Chapter 7: Breaking Down

This chapter opens with Victor approaching his final semester break, the deadlines for his dissertation and contextual study approach. Victor continues to lose his grip on reality with the deterioration of his relationship with Tanya and his perceived competition with Nathan. His behaviour becomes extreme and his thoughts betray him. He starts to believe he could be the second coming.
After a student rep meeting about wayfinding university campus signage he has a vision about the screen interface “Telepress” and returns to his fellow students with a rambled synopsis. He makes them all sign and date his scribbles and gets it date stamped to protect his intellectual property rights. Victor’s computer breaks down on the morning of the dissertation deadline, he is convinced Nathan caused it.

On a night out with Tanya and Lewis, Victor walks out of the film Leon when it’s violence and conflict disturbs him. These paranoid thoughts of war continue after the violence and abandondment of the Ireland v England friendly.

Victor has a huge fall out with Nathan over housework and on return to the emply flat finds what he believes to be a suicide note from Nathan. This single event catapults him into a deangerously altered mindstate. He frantically rings Nathan’s parents, his girlfriend Shumana and old friends to try to find him. After a tortured night awake beside Tanya, Victor believes there is an assailant holed out in Catherine’s bedroom above Tanya’s, similar to the character in Shallow Grave who drills through the ceiling. When the sun rises Victor begins throwing objects out of her bedroom window in an attempt to cause attention and save Tanya’s housemates from the madman. The Police arrive and take Victor to a doctor who prescribes three Valium tablets for the next three nights to end the insomnia. Tanya takes him two hundred and fifty miles home to his parents up north, where he flushes the Valium down the toilet. Two days later, after she leaves to return to her studies in London, things get worse. His parents witness the worst night of their lives while Victor breaksdown, in a fit of panic attacks, in his childhood bedroom. After an admission to hospital, in denial and fright, he deteriorates even further into a full blown “Stress Induced Hypomanic Episode”. The doctors have to fight to save him from arresting. He is sectioned for twenty eight days under the mental health act in a Kendal psychiatric ward, where he has to recover and try to return to university. He goes through hell under antipsychotic medication, experiencing anxiety spirals, disorientation, confusion and fright. Eventually learning to control his thinking distortions and irrational beliefs after fifty five days, he is discharged.

His interview with The Royal College of Art ends in failure, as does his entry in the RSA Student Award final. He is also forced to a deferrment ‘year out’ and so returns his belongings north saying goodbye to Harrow. He enters a summer of deep depression after a ‘Dear John’ letter from Tanya and then a phone call confirming she has left him for Gideon. Victor also has to contemplate the rest of his friends from his year graduating and then leaving Harrow empty for him to return to next year.

The aim of this chapter is to show the audience the full horror of a Stress Induced Hypomanic Episode and it’s effects on the individual, family and friends.