Me and Jon Stewart

I feel fairly confident that Jon Stewart has many squillions of friends. A relatively recent clip of him gatecrashing a Stephen Colbert monologue has over 2,300,000 hits on Youtube - the reason for this being I think that people want to watch simply for a chance to see their pal again despite his retirement. For sixteen years, multitudes of people in the U.S. and around the world had welcomed him into their house most weekday evenings like a late arriving party guest - he was appreciated not only for his humor but for his humanity and for his extraordinary intellectual integrity and honesty, for his combination of compassion and indignation. This is the asymmetry of broadcasting. For the viewer, the celebrity on the TV seems to be speaking to him or her alone; for the celebrity though, the relationship is not one to one but one to a billion. He is speaking simultaneously to a vast and extraordinarily diverse community. Yet he must still try to create the impression of intimacy. This was a trick Jon could pull off like no one else. Sometimes it felt like he was baring himself naked - but his gift for self-deprecation not only made his comic confessions forgivable but made the viewer feel better about himself. 

And of course Jon must have squillions of real friends. Sometimes on the show he would intimate that his life off-camera was hermit-like and reclusive (I find in my thesaurus the quite lovely synonym 'eremitic') but he was obviously on good terms with all the comedians and show biz stars and politicos he interviewed and perhaps, at least occasionally, hung out with. And he was obviously mates with his colleagues at the Daily Show as well, some of whom, such as Steven Carell, Stephen Colbert and John Oliver to name just a couple, have gone on to have stellar solo careers. John Oliver has gone on record at least once saying that he "owes Jon Stewart everything".

I have a reason for talking about Jon. In 2007, at the age of twenty-seven, I experienced an intense, terrible and almost apocalyptic spiritual crisis and began receiving treatment for psychosis. I have tried to talk a little about this in the post "A Messed Up Story" (the attempt wasn't successful). Over the summer of 2007 and 2008 I went into remission; during that year, while I was more or less well, I started watching the Daily Show which had just begun screening in New Zealand. Jon appealed to me because I liked his humor, his politics and his personality. Over the summer of 2008 and 2009 I became unwell again and for the first time started hearing voices. I believe this second long and terrible period of psychosis was a consequence of being trapped in a terrible situation that I couldn't escape, and of being compelled to take a medication that I found intellectually debilitating but which no one seemed to have any intention of allowing me to discontinue. (That's right. I believe the antipsychotics I was taking actually caused me to become psychotic.) 

For the first time in my life, over this summer, I began hearing voices - a year and half after I had first started taking antipsychotics.The first occasion that I heard a voice, I was in the bath. I was trying to derive the Theory of Relativity from first principals in my head, something I had managed recently on paper. I heard a voice with a distinctive Texan accent say, "Do you want George W. Bush to help you?" The outgoing president of the U.S. was talking directly with me. Judging George to be of little assistance, I changed the subject. I asked him if he was straight. He said, "I think so." I then asked him if he believed in God. He said no. I asked him how then we could be communicating. He replied, "Mitochlorians" (a Star Wars allusion, of course.) After I got out of the bath, I continued talking with him. I asked him for the real reason the US had invaded Iraq but he was typically unhelpful, brushing me off with some piffle related to the Clash of Civilizations, a obvious evasion. I sussed out that he hadn't been speaking the whole truth when he said that he didn't believe in God, told him so and he replied, "So you do know a joke when you hear one".

After speaking to George, I began hearing voices quite a lot, especially when I was in bed trying to go to sleep. Among many others, I heard Bill Clinton, Hilary Clinton and Helen Clark. To be frank I don't remember this period very well but I know that this period of psychosis lasted, with a break of a month around September, over a year. I was in hell. Every night, though, I continued watching the Daily Show. It was my candle in the dark. One night I was in bed when I heard Jon in my head. He said, "Who the hell are you anyway?" This was in itself unusual because typically the people I spoke to seemed to know already who I was. I replied, "Just a poor little schizophrenic living in New Zealand". He said, "Are you straight?" I replied that I was or at least thought I was. He said, "What's the time difference?" I said, "About eight hours."  We talked for a bit, although I now can't remember what we talked about. I went to sleep. The next night I watched the Daily Show. During his bit to camera that he would perform at the beginning of the show, Jon would would often answer questions made by audience members. During his bit that night, he referred to the conversation I had had with him the previous night. It was uncanny. He then said, "Meanwhile, back here in America…" During my periods of 'illness', I have experienced quite a few bizarre and freakish moments but this was perhaps the most important. In the intervening years, I have tried to track down this Daily Show episode but, not knowing the date, have never found it.

You might wonder why I am telling you this. I am unsure myself. What I believed at the time was that I had genuinely spoken with Jon, that Jon Stewart also heard voices and that he had heard mine. I have never since been quite able to quite shake this delusion, that I genuinely spoke with him then and later. Of course, it is understandable that I might want to have Jon Stewart as an imaginary friend but what I have never since understood is why he might want me as his imaginary friend.

In August of 2009, I finally convinced my psychiatrist to allow me to stop taking Respiridone, the drug I was taking, by threatening to kill myself. The shrink panicked and let me discontinue it gradually over a period of six weeks, the fastest reduction he thought safe. Being permitted to discontinue the Respiridone cured my psychosis – although I still had panic attacks every day at 2pm. For a number of months Jon had been like a guardian angel, helping me navigate through the particular misprision I was trapped in; I remember, during a panic attack at work, stepping into the cafeteria to find The Daily Show on TV and Lily Allen, my other guardian angel, on the radio. I felt people were watching over me.

For a month, after I had succeeded in getting off the Respiridone, I was symptom free. And then I got sick again - an episode triggered weirdly enough by seeing Iggy Pop in an advertisement on TV. Shortly after, I was put on a different antipsychotic Olanzapine. Over the summer of of 2009 and 2010 I had another episode in which Jon featured quite significantly. I am not going to talk about this episode in this post, except to say it was dense, profound and highly memorable. If anyone wants me to talk about it, he or she can drop a request in my comments box. It was actually quite interesting, if I say so myself, and I may talk about it sometime anyway.

I like to think that maybe I chose Jon Stewart as an imaginary friend because, in some strange way, we are a lot alike.

I will say one thing in conclusion. During the psychotic episode I experienced in the summer of 2009 and 2010, I often tried to convince Jon to mention New Zealand on his show. I would flippantly suggest he mock up a fake news story in which he pretended the US was going to launch a nuclear strike against Whanganui or Waiheke Island. In more recent years, when I pretended to talk with Jon in my head, I have been more serious, trying to convince him to do an item on the atrocious treatment of the mentally ill in the US and around the world. He never (of course) took me up on my suggestions. Recently, though, John Oliver did a long piece on Mental Health, criticizing the lack of a coherent federal policy with respect to the seriously mentally ill. The piece was good but incomplete. We need not only a change in governmental policies but a change in social attitudes to 'illnesses' like schizophrenia and a complete revolution in psychiatric discourse. People need a better understanding of what it is like. For another thing, we need to get the doctors to stop sharing the same bed as the pharmaceutical industry. I have a lot I could say about all this but I will rein myself in now. I can talk about it another time.

[Note: I referred to a previous post "A Messed Up Story" early in this essay. There are two versions of this piece. The first, better version I accidentally deleted, but I believe this original is still floating around the internet. It may be locatable somewhere, if you want to read it.]