[Serious] What's your story of seeing somebody's mental state degrade?

I lived next to a guy from while I was at university. For the first few months he had a laptop, phone, a guitar, books and everything else. I started noticing he wasn't in the apartment often and he started to get thinner in the face. We had a communal kitchen and I noticed that after a month he didn't have anything in the fridge.

Several months down the line and I was looking for a whisk because I was making pancakes. I thought someone might have put it in the wrong drawer. I looked in the other drawer. There were three eggs and a packet of noodles. That was all he had been eating the whole time. I put it down to just being a student.

Some time later I walked past his room and the door was open. There was almost no furniture. All the tech he had had disappeared and I found him in the kitchen with a big bottle of booze. He'd dyed his hair blonde and he had an old tape player on the table playing some Bob Dylan. I don't think it was just booze in the bottle.

Another few weeks passed by without us seeing each other and when he came in his head was completely bald. I found out after that that he'd kept changing his hair to avoid the security at clubs recognizing him. He'd been banned for selling drugs almost everywhere. After that he disappeared and I found out some time later he'd ended up in a squat doing heroine.

You really can go from having everything you need to be successful to having nothing within a short space of time. He was clearly intelligent and just lost control. He had done drugs before he moved to university but I think his parents must have believed it would be a fresh start so he could get out of it.

I don't know what was going on in his life but I just hope he's clean now.

/r/AskReddit Thread