The Hackney estate where Gus grew up in the 70s had kids charging in and out of the stairwells and there was a football pitch in the middle. Gus misses those days. He remembers the togetherness - and the mischief.

Gus was the youngest of 10 brothers and sisters, three of them living in London, the rest back in Trinidad. His dad had left after he was born, and his mum had always been lenient with her youngest boy.

There were a few problems for Gus when he left school - he was arrested a couple of times for minor offences - but nothing so bad that anyone detected the shadow pursuing him. At 19, when he tried to distance himself from a gang, a feud broke out between him and a former friend. Fights and reprisals escalated over the years, ending with the other guy getting jailed.

Gus felt as if he'd been hunted. His work in the building trade was stressful, his girlfriend had left him, he was 24 and the familiar world of his childhood was evaporating. "I was losing links with all the guys I grew up with," he says. "I was grieving."

But he was also buzzing. His mum was now on his case, worried because she thought something more serious might be wrong. Gus didn't think there was - he just wanted to get away. He woke up one morning, smoked an eighth of weed, took £200 out of his bank account and stole a car. Gus drove out of London in search of a B&B where he could hole up, but he crashed the car and spent all of his first weekend in prison, crying his eyes out for the life and opportunities he'd lost.

What happened to him subsequently, he feels, was triggered by events first and only later by illness. "I did have a breakdown," he says, "but my situation was induced by circumstances, not by a chemical imbalance."

After prison, he was arrested again, diagnosed with a drug-induced psychosis and sent to a hellish psychiatric ward. He didn't experience racism as such, he says, although he remembers overhearing one doctor say that a certain psychotic illness was more common in black men, which to Gus sounded like bullshit - a tool for locking people up.

At this time, Gus says he really did experience the wild, racing thoughts of a mental illness. He felt "untouchable", as if there was nothing left that life could hit him with. Nevertheless, he disagrees with the diagnosis he got, of bipolar disorder, because he never felt depressed. There is no official psychiatric classification for "unipolar" manic illness - a high without a low - but that is what Gus thinks would have described his condition more accurately.

It was in this state that he knifed a woman in a pub. He spent the next 18 months in the secure unit of another hospital, under section 41 of the Mental Health Act - the Home Office restriction for patients who have committed violent criminal offences. Gus was put on routine injections of the anti-psychotic drug depixol, and was given regular blood tests to check he was off cannabis.

Discharged four years later, Gus found work, began a relationship and, after six more years of stability, felt ready to come off both his medication and his section.

In his mid-30s, he took his case to a mental health tribunal, and the panel agreed to his formal release. One last obligation was requested by his mother: that he see a doctor again in six months. When he didn't show up, his mum - lenient no longer - got him sectioned again. Gus was outraged. He was adamant there was nothing wrong, and brought his case to two further tribunals, getting released and then readmitted each time.

When the police came after him for the third or fourth time, knocking down his door, a wild fight broke out and he stabbed two of them. He nearly got sentenced for attempted murder, but the charge was reduced to GBH with intent.

That was five years ago, and Gus does not expect ever to be allowed off his current section 41. He stays on his medication, goes to church with his mum and has received an award for the work he's done with a local authority organisation.

But, in his heart of hearts, Gus doesn't think he was ill when he fought the police. "I was just at the end of my tether," he says. "But you've got to be careful how you speak to psychiatrists. If you don't admit you're ill, you never get out. I can't say I did it simply because I was angry, because they'll say, 'You've got no insight, and if you ain't got insight, you definitely ain't getting out.'"

Gus himself points out that if he wasn't mentally ill, he should have gone to prison; maybe eight or nine years. Would he have preferred that?

"Yeah."

"Really?

"Yeah."

· Names and details have been changed.