EVERY day Graham Morgan wakes up, brushes his teeth, walks his dog and thinks about killing himself.

Like the other three activities in his routine, suicidal thoughts don’t take up a lot of his time but they do come into his head “at least” once a day.

What stops Graham acting on them is a legally-prescribed injection, behind his shoulder blade, every two weeks. It keeps him from becoming overwhelmed by suicidal thoughts and spiralling downwards into misery and self-loathing.

It protects him from self-harm and gives comfort to his friends and family, who have had to watch countless hospitalisations, suicide attempts and uncomfortable behaviour from a man they know and love. Without the injection, Graham would certainly be dead.

Despite having an MBE for his work in mental health services, speaking at the United Nations about mental illness, helping to shape Scotland’s 2003 Mental Health Act, working for numerous mental welfare organisations and setting up grass-roots centres for those in need of support, Graham said he still feels “like a fraud” when talking about his own diagnosis – schizophrenia.

The 56-year-old, who now lives in Cardross, explained: "I find it very hard to believe I actually have schizophrenia, so when I talk about bit I feel like a bit of a fraud.

"I think I haven’t got it but everyone else thinks I have, so I talk about it from the perspective of someone who thinks I have.

"I experience depression and anxiety and life can be very miserable. Intellectually I get that I probably do have schizophrenia, but in my heart, I don’t believe for a moment that I do."

Personality disorders are one of the more difficult forms of mental illness for people to get their heads around, explained Graham, who has just written a book on his experiences in the hope of helping more people to understand them.

"I think there is a mystique and a fear about them," he said.

"There is a reality that sometimes we behave in ways that are hard to deal with. I don’t want to be stigmatising about me and my friends, but when you have really bizarre thoughts or you are acting in a way that can become hugely hard for friends and family to live with and cope with, although we need to normalise it, we need to do it in a way that is realistic. We can’t just say that everything will be fine and it will all go away if everyone is nice to you."

Graham's own belief, aside from the fact he doesn't think he has schizophrenia, is that he is "fundamentally evil" and his mere existence is causing the world to become a worse place, in turn making life miserable for those he cares about most.

He has tried to deal with this in a variety of ways, including self-harming, isolating himself from those around him and at one stage even living under the floorboards of his home as he believed this would cleanse him of his demons.

He said: "My son would toddle over and point down at the floorboards and say 'Daddy' because I was living down there. It was awful, and very frightening."

These attempts to solve what, for Graham, is a genuine and real problem, usually comes before period of hospitalisation and months of being under constant observation by medical staff to make sure he does not harm himself or, as on a few occasions, run away from hospital.

Graham's schizophrenia reached its peak at the age of 30, when he had just started a new job and his son had been born. With little sleep, and trying to burn the candle at both ends, Graham's mind ran wild and he was soon overcome with delusions.

He explained: "I was trying to do all the dad things – the nappies and everything that men are meant to do, and be. I was also trying to work really hard, having got a new job and I was keen to do it as well as possible.

"I was not sleeping too well at night and getting exhausted. That’s when everything went haywire and I first started thinking I was evil and there were spirits inside me. It became hugely real to me, something switched in my mind.

"I went to see the GP, and then I was taken to hospital. One of the doctors was on the phone speaking to someone who was suicidal, trying to talk them down I think, and I believed that my presence in the room was somehow going down the phone line and making this person suicidal so I ran out of the room.

"The only thing I thought I could do to save my wife and my son was to cut my wrists and let all the blood out.

"That was the start of it all really.

"I was in hospital for about three months, I refused to touch my wife or my son as I thought they would get 'infected'. They still came to visit me every day. It was awful for me, but much much worse for my wife. She hadn’t expected anything like this in her marriage and now she had this very strange person in her life.

"I was still working too hard when I came out, and drinking too much. I loved my work but life became harder between myself and my wife, and it just stopped working."

Graham and his wife eventually separated, and he continued to have trouble dealing with his mental illness. Periods of loneliness and the isolation from his son, friends and family led him to cycle through periods of hospitalisation and medication, self harm and fear.

But in 2009 he attended a mental health tribunal and was put on a compulsory treatment order – a move which he says has saved his life. It hasn't transformed him into a different person, or got rid of his mental illness, but, he says, it has enabled him to have a more stable and manageable life than he was used to.

He said: "From my point of view, it’s fine. There are very few restrictions – I have to take my medication every two weeks, I have to see my CPN [community psychiatric nurse], I have to see my psychiatrist and my mental health officer, and I have to let them in my house. Otherwise I just get on with life."

He hopes his book 'Start' will help others to understand what life is like for those with mental health problems, and to give people with their own mental illnesses hope that things can change.

Graham now lives with his partner Wendy, her two children and their dog, and said he considers life "pretty lovely" for the most part.

"[The book] is about the real story of recovery, where I am still under compulsory treatment, where I still daily talk to myself of evil and devils and the need to die.

"But at the same time have the most wonderful life where I work, where I am in a loving relationship, help look after two amazing young children, am trying to learn how to train Dash – the six month old labradoodle.

"I really can't complain." he said.

Compulsory treatment orders

Despite life being manageable for Graham thanks to his CTO, he is still conflicted about their use for treating people with mental illness.

The issue of compulsory treatment has been debated across the world for the last few years, after the United Nations High Commissioner said that anyone with a disability should not be denied their liberty for any reason.

According to the UN human rights convention, a person with mental illness is classed as disabled and as such they should not be detained against their will – a contradiction to mental health laws in dozens of countries.

Graham explained: "The UN says that everyone, even if they have a disability, should be given full legal capacity and arguments about mental incapacity are not valid reasons for forcing treatment or sectioning someone.

"That’s where I struggle as you can get to places where you’re not thinking straight. You are determined to die and however much someone will intervene and support you to get to the right place you’re not going to unless there are compulsory measures to stop you.

"If they stopped compulsory treatment in this country it would result in my death, for instance. And the death of many other people.

"However, for too long people have assumed when you're psychotic you can’t make any decisions.

"That’s not the case, you can make all sorts of decisions at all sorts of times."

In a move towards less compulsory treatment, campaigners and medics are trying to work towards supporting mentally ill people towards making a decision about their treatment, rather than forcing them to have specific care.

"What I do really like is the idea of supported decision making," explained Graham

"For example, last time I was in hospital I wasn’t given a choice about taking medication but I was given all sorts of information about the range of medications I could take and I was able to choose which one I’d prefer to take.

"I was supported to make a decision."

Advanced statements are another way in which people with mental illness can express their decisions abut their care if they become unwell enough to do it at the time they most need support.

However, the majority of those with mental health problems do not make advanced statements, with concerns they won't be listened to as the statements are not legally binding.

Graham said:"They are not always adhered to and very few people do them. Although we are supposed to be promoting them and there's a duty on health boards to promote these, very few people are doing them yet.

"My personal opinion is that it's much the same as taking out power of attorney in case you because incapacitated. I think people with mental health problems have the same attitude - they don’t think they’ll ever be sectioned so why do one? Quite apart from the fact they can be over ruled anyway.

"Named person is another way of doing supported decision making. If we have people in our life who know us well they are very likely to be able to understand what our wishes are.

"They can help us to decisions too. If we are in a terrible place and told to do things against our will, if you have someone you trust who might be able to help you understand then things might be easier to navigate.

"There are definitely some people who would not agree with this, and they say all decision making has to stop and they are implacably opposed to it.

"In a roundabout way, because I am not able to make decisions on whether I take medication or not, I am now free to make decisions on every other aspect of my life. I wasn’t free to do that before. For me, that’s how it should be working."