Blue Crystal - Ridler, Mark

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Résumé :
This book tells a fictional story of the CIA and MI5 battling to stay one step ahead in the face of two new technological inventions based on psychological effects. The trail has led to the historic town of Exeter, where the CIA is experimenting on the general population and The Cedars, a mental hospital, in particular, without British consent. After the initial frenzy, MI5 gets the measure of what is going on and a complex international situation develops, where David Cameron and Barack Obama cooperate for a while before competitive tensions emerge once more. The CIA opens an office in Exeter where the main characters-Julia Barnes, Kingsley Khan, Henning Horlicks, and Theofanes Raptor-lead the charge. Their antics regularly bring them moral dilemmas as a result of their work, and it forces them to think long and hard about what their technology is really telling them. Conspiracy theories abound. The hunt focuses on Leather Jacket Man, or LJM, who has a bipolar mental health profile and lives close to the epicentre and the end of the trail, St. Thomas Church. His character is based on the real-life experiences of the author, including psychosis and paranoia that developed as a result of him believing that security services are following him around. In the final chapters, a new mobile technology called SuperVan hits the streets and is used to follow the trail in reverse, starting in the USA and ending up in Australia. LJM discovers the answer to the question of telepathy but keeps it a secret from the CIA and MI5. Until next time!

Biographie:
Mark Ridler was diagnosed with unipolar disorder (depression) in 1998, following the death of his first child. He spent 3 months in Wonford House in Exeter, receiving cognitive behavioural therapy and a series of antidepressants. He fought to come off the drugs and was basically fit and well for the next 15 years. Then after divorcing and remarrying, he experienced a sequence of very stressful family-related episodes. These led to increasingly manic behaviour with psychotic symptoms too, throughout 2013. In 2014, he was admitted to The Cedars, diagnosed with bipolar disorder and prescribed mood stabilisers and anti-psychotics. The mania continued, resulting in a Section 2 detention, a criminal conviction and divorce for the second time. In 2015, Mark was admitted to mental hospital once more with continual delusions and hallucinations, believing that Madonna wanted to marry him. He was only able to make progress when he realised that the voices in his head were fiction. Once he'd made the decision not to hear them, then normality returned. Mark has subsequently achieved good health, albeit with an ongoing underlying depression.