By 1989, things on the surface couldn’t have looked better. Six distinctions, top of my class in aeronautical engineering, well on track for a summa cum laude. My dad thought I was the second coming and even more importantly so did Niels. The Barclays, Bruce, my whole family—they all thought I was a genius. But underneath, I was still the same insecure little fucker I’d always been.
By then, Niels and Carey had bought a house near us in Rivonia. He had a full-size snooker table, and I'd head over in the evenings to play. Bruce would often join. I was drinking too much red wine, studying too little, and the creeping sense that I wasn’t keeping up started pressing in.
Thing is, my stellar first-year results had more to do with a head start than raw intellect. Guys like Giles Wood—smarter, more disciplined—were catching up. And with every lecture I didn’t concentrate in, every formula I fudged, the fear grew. What if all the admiration—especially from my dad—vanished the second I slipped?
Then came the July holiday. Bruce and I were heading to Mallorca to visit my dad. Mia would be there too—we’d been writing letters back and forth, not exactly love letters, but something was there, at least from my side. I’d convinced myself that this would be the trip where everything came right and by that I mean lose my virginity.
Bruce and I boarded the South African Airways flight and drank it dry. All the free booze, all the bravado. We arrived in Mallorca and carried right on. Clubs, strip joints, zero sleep. My dad had rented us the apartment next door to his in San Agustín for the summer. It should’ve been perfect.
He introduced us to his Danish doctor friends—a nice couple in their thirties. Turns out he’d lent them quite a bit of money, and they were essentially on call for his high blood pressure. I mentioned the heart palpitations I’d been getting around exam time. He sent me straight to them for a check-up. Clean bill of health.
Then came the crash.
Probably the third morning there. I hadn’t slept. Couldn’t sleep. Just lay in this stifling little room while waves of pure, unfiltered panic tore through me. The kind of panic that should be reserved for imminent death—but this was self-generated, and relentless.
At about 7 a.m., I stumbled up the hill to the doctors’ house, knocked on the door, wild-eyed and unravelled. I don’t remember what I said—something like “I’m going crazy, please help.” The doctor sat me down, gave me a tablet (probably Valium), and a glass of water. Within minutes, the terror lifted just enough to breathe again.
I begged him not to tell my dad. The shame of it. But my mind wouldn’t stop eating itself alive. Thinking about thinking. No skin to live in. Constant dread with no cause, and no off-switch.
Then I had this brilliant idea: maybe all of this was because I hadn’t told Mia how much I loved her. So I walked down to Club Náutico, where she was working, and confessed my feelings to her. She must have thought I’d lost the plot—and, to be fair, I had.
The days that followed were meant to be holiday, but I was in free fall. We’d go to restaurants; I’d leave early. I don’t even remember how I got home half the time. Sleep was impossible. Heat. Noise. Anxiety thrumming through my bones. A couple of beers would calm me down, briefly—but I knew that road led somewhere very dark so I didn't pursue it.
I was completely disintegrating. I had the brain to excel, to be top of my class—and yet I was barely holding myself together. I needed to go home. I told my dad I needed to get home, that I was unravelling, I'll never forget the pain in his eyes that I was causing him. He brought in the Danish doctor again, who said plainly, “He has major depression. Going back to South Africa won’t fix it.” He was right of course.
But I left anyway.
This was meant to be the dream trip—me and Bruce, Mallorca, endless summer. Instead, I boarded that flight barely able to write my own name. My mum met me at the airport, took one look at me and burst into tears. She’d already spoken to Bill Barclay, who had an old hockey mate—a retired psychiatrist who’d once run Sterkfontein, the state mental asylum.
They took me to see him almost straight from the airport. He’d asked my mum to have me write everything down, so I showed up with pages of frantic notes trying to describe what I was going through. I sat in his office, desperate for someone to just take the pain away, to do something.
He read my account in silence, then looked at me from behind his desk, pulled out a bunch of pills, handed them to me with a glass of water, then gave my mum a list of instructions.
So here I was, back in Parkmore, under the loving care of my mother but completely and utterly mentally destroyed. The holiday in Mallorca was a total write-off—poor Bruce had been left behind, and while he’d be fine, it certainly wasn’t the trip we’d imagined. No one, least of all myself, could understand what the hell was going on with me.
I was seeing Dr. Braude almost every day, and I remember he was also running a gold coin exchange out of the same room where he practiced psychiatry. He prescribed me antidepressants and sleeping pills. The antidepressant was Anafranil—I remember that clearly. The sleeping pill came in a big yellow gelatin capsule, rugby-ball-shaped and about the size of a large pea. I looked it up years later: it was a barbiturate called Amobarbital.
His instructions were simple: “These are strong. Take one, you’ll sleep for ten hours. That’s what you need right now.” So we went home and I did exactly that.
Except I didn’t sleep for ten hours. I slept for two. And it wasn’t really sleep—it was a chemical knockout, a blackout with the faintest illusion of rest. I’d wake in a panic, gripped by a rebounding sense of horror. Then I’d lie there, stunned, until the next wave hit.
The antidepressants were supposed to start working within two weeks. But when every second feels like you're fighting off a psychic drowning, two weeks may as well be eternity. It was an impossible ask.
I don’t want this memoir to get too dark—I've always wanted it to be filled with the humour and the joy I find in life—but there’s no way to tell this part without getting dark. In my walk-in cupboard was my gun safe. And inside it, guaranteed relief. But I wasn’t completely gone—I gave the key to my mother. I knew I couldn’t trust myself. I knew I was unhinged. And I wanted a safeguard in place in case the pain tipped me over.
The next few days followed the same rhythm: daily visits to Dr. Braude for what passed as therapy. There was none. "What do I do when I wake up after only two hours?" "Take another pill was his answer". His entire approach was: “Just wait for the drugs to work.”
Looking back now, and with everything I’ve learned since, he was treating me using guidelines from a psychiatric era that belonged in a museum—stabilise the patient on a tricyclic, numb them with sleeping pills, and hope for the best. But these sleeping pills were barbiturates—highly addictive and dangerous at best, lethal at worst.
One of the side effects was a numbness in my legs. I’d walk to the bathroom and feel this heavy, dragging sensation in my lower body, like I was carrying around someone else's limbs. It felt wrong. Every part of me that was still alive rebelled against it.
Ten days in, I’d had enough. I gathered every last tablet and flushed them down the toilet. I don’t remember all the details clearly—it was too chaotic, too raw—but I do remember that act of defiance. It was something. It gave me the tiniest glimmer of control back.
I told my mother I didn’t want to see Dr. Braude again. And even that—just saying it—helped. I started running, constantly. I couldn’t sleep, but I ran. University had already started, but there was no way I could face it. I couldn’t even concentrate on a single page. I was in survival mode, plain and simple.
Then, one day, lying on my bed, the warped logic of my exhausted, chemically scrambled brain arrived at a conclusion: all of this was happening because I was still a virgin. My mind whispered that once I crossed that line, everything would reset. I would be myself again.
So I got in my car, drove to Sandton City, withdrew my entire bank balance—about 600 Rands—and headed into the red-light district of Johannesburg, Bree Street. I don’t know how I knew which brothel to go to. Maybe I’d overheard someone mention it. Maybe I’d passed it once. Doesn’t matter.
I walked in, selected the woman I was most attracted to, and probably mumbled something polite like, “Are you available?” We drove to her flat, got naked, got intimate—and then I couldn’t perform. My body and my brain simply weren’t cooperating.
It had been a completely futile mission.
I paid her and left, feeling worse than before. Worse because it didn’t work. Worse because I’d betrayed something—I wasn’t sure what. My mother, maybe. So I told her. Confessed the whole thing. She was understandably horrified. She picked up the phone immediately and insisted we go see Dr. Braude.
He listened, wide-eyed, and then said, “Are you completely crazy? You had a curable condition. Now you’ve probably got AIDS.”
I told him I hadn’t actually had sex. But this was 1989, and no one really knew how HIV worked—least of all an old, out-of-touch psychiatrist moonlighting as a coin dealer. And here comes the real kicker. He told me, and I swear this is true: “You need to go find her again and take her for an HIV test. Otherwise, you won’t find peace of mind and you'll make you condition worse.”
So I did.I drove back into Hillbrow, found her, and paid her again—quite a bit more this time to get her to agree to my insane plan. Then I took her to the clinic where Dr. Braude had booked us in and sat with her in the waiting room while they drew her blood. Her name was Candida Roussow.
A few days later, I went to see a social worker at Wits. Told him everything. He was horrified—not just by my story, but that anyone in the medical profession could think sending me back into that situation was remotely appropriate. He was also horrified that I had been given barbiturates which even back then were totally out of fashion in psychiatry.
He got in touch with someone who knew someone, and they managed to access the results: negative, of course. Even if they hadn’t been, I now understand how little the contact had actually mattered. What mattered—more than anything—was that someone, a real mental health professional, had listened. And understood.
Over the next week or so, I felt better. Not fixed, but lighter. I even went away with Pete Becker and a few others for a weekend in Dullstroom. No meds. No Braude. Just space.
While I was there, I'll called my mum from a payphone. “You need to phone Dr. Braude,” she said. “He says you’re a very sick boy.”
So I called him from a pay phone at the Dullstroom Inn. He told me the HIV test was negative and seemed baffled when I said I already knew. I asked if he’d ever heard of Prozac—the Wits social worker said that’s what I should’ve been on. Unsurprisingly, he hadn’t. I told him I never wanted to see him again. He said I’d never get better without him.
He was wrong.
I wasn’t cured. Not then. But I’d begun to understand something vital: his treatment wasn’t going to heal me. It would only trap me. What made a difference—what always made a difference—was kindness. Empathy. Connection.
And that’s what helped me start climbing out of the hole I’d fallen into.
I’ve always known how lucky I was. To have a breakdown—and a roof over my head. To fall apart and have a mother who held the pieces, kept the lights on, made sure there was food, comfort, and patience. Most people in that situation don’t get even one of those things, let alone all of them. So yes, I’m grateful. But I’d still gone through it. And while it wasn’t over, maybe… maybe it was the beginning of the end.
I can’t remember exactly how I got her name, but someone pointed me to a psychologist—Marianna Stuve. A German lady. She practiced out of a small office beneath her house in Northcliff. You walked through a little garden, down a few steps, and into a quiet room lined with bookshelves and comfortable chairs. Warm, quiet light. We just talked, no drugs here. Twice a week, for months.
She taught me breathing and relaxation techniques. She did hypnosis. And I’ll admit, I was sceptical. During one session, I said to her mid-trance, “I don’t think I’m actually hypnotised.” She smiled and said, “Okay. You’re in your chair. Now picture a balloon tied to your wrist. It’s rising. There’s a gust of wind.”
And just like that—my arm went up. Straight into the air. I wasn’t asleep. I wasn’t unconscious. But I was deep. Very deep.
One time, she took me further. Right back—way back. To my birth. And as we got closer to that moment, I started to feel cold. Then freezing. Then shaking. She eventually pulled me out of it and said gently, “You need to ask your mother what happened when you were born.”
So I did.
And my mum told me: she had two massive fibroid cysts. It had been an emergency caesarean. She started hemorrhaging. A three-hour operation. No idea what happened to me, where I went, how long I was alone. Maybe I was swaddled and placed on a table somewhere. Maybe I really was freezing. Who knows?
But bit by bit—through exercise, therapy, and those strange but effective hypnosis sessions—I started to come back to myself.
That December, my dad and Kirsten came out on holiday. My mum went to Malaysia to visit Dilys and Bernard. Which meant—mercifully—she didn’t join us for the road trip.
Just the three of us.
Down the South Coast of Natal. Through the Wild Coast. Across the Eastern Cape. Hermanus. The Mount Nelson in Cape Town. It was beautiful.
And maybe—just maybe—if I hadn’t completely broken down, I wouldn’t have had that time with him. It turned out to be the last real holiday I ever had with my father.
And then came 1990.
I was well enough to return to university. Back to Wits. I'd lost a year, of course—and Giles Wood had not only moved on, he was now substitute lecturing some of the classes I was taking. That’s how sharp he was. That’s how far I’d fallen behind.
But I was back. And the worst of it? That summer collapse?
It didn’t vanish. But it settled. Dormant, at least. For now.