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?