In 2008, after his first child was born and before he was due to get married, Tom Lee began to unravel. It was as if, he explains in his fragile and unforgettable memoir, ‘some internal switch had been clicked or shorted, leaving my body and mind in a state of unrelenting and unsolvable emergency’.
The breakdown began in his body: tight headache, nausea, a stiffness in his hands so extreme he couldn’t hold a pen. Welts erupted on the surface of his skin; he ate only bananas, one half at a time. The discarded halves blackened around the house. He was unable to work or sleep; but these early weeks were what he calls the ‘phoney war, the pre-tremors of a coming earthquake’. Diagnosed by his GP with ‘acute anxiety’, he was prescribed the antidepressant Citalopram, which takes three or four weeks to kick in.
Meanwhile, a friend suggested he try a benzodiazepine tranquilliser called Ativan, which helps with anxiety. When it first came on the market in 1977 it was advertised by a rising sun bursting out from behind a dark mountain: ‘Now it can be yours: the Ativan experience.’ This sunburst was exactly how it felt. Tom rose from his bed, went to the kitchen and ate a sandwich. ‘I felt mellow, but not dozy – alert, clear-headed, my thoughts no longer running into and climbing on top of one another.’ The effect recalls Thomas De Quincey’s discovery of opium: ‘Happiness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat pocket.’ The Citalopram, meanwhile, did nothing, and the GP warned against Ativan, which Tom continued to source from his friend and take on the sly, as though it were a Class A drug.
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