Sept 15 - ON THE surface, John appears like a successful young man in his early 30s.
He runs an engineering business, is married, lives in an East Coast condominium and likes fast cars.
There is just one strange thing: He has been hearing voices in his head since he was 18, and living with them. The voices drove him to attempt suicide over 20 times.
After graduation, he began his own business. Then came a major disagreement with his partners and a traumatic parting of ways.
ST: Paul Eric Roca
That was when a major depression hit. The voices grew more insistent, driving him to his first suicide attempt.
Once he had decided to kill himself, he planned to do it with style, with his favourite music playing.
He chose a Sunday morning to climb out onto the window ledge of his condominium, ready to fling himself off. He looked down, and saw hundreds of people running on the road below.
'There was a freaking marathon,' he said, recalling the incident. 'I couldn't jump with all those people looking up and pointing at me.'
He decided to try again the next morning but when he woke up and opened the windows, he saw thick ropes and cables - workers were painting the building.
He decided that wasn't the way for him to go.
Next, he tried to gas himself in his car. He put a tube from his exhaust into the car. With his favourite music playing again, he popped two sleeping pills and stretched out on the back seat.
The next thing he knew, there was a loud banging on the door. He found a security guard yelling at him: 'Abang (elder brother), you want to die, don't do it here lah. You die here, I die also!'
John tells the stories of his suicide attempts with a casual self-deprecating humour. Despite the mental anguish he lived through, he can find latent humour in those situations.
He made many other attempts, before finally giving up.
Not all were as comical, he said. The last attempt made him realise that if he didn't succeed in dying, he could end up with more problems than he already had.
He had taken 25 sleeping pills. 'I woke up two days later in hospital with my wife screaming at me. Then I had three days of diarrhoea,' he said, deciding then that enough was enough.
That was when he started treatment with Dr Brian Yeo, a psychiatrist in private practice. John doesn't think the medication is effective, but because 'Dr Yeo is a nice chap', he continued seeing him regularly.
He says the voices no longer plague him. Now, he only hears one voice, that of his guardian angel.
But he still recalls days as a secret agent reporting to several countries about what goes on in Singapore.
'We met at clubs. We'd pass on information with a flicker of our eyelids. I never gave information that is destructive, only good information about Singapore.
'What I did helped Singapore,' he declared.
He has been told that all that spying was a figment of his imagination.
These days, he is busy with his business and his life in the real world - but maintains that his days as a spy remain vivid to him.
