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Apr 7 2023
The nature of sobriety

Today marked seven years of total sobriety for me. For seven years, I have been drug and alcohol free. While abstinence is not suitable for everyone, I decided, on April 7th, 2016, that the consumption of mind-altering substances was not safe for me.

I will say I have never approached it through the guise of eternity. “Never say never”, as the saying goes. Instead, I have woken up each day with a commitment to remain sober for that one day. During the challenging times, I have committed to hours and minutes. Whichever way I approached it, I have accumulated almost ¾ of a decade.

Addiction is peculiar. So many think that the focus of the addiction is the issue. We are easily fooled into believing that stopping behaviours such as drug use solves the issue. I lament the fact that it is not so simple. The addicted bodymind is more complex than compulsive behaviours.

I am an addict. I hate drugs and what they do to me, but I adore the feeling of being high. The ability to enter oblivion through a pill or a line is an all too attractive concept to me. Even now, closer to ten years sober than to zero, I find my mind craving it. It’s insidious. Little thoughts of the ways I could get away with it. The ways I could covertly enjoy the feeling of not existing.

I am happy with my sober life. I would not trade the life I have now for something so meagre as drug induced euphoria. That doesn’t mean that living in my Autistic, ADHD, and Schizophrenic mind without switching off for years has been easy. At times, I have been exhausted. An exhaustion I can’t put into words.

I am committed each day to just one more day of sobriety. Because each subsequent day of sober existence brings with it the truth of existence;

Life is a gift. It is meant to be used and spent. The bitter and painful lows only make the highs even more beautiful. Every time I survive a new challenge while maintaining my sobriety, I am able to enjoy the good in life in a vividly high definition.

Sobriety to me is a matter of life or death, and I, for one, choose life.

David Gray-Hammond 1 Comments
Dec 20 2022
Rat Park: Addiction misunderstood

Johann Hari did a lot for the popularisation of the rat park experiment. This person’s now infamous Ted Talk flung open the conversation that perhaps, just maybe, addiction was not biological in origin. While this attempt to depathologise human experience was admirable, both sides of this argument miss a vital cornerstone that bridges so many gaps in our understanding of addiction.

Rat park suggested that the reason the rats preferred drug-laden water was because of the lack of a meaningful social environment. While I will argue that this certainly plays a role on the perpetuation of addictive behaviours, there is more to be considered.

There have been various retorts, but in my opinion, we need to discuss one thing in particular. We need to talk about trauma.

It doesn’t matter what kind of privilege you have in this world, trauma can set off a domino effect, leading you down a path towards addiction. I am yet to meet any addict who was not trying to hide from pain. Some might argue that not all addicts are traumatised, but I would respond by saying that we need to ditch the normative ideas of what trauma is.

Anything can be traumatic, trauma is relative to the Self, not the external observer.

So, yes, a lack of a meaningful social environment can play a big role in addiction, but I do not believe that is what pulls people into the grasp of active drug addiction. It is what keeps them feeling as though they have no way out. That in itself is a traumatic experience which leads to increased drug use.

This is why we need to constantly be aware of the structures and people that comprise our environments. These components are what scaffold us into active addiction. We respond to our environment, yes, but the factor from that environment that plays the largest role is trauma, not sociality.

David Gray-Hammond 1 Comments
Sep 15 2022
Ben Nelson-Roux and Chris Nota: Two tragic tales of systemic failings

This article was Co-Authored by Tanya Adkin and David Gray-Hammond

Trigger Warning: Death, drug and alcohol use, suicide, systemic failure, mental health crisis, inpatient psychiatric care.

The 13th of September 2022 saw the opening of inquests into the deaths of two teenage boys.

Ben

On the 8th of April 2020, Kate Roux forced her way into the room of an adult hostel where she found Ben Nelson-Roux, her son, dead, having been there all day. This happened despite multi-agency involvement and repeated attempts to seek help for her son. Ben was known to be “high-risk” of child criminal exploitation. He was 16 years old. What “high-risk” actually means, is that he was being exploited criminally, and services knew about it. There was no “risk”, this was actively happening. Consultant Psychologist, David Loveday-Simms described him as having a “chaotic and risk taking lifestyle”, this being part of a long history of victim-blaming. He also stated that Ben had started smoking cannabis at age 12. Where was the support for a psychoactive drug user at such a young age?

Loveday-Simms interviewed Ben shortly before his death, and concluded that “he was not a slave to anyone”. Demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of child exploitation. It is frankly terrifying that a CAMHS consultant psychologist demonstrates so brazenly, a lack of understanding around power-exchange, coercive control, modern day slavery, and child exploitation.

That’s not the worst bit.

Loveday-Simms said “I agreed with Mrs Roux that Bens accommodation posed a significant risk to Ben” upon his final encounter with Ben’s mother, before his tragic death. It appears that Ben had been housed as a known child, vulnerable to exploitation, with a history of drug use, and documented attempts to take his own life, in an unsupported hostel for homeless adults. His mother feared that he would die within weeks if correct support was not put in place.

The consultant psychiatrist told the coroners court that Ben would use cannabis and other drugs heavily, which left him paranoid. The night before he died, Ben’s mother had begged for him to be sectioned under the mental health act.

Ben was Neurodivergent, and according to his mother had been struggling with “ADHD, severe mental health issues, and drug and alcohol abuse for years”.

Chris

On the 7th July 2020, a young man fell to his death from a bridge in Southend-On-Sea. It is reported that following a deterioration in his mental health, due to the death of three relatives, he had turned to cannabis to calm himself. It wasn’t Chris’ first visit to this bridge. Paramedics had previously found him at this same bridge on June 27th 2020.

“Coroner Horstead said to Dr Ball: “On June 29th your colleague said you couldn’t keep him [Chris] safe. Was that a view you agreed with?” Dr Ball replied: “That was a view of the whole team that we couldn’t keep him safe at the time.” The coroner said: “Your colleague said there needs to be a hearing for funding. It was unanimous as a team that you couldn’t keep Chris safe in the community?””

Essex Live, (15/09/2022) Click here for more

Chris was Neurodivergent. It’s reported that Chris’ mother Julia had expressed concerns that she felt they were not meeting the needs of her son. She felt he needed specialist autism services. His mother feared that he would die without the correct support. Specialist services were not made available to him.

Chris was Autistic with a learning disability, a drug user, and had previously been sectioned under the mental health act for psychosis. He was 19 at the time of his death.

Discussion

These two deaths were almost three months apart to the day, and 231 miles in distance. Two neurodivergent teenagers. Two vulnerable people who tragically died.

Stories like these are not news to us. They don’t always result in death, sometimes it results in prison, sometimes in long-term hospitalisation under the mental health act. They all follow a similar thread. I don’t think we would be doing either of these young people justice, or the people we work with, if we didn’t acknowledge how far back the misunderstanding of neurodivergence and systemic failings go. It starts in healthcare with lack of healthcare access and a lack of up-to-date knowledge. Parent and victim blaming plays a big part. Discrimination based on stereotypes surrounding young males with “behavioural issues” also play a significant role.

The mess and the underfunding in the education system. The minefield that are Education, Health, and Care Plans (EHCP’s). Lack of social workers with specialist knowledge in neurodivergence, or indeed ANY professional with specialist knowledge.

This should not have to happen in order for people to realise that the system is broken; but that isn’t even happening, there seems to be no change on the horizon. We have a national problem, loads of Neurodivergent people are suffering unnecessarily. In our experience, services just don’t know how to support neurodivergence. Services aren’t designed or accessible for neurodivergent people.

But what would we know, after all, we are just neurodivergent people.

To read more about issues raised in this article, please see the Creating Autistic Suffering series on this website, the first article of which can be found here.

David Gray-Hammond 1 Comments
Jul 10 2022
Back to the corner: Psychoactive drug use, my Autistic experience

Some 4(ish) years ago, my debut blog post on this website was Standing on the corner: Where autism and addiction meet shortly covered by Recovery services as an Autistic adult. Back then My writing was merely an attempt to scream into the void, offloading my frustrations. Little did i know that in 4 years, my articles would have garnered over 25,000 views, and that people would ask me to go places and do things. I was also pretty surprised to discover that for the most part I don’t mind going places and doing things.

With that in mind, I decided it’s time to take another crack at this one, seeing if 4 years of experience makes for an improved experience for you, my wonderful readers and followers.

So here we are.

I’m David. Born Autistic at the dawn of the 1990’s. My life was pretty standard for what you’d expect of a truamatised, psychotic, recovering addict. So let’s consider where this particular part of my journey started.

October 2008.

My long term relationship came to an end (mutually, but still painful none-the-less). On that very same day, I had a peculiar experience. I heard a number of voices calling my name, but it seemed that it wasn’t the people around me that were doing so. Interestingly, this was the day of my first ever cigarette as well. Hindsight tells me that the fact that my first cigarette led to me smoking an entire pack in a number of hours should have been a huge warning for what was coming. Sadly, hindsight isn’t good for much, and I have a traumatised AuDHD brain that at the time was going through what some might term a “prodromal phase” for the psychotic condition I would later be diagnosed with.

Over the next week I discovered that smoking cannabis really helped my growing paranoia and auditory disturbances chill the f*ck out, and that when drank a litre of vodka, I just didn’t give a sh*t. Just a note here for anyone who can’t see what’s coming; drug-use and trauma is a volatile mix. Some people use psychoactives safely and medicinally their whole lives, with no real negative outcomes. I on the other hand came to resemble one of those warning videos your school would have shown you about the dangers of peer pressure and drug-use.

So, naturally I did what any normal AuDHD’er would do when they discovered something that makes them feel good. I did it again. And again, and again, ad infinitum. Each time I used, my consumption grew. Each new environment I entered I would break down another boundary in my life. First it was cannabis, then alcohol, and I figured that since these two weren’t the dangerous and hellish things my school had made them out to be, perhaps other psychoactives would be okay as well. Side note: this is why using scare tactics and abstinence based approached to stop young people from getting high is f*cking irresponsible, because when they find out they’ve been lied to, they don’t truat you on ANYTHING.

My time at university can be summed up by quoting myself “I don’t think you’ve ever seen me this high, have you?” and the phrase said to me most often “How the f*ck are you still alive?”. You see, I hadn’t noticed it, but I was taking drugs by the shed load. I was out of my mind on pretty much anything I could get. It’s easier to list the drugs I haven’t used than the drugs I have used; To date, I’ve never used “street” heroin, or crack cocaine. More on this in a moment.

What this meant was that when I ran away from my environment, making the 300 mile journey back to my mother’s house, I swore I would never use again. After all, I had nearly died on a couple of occasions, and found myself on the radar of what one might describe as “less than savoury people”.

More on my drug use…

Yes, I have never used Heroin or Crack, but what did happen was that I got addicted to Oxycodone, Diazepam (Valium to my american followers), and Spice (you know, that zombie drug that everyone was talking about for a matter of months until it became illegal and everyone decided to pretend like the problem was solved). Of course, I was drinking a litre of whiskey most nights, and I also had excellent taste in red wine and ales.

Unsurprisingly, I found myself under the treatment of what would describe itself as a “Substance Misuse Service” (SMS), interestingly, there seems to be an unwritten rule that when you spend more time in hospital from drug overdoses than you do at home, they get a little angsty with you. Here’s where I start getting pissed off.

By the time I was under the SMS, I actually wanted to stop using, but had completely forgotten what normal life was like. I hadn’t been sober a number of years, and was quite frankly spending most of the day looking like I had just left the set of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. My keyworker was a wonderful person, and conveniently specialised in Novel Psychoactives like Spice. Sadly, that’s about as far as my good experiences go.

You see, I had also been referred to the local secondary care mental health service, referred to as the “Assessment and Treatment Service” (ATS). Again, they took umbridge with my repeated unaliving attempts, and decided they should probably do something about this obvious wild card called David.

Here’s the problem though.

The SMS needed my mental health to be treated. How can a person stop using drugs to hide from trauma, when that trauma is still ongoing and not being processed? Luckily, the ATS had a stellar response; “We can’t treat your mental health until you are sober”. Thank goodness that we could all agree on absolutely nothing.

I was quite privileged eventually, because my lead practitioner at the ATS actually spoke to my keyworker at the SMS, and we eventually got somewhere. It was a psych ward, but it was still somewhere, and that’s what matters.

I detoxed off the psychoactive stuff, and then detoxed some more in the community. April 7th 2016 I had my first day of sobriety in close on a decade. This warranted a celebration, naturally, so naturally I threw myself into a monotropic spiral, had a major psychotic episode as a result, and earnt myself a free trip back to the psych ward. Oh, and by the way, being Autistic on a psych ward is a huge steaming pile of bullsh*t that has been placed in an already burning dumpster.

So what other issues did I face? Services were woefully ill equipped to take on a neurodivergent client on just about every front.

The entire system for appointments was clearly designed by and for neurotypical people who assumed that everyone had a good grasp of time-keeping, sensory regulation, emotional regulation, and their short term memory. It was an absolute nightmare.

So what was different about my drug use compared to a neurotypical?

I think the largest difference was my approach. Drugs were my special interest, still are to an extent (just without the use of said drugs). I used myself as a science experiment. I kept detailed journals of what I’d taken, what dose, what I had combined it with, and how it affected me over a number of hours. My ultimate goal was to find the sweet spot where I was no longer aware of my existence, but still alive.

Another interesting aspect of my drug use was my blatant identity crisis. Growing up Autistic meant being constantly told that who I was, was incorrect. Everything about me was a target for the neurologically provincial bigots. So when I discovered that drugs allowed me to build a new identity, one that I felt was better accepted (says something when your addict identity feels better accepted than your Autistic one, doesn’t it?), I leaned into it and allowed psychoactives to become my ENTIRE identity.

Of course, I was still Autistic and ADHD as hell, so drugs often served to extend my spoons reserves far beyond their limit.

The biggest pull of drugs though? I could switch off my feelings, or change them in a matter of minutes to hours. I had the control, I felt what i wanted to feel. Take that, brain!

Of course I tried things like the 12-step program to get sober. It really wasn’t my sort of thing, but apparently voicing that in meetings is a huge faux pas that means none of the 12-steppers continue to talk to you when you leave the program. I ended up taking things I had learnt from multiple sources and building a life where it was easier to not use anymore. When I was struggling, I would reach out and help someone who needed help. It became a philosophy that I lived by. These days I have to be a bit more careful with my spoons, but still essentially try to live life by helping others out of the dark spaces that litter the world.

The fundamental problem with my experience in “the system” was that no one had any appropriate training around neurodivergent people. To be fair, I didn’t even know of things like monotropism, double empathy, meltdowns, burnout, or really anything to do with actual neurodivergent experience, so I couldn’t really act surprised when services didn’t either.

Life hasn’t been perfect since I got sober, but I’m glad I got to experience it. Sobriety has been a gift that I gave to myself, I don’t intend to ever return it, but one thing I have learnt more recently is that if you spend your entire life trying to predict the future, you’re not going to have a fantastic experience of the present.

A set of final words? If you are struggling right now, with any of the stuff in this article, I want you to know that it CAN get better. I don’t say that to bullsh*t you. The ugly truth is that not everyone survives this stuff. I do, however, urge you to give yourself the best chance you can. 7 years ago, as I embarked on my recovery, I could not have imagined being where I am today. The suffering I was experiencing seemed unending and inescapable. I got out, though.

I truly believe that everyone deserves a chance to be a happy and content member of the society they live in. Of course mental health and addiction are only a small part of peoples experiences, which no doubt I have already, or will, elaborate on in some capacity.

I just need one thing from you, dear reader, don’t give up. Keep trying.

David Gray-Hammond 1 Comments
May 18 2022
Autistic Substance Use Survey 2022

Below is a survey on Autistic people and substance use. The aim is to collate data anonymously on the use of drugs and alcohol in the Autistic community, and use that data to write a report that will be published on this website.

The hope is that these insights may help Autistic people better advocate for themselves with regard to this topic.

None of the questions are mandatory, but the more that you can answer, the more data we will have to look at.

David Gray-Hammond 1 Comments
Apr 7 2022
Addiction advocacy and the inspiration paradox: A reflection at 6 years sober

Today I am 6 years sober from addiction. During those six years I have learnt many lessons, but in this reflection I would like to consider something that has played on my mind for the past three years of my advocacy work.

Inspiration.

While not overtly a bad thing, it is often misused to infantilise and minimise the achievements of disabled people while hiding behind a mask of feigned respect. This phenomenon is known as “inspiration porn”.

A good (hypothetical) example of such a thing would be a video of a disabled person doing something completely mundane, like dancing, but they would be dancing with a non-disabled person. The video would centre the non-disabled as some kind of saviour to the disabled person for doing something as basic as treating them like a human being. The implication of the video, albeit in subtext, would be “Look at the amazing things that disabled people can achieve when an abled person rescues them from their shameful existence”.

It’s dehumanising and wrong.

So, addiction advocacy.

As a recovering addict in the public eye, I do what I do because I want to help others overcome similar challenges to my own, and help reduce their suffering. This does in fact require inspiring people. If it weren’t for the sober addict who showed me kindness during my first stretch on a psychiatric ward, I might not have chosen recovery.

The fact that they had turned their life around, and become someone I wanted to look up to was inspiring, and that isn’t a bad thing.

What would be bad would be if people like myself are allowed to become another source of inspiration porn. It’s a difficult line to walk. I want people to have what I have found, not get off on the tragedies that have formed who I am.

Contrary to popular belief, addicts are people. We are not burdens, we don’t deserve our suffering. Regardless of whether or not we are in recovery, we deserve food, housing, health care, support, and kindness.

This is what I want to inspire in people.

So please, don’t look at me and think it’s a miracle that I recovered. My recovery shouldn’t be the inspiration. I was privileged to have a loving and supportive set of family and friends. I had good key workers (although the services they came from were woefully ill-equipped). I was in a place where I was ready to enter recovery.

What I want to inspire in you is the idea that all addicts deserve recovery. I want to inspire you to challenge the systems that keep people like me trapped in a world of suffering.

I want you to know that those with less privilege than myself need us to get in the trenches and help them fight this war.

If that is what I inspire in people, then I am happy with what I am doing. If, however, you look at me and see a walking miracle, then I have not gone far enough.

The tragedies and traumas of my life should not be celebrated. They should be wielded as weapons to dismantle the masters house, and rebuild it into something where we can all coexist and thrive.

David Gray-Hammond 0 Comments
May 26 2021
Autism, addiction, and my need for control

I have learned a great deal about myself through self-reflection over the last 5 years of sobriety, but one lesson was considerably difficult to learn.

I like to think of myself as a friendly and generally happy and fun person to be around, but the truth is that I need control. I need control over everything. When things in my life are out of my control, I experience a deep-rooted anxiety and panic that can push me into a self-destructive spiral if left unchecked.

This is what made substance use so attractive to me. My life was chaotic and terrifying thanks to my worsening mental health. Substance use gave me control over my feelings and reactions. As an addict, I quickly learned that when things got too much to handle, I could essentially switch myself off.

Not only did it give me control over my emotions, it gave me control 9ver my identity. In previous articles I have spoken about how I was unhappy with my identity, and it’s just as relevant here. I wanted to be someone or something else. Drugs and alcohol gave me that. I was “Dave the Rave”.

I was the guy that by all definitions of the word, should have been dead.

Of course what I failed to see was that I was not controlling my identity, the substances were in fact controlling me. I was not choosing to be David the Addict. It was inescapable.

The final point to consider was that as my mental health deteriorated, so did my routine. My life was chaos. This was horrific to me as an autistic person, which subsequently caused me to deteriorate further. It was a vicious circle that span in perpetuity. Drugs and alcohol actually gave me some semblance of routine. Yet another insidious way that I fooled myself into thinking I was doing okay.

Even now at 5 years sober, I still struggle with my need for control. I catch myself trying to engineer every aspect and every moment of my life. Meditation helps me sit with my experiences, but truthfully the only thing that stops me from manipulating everyone is knowing that it’s wrong. If it was a socially acceptable thing to do, I would absolutely engineer and manipulate everything about my life.

That’s how much I need control over my life.

David Gray-Hammond 0 Comments
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