‘There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens.’ Ecclesiastes 3:1 

'It was just him and me now. He was over there on the other side of the room, standing rigid, upright, and imposing with legs astride. I was boiling, eyes darting, panicking, and desperate. I was in fight or flight mode and over the next twenty minutes, I was going to flip from one to the other in dramatic fashion. My sole intention as I was about to make a dash for it was to run as far away from him as I could find. I had to make a decision and quickly. The longer I stayed in that room, the longer he (the psychiatrist) would be able to exercise control over me, and I didn’t want that. I wanted, in that moment, to be free.

Thus, at just the right moment, I decided to run and I slipped underneath his outstretched arms, which were acting as a barrier to my exit. I managed this with consummate ease and then just hurled myself down the corridor of the ward, round the ward corner, down the stairs, out of the main doors, which unbelievably weren’t locked, and then out and away. I ran like the wind. I had been a member of the school cross country team since I was thirteen years old; I was a fast runner. This was no time for hesitation, and I ran and ran. My intention was to join the road that led to the motorway, so I could either run or walk back home. However, the staff had other ideas, and they also ran after me and caught up with me in a car even before I had reached the outer road of the hospital perimeter.

When they caught up with me, they put me in a headlock on the ground, but I fought like a trojan to be free. The battle was fierce. As I struggled, I became weaker and weaker; partly from running away and partly because they had already given me my first dose of chlorpromazine. I was also run down from not having slept at all for a week. They dragged me kicking and screaming into a car and rushed me, with me still fighting to be free, back to the ward. There was what seemed like a whole army of them all against me, trying to hold me down and subdue me. They finally dragged me back to the ward and into a small side room where eventually, after an almighty final fracas, they injected into my thigh a huge dose of chlorpromazine and a sleeping agent.'

That was it. The battle was over. Within about three minutes, I was asleep in the bed, and they must have undressed me and put me in pyjamas and turned off the light. It was now early evening in December of 1979, and I was about to enter the longest sleep coma I have been in in all my life.