had mown down a mother and child. In the end I dropped my basket of groceries and walked home.
That night, I tried to commit suicide.
At best, it was a fairly Mickey Mouse attempt. I drank half a bottle of Bushmills and munched my way through a box of paracetamol, also taking a pathetically small chunk out of my left wrist with a blunt kitchen knife. Then I got scared and staggered to the nearest A & E unit, where I was given an activated charcoal drink to neutralise the effects of the paracetamol. I spent three days taking up space in an acute medical ward before being discharged with a referral to my G.P., who in turn suggested a weekly session at Take Control.
That was nearly four months ago.
Nobody – not even Joe, my boss – knew about the suicide attempt.
When he gave me the job as his assistant, he made it clear from the start that he expected me to be sober, shaved and in a clean suit, on time and keen. Had he known just how unstable I was, he might not have been so forthcoming with the offer. As it turned out, the work helped me get back on a reasonably even keel in a way that the booze, anti-depressants and therapy hadn’t.