I'd contend that it's one of the hardest things in the world to see someone getting destroyed. I can't work out whether seeing someone destroy themselves is better or worse, but I don't suppose ranking is going to help anyone.

She's flooded her brain with ethanol, nicotine, starved it of nutrients, starved it of rest. She's crushed, split, and torn cells to get through the night she artificially extends. It is a testament to the resilience of the human body that she's not dead, though even that's standing on a knife edge, £4.99, B&Q.

Who is she? She's many people. She's the person who raised my spirits with distraction, the person who I counselled through an early morning of incestuous fallout. She's the person I met in a town where people stared as they walked past because her skin contained more melanin than theirs, and the person I convinced that an abortion was the right thing to do. She's the girl I ate cookies with at the Mall, and the girl I failed to make eat the next morning. She's the girl whose touch made me bite my lip, and the girl who pushed me away because she values weight loss over the loss of me. She's the girl I accidentally denied my love for when I really meant to say that I did, and the girl who with wild eyes and bedraggled hair begged me to make her visions stop.

I couldn't.

It's very scary to realise, at that point, that there's nothing you can do. When you're trying your hardest, you suddenly fall off the cliff of your own delusions and the quartz ticking in your soul just stops. You stare back, your eyes feeling like egg-shells, your expression completely empty because every bit of emotion has been stolen by this girl who wills you to be able to help when you can't. You just hold her, and she tries to move but you don't let her, you stop her with half a will to block her mouth and make. this. all. stop.

And then you relax.

But not for long. She's begging you to let her harm, and your resistance starts up again. There's no silence in this place. When you're running, even if you're being chased, you always have the freedom to stop and let the inevitable come to you. Not this time, there's no breather as long as you're conscious. You hold her wrists and stare blankly into her eyes, your brain a numb machine knowing only what its function is. To stop her.

All machines break eventually though, and so do you. She pulls and suddenly you don't hold on enough, her fingers sliding away past yours. You want to just curl up and cry, but you can't, it's not your choice to do so. You have to watch. It's the truth, it happens, it's reality and there's no escaping it. She's rocking on the floor, clawing at her wrists with her fingernails, and you swear it's the most terrifying thing you've ever seen.

What are you going to do now you've failed? Give up? No. Not possible. Forget this ever happened and carry on as before? Your only choice.

There are no long term solutions, apart from the obvious. None of your profound insightful maxims can help them, or you. You've just got to keep listening, fill yourself up with the emotional toxicity splashed in blood red across the corridors of their minds.

I am the opium of a small section of the masses who fall at the edge of the bell-curve labelled sanity.

And I'm shaking.