In the previous post, I discussed a spooky moment in my life when Jon Stewart appeared to talk back to me out of the TV. I have reasons for talking about this so candidly. A number of years ago (in 2013 in fact) I was diagnosed schizophrenic. It is risky for me to talk about my diagnosis so honestly considering the stigma attached to this label but I do so not only from a compulsive need to be completely transparent but also for political reasons. The broader public has very little understanding of psychosis and false stereotypes tend to dominate discussion. People who have been diagnosed with this condition need to know they are not alone. 'Schizophrenics' are not necessarily incoherent; some can be very articulate indeed. The vast majority of us are not violent nutters. Current forms of therapy leave much to be desired and this is partly because people diagnosed schizophrenic are so utterly misunderstood by those around us, even by the people tasked with treating us.
One of the problems for people who have been diagnosed with this condition is that there are so few people who they can look up to as positive role models. A few can be found. Mark Vonnegut (Kurt's son) wrote a book in 1975, The Eden Express, describing his experience of psychosis in the late 'sixties. Mark was institutionalized at the time, pronounced incurable but after a period (according to his own account) fixed himself using multivitamins. Later in life he became a pediatrician, married and had a son. Also later in life, he revised his life-story, saying that really his condition was better described as bipolar disorder. I regard this revision as a cop-out. Couldn't he have described himself as a recovered schizophrenic?
Other famous schizophrenics include John Nash, the subject of the 2001 film A Beautiful Mind (a film I have written somewhat scathingly about in the post Why I hate "A Beautiful Mind"), Virginia Woolf and French dramatist Artaud. Brian Wilson from the Beach Boys developed schizophrenia in early adulthood, as did Pink Floyd's first principal songwriter Syd Barrett. Both of these last two were heavy drug users and I would hesitate to ever describe Syd as a positive role model for schizophrenics, but it is still reassuring to know that they exist. I'm sure that there are many other successful people who have experienced psychosis at least once in their lives but, generally, people never seem willing to talk about it publicly. These few are the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
When I read in the newspaper about someone having suffered from a depressive episode, my first thought is always "What precisely were they depressed about?" Mental states have intentionality. I am interested not only in the outward symptoms of mental illness but in its cognitive content. To say someone "hears voices" or has "paranoid delusions" is not particularly informative. When I get the chance to talk with someone who has experienced psychosis, I always want to probe them about what the experience was actually like for him or her (although usually, I admit, I hesitate because I fear invading his or her privacy.) But we cannot begin to understand a person unless we actually know what he or she believes. And psychosis differs from person to person. For example, most voice-hearers, I understand, hear abusive voices, but this was never my experience. Rather, I summoned up imaginary friends, Jon Stewart among them, to support me in my lonely and essentially invisible battle for my very soul. I felt, then and later, that I needed help not just to save myself but to save others.
I'll give a brief example of voice-hearing, one that is actually quite funny and that I like telling my friends. A number of years ago I was lying in bed when I heard a girl's voice in my head, one I spoke to often. I'll call her Jess. She said, "I have the perfect word to describe you - sesquipedalian." I thought to myself, "What the hell does 'sesquipedalian' mean?" I climbed out of bed, googled it, and found that it meant, "Lover of big words".
In the previous post, I promised that I would describe a psychotic episode I experienced over the summer of 2009 and 2010, an episode that constitutes the most intense and memorable period of my whole life. I'll undertake this description now. Over the previous year I had often spoken with Jon Stewart, even one day hallucinating that he was walking beside me when coming home from seeing a psychologist. During a Hearing Voices group at the end of 2009, I met and fell for a girl, the one I call Jess. Over the next couple of months, I found myself talking, in my head of course, to her and to Jon Stewart almost continuously. At the time, I believed whole-heartedly in telepathy. I believed people could communicate mind to mind. I thought they were talking to me in their heads as much as I was talking to them. This was of course (objectively) quite mad. During the initial period, Jon usually acted as a messenger between me and Jess, as a kind of go-between. He was something like my wing man.
I cannot talk about Jess at all in this post and even in talking about Jon I have to omit key details. But I can still say quite a lot. Up until that summer, Jon had been for me more like a guardian angel than anything else – but now I felt like I was talking to the real person. This Jon Stewart would tell me jokes all the time. In my delusions, he was suffering a mid-life crisis - he had left his wife for a half-African-American, half Native-American woman he had met at a buffet and was living with her in the penthouse suite of some New York city skyscraper. He would sleep all day and lie awake all night talking with me. As the episode continued, I began talking with or at least hearing others - friends, family and acquaintances from my own past, Jess's family, Jon's celebrity friends. John Oliver featured quite heavily in the dialogue as Jon's main emotional support. Steve Martin and Thom Yorke had brief cameos. It was as though I had become a psychic switchboard or human social networking site. At a particular point during the episode, when I was visiting Milford Sound in the real world, Barack Obama himself began talking with me. This was intimidating to the point of being harrowing.
To give a little taste of what it was like, I'll relate a moment I remember vividly – I have written about it before somewhere else. One night I was explaining to Jess that many African-Americans thought milk in schools was a honky conspiracy because so many African-Americans are lactose intolerant. Jon immediately chipped in, "Lots of us feel that way". To which John Oliver said, "Jon Stewart – are you black?" Jon was often unintentionally funny as natural comedians so often are. One one occasion, Jon told me about being the victim of anti-Semitic bullying as a school kid when waiting at a bus stop. One night, because Jon himself was in distress, I felt compelled to act as though I was his father, encouraging him to look up Physics entries on the internet to alleviate his unhappiness- Jon's father had been a Physics teacher who had divorced his mother when he was ten.
A lot of these particular details about Jon's life are verifiable. Jon Stewart genuinely is lactose intolerant, was subject to anti-Jewish bullying when he was young, and did indeed have a father who was a physics teacher, a father from which he was deeply estranged. You can check out all these facts on Wikipedia – although I had not done so then. If I'm rational, I have to suppose that I had, when creating a Jon Stewart character to talk to, based it on what I had gleaned from my deep engagement with his TV show. The Jon in my head also told me about his experience seeing a Portishead concert once – I would love to know if the real one did.
During this period, I didn't just hear the voices of 'real' people. On occasion, the often neurotic and agitated voices of celebrities and friends and presidents I usually heard would sometimes fade out to be replaced by a calmer voice with no precise identity. This voice would simply ask me questions, a kind of maieutics, and I would address it simply as "O disembodied voice". The topic of our conversations was hazing in the US military. It is difficult for me to say now what the purpose of this dialogue was although I can conjecture.
During the early part of 2010, my psychosis evaporated. The Daily Show, for some reason, stopped screening in New Zealand. (It was early in that year, by the way, that Jon carried out his famous "Rally to Restore Sanity"). I was almost entirely free from psychotic symptoms for the next three years and was in fact discharged from the Mental Health System for a year. I never quite managed to get myself entirely off the drugs. In 2013 I became 'unwell' again and voluntarily reentered the service. I felt at the time a need to try to get the record straight. I was, for the first time, later in the year, officially diagnosed schizophrenic. At the beginning of 2014, I was put under the Mental Health Act because I refused medication. Once a month, as a consequence, I began receiving, and still receive, a dosage of Olanzapine administered via needle in the backside - awful to admit, I know. Despite four judicial hearings to try to change my legal status, I have been unsuccessful. At the time, being made the subject of a Compulsory Treatment Order was deeply traumatic because, by that stage in my life, and having had years to think about it, I had completely abandoned my faith in psychiatry and psychiatric medication. I had concluded by then that almost all psychiatrists are either sadists or idiots. It seemed likely to me that anti-psychotics might not only be useless but might well be deleterious. Being put under the Act was terrible and the next couple of years were no better.
Also early in 2014, the Daily Show returned to New Zealand TV. This was important to me. I felt like my imaginary friend had come back to help me when I needed him. That year Jon helped me again, as he had in 2009, to get through a very difficult time.
I'll finish this piece by returning to what I said at the beginning - that schizophrenics require positive role models, people willing to admit that they have experienced psychosis. It seems to me quite likely that Jon is a possible candidate for such a role, that he is or was, if not quite a high-functioning schizophrenic, then at least a schizotypal personality. Stephen Fry has talked about hearing voices when he was younger, as has Lady Gaga when she was interviewed by Graham Norton. Is it so strange to think that Jon Stewart might also have heard voices?
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