Photograph by Anthony Jones; Script design by Hayley Morgan

Synopsis :

‘I heard that the National Health Service spent thirty six million pounds on sleeping pills lastyear.’‘Yep. I’ve got most of the empty wrappers under my bed.’I’m not saying anything else. Not yet. My General Practitioners (yes, plural) are being harassed by their superiors to bring me off the drugs. My psychiatrist says I’m not mad.The NHS is in a mess. And in the real world, not many dealers can get hold of Zopiclone – the finest sleeping pill known to me, a drug as elusive as sleep herself. I’m anticipating anhorrific withdrawal for the coming winter. Murder may be the only answer.This novel-cum-confessional tells the story of a misdiagnosed ‘depressant personality’ whose battle with the medical profession becomes a close friendship with twodoctors and two charismatic drug dealers creating unbreakable bonds with prisons,metaphorical and literal, and its prisoners.Sleep is a mystery, even to the most erudite of sleep specialists. The nightmare of insomnia is

not

purely psychological: it has a human form: it breathes, it lives. It is aterrifying dictator embodied in the woman in my wardrobe. I have a woman locked in mywardrobe. Something must be done before one of us dies.Based on factual lifelong experience of chronic insomnia, the novel blurs the line between fiction and fact via the subplot of ‘the woman in the wardrobe.’ This woman is the personification of insomnia, with all of its horrors, violence and dramas that lead the

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protagonist into doctors offices, psychiatric treatment, drug rings and police cells. The‘woman in the wardrobe’ underpins the story as an analogy of what life is like withuntreated insomnia.Part-satire, part-drama,

Insomnia

Doctors and Drug Dealers

is an implacableobservation of the mess that is the National Health Service. The close friendship between the protagonist and Doctors X (the GP) and Y (the Psychiatrist) galvanizes a daily search for Zopiclone - a journey which becomes as life-threatening as insomnia itself. Ultimately, thefinal withdrawal leads into the darkness of the soul.Perhaps there, when finally descended into what she most fears, she will find thereasons behind the life she has spent in servitude to insomnia – the real, biological and primalcauses for her state of purgatory. As yet, neither the novel or the protagonist have found sucha cure. And the empty drug wrappers are mounting up underneath the bed . . .