The Ice Age (18 page)

The therapists I saw were expensive and didn't seem to get it; I was taking anti-depressants that didn't do much good either. A psychologist I was seeing called a CAT team after I told him that the Zoloft I was prescribed made me feel like stabbing random people at a shopping centre. They told me to see a therapist, to keep taking my anti-depressants, and to stop using drugs.

Work noticed that I was going downhill. They calculated all of the sick leave and annual leave I was owed, and gave me six weeks off. I went to Queensland and stopped using drugs; when I came back, though, I felt depressed also immediately, and starting using again.

When I got back, the ABC sent me to a psychiatrist — as far as I know, it cost them $1,500. But this was not for treatment — which, as I was only working part-time then, I couldn't afford — it was, at HR's initiation, a Fitness for Work Assessment. The report came back with the use of Axis and Criterion (which are the diagnostic tools used by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)) to conclude that I had ‘Major Depressive Disorder in the context of Substance Abuse and Borderline Personality Traits'.

Meanwhile, I had begun to obsess over guys again: one day, when one of them didn't message me back, I sent him flowers. When he still didn't reply, I took a knife into the work bathroom, and made a long, thin cut from my knee to my groin.

I didn't feel as though I could tell anyone about these humiliations. Whenever I did start to talk to people about what I was going through, I could see them either getting very uncomfortable or they would start lecturing me on what I was doing wrong. That, or they just couldn't have cared less.

At home, I spent hours staring out at the grey Melbourne sky from my high-rise Southbank apartment, miserable and anxious. One day, I decided to give Beck a call; it had been about two years since I had last seen her. As soon as she asked me how I was, it all came pouring out. She listened to everything, and then relayed three or four stories from her own life that seemed to not only encapsulate how I felt, but were remarkably similar to what I had been through. Only Beck, it seemed, had the empathy and the selflessness to admit to having endured the same humiliations as me when it came to unrequited love.

She asked me to come over, and I ended up basically living with her. While there, I met a friend of Nick's — he was by now well and truly off the scene, but his friends still came around — who had recently gotten out of jail. We started a romance as well as starting to use heroin together — never enough to get me addicted, but enough to stop me from killing myself.

I started taking Beck to The Market, where, like everyone else, she had the time of her life. One night, she told me she was going home early because she had bumped into the guy she'd met in a Ferntree Gully pool hall a few weeks earlier, and they were going back to his house to smoke some meth with his two gay mates.

She gave me the key to her place, and returned the next day in a riotous mood. The following weekend, that guy — Rob Smith — was over again, and the weekend after that, and soon enough he hardly left.

From the outset I found ‘Smithy', as we called him, to be kind, friendly, down to earth, generous, and very quick to give a compliment. He and Beck hung out together for a good few weeks before they finally slept together, and he seemed — in his own rough way — to be a real gentleman. He came out with just me a few times, and one night we were joined by another friend; we went back to her house and shot up some heroin. I'll never forget him sweating so much that she — on a fairly cold night — took him out to the backyard, and hosed him down with the garden hose. Around the same time, the guy who I had met at Beck's died from a heroin-related illness.

Needless to say, my work was suffering more and more, and I was quickly becoming a liability. Work managers were very supportive until they got the psychiatrist's report — when they realised I was also using drugs, my manager told me I was an ‘occupational risk' to other employees (at triple j). I was eventually called into a meeting with HR and my manager, who said if I didn't go to a residential rehab I would almost certainly lose my job; she felt I was underperforming to such an extent that I could be placed under a performance review. She said that over 160 people had applied for my job, and that there were award-winning young journalists who had worked on
7.30
and
Lateline
who had missed out to me — even though I was less qualified — and she was now beginning to believe that she had a mistake. I sobbed loudly in front of them for ten minutes, and agreed that yes, rehab was only the option. I went back to my parents, and in the sunshine and isolation, my need for drugs subsided, and by Christmas of that year I was clean. As a condition of getting my job back, though, I still had to go to residential rehab.

As quickly as methamphetamine use had risen in Australia, it now — almost inexplicably, and without the fanfare of its dramatic introduction — began to drop. According to the 2007 National Drug Strategy Household Survey (NDSHS), the proportion of Australians who reported use of these drugs in the previous twelve months decreased significantly, from 3.2 per cent in 2004 to 2.3 per cent in 2007. The meth scare seemed to be over, and it also seemed as if many people had been guilty of engaging in a bit of moral panic. In fact, ecstasy use was still far higher, and used by far more people, than methamphetamine in 2007. The proportion of Australians who had ‘ever used' methamphetamine also decreased significantly, from 9.1 per cent to 6.3 per cent.

Meth's popularity — at least as we understood meth then — seemed to be in free-fall. Perhaps the world had moved on, and the nation's drug users were re-collecting their marbles and going back to work and regular play — including me.

Chapter Six

Every creature has its soft spots

IN A CLASS,
in a public rehab on the rural outskirts of Brisbane's southern suburbs, Audrey, a thirty-something black New Guinean with a slight, almost European-sounding accent, was telling her group, ‘Addiction is an illness, addiction is a coping mechanism. Addiction is about survival.'

Audrey was methodically making eye contact — through her 1960s-style eyeliner — with each of the 11 people in her rehab class. Half were jailbirds who were being forced to attend; there were also two former school teachers, a guy with schizophrenia, a bespectacled middle-aged librarian addicted to sleeping tables, and Richard, the self-described ‘bisexual bipolar bear', who was in rehab after neighbours found him trying to gas himself in the car while on amphetamines. Many eyes were drifting off Audrey, onto the gum trees and the farmland out the window, and perhaps to the future (their plans for when they leave), or to the past (the joys and sorrows of drug use).

‘The brain associates drugs with pleasure, the opposite of pain and death — but instead of giving yourself something that nourishes you and gives you strength, an addict is engaging in behaviour that will make their life worse in the long run,' Audrey explained. ‘You face a problem, you take drugs, your problem gets worse, you take more drugs and on it goes; that is what we call the cycle of addiction.'

Sitting among this motley crew was me: I had arrived three days earlier with my head wrapped in a skull bandana, and my stomach a mess of angry echidnas. I was clean by this stage, and wasn't too keen on going to rehab, or even going back to my job, but the prospect of life on the dole — that is to say, life without parties or drugs while living at my parent's house, an hour away from Bundaberg — didn't grab me either. I
was
, however, keen to work out what had gone wrong, and how I could go back to normal life without experiencing the flood of misery that was my usual experience. I didn't really believe that rehab would help, but I was curious to see if it could.

So in February 2008, Eileen the admin lady picked me up from Beenleigh train station in a minivan. ‘It's quite an interesting area around here,' she remarked. ‘A few years ago it was all rural; now it's becoming an outer suburb of Brisbane.'

We were actually about half-an-hour's drive from my old haunt of Woodridge, which seemed appropriate. Logan House was a publicly funded rehab; the weekly bill was taken straight out of my Centrelink payments. By way of comparison, the Sanctuary, a luxury private rehab in Byron Bay, costs $30,000 a week, and you can get in straight away. Logan House cost $220 a week. It was a bargain, really; for that we got three meals a day, and about a tenth of the medical staff that are employed by the Sanctuary.

Eileen drove me up the driveway, from where I could see the tennis court and the pool. Like the rest of the buildings, the front office was made of ‘he used to give me roses' brown brick.

There were three villas, holding about 24 residents in total, and each of us shared a room with two others.

Eileen explained the rules:

•There was no contact with anybody from the outside for the first twenty-one days.

•Urine and breath tests twice a week.

•The day started at 6.30am with exercise, then classes, four days a week.

Eileen asked if I had deodorant or Listerine or any medications. I answered yes, and she took them off me and put them in a locker, telling me that people can get high on deodorant and Listerine in rehab. I was allowed to keep my asthma medication in my room, but she took my Zoloft from me: I could only take that during specified medication times.

The first resident I met at Logan House was a guy in my villa: he was a talented musician in his early twenties called Max.

‘What's your poison?' he said.

‘Party drugs; I partied Thursday through Monday,' I replied. ‘And eventually heroin on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Until my managers at my radio job told me to take time off or face the axe.'

‘Here sit down, have a smoke with me,' Max said. ‘This is how it went wrong for me, dude. My ex-girlfriend and I were supposed to go to Europe together. I started, like, partying and dealing and stuff, and she told me I couldn't come. But that's why I was dealing, so I could save money. Well, she went to Europe and I'm still here, and with all the money I saved, I spent it on heroin.'

A second guy sat down with us, having overheard Max talking. He was tall with brown hair and a deep Scottish accent.

‘I had a breakdown,' he said without being prompted. ‘And then I went back to the booze.'

‘How are you now?'

‘Getting there. It's difficult. I've been here six weeks. I've been to rehab before, but I really want to make it this time ... and don't worry there are lots of educated professionals here, you'll fit right in. There are all kinds of people here: teachers, business owners, musicians, even a psychologist.'

‘A psychologist in rehab? You mean as a client?'

‘Yep.'

And a few days later I would meet her — her name was Holly — while she was raking up some leaves outside one of the villas. She had brown hair and brown eyes. She told me she became an alcoholic a year or two after her husband died. ‘You know, the thing about grief is, the more you hold on to it — the worse it gets,' she said.

Unlike most rehabs, which are based on the 12-step program, the rehab course at Logan was based on cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT); we were taught that our thoughts control our behaviours and emotions, and our willpower controls our thoughts. We would have a weekly one-on-one counselling session, using techniques by which we would learn to expect and tolerate restless or low moods. We learned to question those assumptions that reinforced our habits (for example, ‘I'll never make friends who don't do drugs'), and to focus on engaging our non-drug activities and creative interests.

The classes were certainly interesting. We were told that thoughts control everything, and that we had complex psychological reasons for drug triggers. According to Audrey, most of our heartache is caused by our own thinking. She told us that most negative thinking is the result of errors in reasoning; what she called ‘thinking distortions', such as ‘overgeneralisation', and ‘all-or-nothing thinking'.

In class, we discussed triggers and traumas. Men talked about being dumped. A young stripper said she used to get so smashed she would peel her cigarettes and eat them like a banana. We each made a list of events that often led to our drug use. For many people, those triggers were similar: ‘Friday nights', ‘having an argument with my partner', or ‘hearing dance music'. Audrey explained that ‘hearing dance music' belongs to a category called ‘euphoric recall'. I wrote my list of risky events:

•Being dumped

•Going out

•Being at a venue

•Stressful day at work

•Having something good happen

•Having something bad happen

Audrey was also my individual counsellor. We had our one-on-one sessions by the river once a week. The thing I found most irritating about her was the way she kept about asking about my homosexuality, and whether or not I had been mistreated because of it. At the time, this seemed completely irrelevant to me.

During our first sessions, I told her I was worried that I might seem a bit boring without drugs.

‘Boring?'

‘Yeah, like when I was a workaholic journalist and a nerd.'