With me, the demons manifest themselves without warning. Have you ever had one of those days where you wake up and you’re Kerry Katona? Most days I’m actually very happy; the birds dress me in the morning and I whistle while I work. Then I have ‘black dog days’, which can last for weeks. Depression is more than feeling sad. In this state I’m so pessimistic I think my big toe is only there so the mortician has somewhere to hang his tag, and my glass isn’t half empty, it’s full... of poison. Nothing can ease the anguish.

These are the days of locking myself away and cuddling cats – certainly not answering the phone. My partner must suffer a great deal due to my little episodes. I feel myself descending into a spiral of despair, and it’s all the more frightening because I don’t know why it’s happening. My many spells on various prescribed antidepressants left me resembling a rather overweight, scruffy Stepford wife. I realised my brain was fried on the day I left a letter in my pocket and posted my purse, then threw my lunch in the communal bin and walked to work with carrier bag full of rubbish. Next came the self-medication and resultant denial of addiction: “Cannabis isn’t addictive! I should know, I’ve been smoking it for years...” and, “I’m not addicted to cocaine, I just really like the smell of it. Now, let’s go somewhere nice and drink lunch.”

It’s difficult writing this because I am ultimately ashamed of my mental ‘weakness’. There’s terrible stigma attached and discrimination is only an opinion away. Merely a few years ago people like me were routinely institutionalised and deemed idiots. I remember my mum telling me of her best friend, the lively and exceptionally eccentric daughter of an aristocrat. She disappeared, only to be seen again two years later on television, waving from a balcony with her father and the Queen... lobotomised.

The loss of such a great and dangerous mind requires me to look back at the histories of glorious ‘nutters’ who have changed the way we think and experience our world for the better by sheer virtue of their courage and lack of respect for perceived convention. Make no mistake: we are the trailblazers. Isaac Newton suffered numerous nervous breakdowns. Both Winston Churchill and Beethoven were bipolar. Buzz Aldrin had clinical depression (wouldn’t you if you were saddled with the title ‘second man to set foot on the moon’) and Trisha Goddard turned her mental shortcomings into a glittering TV career... and no, she’s not the best woman I could come up with – that list is actually endless.