When George Hodgson tried drugs for the first time at 16 years old at a festival, he had no idea that some months later it would spark a chemical reaction in him which would threaten to bring an end to his life.

George had always been an anxious child, he tells me, prone to bouts of hyperactivity. He remembers someone coming to the house when he was very small to teach him how to take deep breaths to calm himself down when he started to feel overwrought. “I remember at school if I got something wrong I’d start going a bit strange,” he says, as we talk at the kitchen table with his mum and dad in their Hampshire cottage. "But it was never totally debilitating."

At 16, having completed his GCSEs and with a long, luxurious summer ahead of him, he did what many teenagers do - he went to a music festival with his friends, where he drank and tried drugs for the first time. “I very ignorantly took some MDMA - an ecstasy-based psychoactive - which I didn’t know at the time was very stupid considering my problems. But I was only 16 and didn’t know what it was going to do to me.”