Archiving my psychotic experiences has been a powerful act of restitution and sense-making. For the mad have always been narrated by psychiatry; their creations collected, annotated and curated by institutions and by people who have never experienced madness themselves.

The problem with illness is that it robs you of pleasure. Young people are supposed to live in the moment, take risks, be spontaneous. But life in a hospital is a boring and cruel simulacra of life, with the minutiae of your body ticking like a machine being the best and only thing to focus on. In other words, you become self-obsessed, but not with gaining pleasure, more in avoiding pain.

It is not uncommon for dying people who are suffering badly to refuse food and fluids while they are still able to eat and drink, in order to hasten death. Some terminally ill people make the trip to an overseas jurisdiction while they are still well enough to fly and take a drink, meaning that they usually die significantly sooner than they would wish to, still in functioning health. Others choose to kill themselves while they still have the physical capacity, currently at a rate of more than one a week in Australia.

It was with much interest to me, on a sticky December day, when the Christmas carols had just started to play on the radio and most of us were thinking about spending time with family during the holidays, that Premier Daniel Andrews announced the Victorian Government would prepare a bill to legalise assisted dying to Parliament in the second half of 2017. Originally opposed to euthanasia, the Premier told reporters that the death of his father had given him time to reflect and reassess his views. And then I read the fine print.