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In the mid-Nineties, married again and with two young children, I went for help; this included an AA programme, a number of talking therapies – and a spell at the Priory, all of which helped me get clean. My own experience made me determined to help other addicts. I gave up investment banking and used my business skills to help a number of private recovery centres for the well-heeled, including the Priory, which I joined as development director in 2006. My job was to make the Priory the mental health service provider of choice for blue-chip companies. Aside from one or two falls from grace, I'd been clean and sober since 1995.

Yet here was I, succumbing to my own addictions again in a terrifying relapse. Facing Michelle, not knowing what to say or do, just crying uncontrollably. She got in the cab and helped me in. I put my head on her lap. I wanted her, someone, anyone to save me.

Alcohol was always my drug of choice, but in this latest episode, which began in September 2012, I'd also used prescription drugs – benzodiazepines and other anti-anxiety medications, zopiclone (a sleeping pill) and anti-depressants. My GP was young and inexperienced, and it was easy to spin him a line about what symptoms I had and what would help. The drugs, with the alcohol, left me in a haze, free of anxiety or any sense of responsibility. I even used over the counter painkillers with codeine to get a hit similar to heroin.

I spent hours locked in my room, drinking one or two bottles of vodka a day. I was paranoid – one fantasy was that the Mujahideen were after me. I had lost a lot of weight and, not surprisingly, my liver was malfunctioning. Having not bothered with a haircut or shave, I wasn't pretty.

Looking back, I recognise in this relapse, not the classic talked-up drama of the addict but the visual and aural hallucinations, massive weight loss and insanity that I've seen close up in others, during the last stages of addiction: the drama that sees people drown in their own blood through oesophageal haemorrhage.

December was spent with the threat of prison for drink-driving hanging over the family Christmas. At the final court hearing, in early January, I was fined and banned from driving for three years, but thanks to reports of my previous good character, I wasn't sent to prison. Any normal person would heave a sigh of relief, hand over their licence and try to rebuild their life. But in the weeks that followed, I chose to keep going in my insanity. That's the way addiction works, once its icy claws are in you. The promising Oxford applicant, the talented and – I'm told reliably – handsome musician, the banker, operator and rehab industry "face" was now reduced to a creature barely able to walk or talk much.

In January 2013, I went into hospital where they put me on drips to rehydrate me and pump me full of vitamins, and where they used drugs to help clear the poisons from my body. The treatment, at an NHS hospital, was first class: I recall telling the consultants and doctors treating me that they were missing some real business opportunities to open a specialist detox private unit for the wealthy drinkers of south-west London. They smiled benevolently, having seen it all before.

I had gone through detox but knew I needed further help with mental health issues if I was to avoid another relapse, but it had to be somewhere I wasn't known. Alex, a friend whom I had helped get sober seven years previously, flew with me to a treatment centre in Andalucia: suddenly I found myself in a dazzling azure and white landscape, surrounded by 1,000-year-old olive trees, where I had both group and one-to-one therapy. I came home at the beginning of March.

I've stayed clean since then. I go to AA meetings most days: I'm not a 12-step fanatic but it seems to help. I'm back with my therapist with whom I parted company in 2010, when I abruptly cancelled our weekly sessions because I was too busy with work. I run three miles a day. I talk to friends – the real ones who have stuck around. I eat and sleep well, and am busy rebuilding relationships with my family.

I try to work out why this last relapse happened. I guess I'll never know, but it has helped me understand what it means to be an addict. And I have a sense that it's going to be all right in the end.