Benefit Street, Brighton.

The black dog that crawled back up on my shoulder 2 years ago has been a teacup  Chihuahua until recently.  About ten days ago I realised he’d morphed into a good-sized Labrador. I think now he’s going for Irish Wolfhound. Now that black dog is not exclusively the property of Winston Churchill, or Robin Williams or even National Treasure, Stephen Fry. Without even having it explained, every bi-polar person instinctively understands what it means the first time they hear it. Because, perhaps, that feeling of carrying an actual physical burden is so familiar?  At times it feels like a sack of wheat on one’s shoulders which is pretty grim – but an old, familiar dog? Smelly and noxious nowadays maybe, but intimately known: - he ain’t heavy, he’s my black dog? Now, even before I was clinically diagnosed at the age of 12, I knew what it was like to feel weighted down – until finally one ends up supine; unable to rise up high enough to get out of bed...

BENEFITS STREET: - BRIGHTON. I've been getting good mileage out of my angst for the past couple of years. But it's time now to put it to one side and start talking out. It's not that I need to be heard because I have tidings of great joy or or nuggets of invaluable wisdom to impart. Nor because I have devised a plan to save the world; or discovered a wonder-herb that will cure all the ills of humans everywhere. Neither do I have any proselytising zeal. But I can communicate. I have, by now, lost just about everything I ever had in life – my possessions, my future, my dignity. But one thing I still haven't lost is the ability to communicate. In times BB (Before Brighton) I used this ability on behalf of the battered, the marginalised, the homeless, the mentally unstable. Because I knew that all the talks I gave, and the things I wrote, were reaching out to touch people. I was getting somewhere. Yet, once I became part of the proble...