Olivia Gordon is bright and highly articulate. The daughter of two Oxford dons, she has been to the jaws of hell in her experience of the drug ecstasy and writes to inform people and to offer help.
Drugs are a religion and a moral code to searching, impressionable young people. Olivia Gordon's Ecstasy-induced depression was a dark night of the soul, completely alien to the corporate/atheistic mentality of her world and yet its direct product.
After a description of the highs - she took her first Ecstasy pill at 17 - Olivia Gordon gives an account of her first euphoric trip, a flashback to early childhood, a sensation of the whole of life flashing before her eyes. There then follows an account of the depression that followed. Included is an account of panic attacks, the experience of coming out of the habit, the sense of religious betrayal, of hell, of the dark side of the E=love=God equation.
Here, Olivia Gordon writes a compelling story of her recovery: her return to 'normality' took eighteen months, a passage through many cognitive mechanisms.
The book concludes with an afterword by Robbie Williams - who has gone through his own Ecstasy-induced hell - and also by an expert on the biochemical causes and treatments of mental illness following the use of Ecstasy.
