James Walton

The case of the amnesiac autobiographer

In The Answer to the Riddle is Me, David Stuart MacLean rediscovers who he is – and doesn't entirely like what he finds

[Getty Images/iStockphoto] 
issue 16 August 2014

In October 2002, 28-year-old David Stuart MacLean woke up at Hyderabad railway station. He was standing at the time, and had no idea where or who he was. A kindly tourist police officer reassured him that his case wasn’t unusual: plenty of young people came to India, took too many drugs and ended up similarly ‘confused’.

MacLean immediately had a flashback to injecting heroin with a redhead called Christina — but this proved to be untrue. (Nor was the universe, as he then believed, created by Jim Henson at a studio in Burbank.) Instead, after he’d been taken to a local mental hospital, the doctor diagnosed the side effects of Lariam, an anti-malaria drug with a history of causing psychosis in a minority of users.

Throughout the book, MacLean returns to the subject of Lariam and its dangers.

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