A New Life: A self-help philosophy leaves suicidal thoughts and unhappy days far behind. Theresa Judge reports.
'I've been right at the bottom - not many people come back from that you know." The middle-aged man is speaking from the comfortable, immaculately maintained house in south Dublin he shares with his teacher wife.
Wallace Huey is describing a time when he was suicidal. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was at college studying architecture in the mid-1970s. There have been many difficult times in the intervening years. But for the past five years he has been writing a self-help book and developing a website which he describes as a guide to help people discover their "inner guidance".
He believes his experience is a testament to how a self-help approach can work and says that he now has "a brilliant life", but he doesn't claim to be cured of schizophrenia.
"I say in the book that I take medication and am supervised by a psychiatrist. I'll always need to take the medication but I am getting stronger all the time," he says.
Equally he stresses how well he is now compared with earlier times in his life. Having "come through difficult, harrowing times", he now strongly believes that he can help others with his self-help philosophy.
He first became ill during his final year at Nottingham University when he was under "an awful lot of pressure". Aged 23, he says he lost a sense of who he was and where he was.
"I remember sitting in a park and crying. I couldn't find my way home, I didn't know my name."
His parents brought him home to Belfast but after a year out he managed to finish his degree and return to Belfast to work. During his 20s he worked in different offices, but got sacked from a few. "If the office was a caring office and took me at my own pace, I could survive."
After some years he set up a management consultancy business but suffered a severe set-back when he was advised by a practitioner in complementary medicine that he could give up his medication.
"So I came off my medication and I gradually became more and more unrealistic. With schizophrenia, you live in a dream world in your mind rather than in the real world around you, so I began to sink into a fantasy world and live out of that.
"I had more and more unrealistic ideas of what I could be, of what I could do, and living that out in a way that didn't make any sense. I ended up walking the streets and barely able to look after myself, and just living this bizarre life, cut off from people. My friends would just have not bothered with me, though my family kept in touch."
He says his family couldn't convince him to go back on medication because "when your mind's like that, you don't listen to people, you're perfectly alright, there's nothing wrong with you".
It was only after he suffered severe hallucinations while visiting the home of his uncle, who was a doctor, that he was persuaded to go back on medication.
"I was being surrounded by flames, and I was in hell and I was burning up. This was real to me - I was jumping around in the bed - as far as I was concerned I was on fire."
Although first believing his uncle was trying to poison him, he says, "some sane place inside my head" knew he should take the medication his uncle was offering. The following day he returned to hospital, but he says his mind was shattered.
He subsequently became very angry because he came to the conclusion after an interview with a psychiatrist that he would never work again. "My dreams of getting married and having a family and having a career evaporated." He was aged 32.
He then started to suffer from severe depression and became suicidal. "That was the loneliest year of my life because I wasn't really capable of having relationships with people and I was in a place of extreme chaos mentally."
He came to believe in finding answers inside himself and his road to recovery started when he listened to an instinct that was telling him that in order to heal he would have to "stop thinking about himself and start being useful to other people".
He began to work as a volunteer in an Oxfam shop in Belfast and says he decided to focus on "being a laugh", on being "the life and soul of the party" while at work.
"I remember coming home after doing that the first day, and feeling absolutely depressed - this was a complete act I was putting on. But something in me knew that I had to keep going with this, and the funny thing was after about three or four years of doing this and extending the times I worked in the shop, the act gradually became a reality and I began to connect with people and really have fun at times. And that gave me encouragement."
He eventually started working in the office five mornings a week, and developed some creative fundraising ideas.
The last major change of his life came with the decision to move to Dublin to be with the woman he has since married. He says he knew this was the right thing to do because he was following his "inner guidance" as he did earlier when he knew he should try to be of service to others.
He says it is this skill of getting in tune with his inner self that he is now trying to pass on to other people through his website, www.alifediscovered.org.
He believes people can tune into their being by cultivating periods of stillness in their lives. "It can be your conscience, it can be your intuition, your gut feeling, it can be the dreams you have for your life, the dreams you have at night time, it can be insights you have, it can be your creativity - all of that is inner guidance."
He and his wife are now planning to open a retreat centre. It was through listening to their inner selves that they found each other.
"If my wife had been trusting her head or maybe other people, she would have said 'no, don't do that' but it has paid off. We're soul mates. We never row, we are completely happily married, we have a great life."