When I was sixteen my bedroom had red walls. I grew up in Canada, and, where I lived it was below zero from November until May. The heating on my side of the house didn’t work properly, and aside from sleeping under a collection of blankets I thought red walls would make me feel warmer.

That November felt like one long freezing shower in a bathroom with crumbling tiles and peeling, rubbery paint. It was cold enough to snow but it rained almost every day. The sky was English grey, and my English mother said it was like winter in London.

My room was a perpetual disaster. I only tidied it if my boyfriend was coming over for a fumble between the sheets. Sometime in early November we had sex for the first time, on a bench beside a small, inner city lake, drenched from rain with bellies full of vodka and orange juice and rum and Coke. We’d become an item the year before, after he’d declared months of pining for me, and he’d become a part of my life and identity. I was so afraid of losing him.

A week or two later I was curled in bed, and it was late enough for the CBC Radio to be playing their overnight programmes of foreign English language broadcasts. My right knee had been hurting since third period, when my literature class had gone to a poetry reading at my arts high school’s auditorium.

Then the thought suddenly occurred to me: what if I had bone cancer, like Alice, a classmate who’d died at the start of grade ten. Then they’d amputate my leg. I was horrified at the thought. Suddenly I could hear my own thoughts as a running narrative. Other voices piped in. I could see colourful patterns in my red walls. I cried. I prayed. I vomited in the pink and beige bathroom I shared with my sister.

I hate being called “unwell.” It’s my least favourite euphemism for being crazy. The term I prefer is HSBW, an acronym supposedly used by consultants in Accident and Emergency at hospitals. As in, Having Sex With Biscuits. As in, Fucking Crackers. I like the honesty of it; it somehow makes me feel less patient-like to be treated and examined and condescended to, and more like a human being who has simply collapsed inside. It’s also less of a joke. I don’t have the sniffles, I haven’t eaten undercooked chicken wings, I’m not coughing up yellow goo. When I’m “unwell,” I can talk to God.

My mother always wakes up early. She takes the bus to work, which is an hour-long endeavour. She’s not the grab-a-NutriGrain-head-out-the-door type of person. She likes to have one or two cups of instant coffee and a bowl of home-mixed muesli, read the papers, take a shower, and prod whoever else is in the house into wakefulness. She found me one morning, before dawn , curled up on our second-hand sofa, in tears. I was seventeen. A few weeks earlier she’d grudgingly taken me to our family doctor for “my problems,” an appointment I’d made with my high school’s guidance counselor. Dr. Madill was from Dublin, and had cheerfully prescribed me Paxil for anxiety. I didn’t tell him about the voices. They’d told me not to. Mum thought it was nonsense; she’d taken me to get the pills, but that was about it. No more mention had been made of the matter.

It was November again. This time I thought God was going to switch my soul into another body, specifically the body of a girl at school who had a disfiguring skin disease. The voices wouldn’t leave me alone, no matter how much I prayed or begged. Sometimes I floated above my body and watched myself in class or taking the bus. The world looked like an Impressionist painting, though I’d been to see an optometrist. By the time Mum found me on the sofa, I hadn’t eaten or slept in any meaningful way for three or four days.

I was in Prague, twenty-three years old and working as an English teacher when I started taking Ziprasidone. At first, Ziprasidone was a mixed blessing. I felt like I had fully risen out of the protective seawater other anti-psychotics had kept me in— like I was breathing fresh, purifying, clear air. I started to write again, finishing poems I’d let linger for a year or more. I lost about thirty pounds, and the subsequent shopping trips, seeing my thinner self in cute, feminine clothes was a boost. But I was also covered in eczema, and almost constantly menstruating. But as my skin cleared, and the bleeding stopped, I knew that Ziprasidone was right for me.

My mother was in Prague when I made the switch. When she arrived home, she went to check the price of Ziprasidone in our local pharmacy. It wasn’t available; the Canadian government hadn’t yet passed through with the approval system. I couldn’t go home. Not for good.

I remember the day I was told I was schizophrenic. I had an appointment with Dr Richard after school. The past few weeks had been rough, and I’d switched medications from Risperidone to Olanzapine after them former had made me shake and lactate. Until that day, I was classed as having schizophreniform disorder, a kind of temporary psychosis. The assumption was that I’d only spend a year or two on medication, and then I would recover. But I didn’t function well without the anti-psychotics. At an earlier appointment, I’d asked Dr Richard what my diagnosis was, and he deferred it to our next meeting.

Dr Richard was a tall, thin French Canadian man with a walrus moustache he used to twirl in our sessions. It couldn’t have been particularly easy to tell an eighteen-year-old girl who’s already gained sixty pounds and become a social outcast at her school that she faces a lifelong battle. Medication. Forever. Schizophrenia. Forever.

Dr Richard’s office was above the best bakery in my city. I came out of the session disoriented. So I got an Illy coffee and a buttery croissant and sat on the edge of a fountain to make a difficult phone call.

“Oh, hello Mum. I’m downtown. Yes, been to see Dr Richard…”

When I was twenty-two, almost twenty-three, I fell into a hole. The summer before leaving for Prague, I experienced the longest lasting depression I’ve ever felt. I was living in student digs and working as a temporary receptionist in a publishing company. Most nights I divided my time between taking baths and smoking cigarettes, watching television and smoking cigarettes, and lying in bed, feeling uneasy and ugly and sticky (it was the hottest summer Ottawa had seen in decades), and smoking cigarettes.

One night I couldn’t stop crying. I called the municipal crisis help line, and the clearly bored student on the other end talked me out of taking a month’s worth of olanzapine in a mouthful.

My meds, a list:

Paxil, one daily, for eight months at seventeen years old. Small and yellow. Generally ineffective for my “anxiety.”

Risperdal, five daily, for seven months between seventeen and eighteen years old. Small and red. They cause me to gain 50% of my starting bodyweight. Eventually I have to stop taking them since they make lactate, and induce painfully noticeable Parkinsonian trembling.

Olanzapine, one daily, from eighteen to twenty-tree years old. I stayed overweight but stable for five years. I switched because they seemed to stop working.

Ziprasidone, two daily, twenty-three to present. I lost weight, though insomnia became a serious problem. Zeldox or Geodon (its brand name) is close to being unavailable in the UK, and its approval was delayed in Canada until late 2007 because it could cause heart problems.

Drug X, four daily, when I had just turned twenty-four, for three months. A drug in clinical trial phase, which I took for a “test drive” under the auspices of my Czech psychiatrist.

Various sleep aids. None of which were particularly healthy or effective.

Setraline (“Zoloft”), one daily, from age twenty-four to present. After experiencing an exceptionally vicious bout of depression, I decided that I wanted to try an anti-depressant. Despite the aura of cynicism surrounding Zoloft and its likes, it does the trick and lifts the burden.

In London, last month, at the clinic where I get my meds, I overheard a woman say, “I want to get off me clozapine. I been really good. Ain’t been aggressive for a year. I makes me bed every day, and puts me things in the chest of drawers.”

I graduated with highest honours in philosophy and humanities from a well-respected university in Canada with a year of credits from an internationally renowned philosophy faculty in Europe. After finishing my undergraduate degree, I went to Prague with nothing waiting for me there but three job interviews, a hostel booking and hope, no friends, no home, no Czech. I built a well-ordered life for myself: I worked for a small non-profit language school, eventually becoming a senior teacher, worked for an independent media collective, had poetry published, and broke down a gender barrier at a bookstore that typically only employed men behind the counter.

And now I’m at the LSE. Maybe you know me, have classes with me. It’s likely that you’ve seen me. Could you ever have guessed I was HSWB? There’s an easy difference between me and the Chest-of-Drawers lady, and perhaps us two, assuming you live your life medication-and-diagnosis-free: luck. I drew the crazy card, but was able to live a normal life, due to circumstances of good doctors, working meds and helpful surroundings. Chest-of-Drawers lady drew the same card, and wasn’t as lucky, and now the best part of her day is folding laundry. I’ve given up looking for fairness.