More Corruption in the Mental Health Service

A couple of months ago, I had an independent review of my status as someone receiving compulsory treatment for schizophrenia. It was only yesterday that I opened my copy of the review tribunal's decisions. After I read it, I was left literally shake with anger.

Apparently a person can be fined $10,000 dollars for talking about what happened during a hearing but I am going to take that risk.

At the independent review, I sat with my mother, my psychiatrist, my key worker and my lawyer. Across from us sat the review panel consisting of a lawyer, a lay person and another psychiatrist. This second psychiatrist had flown up from Wellington, I believe, to assess me. Immediately before the review started, when he introduced himself to me, I smelt a strong odor of shit coming off him. I know this sounds a bit flakey but I believe the reason he smelt so bad was because my subconscious mind was letting me know that this man was utterly bogus, dishonest, full of shit, that he had made his mind up about me before the review even started.

As I have said before, I was 'ill' in 2007, 2009 and 2013. In fact I continued to be somewhat ill right up until early this year and have only completely come right in the last couple of months – despite having been subject to compulsory treatment since February or March 2014. During the hearing the psychiatrist seemed to accept that these were the years I had been ill. However in the decision it was said that I had been unwell in 2008 and 2012. This is completely wrong.

I was quite well in 2012 and in fact completed a degree that year, a Masters in Creative Writing.

In the decision it also says the following,

"In March 2013 the Applicant self-referred to the Taylor Centre, with a recurrence of symptoms. He had reduced his dose of Olanzapine from 12.5 mgs to 2.5 mgs, and refused to increase it. By October his condition had decreased even further."

This is an ABSOLUTE LIE. I was never on 12.5mgs of Olanzapine. From the end of 2009 until the beginning of 2012 I was on 10mgs of Olanzapine. At the beginning of 2012, a day or two after the Laneway Festival which was held January 30 2012, I was discharged from the service and, at that time, I received the consent of my psychiatrist to reduce to 7.5mgs. I felt totally well and so I reduced myself to 5mgs. During the rest of 2012, when I was totally well, I was on 5 mgs. In early 2013, I spoke to my GP, asking her if I could reduce to 2.5mgs. She recommended that I alternate between 5 and 2.5. When I started to become unwell again a little later in the year, I increased my dosage back up to 5.

Between 2007 and 2012 I was treated by a psychiatrist called Tony Fernando. I saw him once about the middle of the year in 2013 and he recommended that I increase the dosage back to 10. So he KNEW that when he was treating me, I was never on 12.5mgs, that my highest dosage had been 10mgs, and so the idea that I had been on 12.5 mgs is not just a accidental mistake but must be a deliberate lie - presumably attributable to him.

But the thing in the decision that made me supremely angry is this.

"Finally, somewhat poignantly, he said that he would argue his case better if he knew what the cause of his mental health problems was." 

I never said this. I know I never said this because I know what the cause of my mental health problems were. I didn't spell it out at hearing and this is my mistake, but I know that the cause of all my psychotic episodes has always been people thinking I was gay when I'm not. Yes, I was well between early 2010 and early 2013 but this long period of wellness was the result of me just accepting that people in the Mental Health System thought I was gay when I wasn't. I believe I was 'outed' over the summer of 2008 and 2009 and this was the cause of my worst psychosis that occurred during 2009. Between 2010 and 2013 I just endured others' misperceptions of me. The reason for my illness in 2013 was that this situation, this misperception, had become unsupportable; I needed to get it on the record that I was straight. But the psychiatrists I saw then didn't seem to believe me and continued not to believe me right up until late last year; it is only this year that they have started to recognize that I'm genuinely straight.

My problems can, in the main, be blamed on Tony Fernando, the psychiatrist I saw between 2007 and early 2012. I hate this man. In fact, I'm going to say now what I have thought for a long time about him but have been reluctant to express out loud - that when Tony Fernando masturbates he fantasizes about men, specifically he fantasizes about sticking his dick in the mouths of his heterosexual male patients. I don't know whether the psychiatrist who was on the panel is also a closet homosexual but he's certainly a liar - and from the beginning of my illness I have tended to put closet homosexuals and sociopaths in the same category.

Psychiatry and the Mental Health System is based on bullshit. How many suicides are caused, how many lives ruined by false records and by something that amounts to sadism? If, dear reader, you have a family member who becomes 'unwell', my advice to you is to send him or her somewhere quiet and just him get over it in his own time. Don't refer him to the doctors because they will only make him worse. The whole Mental Health System is morally and intellectually bankrupt and the people who run the show, I can only hope, are all destined for hell when they die.