Dates, Dosages and Other Matters

In the last couple of posts I have talked a little more about life. In today's post I want to fill in some details from previous post and speculate about a serious example of psychiatric misconduct.

The Big Day Out 2007 was held January 17, as I said in the last post. I was still working at bFM on Waitangi Day, the 6th of February, the only other ones working at the station that morning being Mikey Havoc and a young female newsreader. I do not know the date I stopped working at bFM. The Red Hot Chilli Peppers' concert was held April 21 (based on what I can look up on the Internet.)  So, this suggests that if I worked at bFM for another fortnight after Waitangi Day, there was a gap of about three weeks between my leaving bFM and seeing the Chilli Peppers play. If it was three more weeks at bFM, it would be a fortnight as I said in the previous post. I do not know if I was experiencing psychotic symptoms prior to this concert - my feeling is that the impression that I was under surveillance in my own flat probably began before this gig but greatly worsened afterwards. My guess is that I remained at the Big House between a fortnight and a month after the Chilli Peppers concert before I reached the crisis point I described in the previous post and had to be rescued from the flat by my brother. I do not know off hand the date I first made contact with the Mental Health System or the date, shortly after this, that I had my first consultation with Tony Fernando, the psychiatrist I would see until early 2012.

In the previous post I said that when I first rocked up to bFM in 2006, almost the first thing I told Jose was that I had "accidentally picked up a male prostitute", something I had also told my flatmates. I feel I need to explain what actually happened. Perhaps a fortnight or a month before I first went to bFM, a German backpacker came to stay at the Big House. We went out drinking and clubbing one night – he seemed to expect me to know where all the Drum and Base venues in the city were and held it against me that I no longer did. The next morning, at about 10am, I drove him into town, to the Intercity bus station. On the way, my car ran out of petrol. I pulled into a bus stop by the Civic and ran with the backpacker up to the bus station. When he was safely on his way, I went to a petrol station at the top of Mayoral Drive (this petrol station no longer exists), picked up a canister of petrol and went back to my car. A street kid hanging around at the time decided to give me a hand filling up my tank: I was in a way elated (stupid accidents can do that to a person), a state of mind reinforced by the fact that I had a bus driver honking at me, and impulsively offered the street kid a ride in my car.

He got in and we went back to the petrol station to finish filling up the tank. On the way he took a Bourbon and Coke from the bag he was carrying and started drinking it: his bag was full of Bourbon and Coke cans. I began to get a bad feeling, a feeling of sick discomfort, anxiety or dread. I was already regretting my impulsive offer. I asked him where he wanted to go and he said he had friends in St Heliers, so I drove there. On the way, he asked to use a public bathroom: I stopped and he went in and emerged shortly after. I half thought he expected me to follow him in.

By this point, you see, I had begun to develop a queasy feeling that this kid might be gay, that I had, in a way, accidentally picked up 'a male prostitue'. Picking up hitchhikers is one thing, impulsively giving car rides to street kids is another. Bear in mind, though, that this was 10am on a weekday morning and not a time when one would expect to find male prostitutes soliciting business. When I arrived at St Heliers, I found that his claim that he had friends there was a lie. I drove back into town and, becoming increasingly desperate, asked him where he wanted to go instead. He said, "I want to go with you, Andrew!" We drove back to Fort Street and, because he still refused to get out of the car, I pushed him out.

Now, I have thought about this horrible incident a little in the eleven years since. It was possible simply that this kid was homeless and wanted me as a benefactor, someone who could provide him with somewhere to stay. It is also possible, though, that this kid may well have been sexually abused when he was younger, that he was drawn towards older male father figures. I was twenty-six then. I still don't know what this kid's problem was; I can only surmise. But I do know, or at least suspect, that my impulsive offer to give him a lift in my car was an incredibly stupid mistake.

I came home and, as I said, immediately told my flatmates that I had "accidentally picked up a male prostitute". I didn't explain in any detail what had actually happened. I have since talked about this incident with my mother and, in 2014, I sent an email describing this event to my psychologist: I think the asshole didn't believe me. In 2014, for the first time, I discovered that the mental health 'professionals' treating me had performed brief interviews with members of my family and my flatmates when I first became a patient. Perhaps a flatmate had reported to them that I had picked up a male prostitute and those treating me had concluded that I made a habit of cruising for male prostitutes. Those treating me never asked me about it, and if they had been told a false story, never checked to see if their 'facts' were right. When I told my psychologist this story via email in 2014, I volunteered the information.

At this point I would like to get back to dates and events.

After leaving the Big House, I remained psychotic for the rest of 2007. I had been put on 2.5 mgs of Rispiridone. During this time I continued to believe that there were more gay people than straight people in the world, that the planet was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals. My psychosis ebbed away shortly after Christmas and I was almost well for the entirety of 2008, going back to University to complete some Philosophy papers. On the 5th of January 2009,  I became psychotic again, pretty much the same night as I attended Neil Finn's second Seven World Collide show. (In a previous post I said that this concert was held December 2008 – this was an error based on my confusing the month the accompanying album was recorded with the date of the concert.) It was that month or the next that I started, for the first time, hearing voices. (I have described this moment in the post "Me and Jon Stewart".) The trigger, or stressor, that caused me to become psychotic again was that I believed, intuitively or psychically, that my evil faggot of a psychiatrist had falsely put on my record that I had come out as gay.

I was very 'unwell' for almost all of 2009. The caustic agent that made me sick was my feeling that I had been falsely outed, that those treating me thought me gay. More than that I believed that the Rispiridone might somehow actually turn me homosexual. Shortly before August 2009 I started hearing voices saying "I'm gay, I'm gay": I thought these were the voices of all the other patients in the world taking Rispiridone coming out. I was even a little scared that I might say it out loud. I panicked. Due to incredibly distressing psychotic symptoms and general physical and mental malaise associated with this horrible drug, I considered suicide, even going so far as to write a suicide note. This suicidal ideation occurred on the 6th of August, my mother's birthday.

When Tony Fernando, my psychiatrist, learned that I had considered suicide, I think he panicked. He allowed me to discontinue the drug. I reduced it by 0.5mgs a week over the course of a month and half, the fastest he would allow me to go off it. Being allowed to discontinue the Rispiridone cured my psychosis. I was pretty much well for about a month, although I had severe difficulty sleeping. I thought that by getting off the drug I had also escaped the diagnosis. I even went with my mother to Sydney for a wedding, while I was there hitting on a girl in a boat. A couple of weeks after I got back from Sydney I again became unwell, the triggering event being, bizarrely I admit, seeing an advertisement on TV featuring Iggy Pop. Basically, I decided that even though I had managed to get off the horrible drug Fernando had put me on, I was still stuck in the same situation.

Shortly after this, I ended up back in the Taylor centre and was put on Olanzapine, the dosage gradually being increased to 10mgs. I remained psychotic but the psychosis I experienced when taking Olanzpine, while being slightly more intense than the psychosis I experienced when taking Rispiridone, was far less terrible. I thought, wrongly, that I had somehow "got out the other side".

That summer I met Jess (at a Hearing Voices group) and started talking continuously with her and Jon Stewart in my head, a period I have described in a number of posts in this blog. My psychosis abated over the first couple of months of 2010. For the next two and half years, I was well. From around November of 2009 until early 2012 I continued taking 10mgs of Olanzapine. My last appointment with Tony, after which I was discharged, occurred right after January 30 2012 – I remember this vividly because I had attended the Laneway Festival on that date and I was still extremely sunburnt. At this appointment I negotiated a decrease in my medication from 10mgs to 7.5mgs. Because I felt so well, I took it upon myself to decrease my dosage to 5mgs. I remained well for all of 2012, starting and completing a degree (an MA in creative writing). In early 2013, I asked my GP who I saw every month, or every couple of months, if I could decrease my dosage from 5mgs to 2.5. She advised me to alternate between 5 and 2.5.

In early 2013 I became psychotic again, the triggering event this time being a letter I sent to the newspaper about an historical correlation between lead exposure and crime, a letter that was published. Just before Easter I again voluntarily re-entered the Mental Health Service as a patient and saw the psychiatrist Dharma, my first appointment with a psychiatrist other than Tony since 2009. I have described this appointment in the post "Bruce Springsteen vs. Faith No More". I sought two things: first, I wanted it finally on the record that I was straight and second I thought by doing so I could somehow help Jess, that I could vouch for her. My psychosis that year was very much concerned with Jess – I was afraid she might somehow turn lesbian (which in a way she did that year or the next). I had two appointments with a locum called Dharma and then saw Tony once. Tony advised me to increase my dosage back to 10mgs. I was reluctant to increase my dosage because I no longer saw any therapeutic value in antipsychotic medication. I started seeing a different psychiatrist, Jen Murphy. In first appointment with Dharma, I had told him of the three women I'd been in love with over the course of my life, Danielle, Sara and Jess; just before I saw Jen I heard a voice saying, "Don't talk about love, talk about sex" and so, at my first appointent with Jen I told her truthfully that the first time I slept with a girl was New Years Eve 1997 and that the last time was a one-night stand in Wellington two years previously. Even this didn't seem to be enough to prove I was straight and so I wrote a short essay in which I described the closest I had ever come to a homosexual experience (an experience I mentioned in the post "Definitions of Sexuality"). For some reason Jen didn't believe me; at a later consultation she even implied that I was a 'phoney'. After a couple of months of seeing Jen, I was bullied into increasing my dosage either to 10mgs or 12.5mgs (I can't remember now how much). I felt like I was being punished for telling the truth and started throwing up every night to get the drug out of my stomach. For a period towards the end of the year and the beginning of the next I was permitted to be drug free. I went to the Big Day Out in January 17 2014 with my brother and this is the last time I can remember being happy.

In early 2014, I think around February, I was put under the Mental Health Act and started receiving compulsory treatment, as I still do. Despite now receiving compulsory treatment I continued experiencing psychotic symptoms. At the very end of 2014, I again considered suicide – this after a year of seeing the psychologist Simon Judkins. I was much more unwell between 2014 and 2016, when taking 300mgs of Olanzapine once a month, than I had been in 2012 when I was only taking 5mgs daily. Towards the end of 2014, there was a thunderstorm and I heard a voice, speaking it seemed out of the thunder, saying "I'm gay". It was awful. I was again scared, as I had been around July 2009, that I might say it out loud. It was shortly after this that I considered hanging myself in a closet. Judkins had obviously been of great assistance to me. It is really only over the course of the last six months that I have fully recovered. I was much more 'well' in 2012, when I was taking 5mgs of Olanzapine daily, than I have been over the last three years when taking 300mgs every four weeks.

All this information may seem boring. But I have had multiple 'independent' hearings and in every hearing false claims have been made about my life and my medical history – this is why I feel the need to talk about it publicly. In every hearing, it has been claimed that I was on 12.5mgs of Olanzapine and that I became sick at the beginning of 2013 because I had reduced, unilaterally, my dosage from 12.5mgs to 2.5. This is bullshit. I was on 5mgs of Olanzapine from very early February until very early 2013 when, as I have said, I reduced my dosage slightly with the consent of my GP, from 5mgs to the equivalent of 3.75. At other hearings it has been said, falsely, that I was ill in 2008 and 2012. In fact, in the last hearing, even though the psychiatrist on the panel seemed to accept at the time that the years that I considered myself most ill were 2007, 2009 (by far the worst year in terms of psychosis) and 2013 he went ahead and wrote in my judgement that I was unwell in 2008 and 2012, completely counter to my oral testimony. What evidence do they possibly have that I was unwell in 2012? I wasn't even in the system. Also in my last hearing, Jen Murphy said that I had only ''recently disclosed' the suicidal ideation that I had experienced at the very end of 2014 – but this is another untruth. The suicidal ideation I experienced had come up at a hearing in September of the previous year and it had been known about since shortly after it happened.

None of these psychiatrists can lie straight in bed.

I'll highlight another massive untruth. It has been said about me that I was ill in 2008 and well in 2009, that I didn't become sick again until shortly after up I stopped taking Rispiridone. It was said that I dicontinued the Rispiridone because of side-effects. In fact, the eight months in 2009 before I discontinued Rispiridone was the worst period of psychosis I ever experienced. The real reason I was allowed to discontinue the Rispiridone was because I had considered suicide and Tony Fernando panicked. Shortly before I started incrementally reducing this drug, I'd heard a voice saying "The only difference between you and them is testosterone"; I thought Rispiridone might somehow turn me gay by fucking with my hormone levels. It was only after I had started reducing my dosage that I told Tony Fernando that I thought my testosterone levels might have been being adversely affected and he referred me to an endocrinologist. In fact, my testosterone levels were fine; my fear had emerged from my psychosis, from a terrible anxiety that the drug I was on might somehow turn me gay. It wasn't "side effects" that forced Tony to allow me to discontinue the Rispiridone, it was the fact that I had considered suicide. The claim that I was allowed to discontinue the Respiridon because of "side effects" is another lie, a lie to protect Tony Fernando from charges of gross incompetence of misconduct.

Around February or March 2014 I wrote a long essay describing my entire life, right up until the time I was put under the Act. Many of the things I wrote about in this essay I have covered in this blog, although this essay was perhaps better written and more complete than any of the posts I have written. I took this long essay into the Taylor Centre and asked for it to be given to Jen Murphy, my then psychiatrist. I don't think it ever reached her. In 2013 I had written a short essay, as I said, describing the closest I had ever come to a homosexual experience and, when I alluded to my essay, those treating me (and I include not only Jen Murphy but also Simon Judkins) may have thought I meant the one I wrote in 2013 rather than the one I wrote in 2014. Why did this essay I wrote in early 2014 not reach Jen Murphy? I think Tony Fernando took it out of her box. I remember one time going into the Taylor Centre to have a blog post given to her; Tony Fernando overheard me, emerged from his office to make sure that it was me in the reception, and then went back into his office without talking to me. He was making sure it was me surreptitiously. This does not seem like much in the way of evidence that Tony was intercepting my written communications to Jen Murphy – but all these years later I can only assume she never read the long essay I wrote in early 2014, and the only reason I can assume that she didn't read it was because Tony Fernando removed it from her cubbyhole.

In my appointments with Tony, appointments that I had between 2007 and 2012, I often received an impression of absolute mendacity and dishonesty. I have said before, and I will say it again, that this psychiatrist is a sociopath, a man fundamentally dishonest, with no respect for the truth at all and no sense of shame. I just sensed this. I suspect that Fernando regards psychiatry as a game – how far can he go to make his patients worse without being held criminally culpable? In my case, his treatment of me almost amounted to sadism.

The whole mental health system is based on bullshit. Obviously, dear reader, the only explanation for what happened to me is that someone lied about me. I feel absolutely sure that it was Tony Fernando who lied. But it is not just Tony who lies. They all do it. Rather than admit that a psychiatrist has fucked up, deliberately falsified records or made an accidental mistake, the doctors close ranks. Whenever a mentally ill person kills himself or herself, the psychiatrists lie to exculpate themselves. These are people, after all, who a few decades ago would compel the mentally ill to receive Insulin Shock Therapy and Electro Convulsive Therapy, who at Lake Alice would force the inmates to take ice baths. I remember an appointment with a psychiatrist, one Jeremy Whiting, at which I said that "labelling people was a way of withholding empathy"; he recoiled from me as though I were a snake. Psychiatrists routinely dehumanise their patients. And they are all thoroughly dishonest. They are dishonest because the whole system is based on two massive lies: that mental 'illness' is literally an illness and that antipsychotics work. And the stigma surrounding mental illness only makes the power imbalance between doctors and patients worse – it discourages patients from speaking out when they have been mistreated because they fear public discrimination.

I have written several post about the psychologist I saw in 2014 but one other thing he said is worth mentioning. I know I digress but bear with me reader. One day he delivered a strange mad outburst. He said to me, "So you think homosexuals can't get sick?" It was an objectively insane thing for him to say. I would assume that homosexuals are at least as susceptible to psychosis as heterosexuals and in fact I have met one openly gay patient through the service – as well as several other patients who I think have had their sense of sexual identity screwed up by their treatment. I used to think Judkins was just an asshole – but perhaps what happened is this. I assumed he had read the long essay I wrote around February 2014 but perhaps he didn't even know about it. Perhaps he only read the short essay I wrote in 2013. Moreover he most certainly based his view of me on what Tony had written about me. It may be that Simon Judkins was actually trying to be a good man but that his view of me was skewed because he had received false information.

This post is a little chaotic I admit. If you dredge through it, however, I think you'll receive some idea of what had happened to me. I believe that I have been the victim of serious misconduct – and the primary culprit is the psychiatrist I saw between 2007 and 2012, Tony Fernando.

My First Psychotic Episode

In this blog, I have been quite candid about my experiences of 'mental illness' and about how, in late 2013, I was finally officially diagnosed schizophrenic. It should be obvious to readers that I really hate psychiatry and psychiatrists generally, something I will come back to at the end of this post. Although my first psychotic episode was not caused by drugs or doctors, every subsequent episode was, either directly or indirectly. The reader though may be interested in the circumstances of my first psychotic episode, the episode that led me to become a patient of the Mental Health System in the first place and which I cannot blame on any psychiatrist. This is the subject of today's blog. Bear with me, reader, it should be interesting.

I should say some things about who I was before this first episode. I was a zero on the Kinsey Scale, exclusively heterosexual not only in my sex life but also in my fantasy life. (I suppose I need to say I still am.) In fact I didn't even consider that there might be an alternative. However for a large chunk of my life I had been troubled by worries that others around me, in certain situations, thought I might be gay. I am not quite sure why I gave this impression. Partly it might have been because I am intelligent and perceptive, partly perhaps because I have a slightly higher than normal voice (think Michael Cera or Jeff Buckley), partly because I was preferred poetry to rugby, having by the age of 24 completed two degrees in English Literature. My strategy for dealing with this anxiety was to be maximally non-homophobic. Although I didn't associate with gay men in real life, in 2001, the same year I wrote "Bruce Sells Out", I wrote another short film about two gay men who engage in a kind of Cold-War-espionage type sex game. This really shows how comfortable I was in my own sexuality. I firmly believed then that homophobes, people who hated gays, were all themselves closet homosexuals. A third aspect of how I viewed the world, which worsened as I grew older, was that from time to time I would discern some signs of homosexuality in others around me.

These three aspects are not sufficient in themselves to explain why I suffered an apocalyptically awful psychotic episode at the age of twenty-seven. I sincerely believe that my parents' divorce when I was seven had given me a vulnerability to mental 'illness'. It is interesting to note that, that same year, 1986, was also the year homosexuality was legalised in New Zealand.

In 2006, I enrolled at Teachers' Training College. I didn't want to become a teacher but was effectively emotionally blackmailed into it by my father because he felt I was doing nothing else with my life. It was extremely hard work and exacerbated my natural anxieties. After about six or seven months I dropped out. Also at the beginning of 2006, I went to live at a flat known by its residents and others around Auckland as the Big House. The Big House was called home by twenty flatmates and was very Green, very hippie and officially vegetarian. Nandor Tzanchos had lived there and in fact my room was his old room. Now, reactionaries might see something dodgy about a flat that was virtually a hippie commune, but, although half my flatmates smoked pot every day (the other half never smoking cannabis at all), otherwise we were all pretty square. All the residents were either working or studying. To get some idea of what living in a flat like this was like, I recommend the reader have a look at the story "Starlight" that I have published in this blog, some time ago, although this story was more inspired by my time living at the Big House than a fully accurate depiction of this flat.

After I dropped out of Teachers' Training College, I  felt at loose ends. I felt, vaguely, that there was a community out there waiting for me if I could find it. I rocked up to the radio station bFM, partly to see if I could help out but mainly to revive an old friendship with Jose Barbosa, a producer and current affairs presenter who worked there with whom I had studied my MA. Jose had never been a close friend but I associated him with a happy period in my life and wanted to recover it. I should say something about bFM. This station is a Student Radio Station that then possessed an enormous cachet, its brand then perhaps being the best in the media landscape. Although it competed with commercial radio stations, it was run (mainly) by volunteers. Its success then (I don't know about now) was founded on the fact that it had created an extremely strong sense of community among its listeners. At this time, 2006, the breakfast show host was Mikey Havoc.

When I rocked up to see Jose, one of the first things I said to him was that I had recently "accidentally picked up a male prostitute". This sounds incredibly dodgy, I know, but the actual incident was literally an innocent mistake; I would describe what happened here but to explain the circumstances would take too long. I described it to my psychologist in 2014. I had found this mistake distressing and had mentioned it to some of my flatmates, although I didn't explain the details. I told Jose this because I wanted him to identify one way or the other; I didn't want to accidentally befriend a gay man. Jose made no reply. He took me in to see the News Producer, Noel McCarthy, and introduced me as "his friend". Noel looked me up and down (I was then wearing Peruvian pants that I had received the fuzzy idea were the trousers of choice for cool people) and offered me a role coming in a couple of days a week to write new stories.

I should say that I guess I wasn't wholly well at the time but I wasn't then psychotic.

In the years since, I have wracked my brains repeatedly as to whether Jose was gay or not. Evidence that he was gay? His beard, his love of Mr Moon by the Headless Chickens, his close friendship with Mikey, some other small signs. Evidence that he was straight? His evident appreciation of the comic series The Punisher. In the same way that I didn't know whether he was straight or gay, I assume he may have been similarly uncertain about me. After all, he may well have known about my gay spy film but have been unaware of my previous relationships with women. Obviously telling him that I had "accidentally picked up a male prostitute" was not the ideal way to commence my stint working at the radio station.

Writing news stories for a radio station is a simple process. A couple of days a week I would arrive at the station about 5am and find items on the Internet by real journalists, from both national and international sites, and rewrite them for broadcast. After a little while working there, I started allowing my sense of humour to inform my pieces. I had an anarchic, skewed view of the world. I never made anything up but I would try to highlight the absurdity in some of the various stories I found. I described Pope Benedict's popemobile as 'pope-tastic'. I did a piece satirising those ridiculous articles about the death of the world's oldest person (Mikey reacted to this story by saying, "Slow news day".) One time I found a piece in the Sun comparing Tom Cruise to Jesus Christ, informing the public that Cruise had been chosen as the Jesus of Scientology. My rewritten piece contained the immortal line: "Like Jesus, Tom Cruise will gather disciples and spread the word of L. Ron Hubbard to the masses". This item made even Mikey laugh. I honestly believed that I was just working at a simple student radio station and that it was permissible to play around a little. I mention the Cruise story for another reason: I believe it may have gone viral. It was just the next year that Cruise performed his bizarre 'in/out' rant on Youtube ,and in Talladega Nights, Will Ferrell's character says at one point, "Help me Jesus! Help me Tom Cruise!" Generally though, I was writing serious stories, and wrote many on the war in Iraq and in support of gay marriage.

I think it was early in 2007 that I started to experience my first psychotic symptoms. The anxiety that others might think I was gay hadn't gone away but in fact had gotten worse; I didn't do anything about it because I felt I shouldn't need to say or demonstrate that I was straight. I vacillated between thinking that others at the station thought I was gay and thinking that everyone else who was working there was gay. Perhaps this 'delusion' is understandable given the situation I was in. What is perhaps less understandable is that I gradually began to feel that the station was bugged and that everything everyone said there was being monitored by outside agencies – although I can't be sure when this delusion started to form, if it was there prior to the Big Day Out on January 19 2007 or emerged afterwards.

At the forefront of my mind, though, I clung for life to the belief that everyone at the station knew I was straight. About a week or two before the Big Day Out, an incandescently hot nineteen-year old German girl came to stay at my flat. I thought, "She likes music; I work at a radio station; I'll woo her by taking her in to bFM and having her sit in on Mikey's breakfast show." I brought her in on two occasions over the course of week. It seemed like a good idea at the time – but it turned out a disaster. It was a terrible thing to do to Mikey, to have him try to do his show with a very attractive teenage girl sitting with him in the studio. I remember at one point Caroline leaving the studio, coming out to where I was sitting excitedly and singing Sigur Ross in my ear; she must have been having a great time. I overhead Mikey saying to Jose. He said "Have you ever had a little girl singing in your ear?" It should have been fun for me but in fact the whole thing was awful.

On January 17 I attended the Big Day Out (then New Zealand's most popular music festival) with some of my flatmates. I took Extasy and smoked a lot of pot (the only time I have ever really enjoyed cannabis to be honest). Stoned out of my gourd, I watched Tool play: they probably performed "Stinkfist". Immediately after the Big Day Out, Caroline vanished from the Big House (the furthest I ever got with her being a kiss on the back lawn.) On the next Tuesday (what Extasy users call Deeky Tuesday), I went into bFM and suffered a complete meltdown. It was unfortunate that this Tuesday I may have been put on air for the first and only time, performing a field piece abut an amphetamine lab explosion up at K Road not far from the station. As a result of Caroline and this meltdown, of my fear that I might have accidentally outed myself (I was very self-conscious about my voice), my relationship with the others at the station, paid staff and volunteers, deteriorated markedly.

Simply put, they couldn't make me out at all. I think they even thought I might be a fundamentalist Christian; one girl asked me my opinion of abortion.

After the Big Day Out, my psychotic symptoms, which had been only slight, dramatically worsened. Not only did I have the feeling that the others working at the station were fake, were gay, I started to experience 'delusions of reference'. I thought that the news stories I was finding were about me – that the media was ganging up on me or forcing me into an increasingly untenable position, that I was being backed into a corner. I started to experience what I thought of as 'psychic feedback' – I felt I was reaching a greater audience than I could ever have expected when I thought of bFM as just a little student radio station, that I had somehow suddenly become famous, and that I could somehow sense others' opinions of me. My mental state is hard to describe. I should say that I wasn't hearing voices (I didn't start to hear voices until two years later) but I was under immense stress. I thought that perhaps I had been outed as gay or had outed myself accidentally. I don't quite understand why I did this but I moved from a fear that others thought I was gay to the paranoid delusion that the others working there were gay. I thought I had to pretend to be gay to fit in. Up until that point I had been trying to somehow be gay and straight at the same time and this balancing act was becoming increasingly impossible to maintain.

About a fortnight or a month later, things reached another crisis point. It was Mikey's turn to have a meltdown on air. I wasn't in a position, literally, to hear what he said but at the time I thought he was trying to come out as straight. It was his Tom Cruise 'in/out' breakdown. I worried also again that I was being outed. I found a story on Russell Brown's news site Hard News (Brown once being a contributor to bFM) about border control; it contained the line: "If you let in a flamboyant homosexual, you might as well let in a Catholic". I wanted to run this story to say that I was straight. The station manager wouldn't let me. At the end of the breakfast show, I went into the studio. Something happened which I still can't fully explain or describe but which led me to believe (wrongly) that Mikey and Jose were both coming out to me as gay. In fact, I thought they were having an affair with each other. (For readers unfamiliar with New Zealand, I feel I should say that Mikey was then married.)

At this point, I need to say something about the Russell Brown story and the line I cited above. This sentence crystallised something in my mind. It seemed apparent that, not only had the people at bFM and by extension the media, believed that I was gay when I first started working there, they had employed me because they thought I was gay. And the reason everything had turned to shit for me is that they had found out I was not. Moreover, the phrase "let in a flamboyant homosexual" seems to imply that while the media does not generally let in flamboyant homosexuals, it does let in non-flamboyant, i.e. closet, homosexuals. From this I could only infer that the media must be full of closet homosexuals. I was a straight man pretending to be gay to get a job in the media. A month or so later I would go even further, deciding that a conspiracy of closet homosexuals ruled the world. My logic was impeccable.

1. Heterosexuals can't recognise if someone is a closet homosexual or not.
2. Closet homosexuals can recognise each other (using gaydar).
3. Like the freemasons, members of a secret society will want to help each other out, to assist each other in climbing the social ladder.
THEREFORE
The world must be ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals.

Having formed this extraordinary powerful paranoid delusion a month or so later, it would endure for the rest of 2007 and surface again in 2009. I would believe, among other things, later, that everyone who went to an Ivy League university was a closet homosexual, that everyone in the Republican Party was a closet homosexual, and that all the Nazis had been closet homosexuals. In my head, openly gay people were good, were honest; closet homosexuals were evil, dishonest, even sociopathic. The world was ruled by psychopaths.

After that moment when I thought Mikey and Jose had come out to me, I felt briefly euphoric. I felt like I had been let into an exclusive club. The euphoria didn't very long at all – it was a secret I couldn't keep. I needed to tell someone, so I told my mother. I also told my best friend at the Big House – I don't think he coped with this confidence very well. Although I don't know for sure, I can imagine what happened. He would have been upset by this 'secret''. Other flatmates might have asked him, "What's wrong?" He replies, "Something that Andrew told me." They ask, "What did he say?" He replies, "I can't tell you!" I believe this is one possible component in the disastrous situation I would end up in with respect to my flatmates a month later.

I only worked at bFM another week after this. On my last morning there I had my final public meltdown. I had decided that the station was full of homosexuals and that I had 'outed' myself simply by deciding to work there. I'd read an article in the newspaper, a gossipy piece that didn't name names, that seemed to be about me, Jose and Mikey and implied a love triangle with Jose as the main vertex. That last morning I needed to tell the world somehow that I was straight and the only way I knew how to do this was to out everyone else. I wrote a couple of items, one among them implying that the media, judiciary and government were all full of closet homosexuals. (I should have included the medical fraternity.) Like all my items it was read on air without being checked first. At the end of the breakfast show I went into the station reception and saw Mikey and Jose sitting on a couch, both red-faced and obviously under great stress. I said, "Sorry - interrupting." Mikey fastened his eyes on an attractive girl walking past and replied, "Sweety". I crossed to Jason Rockpig, the man in charge of the playlist, and told him that I couldn't work at bFM anymore, that I wasn't 'cool' enough. He asked me sarcastically about Caroline. I said, "She vanished." This was my last day at bFM.

After ceasing work at bFM, I was sort of vaguely all right for a while, perhaps a fortnight. I read Troilus and Cressida by Shakespeare.I thought by stopping work at bFM I had successfully escaped a terrible situation– but scandals don't go away. I attended a Red Hot Chilli Peppers Concert with my younger sisters and nephew. During "I Could Have Lied", Anthony Kiedis inserted the line, "I could never say that I am queer" into the song and then ran off the stage. He had grown a moustache especially for the Auckland concerts. It was terrible. I thought I had got away from homosexuality by leaving bFM but it seemed to be following me– I was still being burdened by other people's secrets. I couldn't escape. I felt Kiedis's decision to 'come out' during the Auckland concert must have had something to do with what had happened at bFM.

Shortly after this night, the psychotic symptoms that I had experienced at bFM returned, now at my flat. I decided that I was under surveillance - that the fire alarms were listening devices. I started sleeping during the day and walking all night. I decided that my flatmates were divided into angels and demons. It was almost a blackly religious experience. I feel sure that one of the reasons that I had become ill –though I have little direct evidence of this – was that a rumour that I was gay had spread through my flat. And my increasingly erratic behaviour, which my flatmates couldn't recognise as resulting from a psychotic episode, and which I couldn't recognise as such myself because I had never experiences a psychotic episode before, might have fuelled this misconception. At some point I developed the theory that I described above, that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals. I tried to work out who was listening to me and decided that everything I said was being live streamed to a gay website, that I had a huge gay following or fanbase. (Is it any surprise that I would later become obsessed by Kurt Cobain? He obviously believed the same thing.) Towards the end, I was even talking directly to this audience. This episode was of almost hellish intensity. I feel I should say that during this period I never outed anyone or even used the words 'gay' and 'straight'.

Shortly before I stopped working at bFM, a Frenchman took up residence in the flat. He would engage me in conversations about spirituality. One night, towards the end, we were talking spirituality and I hallucinated a golden glow over Parnell Rise – at almost the same moment I felt an impulse, almost akin to demonic possession, to kiss him, something I had never experienced in my life before. I didn't submit to the impulse. I went for a walk. I decided that everyone in the world was gay except me. I thought of Jaques Lacan's theory that the Name of the Father is the centre of the system; I decided that if everyone in the world was gay except me then my father must be gay as well. All of the distress of my parents' divorce when I was seven came back to me; I decided that my father had divorced my mother to stop me becoming gay, that he had done it to save me. I considered drowning myself and walked into the sea up to my shins – but then decided that suicide would just bring more shame on my family. Instead I came home and told some of my flatmates, "My father is gay but I'm straight!"

The Frenchman who was around this night remarked to me, "Don't you know that you have to be a member of a group to make fun of it?"

For a brief moment I was well, in the sense that my psychotic symptoms and delusions went away. For a brief moment I had insight. One of my flatmates called my brother and he came and removed me from the flat. I told my flatmates, right before being picked up and taken away, that I either had schizophrenia or multiple-personality disorder and didn't know which. The delusion that I was under surveillance went away but it came back – shortly after I started seeing my first psychiatrist Tony Fernando. I would believe intermittently for the next three years that I had a listening device in my glasses and that if I outed anyone, or even used the words 'gay' and 'straight' I would be killed.The reason for this should be obvious. I believed that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals and I ended up stuck as a patient of one.

The psychiatric profession is composed almost entirely of utter scum - all of them, it seems to me, are basically dishonest, incompetent, venal and corrupt. I became ill twenty years after the decriminalisation of homosexuality in New Zealand but it seems doctors all have a 'fifties mentality, imagining themselves still living in a world in which nobody admits to being gay and in which a person's sexuality has to be determined from circumstantial evidence. None of them seemed to think I was being truthful when I said I was straight; what world do they live in? Is it a world where everyone on the Left is gay? Moreover, I wrote a long essay at the beginning of 2014 in which I discussed what I have described in this post and much more beside and gave it to my psychiatrist – it is quite evident that the bitch never read it. I would go so far as to say most male psychiatrists are closet homosexuals, by which I mean that they are sexually attracted to men and like to imagine, when they jerk off, that they are sticking their dicks in the mouths of their heterosexual male patients.

Psychiatrists currently have no good theory of schizophrenia. They seem to regard it as an inexplicable 'dopamine imbalance' and think the only form of treatment is sedatives. I believe, based on my own life experience, that the best theory is the Stress-Vulnerability Model, although one cannot fully understand psychosis without realising that it has a spiritual component. I had incurred a vulnerability because of my parents' divorce when I was seven; the Stressor that caused me to become ill were people around me thinking I was gay when I wasn't, first during my time at Teacher's Training College, then at bFM and then finally even in my flat itself. I have said before, but it bears repeating, that I didn't start to hear voices until December 2008 or January 2009, after I had been on 2.5mgs of Rispiridone for over a year and a half. My 'treatment' worsened my condition. When I first made contact with the Mental Health System, I said I wanted to come out as straight. How difficult could it have been to understand the situation I was in?

The Problem with Kinsey

In today's post I am going to be a little self-indulgent and talk some more about my interactions with people in the Mental Health Service. In particular, I am going to elaborate on my conversations with the psychologist I saw in 2014, conversations I have described before in earlier posts, specifically "Definitions of Sexuality" and "The Myth of the Repressed Homosexual". I loathed this psychologist and in today's post I want to try again to spell out why.

In the previous post I outlined a consultation I had with a psychiatrist and social worker immediately before Easter 2013, having re-entered the Service after a year seeing a GP monthly. Something I hinted at but didn't make fully plain in that post is that it was evident that these two both expected me to come out as gay – this being six years after I first became a patient of the Service and me then being then thirty-three. In fact I didn't but it was horrible to be in that situation, to sense that this was the reason they thought I wanted to see them. The psychiatrist, a locum who I had never met before and only had one or two appointments with afterwards, was an Indian man with a rather high voice. In 2014 I started seeing a psychologist, Simon Judkins. On one occasion Simon asked me if I thought this psychiatrist, Dharma, was gay. I said, immediately, no, that he was "a straight man with a high voice." Judkins completely ignored what I had just said told him and went ahead with his pre-prepared script, "Well... you might be surprised to know that he's getting married."

It was evident that the psychologist had formed an impression of me before even meeting me and was unwilling or incapable of altering his opinion. It was also obvious that he couldn't tell the difference between straight men and gay men and based his judgment of this matter solely on whether a man was married or not. We were living on two totally different planets. On another occasion Judkins said to me, a little sententiously, "Whether a person is gay or not is between them  – and God." The fact that he felt the need to tell me this might suggest that I spent my sessions with him continually outing people but this is not true. The only people I claimed were gay were a colleague at the radio station at which I worked when I first became unwell, and the psychiatrist I saw between 2007 and 2012, one Tony Fernando. I reported this remark Judkins had made to my then key worker, one of the few genuinely good people I have met through the Service, and he commented, "Simon said that – to you, did he?" Presumably Simon's statement, given the situation I was in, was objectively insane.

This psychologist's attitude to sexuality was all fucked up. On my first appointment with him I said I was straight several times. His eyes took on a strange shifty look. He said, "You shouldn't divide the world into homosexual and not-homosexual." I said, "Do you mean homosexual and heterosexual?" He said, "No, I mean homosexual and not-homosexual." I said, "Do you mean homosexual and bisexual?" He said again, "No I mean homosexual and not-homosexual". In a later session he told me that sexuality was "fluid" and called me "aspergerous" for refusing to believe him. He expressed incredulity that I believed that one homosexual experience was proof sufficient of homosexuality. All this leads me to one simple conclusion. According to Theory of Mind, a person makes sense of another by imaginative putting himself into the other's shoes. This psychologist thought everyone was bisexual. Presumably this must be because he is bisexual himself. And by 'bisexual' I mean that he fantasises about both men and women when he masturbates.

I should say that Judkins is married (to a woman) and has two children. He couldn't identify himself as 'straight' but, under pressure to try to say he wasn't gay, this was all he could tell me.

Simon presumably feels himself to live in a world full of secret sinners. On another occasion we got to talking about cannabis and he said that many people come home and smoke pot every day to relax in the same way that other people have a beer. Having known very many stoners in my life, I was inclined to agree with him about this, that pot is often harmless, but, given attitudes to marijuana prevalent among Mental Health Professionals, it seemed an inconsistent, hypocritica, event bizarre opinion for a representative of the Service to offer. Presumably he was trying to manipulate me, trying to fossick out of me an admission that I was a cannabis user – without realising that I have been candidly speaking about my former occasional use of drugs to people in the Mental Health System since at least 2008. I suspect Judkins was seeking to put me in a relaxed environment in which I could talk about shameful secrets - without realising that all the 'shameful' secrets in my life I had already talked about. Once again Theory of Mind comes into play. Presumably Judkins tends to assume that others have shameful secrets because he has a few himself. Given his bisexuality these secrets presumably involve at least a few homosexual experiences. Did he give a couple of men hand jobs? Blow jobs? Did he engage in anal sex with a man or two and, if so, was he the giver or the receiver, the top or the bottom?

People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.

At a later session, I leant him a short story I had written "69". (I published this story in this blog some time ago; it is funny and well worth a read, dear reader, if you are interested in what many regard as my best short story.)  This story is about a menage a trois, a man sleeping with two lesbian women. When I saw Judkins next, he said, as if he was telling me something I didn't already know and not literally quoting back at me a line from the story I had given him, "It's a male fantasy to have sex with two women at once". At the end of the session, he said something about how he thought writers would often lie: a liar's response to a truth teller. Now, I admit I have never in reality slept with two women at the same time but it is one of my staple sexual fantasies, something I continually return to in my own imaginative life. Judkins couldn't seem to comprehend this notion of 'fantasy' at all. When Judkins delivered my own line back at me, he said the word "fantasy" in a strangely uncertain way, as though he couldn't quite understand what the word meant. This makes me wonder if perhaps I am wrong in supposing he fantasises about both men and women. Perhaps he doesn't fantasise at all. Freud argued that homosexuals narcissistically turn their libidinal energy upon themselves and perhaps Judkins fits this Freudian definition of a Narcissistic homosexual – he takes himself as the sole object of his own sexual desire.

Regardless of whether this psychologist is a bisexual who fantasises about both men and women when he masturbates or a Narcissist who fantasises only about himself, one thing is clear. He gets his idea of sexuality from Kinsey, as do most of his colleagues. This is a problem. What followers of Kinsey, widely regarded as the seminal thinker about sexuality, don't appreciate is the fact that the theories he came up with and the research he performed were almost certainly skewed, distorted, because Kinsey himself was a sexual pervert, a man who in his childhood and early adulthood would insert objects into his urethra to punish himself for his homosexual desires. It seems possible that Kinsey projected his own perversions and sexual self-hatred onto others to make himself feel better about it, less ashamed ("I'm not unusual; everyone does it!"). The whole discourse about sexuality is bent because it was written almost entirely by homosexuals and by sexual deviants (Michel Foucault included). It is from Kinsey and those who came after him that we derive our general notions of sexuality, and in particular the pernicious idea that ordinary people are frequently off clandestinely enjoying homosexual trysts with each other. This perspective, of a world full of secret perverts, is sick and has noxious consequences. It makes psychiatrists, the ones who are not themselves perverts anyway, view themselves as the lonely inhabitants of a lofty mountaintop, themselves square, straight, morally unimpeachable, peering down on the masses below all cavorting with each other like bonobo monkeys. But they are wrong. Homosexuality is less common than they believe and, when it occurs,  almost always tends to publicly come out.

If I can alter my appraisal of his psychologist I saw, this man who couldn't seem to believe that I might indeed be totally straight, I might suggest that he views himself as the only heterosexual in a world of homosexuals. His is a worldview warped by theorists like Kinsey. But, in the real world, most people are zeros on the Kinsey scale, most people are totally straight. Ordinary heterosexuals exists and most ordinary heterosexuals regard homosexuality not just as repugnant but actually unimaginable. A world of people secretly fucking each other while professing sexual rectitude, full disclosure, a world of hypocrites, is not the world I want to live in, not the world I think I inhabit. But it is the world in which Judkins imagines himself to live. I only saw this psychiatrist for eight or nine months but it was like banging my head against a brick wall of stupidity, hypocrisy and mendacity. I concluded our relationship with an email which I cannot quote verbatim but included the following immortal line: I told Judkins that he was in denial of his True Self and that if he didn't already fantasise about men when he masturbated, that he should start.

This email got me into serious trouble. But I don't regret it. Judkins was an asshole. And psychologists like him cause more harm than good.

Bruce Springsteen vs. Faith No More

In a post last week, I discussed the issue of whether or not people possess free will. The existence or non-existence of free-will is a divisive question in religion - Catholics generally espouse the doctrine that people can voluntarily pick virtue over vice but many Protestants, particularly Calvinists for example, think that free-will is irreconcilable with God's omniscience and believe people are born either saved or damned, that one's innate essential nature predetermines one's fate. The issue of whether people have free will or not is also fundamental to any discussion of sexuality. Left-leaning liberals tend, like Calivinists, to believe that people are born one way or the other although, unlike Calvinists, they refuse to judge people morally for who they are; religious fundamentalists and many right-wingers however, such as here in New Zealand the repugnant Born-Again Christian Ian Wishart, believe homosexuality to be a choice. Right before Easter 2013, a psychiatrist asked me if I would choose to be gay and this had a traumatic effect on me. In the post I wrote last week ("Free Will and Supernatural Causation"), I argued that there is no such thing as free-will, that free-will is an illusion, but that people need to cling to the idea of free will, cleave to the belief that they have agency, because to embrace fatalism is also often to surrender to feelings of apathy and powerlessness. In today's post, I want to talk about the illusion of free will and how it informed a big chunk of my life.

I have talked about my life experiences before in earlier posts but for this post to make sense I need to go over some of them again briefly. In the first part of 2007 I experienced a terrible psychotic episode – a large part of the reason for my descent into a kind of Orphic underworld I believe was that a rumour that I was gay had spread through my immediate milieux. I couldn't be sure about this, sensed that I was being misrepresented in others' minds, but didn't know how to fight it, couldn't even endure it – I reacted to the stress of this situation by forming the delusions that the smoke detectors in my flat were surveillance devices and that my flatmates, of which I had twenty, had divided themselves into angels and demons. Having reached crisis point and having considered walking into the sea, I was rescued from the flat by family and was taken to a Mental Health clinic where, upon first contact, I made the most important declaration of my life, that I wanted "to come out as straight". It seems a bizarre statement to have made but it made sense to me at the time considering how ill I was.

The people treating me, for some reason, didn't believe me and continued not to believe me for the next nine years.

The situation in which I had found myself was inescapable. As a patient of the Mental Health Service, I had found myself in an environment or culture where no-one used the words 'gay' or 'straight'. Shortly after my admittance, I formed the belief that a secret language or code prevailed, in both the Mental Health Service and in the world more generally, in which people were divided not into gays and straights but into 'cats' and 'dogs'. Some people were cats, some people were dogs. I was not privy to this arcane mystery. Were the cats straight and the dogs gay? Was it the other way around? Were the cats closet homosexuals and the dogs openly gay? Was it the reverse? I felt that the world was requiring me to make a choice, impelling me to identify as one or the other but, because I didn't know what either term actually meant, I refused to do so. I wanted to identify as 'straight' – I didn't want to employ the language of the Illuminati or to commit myself to a descriptor the meaning of which I didn't know. The issue of the precise sense of 'cat' and 'dog' in this hermetic secret society bothered me for many years and, never knowing what these codewords signified, I never really committed myself to one group or the other.

All through my illness, I continually felt that I was being asked to make a choice, that if I chose correctly I could deliver myself from madness, that my entire life would rest on the alternative I opted for. It wasn't just a choice between being a cat or a dog. In November 2009, the night the Affordable Care Acts was passed by the House of Representatives, after a year of solid and almost continuous voice-hearing, I came home from work and my brother showed me my nephew's iPod. Two artists jumped out at me – Bruce Springsteen and Faith No More. I decided immediately that this was another choice, perhaps the most important one in my life. I had to choose between these two artists and my whole future rested on whom I selected. But it was a choice almost impossible to make because, as with the choice between being a 'cat' or a 'dog', I didn't know what either band signified, would represent in terms of my future. A couple of nights later, despite my ignorance, I chose to pick Faith No More. In fact, I'd decided I had no real choice. I had always been a fan of Faith No More and had always viewed Bruce Springsteen as someone somehow ridiculous. (I know this opinion may offend fans of the Boss but bear in mind that I didn't then know Springsteen's music well and still don't.)

It felt like I was exercising free will but in fact I had no choice at all. The choice had been made for me. The significance of this 'decision' is still not fully clear to me, although it is clearer than it was. I have written about Faith No More in an earlier post but have never written about Springsteen. I don't know what would have happened to me if I had renounced my own life by picking the latter. But it is interesting to note that Bruce Springsteen is Jon Stewart's favourite rock artist, the musician he most identifies with, and that Springsteen performed here in Auckland just last week.

A month or so after Obamacare passed its reading in the House, back in 2009, I wrote a poem, the last poem I ever wrote. It has relevance to what I'm talking about so I'll quote it here. It has no title although I have sometimes called it "Poem Written When Mad".

The brick asserted its right to be
More than an idea in someone's head,
And soon as the press got wind of this,
A thousand ghouls gathered 'round his bed

And started demanding to be fed.
"We want what's in your brain," they said.
"No point prevaricating, don't try to hide,
Just speak out whatever's on your mind."

So I obliged and they, in return,
Vouchsafed a vision of heaven's domain,
A million bubbles adrift in primordial goop
Endlessly repeating each its own name.

"Open your eyes," said one. "Don't listen to those
Others and their idle chat, that's just noise
Jamming the signal. There's a light at the end
Of the tunnel, if you're wise."
                                           So I chose.

There's a lamp at the end of the tunnel.
There's a life at the end of the tunnel.
There's a seed at the end of the tunnel.
There's a knife at the end of the tunnel.

At the end of the tunnel, there's another tunnel.
In the end there's something still can be said

When I wrote this poem, I was hearing voices almost continuously, so that explains why this poem is somewhat crazed. The line "At the end of the tunnel, there's another tunnel" might be taken as a reference to reincarnation – or it might be taken as a reference to the lesbian practice of tribbing. I wasn't fully intending either sense when I wrote it.

Around this time, I had another choice. I climbed Mount Hobson, a hill near my home, and asked the voices how I could escape my madness. A voice said, "Accept consensus reality." I replied, "Okay." On the way down the hill I encountered a rough-sleeper and heard two voices in my head, one saying "The saved" and the other "The damned." I didn't know which of us was which.

After this I experienced the episode involving Jon and Jess that I have described in previous posts and then gradually, over a couple of months, stopped hearing voices entirely. Early in 2012 I was discharged from the service (although I continued seeing a GP and taking a lower dose of medication). In early 2013 I became psychotic again and decided to re-enter the Mental Health Service, just before Easter seeing a new psychiatrist, a different one to the doctor who had 'treated' me between 2007 and 2012. I became involved in the system again basically because I wanted it finally on the record why I thought I had become sick again in the first place.

At this time I was once again possessed by a delusion that I had first entertained in 2007. I won't spell out this delusion in this blog except to say that it involved sexuality. I described this delusion and the circumstances surrounding my first psychotic episode to the psychiatrist and social worker I saw, something I had never fully done before, in a small and claustrophobically windowless little room. One asked, "How do you identify?" I replied, "Straight." I was asked, perhaps flippantly, "When did you know you were straight?" I said, "From puberty." I told them that, when I first became unwell, I had believed that everyone in the world was gay except me. The psychiatrist seemed astonished. "You thought everyone was gay except you?" (Bear in mind this consultation occurred six years after I first entered the service as a patient.) At this time I was obsessed by Kurt Cobain and I quoted something he had apparently said, "I wish I could be gay just to piss off homophobes." The psychiatrist said, "Would you choose to be gay?" I said, "I'd rather die first."

Although I had perhaps invited this question upon myself, being asked if I would choose to be gay had a devastating effect on me. Asking a thirty-three year old man with no homosexual history at all if he would choose to be gay is like asking a thirty-three year with no criminal history if he would choose to kill someone. That night I had terrible nightmares and suffered a psychological event that I won't explicate in this blog except to say that I suddenly realised that it was indeed possible for a person to choose to be gay. The appointment occurred just before Easter. I was sending song recommendations to Jess via text message almost every day at this time and right before the appointment, I recommended "Let Me In" by REM, a song written for Kurt Cobain. After Easter and this appointment I sent her "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out" by the Smiths.

For a long time the idea that sexuality might be a choice haunted me, provoked in me significant distress. I was 'unwell' then and remained unwell for some time. Suppose for a moment that people really do possess free will. If someone chooses to kill someone, that decision is irrevocable – he or she must live with that crime forever. The choice to have killed someone can never be unchosen. I assume, dear reader, that you are not a murderer: presumably, then, everyday you make the decision not to to kill anyone. If sexuality were indeed a choice, it would be similar to this. The decision to turn gay is irrevocable; if sexuality is a choice, straight people, therefore, must choose everyday to stay straight. This was my situation. For a long time, I would have to repeat my choice to be straight every single day.

As time passed, particularly over the course of this year, my fear that I might somehow turn gay abated. Quite simply I am straight and could be nothing else. This is not a choice. It is who I am. But this realisation did not come easily. In the previous post about free will, I gave some credence to Fatalism, a metaphysical position that can seem nihilistic because it seems to deny people volition, self-efficacy. However, Fatalism need not be a negative philosophy. The other day I did some cursory study of the Calivinist doctrine of 'irresistible grace', the credo that salvation comes to people destined to receive it whether they seek it or not. I couldn't be a Calvinist (it seems to me that Calvinists are often assholes) but the notion of irresistible grace seems to tie in loosely with ideas from Gnositicism and Buddhism. The world, it seems to me, is a factory that manufactures souls and suffering is part of the assembly line. For a time perhaps I had to believe that sexuality might be a choice even though I know now that it is not. People don't choose right over wrong; people do not choose to be straight or gay; nor should people opt for virtue rather than sin in the belief that they can in this way reserve seats in heaven. Good people are good and bad people are bad; straight people are straight and gay people are gay. And one does the right thing solely because it is the right thing to do.

It seems to me that if I made a choice at all that would influence the rest of my life, it was the choice to pick Faith No More rather than Bruce Springsteen back in 2009. And yet this was really no choice at all. It was no choice because it was uninformed – when I opted for Faith No More over Bruce Springsteen, I had no idea either signified, what consequences would follow from either alternative. And it was no choice at all because my entire life up until that point had led me to choose Faith No More instead of the Boss. To choose Springsteen would be to renege on my own life. I felt I was exercising free will because I needed to feel at least a little that I had some control over my life, that there was some escape. But really I had no choice at all.

I should finish this post by saying that, although I am making some bold statements, I am still unsure where I stand on many issues. I believe in meliorism, the idea that society can be improved, and this is hard to reconcile with fatalism. If the world is indeed "the Vale of Soul-making" (to quote John Keats), I feel the process should be less painful and less life-consuming. Perhaps as Calvin thought the world can be divided into those eternally predestined for salvation and those predestined for damnation. Or perhaps it is truly possible to help and even save others. I don't know the answer and perhaps never shall.