This blog is a strange animal. When I started writing it, it was about narrative theory but, over time, other subjects intruded: I began including short stories I'd written and talking about philosophy more generally. In posts about Kurt Cobain, John Nash, David Foster Wallace and perhaps Virginia Woolf I suggested, sometimes subtly, a different perspective on mental illness – that what drives a person mad is other people's misperceptions of him or her. I also have talked a little about my own life and that's what I want to do again in today's post.
After I left school I studied for two years at the University of Otago. At this time, I was in a long-distance relationship with my first girlfriend. One day, back in 1998, because I missed her, I bought a Cleo magazine, a magazine she liked. My best friend at the time teased me about this but I replied that I was secure enough in my sexuality that I could buy a women's magazine without worrying about it. My friend, a Philosophy major who would write his Masters thesis on Wittgenstein, said, "By that logic, you could prove beyond doubt that you're straight by dressing up in women's clothes." I took this as a challenge. We borrowed a dress, high-heels, and a wig from our lesbian friend who lived down the corridor in the same hall of residence, I dressed up in women's clothes and my friends took photographs. It was a fun night and a little boozy.
The point of this story, of course, is that I was secure enough in my heterosexuality that I could dress in women's clothes without worrying what others would think. It was the same logic that lead me to vocally support gay rights when I was older.
I tell this anecdote not only because it is perhaps amusing and revealing but because it had an effect on my life later on. In 2007, at the age of 27, as I have talked about before, I suffered a serious psychotic meltdown. The reasons for this crisis, which included a consideration of suicide, were complicated but a big part of was that it was caused by people thinking I was gay when I wasn't, perhaps because of false rumors, perhaps because of a misunderstanding of something that actually happen. After the crisis passed, I was briefly well but, at my first appointment with a psychiatrist, I felt immediately, rightly or wrongly, that he had diagnosed me as a latent or closet homosexual: an impossible position to be in because there was no way I could tell him he was wrong. Shortly after this, having become a 'client' of the Mental Health Service, I told my key worker the anecdote I related above. It was the only way I could try to explain the catastrophe that had occurred to me.
I don't believe my key worker understood what I was trying to say. I suspect what happened was that it was recorded in my notes that I was a transvestite. Towards the end of the year, having become increasingly panicky about the situation I was in, at a respite facility, I started trying to say indirectly something I shouldn't have needed to say, that I was straight. With a health worker at a respite facility, I talked about a trip I took to Europe in 2004, about all the pretty girls I encountered. She asked me, "Did you like what they were wearing?" I said, "No, I liked the girls!"
In other words, my anecdote had been interpreted the exact opposite of the way I intended.
This condition I had is far from uncommon and I feel it very important to describe it. I have observed it in very many other patients over the years, many diagnosed 'schizophrenic'. It has three principal features: a paranoid fear that others around them are secretly homosexual, a compulsion to find indirect ways to say one is not and an inability to say the words 'straight' and 'gay'. The root of the condition is the inchoate insight, apprehension, that to have the world think one is gay is almost the same thing as actually being gay, is in fact its cause. (Don't believe me? Check out The Good Son by Paul McVeigh, a harrowing read.) This type of schizophrenia is terrible but there are simple ways to ameliorate it, simple ways psychiatrists don't adopt. The culture of the Mental Health System needs to change. Issues of sexuality should be more openly discussed, homophobia should be eradicated, and, most importantly, the straight patients should be reassured that those treating them know that they are straight. In fact, I think that when a patient is first admitted to the Service, they should be given a questionnaire that asks, along with questions like "Did you suffer anything traumatic in your childhood?", the simple query, "How do you identify in terms of sexuality?" Currently this doesn't happen.
The notion that schizophrenia is an organic illness is profoundly stupid and should be abandoned.
It might be interesting to say a little about what it is like to be a patient of the Mental Health Service in this country at this time. I see my psychiatrist for an hour about once every two months. I almost never see the key workers I've had over the last several years – they may well be reluctant to see me because they know I am an unwilling patient. My main involvement with the Service is my compulsory monthly injection of 300mgs of Olanapine, administered via needle in the backside. It's an involvement I would prefer not to have. On the occasions when I do see my psychiatrist, I go in trying to guess what to talk about. The psychiatrist asks no questions, and says very little in fact. If I present with an opinion that might be a delusion, one would expect her to say, "Why do you believe that?" – but this never happens. If there are strange things in my record, as I assume there must be, I am never asked to explain what I meant. I have almost no idea of what my shrink really thinks of me – I find out a little only at Judicial and Independent Reviews of my legal status of which I have had five. At a recent consultation I decided that it was important to explain why I was well from early 2010 to early 2013: I was asked in surprise, "You were well in 2010?" Presumably they must have thought I was ill then. It is important to say that my current diagnosis is baed on reports from my first psychiatrist, who I saw between 2007 and early 2012, a man readers of my previous post will be aware I have a very low estimation of. To put all this in other words, those treating me don't have the slightest idea about my life or who I am. And yet they have the gall to call me 'schizophrenic' and force me to take a drug that makes me feel nauseous all the time, that honestly hasn't been helpful anyway.
The condition I described above, to reiterate, is not uncommon. I believe Kurt Cobain had it. I believe John Nash had it. I suspect David Foster Wallace had it, although he did a better job at hiding it than others. I think what I am saying here is important because psychiatrists themselves do not understand this condition, classified as a type of schizophrenia, although its cause and cure is really quite simple. But I suspect the prescription I have suggested is the exact opposite of what the psychiatric community believes to be the proper treatment of it Which is why so few people actually recover from it.
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