In 2013, Tarik Kaidi was sectioned under the UK’s Mental Health Act. At the time, he did not understand why he was being detained, as he felt he was at the peak of his life. For months, his mind brimmed with new ideas; he was constantly on the move, meeting friends, networking, and making plans. He felt energetic, confident, sociable, and unstoppable. His music business was thriving, he was the father of a young daughter, and he was about to get married. For Kaidi, life had never been brighter.
But while he felt invincible, his family saw something else. What he considered creative energy, they recognized as increasingly erratic behavior and contacted mental health services. When police stopped him just after he received a vaccination before his honeymoon in Mexico, the intervention came as a shock.
More than a decade later, standing on a spiral staircase in London’s Earl’s Court district, Kaidi – in black sunglasses, a blue tracksuit, and a baseball cap – shakes his head as he recalls being taken to St Charles Mental Health Centre. In the months before his detention, he says he experienced a manic episode – the period of heightened mood and energy associated with bipolar disorder, which he was later diagnosed with. “I was in denial at the time,” he says, describing the excessive impulsiveness and hyperactivity as resembling symptoms of ADHD – “but a thousand times worse.”
Although he now accepts the diagnosis, Kaidi still criticizes how he was detained and some of his experiences in the hospital. He says he often pretended to swallow the medication when forced to take it. He remembers being surrounded by patients shuffling through hallways in a drug-induced stupor, their slumped postures and blank faces reinforcing his fear of treatment. In the weeks that followed, the euphoria gave way to deep, painful depression – a common phase of bipolar disorder after mania. His wedding, scheduled for a week after the intervention, was canceled, and his relationship with his partner ended.
After discharge, Kaidi describes feeling his energy completely drain away: “It felt like hell; all interest disappeared, all pleasure vanished; I felt worthless.” He almost completely withdrew, venturing out only occasionally to take his daughter out before retreating back inside.
Until a friend who saw his distress invited him to join a football team for mental health. For the first time in ten years, Kaidi put on football boots. As he trudged across the artificial turf, sweat began to seep out, relieving the frustration and grief accumulated over many years. Finding his touch as a striker, each goal boosted his confidence, and every moment of joking with teammates pulled him out of the isolation he had crawled into.
