Thursday, 22 December 2016

Just Some Stuff

I try in this blog to be as exact as possible in my use of language but sometimes I slip up. I tend often not to go back to posts and revise them and this is not the place to give an inventory of slight errors. But I'll mention one: in the previous post I said that I adopted Jon Stewart as an imaginary friend in 2009 party because he was the straightest person I knew. In fact, there were lots of reasons why I became imaginary friends with Jon. And it felt at the time more like he adopted me than I adopted him.  There is a second thing I should mention. Readers may have noticed a more sizeable inconsistency in my last post. I began by attacking psychology and then later employed psychological ideas to attack a psychologist I once had. Perhaps this is permissible. Maybe the best way to arraign a psychologist is to wield his own weapons against him.

I know my readers may be more interested in posts about The Sandman and Virginia Woolf than posts about my own life but I have this year in my blog often had reason to describe it and in this post I feel the need to clear up as best I can one last puzzle. I have said that in 2007, at the age of 27, I was diagnosed homosexual and that this misdiagnosis has only been 'corrected' (if it has) this year. I was diagnosed as a homosexual who wouldn't come out. I have also been diagnosed schizophrenic, officially in 2013. I feel I need to explain two things: why I believed that I was diagnosed homosexual in the first place and why at least some of the people treating me thought it.

In 2007, I had a serious apocalyptic psychotic meltdown. When I first arrived at the Mental Health Clinic at which I am still being treated, I said among other things (I can't put down here all I said that first day in this blog) that I wanted to "come out as straight". What I meant was "I have always been straight and I want people to know it". Unfortunately a statement like this is open to misinterpretation. Another possible reading of it is that I was a gay man who wanted to turn straight. It was an unfortunate ambiguity that could have been cleared up by honest communication. This never happened. At my first appointment with the psychiatrist he talked sarcastically of my "breakthrough" – presumably he thought my saying I was straight was a delusion. At this appointment or the next he told me  to "stop avoiding". It was terrible for me. I had been immediately diagnosed as a repressed or closet homosexual.

Now, I'm unsure if it is possible for a gay man to form the delusion that he is straight but it seems unlikely. This misunderstanding, that I was a gay man who had formed the mistaken belief that he was straight, could easily have been corrected if someone had had a proper conversation with my mother, who actually knows me quite well, but I don't know that people did. The severe delusion which possessed me in 2007, in fact – the delusion which dominated my thinking – was the belief that a massive conspiracy of closet homosexuals controlled the world. There were often times that year that I believed that there were more gay people in the world than straight people. In such a world, the statement "I want to come out as straight" makes more sense.

In 2007 I was very ill. In the horrible situation in which I had found myself, a situation in which I had said that I was straight but hadn't been believed, was continuously being doubted, I became acutely afraid of somehow outing myself accidentally, by drinking the wrong brand of beer perhaps. The world I had found myself in offered me only one way out. My belief in a conspiracy of closet homosexuals, together with a delusion that my glasses were bugged and that others were listening to everything I said, made me censor myself. I didn't use the words 'gay' or 'straight' again, with anyone, except maybe my mother, publicly, until 2012. 2007 was a terrible year. In 2008 I recovered somewhat from the episode I had suffered the previous year, and was more or less well. (In notes used about me at one of my hearing it says that  I was ill that year. This is quite false.) What might seem unbelievable, considering my diagnosis, was that I was actually still more or less going out with a girl at this time, in 2008, a girl I'd gone out with since maybe 2003 or 2004.  Although we lived in different parts of New Zealand, I would drive to Katikati occasionally to visit her. In the second half of the year we broke up conclusively, ending a relationship that had lasted about five years. Shortly after I broke up with her, an old friend called me up and I sheltered him at my house for a period. Later I would visit him at Piha, a beach on Auckland's West Coast. At this time he was my only friend.

During this year, I was receiving 'therapy' of a sort from a nurse at the clinic. We never discussed sexuality, my family, or anything significant. During this period, I talked about my friend. What I suspect is that this friendship, which was entirely platonic, coming on the end of a relationship with a woman, was misconstrued as a sexual relationship. On the basis of this friendship it was decided that I was openly gay. I had, despite my efforts, accidentally 'outed' myself. It seems unbelievable but this is what I believe happened. In December of that year, I became psychotic again, ending my friendship with this chap, and, shortly after, for the first time, started hearing voices. The psychotic episode that started then, in December 2008, lasted until early 2010 and was the worst I ever experienced. (In notes written about me at one of my hearings, I should say, it was said that I was well in 2009.)

I should repeat something that I said before in a previous post, that from when I was admitted as a patient in 2007 until August 2009 I was taking 2.5 mgs of Rispiridone. In August 2009 I was allowed to discontinue it because I threatened to kill myself and after this was well for about a month or two. The psychosis I experienced at the end of 2009, and during the first period I took Olanzapine, was a little more intense but far less terrible than the psychosis I experienced while taking Rispiridone.

It may seem incredible that those treating me could have concluded that I was a practicing homosexual because I talked about a male friend. But this is possible in the toxic environment of the Mental Health System. In a culture in which no-one is asked if he or she is gay or straight, same sex friendships are always suspect; no-one is straight and no-one is gay. I have observed this stupid attitude among Mental Health Workers concerning other patients - patients who give every indication of being straight. Workers in the Mental Health System often simply assume, as a kind of default position, that their patients are sexually muddled. I believed in conspiracy of closet homosexuals and I was in a culture that encouraged this delusion.

Just because a person has a good friend of the same gender doesn't mean he or she wants to fuck that person.

So, how did I know that this 'outing' around December 2008 had happened? To be honest, I just sensed it, somehow psychically. Often it was more a matter of body language more than anything else. The clearest evidence that it happened is when my psychiatrist asked me in 2009, as I mentioned in the previous post, if I "stood up for myself" or was "a people pleaser." He was asking me if I prefer to give or receive blow-jobs from men. At the time I didn't know what he meant but, because I was scared of him, I said "people pleaser". In effect he had put me in a double-bind – perhaps deliberately.

Often psychiatrists assume that they are dealing with patients who are gay but haven't come out to their family or to anyone else. They try to talk around the family. But this is wrong. The proper attitude is to suppose patients know their sexuality and to ask.

So why did they think I was gay at all? I think this psychiatrist came up with his diagnosis immediately, upon first meeting me, and then simply never corrected it. Perhaps partly this was because of my body language at the first appointment; perhaps partly it was because he never made any real attempt to understand me. Perhaps this psychiatrist believes that all of his patients are gay. I decided immediately, at my first appointment with him, that he was a member of the Homosexual Conspiracy and perhaps my fear expressed itself oddly. In those early days I thought sometimes that I would have to pretend to be mad and sometimes that I would have to pretend to be gay not to be assassinated by members of the this conspiracy. Later, in 2009, I found that my body language seemed to betray me against my will. Because people seemed convinced that I was gay despite my having said that I was not, both directly and indirectly, this caused me to become acutely self-conscious, to behave camp-ly even though I didn't want to. It was a terrible psychotic symptom. I felt as though I had been possessed by some tormenting demon.

An anecdote gives some illustration of this split between who I was and how I sometimes presented myself. My job then at the TAB involved taking bets on horses over the phone and, during a shift, I would take a couple of calls a minute. Sometime I think in 2009 I started doing something bizarre. When I received a call, I would make a snap judgement as to whether the caller was gay or straight. If I decided he was gay I would put on a gay voice. If I decided he was straight I would use my own voice. After a week or two of doing this, I became aware that I was doing it and made an effort to stop. On the next call I put on an Australian accent. My co-worker sitting next to me turned in some alarm to the chap sitting on the other side and said, "He's doing an Australian accent now!"

Those days were terrible. I thought I had to make a choice between being a closet homosexual or an openly gay man – when in fact I was straight through and through.

There is another reason why people may have thought I was gay. It is possible that they thought it because I was so innocent. I mentioned previous girlfriends sometimes to those treating me but I didn't talk about sex or pornography or masturbation. I didn't disclose that I actually quite like sex with women. I shouldn't have had to. I talk more candidly now, in my blog, because I feel subjects like sexuality need to be more openly discussed. I believe now that sexual desire rather than love is the essence of sexuality but I didn't always hold this belief – that the essence of sexuality is sex not love. In late 2009 I fell in love with the girl I call Jess in this blog: at that time I had decided that the fact of my falling in love with a girl was the best proof of my heterosexuality. In early 2010, I told this psychiatrist that I had fallen in love. He said, "A boy or a girl?" It was the first and only time he had ever enquired directly about my sexuality. I said "A girl." It was a relief to be able to say it. What I now know was I that I was just playing the game. What I should have said was, "Of course a girl, you evil faggot." But, then, I was coming off the end of perhaps the most terrible year of my life.

I said in a previous post that from 2010 until early 2013 I simply lived with the idea that people in the Mental Health Service thought I was gay. I am unsure if this is true or not. It may have been simply that they thought I had been sexually muddled at some time but now wasn't or they may have thought that I was gay man who wouldn't come out. I don't know for sure but I think now the later. And different people in the system may have believed different things about me. In the beginning of 2013, I wrote a letter to the newspaper (about the idea that there might be a correlation between lead exposure and crime) and I suffered another episode immediately afterwards. My life had reached a crux. What I suspect but don't have evidence for is that I was publicly outed at this time, perhaps by persons in the Mental Health Service. I should say now that it is possible that I had a certain notoriety among a certain set of New Zealanders and so people know my name and took an interest in me. I say this because, at the beginning of my first episode, I was volunteering for a popular radio station, writing news stories. (A period of my life that might possibly make an interesting subject for a future post.) When I re-entered the Mental Health Service in 2013, it was because, as I have said before, I needed it finally on the record that I was genuinely straight – because I thought people still didn't know.

To finish this post, I should say that the culture among psychiatrists and Mental Health Professionals is totally wrong. In the previous post I suggested that people always start off straight and then, if they turn gay, turn gay later in life; nevertheless, it is wrong to assume that patients are all sexually muddled. Such an attitude creates the condition it expects. When someone first presents as a person requiring treatment, one of the first questions that should be asked is, how do you identify in terms of sexuality? It is a horrible problem I admit and there is no easy answer. But one answer might be simple common sense. I was twenty-seven when I first became ill, had had two long term relationships with women, no sexual relationships with men and had said that I was straight when I first entered the service. What more evidence should be required?

This may not be my most compelling or easily understood post. But I think it is important.

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