Concerning Intuition Again

I have written a little about intuition in previous posts but I think this may be a more interesting post than some of those others. It concerns intuition again. First, what is 'intuition'? Intuition is the ability to know something without being told, without having solid evidence, the ability to correctly read a person or situation from nuances of body language and other ephemeral and contextual signs. Perhaps 'intuition' is even to upload information from the collective unconscious. I think intuition can be unreliable but, in this post, I am going to focus on intuitions that were correct. As I have done in some recent posts, I shall tackle my topic by telling a series of stories.

My first story is a recollection from my time living in the Big House in 2006. My best friend then was a chap called Simeon. He had a friend whose name I've forgotten but who I'll call Barry. When I first met Barry I didn't like him – I thought he was pretentious. (In hindsight I regret this judgment.) One time driving with Simeon, he told me, "Barry's gay, you know." The next time the three of us were together, I was extremely uncomfortable, even silent around Barry. (I regret this too, now.) Barry recognised my discomfort and said to Simeon, "Simeon, you bastard!" Simeon smirked to himself. I had said nothing but Barry had intuited from my body language that Simeon had outed him.

Around 2013, the leadership of the Labour Party here in New Zealand was contested and one of top candidates was a chap called Grant Robertson. Robertson, from everything I heard, is highly intelligent and competent. He also is gay. Robertson didn't win the leadership fight, probably because many on the Left had decided that New Zealand wasn't ready for an openly gay Prime Minister, but, during the contest, the radio DJ Matt Heath wrote an article for the newspaper strongly in favour of Robertson. He had known Robertson when they were both students at Otago University. In those days, in his youth, Heath and his mates would describe anything and anyone they didn't like as 'gay'. Somehow someone told Heath and his crew that Robertson was gay; shortly after Heath, his mates and Robertson went out drinking. At the end of the night Robertson laughingly said to them, "Who told you I was gay?" They asked how he knew they knew and he said, "I've been with you all evening and you haven't used the word gay once!"

These stories suggest that gay men are acutely perceptive not only of who's gay and who isn't (the proverbial 'gaydar') but of who knows they they are gay and who doesn't. I don't think I have to leave it to the imagination of the reader to wonder what happens to straight men who are falsely outed. Straight men can intuit when others think they are gay as well as gay men.

I strongly believe that probably the main cause of schizophrenia is a gap or chiasma between what the sufferer intuits about what others think and his or her evidence for what they think. Last year, one time when I was at the clinic for an injection, I met a man who worked as something like a peer support worker. He was no longer a patient of the system himself but had been sick in the past and continued to take medication. When I found out this out, I asked him about it. His voice, which had been confident and sane until then, took on a strangely confused and uncertain tone. He said that, when he was 'unwell', he'd had the delusion that people wanted to put him in prison. I later told my nephew this story and my nephew, who is at least as sensitive as me (if a little less analytical), immediately said, "People probably did want to put him in prison!" I agreed. This man had been driven mad by a true intuition and had then been bullied into believing that this true intuition had been a delusion.

In the documentary Montage of Heck Courtney Love tells the following story about Kurt Cobain. During the last year of his life, Love had briefly toyed with the idea of having an affair. She didn't actually have an affair and didn't tell Cobain that she was considering it. It was just an idea that drifted through her head. Somehow however Cobain sensed that she was considering cheating on him – and reacted by attempting to commit suicide. I think Love told this story in the doco because she felt guilty about her adulterous thoughts and the effect it had, and wanted to confess it publicly. It was the worst wrong she had done to him. But she also said that she had no idea how Cobain knew. It seems Cobain was spooky like that.

The type of intuition I am describing could be rationalised as a heightened awareness of others' body language and speech, a heightened ability to make sense of others. But as the Cobain story shows, to make full sense of intuition we need to go beyond rationality right into the realm of ESP. In this context, I would like now to tell a story that I've wanted to tell for some time but have been reluctant to because it might reveal to readers who Jess really is. I'll tell it now anyway.

At the beginning of last year, I was living at my brother's house. One night I was unable to sleep and so decided to go for a walk. While walking I began to feel that information was being downloaded into my mind. I thought that I was going to be in the newspaper the next day. Then I changed my mind and decided that Jess was going to be in the newspaper the next day. I thought maybe there would be an article exposing the scandal of her eight month hospitalisation in 2012. While I was walking, the sun came up. I went home and got some sleep at last. When I rose I went through the front section of the newspaper to see if there was anything about Jess – but somewhat desultorily because, by then, I thought it had just been a passing delusion. I found nothing. Later that day I visited my mother and she said, "Your friend Jess was in the paper today!" There had indeed been an article about her, just not in the front section but in the magazine section. It seemed that Jess has won runner-up in the Sunday Star Times short story competition. And the article's writer compared her to Eleanor Catton.

Readers of my blog will know that I was very 'ill' in 2009 and well from around mid 2010 until early 2013 when I suddenly became 'ill' again. Psychiatrists have said about me that I was ill in 2012 (which is bullshit) and have also said that I became ill because I reduced my medication, unilaterally, from 12.5mgs to 2.5mgs in early 2013, another 'alternative fact' that I have debunked several times in this blog already and so shouldn't need to talk about again. I do feel that the psychotic episode which began in early 2013 had a cause – but I can't be sure what it was. I became sick because something happened in the world that related to me. But I hadn't then, and haven't now, any evidence to tell me what that thing was. In the same way that I intuited vaguely that Jess would be in the newspaper but didn't know the context, I think I sensed psychically or intuitively in early 2013 that someone in the world had screwed with me. The problem of what exactly happened in early 2013 is something that still troubles me and may trouble me forever.

This post has been a list of true intuitions. Even the last paragraph describes a true intuition I think. If people are capable of true intuitions with respect to others, why do so many people go wrong? I think people falsely intuit things about others because they have bullshit in their lives that they haven't addressed and this distorts their perceptions. This is the best theory I can advance at the moment.

I want to talk briefly about a quite different topic – the Mental Health Service. I know I am drifting off the subject but I'll come back to it.

The Mental Health Service seems, on the face of it, to have two functions.
1. To help people suffering from mental illness, to treat them and ideally to cure them.
2. To protect society from dangerous crazies by controlling them through tranquillisers and hospitalising them when they become unmanageable.

The ordinary public probably assumes that the Mental Health Service primarily has the first role. When I first became a patient, it was what I thought – I thought the shrinks and psychologists were there to help me. In fact, psychiatrists make no attempt to help the mentally ill at all. The Mental Health Service only has the second function. All that happens when a patient consults with a doctor is that the doctor sits silently listing symptoms and traits and uses these to make a classification from which there is no escape. It surely is an additional cause of illness – to be stuck in a system with people who pretend to want to help you but secretly hate you. I was diagnosed schizophrenic in 2013 – since then I have seen whichever psychiatrist I am stuck with for an hour every two or three months. Regardless of what I say or do, there is nothing that will change the doctor's fixed opinion – that I am incurably nuts. (I truly hope my readers can see how ridiculous this is.) Nothing is done to help me. My consultations with my current psychiatrist are literally pointless because nothing happens, nothing changes. I assume that psychiatrists are well paid – but they are well paid for doing nothing. And all my suffering because a sociopathic psychiatrist years ago lied about me.

I might conclude by coming back to the concept of intuition. Psychiatric diagnoses are in fact based on intuition rather than facts. In this post I have listed a number of true intuitions – why then are psychiatric diagnoses so often so fucking wrong? For two reasons I think. First, most psychiatrists entirely lack sensitivity. In fact they often lack social skills entirely. Second, psychiatry is based on bullshit. How can a psychiatrist accurately understand another when his or her own life is based on a massive lie?

Concerning Science

On April 22nd, hordes of physicists, botanists, biologists, mathematicians and other academic, together with masses of lay-people, descended upon the boulevards of major cities around the world to protest against the Trump administration in the name of Science. The boffin brigade was buoyed by the success of other demonstrations, such as the Women's March, and driven to take back the streets by Trump administration moves to deny climate change, slash funds to the EPA and stifle scientific debate. It was a protest in the name of truth, a protest against bullshit.

Now, I consider myself pro-science. I am interested in it. I spent years trying to work out for myself a derivation of the Theory of Relativity from first principles: to look up others' proofs seemed cheating. I have a textbook on physics that I have read and re-read so often that it has fallen to pieces; I have passages from it memorised. When I lie in bed unable to sleep, I think about physics and mathematics. I believe in anthropogenic climate change, that global warming is caused by increased levels of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere, released not only by the burning of fossil fuels but also by bovine methane emissions. Every year of the last three years has set a new record for being on average the overall hottest year in global history: climate change deniers pretend this inconvenient fact does not exist and offer no alternative explanation for why the planet's temperature has increased. It seems incontrovertible that global warming is caused by human actions and I have believed this since the issue became newsworthy in the 'nineties.

However, readers of my blog may suspect me of having an anti-science bias and so I thought I would use this post to clarify my position on a couple of issues.

In the post "On Evolution", I timidly, diffidently, put forward an objection to the Theory of Evolution as it is usually understood. I knew I was taking a risk. I feel I should say that I actually do believe in Evolution – I believe the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, as seems to be the scientific consensus today; I believe that humans and chimpanzees share a common ancestor; I believe moreover that humans and walruses share a common ancestor, although we have to go a little further back to find that missing link. Evolution happened and is still happening. What I don't believe is that Natural Selection is by itself a sufficient mechanism to explain evolution. Darwin's original theory is founded on the idea that there is genetic variation among members of a species but does not account for the origin of this variation. Modern Evolutionary Biologists argue that variation results from completely random mutations – this is the argument of Richard Dawkins in The Blind Watchmaker for instance. But I do not believe that an appeal to pure chance is a satisfactory answer to the question of how variation arises.

Religious apologists often employ an argument called by its critics "God of the gaps". Where science fails to account for a natural phenomenon, God is invoked to fill the space. Why is the Earth's orbit stable? Because God is steering the ship. The appeal to pure chance seems more scientific but it is not, in fact, dissimilar from the appeal to God. How did the allele for blue eyes first appear? It was a random mutation. The Christian apologist cites divine intervention; Dawkins cites pure chance. Both strategies foreclose the possibility of further investigation.

Every effect has a cause. This principle can be missed by both sides. To adhere fully to the principle of causality is not, however, to say that every action is deliberate. Sigmund Freud argued that there is no such thing as an accident, but I do not believe this. Walking down the street, I step on a banana skin and slip off my feet. Freud would argue that I subconsciously wanted to step on the banana skin – but this is ridiculous. My pratfall had causes (the placement of the banana skin, my selection of a route, the fact that I was absent-mindedly thinking about Relativity instead of paying attention to where I was going), but I did not choose or desire to step on the banana skin. The network of causality extends beyond individuals to their environment and to rest of the world: the buck never stops. And as Chaos Theory has shown, an effect does not have to be proportionate to its cause.

My position is that events can have supernatural as well as natural causes. Evolution happened yes but, and I step out on limb here I admit, perhaps it was steered by a Higher Power. This view has philosophical antecedents: there was a French Jesuit philosopher who argued that humanity would evolve into God. I forget this philosopher's name although I remember it started with an 'L'.

Another reason why readers may think me anti-science is my opposition to psychiatry. This opposition does not make me anti-science though, because I do not think psychiatry is a science. It is a pseudo-science. Psychiatrists, in my view, are all charlatans and witch-doctors. Up until the 'eighties, I think, it was considered normal practice to subject psychotics to electro-convulsive therapy even though there was no credible theory of schizophrenia to justify this treatment and no real evidence to show that it worked. They even used to believe that they could 'cure' homosexuality by electrocuting people, as happened with Lou Reed. None of them, then and now, know what they're doing. Psychiatrists today flail around incompetently because they stupidly continue to believe mental illness is actually a physical illness – when it is in reality a reaction to social stressors. And all treatments like ECT and Insulin-Shock-Therapy ever did was make people worse.

In the post "The Big Con", I argued that the notion that anti-psychotics work is bullshit, a big lie. The term "anti-psychotic" is a misnomer – medication does nothing to reduce or alleviate psychotic symptoms, all 'anti-psychotics' do is tranquillise. I thought I would adduce another argument to show that the idea that anti-psychotics are helpful is a fallacy, one that I did not include in that post.

Readers with no experience of mental illness or treatment may be unaware that there are many different types of anti-psychotic medication. Ones I can think of off-hand include Olanzapine, Rispiridone, Quitiapine, Apiprizole, Seraquil and Clozapine. It is very rare for a patient to have only ever taken one kind of antipsychotic: I have only ever taken Rispiridone or Olanzapine but my friend Jess has, at different times, literally been on all of them. Patients continually get shunted from one type of medication to another until the doctors find one that seems to work. This is no secret in the Mental Health Service. Workers often talk about trying different medication on people until they find the one that "fits that person". Now, reader, I'm asking you to apply a little fucking logic to this situation. If one anti-psychotic 'works' on one person and a different anti-psychotic 'works' on another, only two conclusions follow. Either there is a different kind of schizophrenia for every different type of medication (so an Olanzapine type Schizophrenia, a Rispiridone type Schizophrenia and so on) or whether a person is well or ill, 'in remission' or 'in relapse', has nothing to do with the medication he or she is taking at all. If a person shows improvement when taking a particular drug, the drug is credited with the improvement – but it perhaps has nothing to do with the drug at all. In fact, I think some drugs, like Rispiridone, actually make people worse, and I base that not only on my own experience but on reports from others and observations of others. Schizophrenics are supposed to try to have 'insight' – how can a patient have insight if he or she is bullied into believing bullshit?

I'll end this post with a point about my life that I should spell out. When I first became a patient of the Mental Health Service in 2007, I was a voluntary patient. I knew very little about schizophrenia and psychiatry then. I took my medication because I had faith that they psychiatrists knew what they were doing. In January 2012, I was discharged from the service proper, although I continued to take a lower dose of medication. In Easter 2013 I started seeing psychiatrists again, again voluntarily. In early 2014, I was put under the Mental Health Act and legally compelled to take medication. You might ask, astute reader, what crime had I committed to be sectioned and coerced into taking medication? My only crime was that I had refused to take medication. Because I no longer believed in the efficacy of anti-psychotics and didn't want to take them anymore, I was legally forced to. Ever since I have been in a Catch 22 situation. If I say I'm sick, this is offered as evidence that I need to take medication; if I say that I'm well, this is offered as evidence that the medication is working and that I should continue to take it. Once the diagnosis is made, there is no escape. My life is hostage to the whims of liars and arseholes.

I suppose I should say something about what I believe to be the causes and remedy of my own 'illness', but I have talked about it enough in previous posts. I should return to my topic – science. Yes, I believe in science but this does not mean I accept everything posing as 'science' today. Modern psychiatry is about as scientific as nineteenth century phrenology. I admit I consider myself something of a mystic but for me mysticism is not an alternative to science but a supplement to it. Quantum physics, as I argued in "Free Will and Supernatural Causation", allows for this possibility. I also recommend the reader have a look at the post called, I think, "Rationality vs. Mysticism" for another discussion of this.

On Personality and Some Semi-Random Recollections

One of the ever-present and ubiquitous challenges that faces everyone, not just philosophers, psychologists and psychiatrists, but all people, is the problem of the Other. Human are social animals, we form and maintain relationships with other humans, and we try to engage with other humans from a position of knowledge rather than ignorance; we try to make sense of others. Intersubjectivity is what Derrida calls an 'undecidable'. It lies between 'subjectivity' and 'objectivity' – one could argue that these two terms both have intersubjectivity as their ground in the sense that the 'objective' arises from a shared consensus among different parties and the 'subject' also is born from relationships with other people, from others' view of the self. The problems of intersubjectivity and Otherness have been a central concern of philosophers at least since Hegel, with contributions made by Husserl, Sartre and Levinas among others. In this post, I am going to just tackle one aspect of the problem, the notion of essential character or personality.

The common-sense view of the world adopted by most people is that individuals possess essential, enduring and unchanging personality traits. I seek to understand others and, if I am a little more enlightened, I seek to understand myself. If I describe a person to a third party, or seek to explain myself to another, I use adjectives. I might say someone is "generous" or "miserly", "sophisticated" or "naive", "introverted" or "extroverted". Whenever I do so, I am assigning essential qualities to that person. Psychology and psychiatry also assume the presence of enduring personality traits, of natural kinds of person. A patient may be 'diagnosed' Borderline or Avoidant or Narcissistic, autistic or bipolar or schizophrenic. Again the tendency is to assume that people have essential characters or natures.

Whenever we describe a person, we are almost inevitably making a moral judgment. If I say someone is "selfish", for instance, I am assigning a negative label to that person. Almost all labels are either positive or negative although a descriptor like "cynical" can seem negative to someone and positive to another. The current discourse in psychiatry is founded on the idea that people can be divided into different categories, where every category is considered a different sort of deviation from the norm. What constitutes normality however? Who gets to define it? We can only presume psychiatrists are the norm. Every diagnosis is a moral judgment, an Authoring of the patient.

I have a problem with this essentialist view of the human personality. The problem is that a person may present differently at different times and in different situations, and that an observer's own biases, prejudices and preconceptions may influence his or her judgement of another.

Last year, for instance, I had lunch with my brother and his attitude was angry, even hostile. If he had been a stranger I had never met before, I might have thought that he is a naturally angry person. Knowing him well I had first thought he might be angry with me, and then found out from him that he had that morning visited a friend dying of cancer in a hospice. He said to me something like, "It's all so fucking unfair!" The lesson one can draw from this is that a person's apparent personality can be affected by events and experiences in his or her immediate past and that to assess a person's character we need to factor in what has happened in his or her life, both recently and more further back. To understand another we require information: we need to know what has happened to him or her.

Sometimes a person can depart from his 'normal' personality for longer than a day, sometimes it can last months. In 2007, I was profoundly unwell. I believed that the world was controlled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals who might kill me if I exposed them. I also believed that a listening device had been planted in my glasses and that everything I said was being monitored. This episode lasted from just before I became a patient of the mental health service until around the end of the year. say around eight months. I didn't talk about either delusion. I remember back in 2007, my mother and I travelled to Wanganui from Auckland to visit my aunt and we were followed by a truck: I though the truck-driver might be an agent of the homosexual conspiracy and that he might run us off the road. When we arrived at Wanganui, a small city of just over 42,000 people that I had never visited before, I decided that it was an enclave of enlightened heterosexuals who had fled there to escape all the closet homosexuals that made up the bulk of the population in New Zealand and around the world. In the years since, I would often toy with the possibility of moving to Wanganui.

It may seem like I am digressing but the point of this story is that for most of 2007 I was possessed by an extraordinarily powerful paranoid delusion – but those treating weren't aware of it. I even believed that patients of the Mental Health Service were basically intelligent heterosexuals who had cracked the secret of the homosexual conspiracy; I thought the system was an instrument of the homosexual conspiracy intended to silence or neutralise potential whistle-blowers. I sometimes thought that their strategy was to turn straight kids gay, to bring them into the conspiracy. Towards the end of the year I was a day-patient at an up-market respite facility called Mind Matters; I believed it to be a recruiting ground for homosexuals and when I first started going there thought I would be sacrificed.  Without understanding how ill I was, the cause of my illness or the nature of my core delusion, those treating me may well have thought my behaviour was characteristic. I remember one young woman at Mind Matters saying to her colleagues, "You remember the DSM IV? Borderline Personality Disorder?" I piped up from the couch, saying that I had diagnosed myself some time ago as having Avoidant Personality Disorder.

On one occasion, I remember my corrupt and mendacious psychiatrist, Tony Fernando, telling me that delusions were, by definition, fixed. I can't remember when he said this, but I think it must have been either in 2009 or 2010. He couldn't have known with certainty what my core delusion was because I never spoke about it until 2013 but perhaps had intuited it. Consider – if delusions are always fixed, by definition, then if a patients says, once, that he thinks the Queen is a reptilian shapeshifter, it will go in his or her record as an inflexible belief. Psychiatrists never ask, "Do you still believe so-and-so?" The notion that delusions are inevitably fixed is just one more bit of bullshit that let psychiatrists get away with murder. The delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals featured strongly in the psychosis I experienced in 2007, very intermittently in the psychosis I experienced for almost all of 2009 and evaporated entirely over the Southern summer of 2009 and 2010, at the same as the delusion that I had a listening device in my glasses went away for good. Having Obama and Jon Stewart as imaginary friends proved to me that this neither belief could be true. That was seven years ago now and neither delusion ever returned.

What I am hoping to show is the difficulty assessing a person's personality when a person exhibits different behaviours and different characteristics at different times. Personality is not fixed. If there is such a thing as essential personality, different aspects of it manifest themselves at different times.

The other difficulty associated with understanding another's character is that personality is situational. When one enters into a dialogue with another, one constantly monitors the other's body language and what the other explicitly and implicitly says. If one tries to avoid or minimise tension with others, if one wants to be liked, one monitors one's own speech in a way that reduces the possibility of conflict. When a patient is in a consolation with a psychiatrist, the patient is continuously assessing the psychiatrist's micro-expressions and drawing conclusions from what they say and don't say. Psychiatrists think they can maintain an 'objective' perspective by saying as little as possible but this doesn't work.

I thought I would now, as I did in the previous post, tell a few stories that reveal my way of observing and making sense of those treating me. I'll put these recollections in chronological order.

As I've said before, I sensed or intuited that at the end of 2008 or the beginning of 2009 my arsehole of a psychiatrist had either put in my record that I'd come out to him as gay or put something damning in my report that suggested I was gay. The psychosis I experienced for all of that year (with a gap of semi-wellness in late August and September after I'd been permitted to discontinue rispiridone) began in January 2009. Upon my mother's suggestion, I had decided to study information technology at AUT and, despite my psychosis, gave it a go. At an appointment with Tony before semester began, I told Tony my plans. My relationship with Tony was conflicted: I sensed that he was an arsehole but because he had complete power over my life I kept trying to believe that he was good. At this appointment, I told him that I hoped that by studying IT I could "make a difference": what I meant was that I believed that professions like IT were full of closet homosexuals and that if a heterosexual broke into their ranks this would be a kind of civil rights victory. I didn't actually say this out of course. When I told Tony this, that I wanted to "make a difference" the cunt smirked. I knew that my statement could be taken in exactly the opposite way than I intended, and sensed that he would, but there was nothing I could do about it. I believe Tony knew exactly the cause and nature of my illness, and that he took pleasure in fucking with me.

Later in 2009 he asked me, in a deliberately offhand manner, with my parents in the room, if I "stood up for myself" or was "a people pleaser". I had no idea what he meant but, because I was scared of him, I opted for "people pleaser". Again he smirked. He could put this on my record. One of the older theories of schizophrenia is that occurs if a sufferer is trapped in a double-bind, when a sufferer has only two options, both of which are bad: for me it was the choice between being a cat and a dog. Tony was deliberately putting me in just such a double-bind.

Towards the end of 2009, on Mt Hobson, I heard a voice suggesting that the way out of my madness was to "accept consensus reality". The episode involving Jon and Jess happened immediately after. For the next three years, I just lived with the fact that people in the Service thought I was gay: it made me uncomfortable but didn't make me ill. I never made a secret of the fact that I was pursuing a girl in 2011 (Jess of course), never gave anyone any reason to think that I was gay. Perhaps people thought I was gay but simply didn't want to come out.

In the first half of 2010 I wrote an article about Schizophrenia which I tried to get published in North and South. It wasn't well written; moreover, I described my experience of psychosis without once referring to sexuality. I gave a copy to Tony and he went through it as though it was an undergraduate essay, ticking every paragraph. It is one of the deep shames of my life that I sort of got on with Tony for several years. But then I had no choice.

Between 2007 and 2012, my key worker was a woman called Kate Whelan. From 2010 onwards she would organise a coffee group for 'clients' of the Mental Health System. A girl called Rose was a regular attendee. One day I asked Kate about Rose and she told me that Rose had brushed off the coffee group that day to spend time with a female friend instead. Kate kind of shuddered or shook herself. (The nuances of body language can be hard to put into words.) Now, the reason I asked about Rose was because I thought she was incredibly hot. But Kate, being a totally straight woman, was incapable of seeing that. She thought I was asking about Rose in relation to Rose's sexuality. Which was stupid because Rose, a committed Christian, was quite evidently straight – I know this because in one of the coffee groups she had talked about joining a dating service provided by her church. The fact that Kate could think Rose (and me as well) sexually muddled is evidence of the rottenness of the system. No one is safe from suspicion.

In early 2013, in the interval between my letter about lead being published and my formal reentry into the Mental Health Service just before Easter, I became 'unwell' again as I described in the post "What Happened in 2013". I saw Kate again briefly when I needed help getting a benefit from WINZ. I had become paranoid again. At a cafe just after my appointment I launched into a spiel about the women I had loved in the past. Kate asked me, "Don't you want to be part of a community?" She obviously meant the gay community but there was no way for me to reply, to tell her that she had me completely backwards. At a coffee group very shortly after I told her about how my friend Jess had spent eight months in hospital the previous year. Kate said, "I hope she came out with something." I felt like killing Kate for saying that. It beggars belief. Why would people in the Mental Health Service think young men are cured when they start fucking each other up the arse, and young women are cured when they start going down on each other?

I'll tell one more anecdote. After my last Independent Review, the judgment had contained the sentence, "He said rather poignantly that if he knew the cause of his illness he would argue his case better." This is a complete lie: I never said that. I knew why I had become ill – it was simply impossible to talk about in that setting. I had my most recent appointment with my current psychiatrist Jen Murphy a fortnight or a month ago. She asked me how much I drank, presumably to see if she can put it in my record that I'm an alcoholic (I'm not). When I saw Jen recently, though, I had decided to finally explicitly explain why I had become ill in the first place. I told her that my parent's divorce when I was seven had created a vulnerability (at which she laughed dismissively), that I had been living in a flat of twenty people and that a rumour had gone around my flat that I was gay. When I said this Jen nervously reached for a glass of water. It was a 'tell' as revealing as the moment Kellyanne Conway flicked her hair when introducing the world to the concept of 'alternative facts'. I had killed two birds with one stone. First I had made it explicit that the whole reason for my illness was being thought gay when I'm not. Second I had indirectly pointed out that my flatmates were all (or almost all) straight, completely counter to the impression  I think the psychiatrists and health workers had formed of the Big House.

I admit in this post I have strayed off the subject. The point I am trying to make though is that communication is always a two way street. Psychiatrists think that they're objective, think that they can accurately read and describe their patients, but they are not objective at all. Biasses and preconceptions dominate the relationships. In fact, I think most psychiatrists actually lack inter-personal skills. Patients read their psychiatrists as much as psychiatrists read their patients and can alter themselves to fit the doctor's interpretation. The condition 'schizophrenia' is created in psychiatric consultation rooms.

I'll tell one more story, just to show how 'sick' I was in the period before I was allowed to discontinue Rispiridone. One night I went into my back garden. I thought I was Jesus and that the garden was Gethsemane. I thought a tree in the backyard was one of the suicide trees from Dante's Inferno. I thought that I was Jesus and my role was to save young people from killing themselves; like Jesus before the Crucifixion, I said to the voices, "Choose someone else!" I went back inside and lay on the couch. I asked the voices, "Am I Jesus or am I in hell?" The voices replied, "What's the difference?"

I saw on TV1 news last night that Prince William, Prince Harry and Lady Gaga have joined voices to promote mental health awareness, a campaign called Heads Together. William was encouraging people with mental health issues to seek help; he also said he would like mental illness to be treated in the same way as physical illness. I think he's wrong on both counts. The Mental Health System here in New Zealand and I believe in much of the rest of the world doesn't help people. If anything, it makes people worse. I don't know if I can advocate that people not seek help but, until the System is fixed, it may be better for patients to sort themselves out rather than seek 'treatment'. William's comment that he wanted mental illness to be treated the same as physical illness is also stupid – we already live in that world. This is why psychiatrists rely on medication as usually the sole form of treatment. Sometimes, yes, mental illness is a physical illness, when someone has received an injury to the brain or has developed dementia. Most often though it is the result of environmental stressors and this needs to be recognised.

This post has stray well off its original subject. I hope readers will forgive me. I will try to be more focussed in future posts.

Bullshit

I intended originally to present a more philosophical essay in today's post, a discussion of the nature of personality and how people assess and describe other people's characters and temperaments, but I decided that this could wait a little longer. Instead, I want to cover a slightly dis-jointed series of personal recollections, more or less in chronological order. In the previous post, I talked a little about conspiracy theories, saying that although most of them were bullshit, some might be true. The unifying idea behind today's post is the concept of bullshit.

Conspiracy theories are invented, endorsed and propagated by both members of the Left and the Right. One conspiracy theory of the Left that may be true or may be false is the story that the Russian government gathered kompromat on Donald Trump, secretly recording a liaison between Trump and Russian prostitutes in Moscow, a liaison during which the prostitutes either urinated on him or on each other, with the intention of blackmailing Trump should he became president. The reason I say this story might be false is because there is considerable uncertainty about the veracity of the dossier, compiled by a former M16 intelligence agent, in which the claim is made. It might still be true, though. I feel quite sure that the the theory that Russia interfered in the American election to help Trump get elected, through the promotion and dissemination of bogus blogs and fake news items on social media, is correct. Some Left-wing conspiracy theories, such as the idea that vaccinations cause autism, are probably false, but, on a whole, the Left has a much better handle on the truth than the Right. For example, most Republicans still insist that Climate Change isn't happening. Trump, during the campaign, even asserted that global warming was a hoax invented by the Chinese to hurt American business. This is just one example among many of the way the Right invents and spreads misinformation.

Liberals and Conservatives live in two separate worlds. Democrats get their news from the mainstream television networks, from newspapers, from reputable internet news sites like Mother Jones and from late night news satire programs like The Daily Show. Republicans get their news from Fox, from insane blogs and podcasts and from their equally delusional friends on Facebook and Twitter. The world of the Right is an echo chamber in which the craziest and most evil conjectures are spawned and amplified; it is a fun-house mirror in which Republicans' see reflected  their own madness, a madness born of their own stupidity, feelings of inferiority and self-hatred. There is no consensus reality; we live in a post-truth world. I like to imagine my readers are good secular liberals who live exclusively in the Left-leaning bubble and so you might not realise just how bad the situation has become. But I can tell some stories that illustrate this.

Recently I hung out with a friend of mine who immediately launched on first seeing me into a spiel about how the recent gas attack in Syria or the Trump administration's response, I forget which, was the result of machinations by a global banking conspiracy, a conspiracy including the Rothschilds. I laughed it off, saying "The Protocols of Zion, Amy!" but she was quite serious. When asked where she had picked up this information, she equivocated, saying she had got it from several reliable sources, but I suspect that she picked it up from a former flame, an American non-Trump supporting Republican, who had perhaps found it on some other idiot's blog. This girl, I should add, is a Labour supporter but seems to lack that filter that helps people distinguish between truth and bullshit.

As a patient of the Mental Health System, I have contact with two Mental Health professionals, my shrink who I see every couple of months, and my Key Worker who I currently see once a fortnight. (Of course, I also go in to the Clinic every four weeks to receive an injection.) When I see my Key Worker, an expatriate Indian South African who has been attached to me for about six months, we discuss politics. He also is a conspiracy theorist. A couple of months ago he said, "Do you want to know what the most Communist country in the world is? The answer may surprise you." I hazarded a guess that it was some Scandinavian country, although I added that a better word for these countries would be 'socialist'. He said, "No, it's the United States." This stopped me in my tracks; I had to tell him straightaway he was talking bullshit. Anyone who makes a claim that the United States is the most communist country in the world has no idea what the word 'communist' means. Last week I saw him again and he told me that the gas attack in Syria had been carried out not by the Assad regime, as the Pentagon and entire mainstream media has reported, but by ISIS who somehow had gained access to chemical weapons. In other words, his head is full of bullshit. It is a world-view born from a deep distrust of the 'mainstream media', from the idea that he most news is 'fake news'. In fact this chap gets his worldview from RT, the Russian Government owned news network; he has tried to encourage me also to patronise this news source. It makes me incredibly uneasy to have a Key Worker with such a flimsy grasp of reality – I half think he might be a Russian agent. But I don't get to choose my Key Worker..

It actually frightens me how susceptible people are to bullshit. And it affects me personally, because I have been the victim of bullshit.

I have in this blog discussed several times the period in my life when I was having weekly sessions with a psychologist attached to the clinic, in 2014. I shall assume readers have read and vaguely remember these posts. Around February of that year, before I started seeing Simon Judkins, I gave a long essay to my psychiatrist describing my entire life. It was twenty-five pages long (not fifteen as I have previously said in this blog). I thought this essay had been given to the psychologist and that he had read it but I feel now that he either didn't read it, didn't understand it or didn't believe it. Judkins obviously regards his role as helping homosexuals acknowledge and accept their hitherto denied sexual orientations, and was unnerved at my first appointment with him when I told him I was straight. During my sessions with Simon Judkins I discussed homosexuality, yes, much in the same way I have discussed it in this blog but also repeatedly came back to girls – prior girlfriends, girls I had been attracted to in the past and was attracted to at the time. I don't think any of the actual facts of my life, or the real causes of my illness, made it into his record.

In around 2004 or 2005, while competing my MA in English Literature, I wrote a research essay about the poet John Ashbery. I chose Ashbery more or less at random, mainly because he was a seminal figure in the early days of Post-Modern poetry, and set myself the task of interpreting his incredibly long and incredibly difficult poem Flow Chart. This poem is essentially concerned with Ashbery's life but is almost impenetrable. Having nearly given myself a cerebral haemorrhage trying to make sense of it, I decided that it was a massive 'coming out' poem. But if it was a statement of Ashbery's sexual identity it was a very strange one: he never used the word 'gay' or described sexual relationships with men. It was as though he was coming out as gay only to the two people in the entire world who could read his poem and understand it. This put me in an extraordinarily difficult position. When writing my essay about the poem, I tied myself up in knots trying to talk about the fact that it was a 'coming out' poem without ever explicitly outing him. It was an essay as impenetrable as the original poem.  I was in the process then of applying for a scholarship to an American university to do a PhD in English Literature and I sent this essay to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, MIT and Berkeley.

In more recent years I decided that I was wrong in thinking that in Flow Chart Ashbery was coming out as gay; I decided instead that he was trying to achieve the almost impossible feat of coming out as straight, and I told Judkins this. Between sessions, Judkins did some cursory research on Wikipedia and, at the next appointment, told me that he'd looked Ashbery up and that Ashbery was "definitely gay". I said, "Well, I didn't have Wikipedia when I wrote the essay." The evidence, by the way, that Ashbery is gay, is that he never married, had gay poet friends like Frank O'Hara and wrote a love poem to a male student when he was in high school. Now, I no longer believe any of this is proof sufficient that Ashbery was gay; perhaps the love poem was an expression of platonic rather than erotic love. I no longer can be sure.

In another session I discussed Lou Reed with Judkins. For those who don't know, Reed was treated for homosexuality in the late 'fifties, when he was a teenager, receiving Electro-Convulsive Therapy; in later life he only had relationships with women. When I told Judkins this, Judkins replied sarcastically, "Perhaps they cured him". Judkins missed my point. I believed then and think it still plausible today, that Reed was never gay in the first place, that he was treated for a condition that he didn't have. Reed scholars may dispute this. In other words, I was interested in people who are thought to be gay but aren't. In his attitude Judkin's attitude was inconsistent, hypocritical in fact. He had said to me in an early session that sexual identity was "fluid" but it was quite evident that he didn't believe this.

I think Judkins thought I was a closet homosexual, that I had a homosexual past that I refused to talk about, and was building a picture of me as someone who identified with people Judkins thought were gay. I probably talked about Kurt Cobain as well and this didn't help. In fact, I suspect, and I'm being totally honest now, that Judkins believes all his patients are either homosexual or muddled, perhaps because its the fashion in psychiatry and psychology to assume all schizophrenics are repressed homosexuals or perhaps as the result of massive projection.

In 2014, I saw for a time a new psychiatrist. The psychiatrist I had seen in 2013, Jen Murphy, was away on maternity leave. The first question this new psychiatrist, a woman called Sati, directed at me, with a hostile manner, was "Have you given up yet?" She was asking me, in fact, if I was ready to admit that I was gay. Having said that I was straight, directly and indirectly, since Easter of the previous year, having given the shrinks a long essay several months previously which proved it and having been seeing Judkins at that time for some months, I couldn't bear that they still seemed to think I was a closet homosexual; I chose to interpret her question as a reference to suicide, and replied, no, that basically I was a hopeful person. If she was indeed referring to suicide, it was an incredibly callous question to ask.

I continued seeing Judkins up until the end of 2014 or the beginning 2015. At the very beginning of 2015, I experienced some suicidal ideation. It was a direct result of a year of helpful therapy with this man. I felt like killing myself because there seemed no other way out. I was at this time seeing a different psychiatrist again, one Jeremy Whiting, and the idea of a reduction in my medication had been mooted; I think the cunts in charge of my life had decided that I had come to terms with my sexual orientation and that it was permissible to reduce my dosage. I had a judicial hearing at which it was determined my medication could be reduced from 300mgs every four weeks to 210mgs. At one of my appointments with Whiting, I think shortly before the hearing, I asked him if my diagnosis of schizophrenia would prevent me travelling overseas and mentioned a three month trip I'd taken to Europe in 2004. From his body language, I could just sense what he was thinking – that my trip to Europe had been an opportunity for multiple homosexual trysts. He didn't say anything, I simply intuited that he thought this. You might think I am reading a lot into very little. However, at all the Independent Reviews I have had since, at which the psychiatrists have argued that I am not fit to be released from the Mental Health Act, my shrinks have deemed it relevant to mention that I had an OE in Europe in 2004 and irrelevant to mention my previous girlfriends- although in the last review in the second half of last year, Jen decided to put in my report at the end, "He identifies as heterosexual and has had relationships with women in the past".

I wrote a little about my trip to Europe in the post "Stolen Kisses".

After the judicial hearing at which it was decided my mediation could be reduced to 210mgs, I saw Whiting again. My mental state around this time was profoundly depressed and distressed. A part of me knew that the cunts still thought I was gay; another part of me wanted to believe that the truth, having been put into writing a year before, and having been told to Judkins, was at last on my record. I told Whiting the story I wrote about in the post "Definitions of Sexuality", about the time when I was twenty-two when a man got in face. I described the situation I felt I had been in: "diagnosed homosexual and that's the only homosexual experience I ever had." Whiting grimaced. He old me I should start seeing Simon Judkins again. Perhaps he regretted his decision to let me reduce the drugs; he must have realized I still hadn't acknowledged my homosexuality. It suddenly became clear to me that Judkins must have been lying about me. That night or the next I sent Judkins an abusive email. I asked him, among other things, if he liked to spend time in gay saunas; I also told him 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." Judkins lodged a complaint against me and immediately that after I ended up back in the psychiatrist's office - Whiting had gone to South America on honeymoon and so it was with Sati again. My dosage was increased back to 300mgs which is what I am still on. At the Review that I had in September of 2015, the reason given for why they increased the dosage was "weight loss" rather than the fact that I had sent my ex-psychologist an abusive email.

I'll tell one other story. In May 2015, my mother and I saw a screening of the Kurt Cobain biopic Montage of Heck. At my next appointment with Sati I mentioned that we had seen it. She said something like "is Kurt Cobain someone like you?". I don't remember her precise words unfortunately but her meaning was clear: she thought Cobain and I were alike in being closet homosexuals – although psychiatrists don't seem to use that term. So I said that I had liked Cobain since I was a teenager and explained that when I first got sick in 2007 I had believed that everyone in the world was gay except me and that Cobain was the first person I could think of who was also straight. She drew back in surprise, was taken aback, perhaps because what I said ran completely counter to the records about me, perhaps because I had actually used the word "gay". I recognised that this information about my first episode was new to her and told her that I told my psychiatrist Dharma this in 2013. So it should have been on my record. And of course I had written a fucking essay about it all very early the previous year.

In an earlier post, I mentioned that, back in 2014, on one occasion Judkins had asked me if I thought Jon Stewart was gay or straight. The other night I heard Jess in my head and she asked me, "Why did Simon Judkins ask you if Jon Stewart was gay or straight?". This might be a cue that this question is important and so I should hazard a guess. The Daily Show screened in New Zealand from 2008 until the end of 2009 and then went off the air here; it came back at the beginning of 2014 not long after I was put under the Act. I felt at the time, as I have said in previous posts, that I felt that my imaginary friend had come back when I needed him, when my life had reached rock bottom. I have written about my observations of Jon that year and the next in the chaotically written post "Me and Jon Stewart Part 3" but I feel I need to make something clear that I didn't make clear in that post. I sensed then, from watching his show, that rumours about his sexuality might be swirling around, that Jon knew or sensed this and that Jon found it painful. I remember an episode early in 2014 where he reported an audience member asking him if he enjoyed receiving blowjobs; his discomfort was palpable. Given the prevalence of bullshit in the US in recent years, I wouldn't be surprised if people on the Right hadn't launched a smear campaign against him. He knew about the rumours and I think it even made him ill. What I now suspect is that this rumour had reached the ears of my psychologist and that being the stupid shit that he is, someone who had never watched The Daily Show, he had believed it. The fact that I had been imaginary friends with Jon had been taken as further evidence that I was a closet homosexual.

This post is too long but I need to tell one more story. The older brother of a friend of mine is also diagnosed schizophrenic. He became ill at the same age as I did, saw the same psychiatrist as I saw did, Tony Fernando, was also put on Rispiridone first and then Olanzapine later. Unlike me, he was hospitalised repeatedly. He is now outside the system although I think he still takes lithium and I think Olanzpaine. He is still evidently unwell and is an alcoholic now. He told me once that he got out of the system by "telling the psychologist what the psychologist wanted to hear", something I am incapable of doing. You can easily imagine a little what he might have told the psychologist. He was quite evidently straight when he was younger but his sexual identity is now all fucked up. Although he hasn't come out to any of his family and friends, one can sense it. My friend, I should add, is completely unwilling to admit that his older brother's sexual identity is now all fucked up and that the reason it is fucked up is because of his treatment by the Mental Health System.

Unlike me, Yves never kept a blog telling his side of the story.

Being a patient of the Mental Health System in this country is like living in Putin's Russia. The whole system is built on bullshit, on incompetency and lies. I know I go on a bit about this but you have e

What Happened in 2013

The other night I heard Jess's voice in my head. She said, "You need to explain what happened in 2013." Now, I don't know how interested readers are in the minutiae of my existence but I took this 'intrusion' (as some people call it) as a sign that what happened that year is a topic I should cover in this blog. I am not being exhibitionist. I feel my story is important, has relevance to broader issues, such as schizophrenia, sexuality and the failure of psychiatrists and of the Mental Health System generally. What I think I am describing is utter corruption. The personal, as they say, is the political and I need to tell my story, not only for myself, but for others.

I won't rehash my whole life but it is necessary to say again that from mid 2010 until early 2013, as I have said before, I was 'well', in the sense that I was almost free of psychotic symptoms. In fact, in early 2012, I was discharged from the Service – although I continued to see a GP every month or every couple of months and continued to take 5mgs of Olanzapine daily. In decisions written about me in more recent years, such as the one issuing from an independent review of my status as someone receiving Compulsory Treatment in the latter half of last year, it was said that I was ill in 2012. I have no idea why the psychiatrists think I was ill that year. I remember waking up on New Year's Day 2013, in fact, and thinking to myself, "This will be a good year."

I was completely wrong.

Early in the year I consulted with my GP and asked if I could reduce my dosage from 5 to 2.5mgs. She suggested I alternate between the two. I was still well at this time – if I was ill, I wouldn't have asked to reduce my dosage. Perhaps a week or a fortnight later, I read an item in the newspaper. The subject was gun control in the United States but it made reference to an article in Mother Jones called "Lead: America's Real Criminal Element". I was intrigued and looked the Mother Jones article up.

I need to say something about this article. Its argument is quite simple. For much of the twentieth century, starting I think in the 'sixties, crime rates around the Western world dramatically increased every year, a continuing upwards trend that peaked in the early 'nineties. After that crime decreased every year. Although there has been a slight upwards blip in the last couple of years, we here in New Zealand, in the US, and in other developed countries, have not had nearly the same terrible levels of crime as was normal around 1992. The massive increase and decrease in crime over the course of the twentieth century seemed inexplicable to many observers and multiple theories were floated to explain it, such as the idea that it could be connected to Roe vs. Wade and the legalisation of abortion. None of these theories seemed quite right.

In the Mother Jones article, however, a simple explanation was proposed. Crime had increased because generations of people around the world has been poisoned by lead pollution when they were children. Lead exposure had caused brain damage, particularly to the frontal cortex, making people more impulsive and more likely to commit crimes in their early twenties. The reduction in crime since the early 'nineties was related to the fact that a generation had grown up who had been much less exposed to lead as children, because lead additives had been removed from petrol some twenty years previously. In other words a large share of the crimes committed during the 'seventies and 'eighties could be attribute to lead in paint chips and in car exhaust.

When I read this article, I found it credible. More than credible, I found it horrific. If true, we were talking about an atrocity that seemed to me on a par with the Holocaust. Whole generations of people around the world had been inflicted with brain-damage, resulting in an increase in anti-social behaviour and crimes like murder. In the novel Fatherland, Robert Harris imagines an alternative world in which Hitler won the Second World War and in which the Holocaust happened  but has been covered up. The idea that whole populations might have been neurologically damaged and that people in power knew about this but didn't want to reveal it to the public seemed to me a monstrosity of equal scale.

I wrote a letter to my local newspaper about the lead-crime correlation. The tone of the letter wasn't actually horrified; rather it was tongue-in-cheek. The letter was published two days later. Reading the paper and listening to the radio in the week or two following, I received a appalling impression. I sensed that people in the media had read my letter, read the Mother Jones article, but that no one was prepared to talk about it openly. Either journalists themselves couldn't believe it, they felt the public couldn't or wouldn't believe it, or they felt afraid of instigating a shitstorm with governments and industry. No one was prepared to tell the truth.

The idea of a historical correlation between crime and lead exposure which no one in the media was prepared to confront face on may seem like a conspiracy theory to you, dear reader. But what has happened in the years since the publication of the Mother Jones is that this truth has seeped into the collective consciousness, even if it never made front-page news. Last year, John Oliver produced an episode about lead poisoning (simply called "Lead") and just a couple of weeks ago the New Zealand Herald reported a University of Otago study which had found, if I recall correctly, that Millennials were on average six IQ points smarter than their parents – because they hadn't been exposed to lead as their parents were. The truth has indeed got out but in such a way that it hasn't caused riots in the streets.

The world today is awash with conspiracy theories, devised by people on both the Right and the Left. But just because most of these theories are bullshit doesn't mean some of them aren't true. A 'conspiracy' can simply be an idiotic idea shared universally. Before Copernicus, a kind of 'conspiracy' existed – everyone was complicit in promulgating the idea that the world was flat. One 'conspiracy' of this idiotic sort, one that I have talked about in this blog and about which I feel strongly, is the stupid notion promoted by psychiatrists, Mental Health Professionals and unwittingly by much of the public that antipsychotics work, that schizophrenics are well when they take their drugs and sick when they don't. I may have to talk about this again in a later post. Consider another conspiracy theory: the belief that MMR vaccines cause autism. In recent years, the prevalence of autistic spectrum disorder among children seems to have greatly increased. Either the real incidence is actually the same and it is simply being diagnosed more often (an idea I find quite plausible) or, if autism genuinely has really become more common, there must be something in the environment which has caused the increase. I'm not subscribing to the idea that vaccinations might make kids autistic but it is not paranoid to suppose that effects have causes. To think this way is not to indulge in conspiracy theories. It's simple fucking logic.

After I wrote my letter, as I said, I sensed that people in the media had read it but perhaps thought it silly, or wanted to present it as silly. In 2013 the big issue occupying people's minds in New Zealand was gay marriage and shortly after I wrote my letter the paper printed an article satirising the views of a religious opponent of gay marriage who had suggested that legalising gay marriage would lead to an increase in crime (a "gay crime wave" it was called). When I read this piece, it lead me to believe that, even though it was six years after my first psychotic episode, people in the media still thought I was gay. In other words, the anxiety that I'd had in 2007 returned. I went on a trip with my mother to the South Island and all our family friends seemed to behave oddly around me. One night, in Wellington, I thought about the comedy film "In/Out" and what I thought that night has influenced me ever since.

I haven't actually seen "In/Out" but I think I can give the gist of the film. Kevin Kline plays a school teacher who one night watches a former student win an Oscar for Best Actor. The former student, who had played a gay character, says in his acceptance speech that he based his performance on Kline. This comes as a shock to Kline: up until then, he hadn't known he was gay. As I said, I haven't seen this film, but I what I think happens is this – that, having been 'outed', for a time Kline struggles against his newfound reputation, but then, by the end of the film, accepts his newfound gay identity. He turns gay because the world thinks he is. That night I worried that I might be in Kline's position, that someone might have publicly 'outed' me. I decided that what turns a person gay is having people around him think he is.

Essentially the psychotic episode I suffered in 2013 that would last, to be honest, for the until the end of last year, began in the couple of weeks after my letter was published, no earlier. When I came back from the trip South, I also developed the impression or delusion that the film I had written about Jess in 2012, "The Hounds of Heaven", had been read by people in the media – and that they hated it. For the first time since 2011, I got in touch with Jess herself via texts and found that, in 2012, when I was writing my film about her, she had spent eight months in hospital. When I found this out I panicked. A part of me worried that I might have somehow been responsible for her hospitalisation. I also became very frightened, even distressed, that she might turn gay or be in the process of turning gay.

You might think, "Why care if some girl turns gay? You hadn't seen her in over a year. Surely that's her business, not yours." I need then to explain something about my views on homosexuality, something that I have sketched out in earlier posts but need to make completely clear. It can be boiled down to a simple logical argument.
1. No one chooses to be gay.
2. Nobody is born gay.
THEREFORE
Something in a person's environment must turn him or her gay.
Not only do I believe that something environmental causes homosexuality, my thinking is influenced by a prejudice: I think it is better for people to be straight than gay. Furthermore I have witnessed people turn gay and the process is a kind of torture of the soul and many do not survive it, killing themselves instead. I don't know if homosexuality can be 'cured' (if that's the word) but I do think it can be prevented.

Of course, the question then is – what precisely is the environmental factor that causes homosexuality? Back in 2013 I believed that a single homosexual experience can tip a person over the edge. My head filled with stories about what might have happened to her. One of the stories that floated through my mind at the time was that Jess had had such an experience , that it had provoked a psychotic sexual identity crisis, and that this was what had led to her eight month hospitalisation. Another story that floated into my head was that she had been raped by a female orderly while in hospital. Whatever the cause of her 'illness', I sensed that she was in dire straits, and felt I needed to help her; my method was to send her song suggestions via text almost every day. I was trying both to prove to her that I was straight and to steer her towards heterosexuality. I had no strategy; every song recommendation was based on a hunch. Jess never replied to any of my texts, until around halfway through the year when I sent her a text saying that I was going to stop messaging her and recommending one last song, "Perfect Day" by Lou Reed. She finally got back to me, texting me to say, in part, that I "was the most interesting she had ever met" (sic). We met a couple of times face to face shortly after but, for reasons I only partially understand and won't go into here, the relationship never progressed.

You may think, gentle reader, that hospitalisation is a humane way of treating schizophrenics. You couldn't be more wrong. Jess described her time in hospital and it was as awful as I imagined. She told me she had been put on four different anti-psychotics at once – I don't know if this means four injections in the arse a day or one injection containing four medications. She had punched a hole in a wall and tried to run away twice. While she was in hospital, she had formed the delusion that there was a video camera in her eyeball and that her mental health team were watching the world through her eyes; she had considered cutting out her eye. Thankfully I myself have never been hospitalised but I sincerely believe that the Mental Health Service treats some patients so badly they'll do anything to escape it.

Texting Jess was only one aspect of my strategy. Just before Easter I became a voluntary patient of the system again and once more started seeing psychiatrists. When I re-entered the system proper I asked to see any other psychiatrist than Tony Fernando, the doctor I had seen between 2007 and the beginning of 2012. I was put with a locum called Dharma and have described my first appointment with him in the post "Faith No More vs. Bruce Springsteen". My aim was to get it finally on the record that I was straight and thought furthermore that by doing so I could somehow help Jess, vouch for her. At this appointment I not only said I was straight, I named the three women I'd loved in my life. After two appointments with Dharma, and one with Tony, I started seeing a different psychiatrist, Jen Murphy. Just before I saw her, I'd heard a voice saying, "Don't talk about love, talk about sex." So I told her (truthfully) that the first time I'd had sex was New Year's Eve 1997 and that the last time was a one night stand in Wellington some two years previously. I knew that simply to say that I was straight was not sufficient, I needed to somehow prove it. And to talk solely about heterosexual experiences was also not sufficient, I knew I also needed to prove an absence of homosexual experiences and so I gave her a short essay describing the closest I had ever come to any. (I mentioned this in the post "Definitions of Sexuality".)

By the middle or later part of the year I thought I had 'won'. I was seeing Jess again and thought I had successfully got it onto my medical record that I was genuinely straight. I thought that this would be enough to make it public. A delusion about my father being gay, that I had first entertained in 2007 and which had resurfaced in early 2013, had evaporated. Then it all started to turn pear-shaped. I thought that saying, and proving, that I was straight would suffice but it started to become apparent that the psychiatrist didn't believe me, that simply saying I was straight wasn't enough. It didn't help that I thought I was famous. Around this time Tony Fernando, who had perhaps the highest public profile of any psychiatrist in New Zealand, got himself into the Sunday Star Times. I don't know if I read the whole article but I remember one quote "There are signs you learn to look for." I formed the belief, I won't call it a delusion, that at some point in the past, when I was his patient, he had falsified my record and said that I had come out as gay when in fact I hadn't. In fact, this is something I had believed before, in very late 2008 or very early 2009 when I think it happened, but this was something I had found so terrible at the time that I had put it in a box in my mind and chosen not to think about it for close to four years. After I read this article in the Sunday Star Times, I wrote a letter to the paper describing Tony as a sociopath and sent a satirical item to the journalist Steve Braunias, ostensibly from Tony's perspective, that gave some vague idea of what I thought might have happened. It contained a sentence, from Tony's perspective of course, describing my first appointment with him. "He gave me a hard-on and so I decided to diagnose him as a repressed homosexual."

In an episode of the current affairs comedy show Seven Days that screened shortly after this I remember Dai Henwood saying, "I told you this would happen if we legalised gay marriage!"

After this my psychosis greatly worsened. I thought I was the victim of a cover-up to protect Tony Fernando from charges of gross misconduct. I thought Jess and Tony Fernando were colluding, even sleeping together. I managed to allow Jen Murphy to allow me to go completely off the drugs and came right briefly. Around late January or early February 2014, I became ill again – I think because I sensed what was going to happen, that I wasn't going to be allowed to stay off the drugs. I was sent, more or less against my will, to a respite centre where I saw God. (I have described this in the post "Concerning Religion.") Immediately after this, I was put under the Mental Health Act and began receiving Compulsory Treatment, as I still do. I felt then, and still do, that I was diagnosed schizophrenic and put under the Act for saying that I was straight.

I need to say something quite important here. From the beginning of 2010 until the beginning of 2013 I knew, at some level, that people in the Mental Health Service thought I was gay but I just lived with it somehow. I gave indications of being straight but didn't make a big deal of it. What made me ill in late 2013 and what has kept me ill since has been the fact that I have repeatedly said I was straight – and not being believed.

This blog is a strange beast. Sometimes I fail to properly proof-read and mistakes may creep in. I hope this hasn't happened in this post. Nevertheless I feel I should write about my life because I believe what happened to me has significance beyond one person's story. Consider my imaginary friends - in 2009 and early 2010, I would speak not just with Jess but with Jon Stewart and Barack Obama. I had significant friends. I don't speak with Jon any more but a couple of months ago, while lying in bed, I had a conversation with Stephen Colbert. This happened immediately after I published my post "Bruce Sells Out". It was an extraordinary real-feeling conversation; Stephen seemed totally comfortable with the idea of conversing with someone via telepathy. Basically he wanted to interrogate me about my relationship with Jon Stewart. I considered introducing him to Jess and he said, "I don't want to speak with the girl." A couple of weeks later I heard John Oliver. He started quite aggressively, saying "Idiots are made, not born!" then seemed to relax around me. I asked him, "So what do you think the cause of homosexuality is?" He said, "Well, this might sound stupid, but I think its a phase." So I said, "John Oliver – are you an arse man or a breast man?"

The people I talk to in my head are on the side of heterosexuals and openly gay men and women. More than that they are on the side of truth and honesty. People like Tony Fernando are on the side of closet homosexuals – and more than that they are on the side of secrets and lies. It's a choice between truth and falsehood. The world has only two sides and you have to pick the right one.

Genre and The Much Reported Death of the Author

I have this year gone back to University to study a Post-Graduate Diploma in Communications. Last week I wrote my first essay, on the concept of a genre, and I thought, "Why not upload it to my blog?" So here it is. It is, I believe somewhat better written than many of the posts I have slapped together recently. It may be a little academic but I hope you enjoy it anyway.

2. “Pop culture analysts identify and dissect the various genres that make up their subject and also explore the nature of audiences for each genre” (Marcel Danesi, Popular Culture). Discuss the relationship between popular media and genre.

Genre and The Much Exaggerated Reports of The Death of the Author

The concept of “genre” has enormous utility in the identification and elucidation of the diverse texts that make up the subject studied by pop culture analysts. Pop culture arguably grew out of sociology and the concept ‘genre’ provides a bridge between a sociological approach to culture, in which texts emerge from and ‘reflect’ society as a whole, and the traditional approach adopted by old-fashioned literary scholars in which an individual work, such as a book or a film, is interpreted in isolation from its social, cultural and generic context, as the expression of the life and world-view of an individual author. Pop culture analysts today often adopt the perspective that the author of any particular work can be safely discounted, overlooked, bypassed, that we can move directly from society to popular media texts via genre. This essay aims to show the limits of this approach and argue that the author remains important. The intention, hopefully, is to resurrect the author.

The study of popular culture combines elements of two different disciplines: the sociological or anthropological study of people and cultures generally, and literary criticism. Traditionally, up until the mid-twentieth century, literary critics believed that the meaning of a text lay in the intentions of the author; the purpose of literary criticism was to interpret the author’s intent, to translate it into simpler language or bring it to light. When films first became objects as worthy of study as written works, in the 1940s, French film critics invented the term ‘auteur’ to circumvent the problem that films are created collaboratively: when studying a film, they argued, one should look to films that bear the distinct imprint of the director’s creative personality and assume that the meaning of a film lay in the director’s intent when making it. Starting in the ‘sixties however, in particular with the publication of The Death of the Author by Roland Barthes (1967), the meaning of a text floated free of the author’s intent, Barthes arguing that the meaning of a text lay not in the author’s (or auteur’s) mind but in the mind of the reader.

Beginning in the sixties, the erasure of the notion of ‘author’ enabled a new paradigm to come to the fore: the idea that societies and cultures create texts rather than individuals. This change occurred as Saussure’s Structuralism became popular. The anthropologist Lev-Strauss had produced a Structuralist account of myth, arguing that all myths express universal formulas that arise from timeless characteristics associated with mankind and primitive societies (see for example Structural Anthropology 1976); in 1928 Vladamir Propp (Propp, 1968) had argued that all the tales in Russian folklore are based on simple formulas, that the semantics change but that the syntax never does. Both Lev-Strauss and Propp argue that story structures are universal and atemporal. This idea soon came to be applied to  contemporary fictions. As the twentieth century progressed, however, Post-Structuralism eclipsed Structuralism and the idea of eternal narratives fell away. Culture was still seen as structured like a language, stories were still seen as instances of parole arising from an underlying langue, but it was recognised that societies and cultures, language itself, could change, was diachronic rather than synchronic.

Structuralism and Post-Structuralism both informed the developing field of Popular Culture Studies and found expression in the concept of ‘genre’ as a means of approaching popular culture. Thus today we often find Pop-Culture academics making two bold claims – that the putative authors of works are not fully conscious of their own intent when creating texts and that texts ‘reflect’ society as it is when the texts are written. Society itself speaks through works of fiction. In Popular Culture Genres (1992) Berger repeatedly makes both these claims. For example, he says when talking about westerns,

"At the same time, as Wright has tried to show, stories tend to reflect changes going on in the economic and political structures of society: the westerns evolved, mirroring changes taking place in the American economic system. This mirroring is, of course, not done consciously by writers of westerns or anyone involved in producing them. The changes in the westerns reflect changes in American society as felt by writers, who then, without consciously trying to do so (generally speaking) mirrored these changes in their scripts."

                                                                                                   (p. 77, italics mine)

Producers of pop cultural texts are in a way puppets of the social forces in which they are enmeshed. Consumers too are also in a way puppets – the popular success of a particular text can be attributed to some kind of social affinity between consumer and commodity. Elsewhere in Popular Culture Genres, for instance, Berger divides the population into four groups – Hierarchical Elitists, Individualists, Egalitarians and Fatalists – and proposes that each group gravitates towards different genres. For instance, he argues that Egalitarians may tend to like comedies and Fatalists may tend to like Country & Western songs (p. 60-63).

In Popular Culture studies, the term “genre” mediates between society and individual texts in a way that the term “author’ once did in literary criticism. The aim of this essay is to show the limitations of a theory that has societies generating narratives and downplays authorial creativity.

The simplest way to argue in favour of this thesis would be to focus on non-generic texts, on texts that bear an author’s distinct imprint, but this shall not be the strategy of this essay. Genres certainly exist and much popular culture, particularly movies, is certainly generic. According to Danesis: “Genres are identifiable by certain conventions, which audiences have come to recognise through regular exposure” (Danesis, p. 32). It is useful to distinguish between three different types of convention: conventions of style, of structure and of content. For instance, the film genre  ‘comedy’ has as its unifying feature a shared style. Every moment in a comedy is intended either to be funny itself or to set up a later joke. Films like Living in Oblivion  (DeCillo, 1995), Bruce Almighty (Shadac, 2003) and The Trip (Winterbottom, 2011) have nothing in common in terms of content or structure: what they share is a style, an ‘intent’ to make audiences laugh regularly.

A sub-genre of ‘comedy’ is ‘romantic comedy’. Beyond the stylistic convention of presenting gags regularly, these films have a shared structure. They present a man and a woman who usually meet early in the film, are destined to be together but only couple up at the end because, until then, obstacles of some sort stand between them. In the film Sleepless in Seattle (Ephron, 1993), the obstacle standing between the two protagonists is the fact that they live on opposite coasts of the United States. In You’ve Got Mail (Ephron,1998), the future lovers form an attachment anonymously via email but, in person, dislike each other because they own competing business. Towards the end, however, they discover each others’ ‘secret identities’ and realise their love for each other. In both When Harry Met Sally (Reiner, 1989) and What Happens in Vegas (Vaughan, 2008), the protagonists initially dislike each other but gradually fall for each other over the course of the film, only realising the depth of their feelings towards each other at the end; in this latter film the two have drunkenly married in Las Vegas and are forced by a judge to remain married if they wish to receive a fortune made at the casino. In both Friends With Benefits (Gluck, 2011) and No Strings Attached (Reitman, 2011), the principle characters start sleeping together early in the film, a significant innovation in the Romantic Comedy genre (it is interesting to note both films were made in the same year), but only commit heart as well as body to each other at the conclusion.

Romantic comedies are always concerned with a man and woman who make some kind of contact early in the film but do not commit to each other until the end. However, what brings the two together in the first place, and what keeps them apart until the resolution, can vary from film to film, and this point-of-difference or ‘high concept’ is the selling point for each film, what makes each film distinctive. Thus every romantic comedy balances convention (the love story, a story which is always the same) with innovation (the particular obstacles that stand between the two lovers). This innovation can be attributed to the conscious and intentional creativity of writers and directors. A significant audience exists for romantic comedies and they are marketed to this audience as ‘romantic comedies’ but every film in the genre (ideally) depends upon a uniquely different situation.

Another significant genre is the High-School Film. Examples include Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Heckerling, 1982), The Breakfast Club (Hughes, 1985) and Dazed and Confused (Linklater, 1993). The High School Film is not a recognised genre and many movies of this kind are categorised as coming-of-age films or romantic comedies: for instance the seminal film Clueless (Heckerling, 1995) is often classified a coming-of-age film, while 10 Things I Hate About You (Junger, 1999)  is often classified a romantic comedy. Clueless, Cruel Intentions (Kumble, 1999), 10 Things I Hate About You and Easy A (Gluck, 2010) are notable because all either adapt or refer heavily to literary classics – respectively Persuasion by Jane Austen, Les Liaisons dangereuses by Pierre Chaderlos de Laclos, The Taming of the Shrew by Shakespeare and The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorn. Each classic has a quite different plot. Adapting classics and setting them in high schools being so common, such films might be said to form a sub-genre of the High-School-Film. One wonders if anyone has thought to adapt Wuthering Heights for teens yet?

What High-School films share is a sense that a High-School is a world unto itself, a microcosm of society. Some of these films, such as the first three mentioned, are ensemble pieces; others, while tending to focus on a single character, typically female, also tend to have subplots about the romantic fortunes of second-tier characters. This makes them significantly different from romantic comedies which usually focus only on the romance between the two central characters. Conventions include not only the high school setting but the sense of a high school as composed of various cliques; teachers are generally presented positively and students are generally presented as engaged and enthusiastic. This makes these ideal films to be taught in real schools. The High-School film is particularly amenable to genre hybridisation – for example the film Brick (Johnson, 2005) pastiches hard-boiled detective fiction even though its main setting is a school and all its significant characters are teenagers. Although the High-School film is a genre, each film in the genre differs significant from the rest.

The Vampire Film genre also shows how films within a single genre can vary significantly from film to film. Whereas romantic comedies share a style (a continuing humorous tone) and a structuring premise (“Love Conquers All”), and High-School Films have in common a common setting, what ties together Vampire Films is that they all contain vampires, a convention at the level of content. The seminal vampire story is the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897) and the first film vampire is Nosferatu (Murnau, 1922). Many of the films that followed were horror films in which the vampire played the part of a monster terrorising innocents, an example being Dracula (Browning, 1931). Insofar as ‘Vampire Film’ can be considered a genre unto itself however, it allows for the possibility of many different styles and innovations. Comedic Vampire Films include Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein (Barton, 1948) andThe Fearless Vampire Kiillers (Polanski, 1967). Innocent Blood (Landis, 1992) features a good vampire who only preys on criminals: this film is notable also for mixing horror, comedy and gangster (specifically mafia-film) conventions. My Best Friend Is A Vampire (Huston, 1988) is a pure comedy featuring a teenager turned vampire who drinks only pigs’ blood. What ties together all these films is simply the vampire concept.

Two vampire films that deserve special mention are The Lost Boys (Schumacher, 1987) and Near Dark (Bigelow, 1987). These two films, released only two months apart, have virtually the same basic plot. A young man is turned into a vampire (fully in Near Dark and partially in The Lost Boys), spends time with the other cool kids, the vampire posse, and falls for a girl who runs with the vampires. In Near Dark, the protagonist recovers his humanity through blood-transfusion and at the climax kills the vampires who were formerly his peers to rescue his girlfriend; in The Lost Boys the protagonist must kill all his former friends before he can become fully human again. In both films, the protagonist runs with the vampires for a time before turning against them. These two vampire films, made independently of each other, must have spoken for something in the zeitgeist. Both films are concerned with the dangers of teenage rebellion, the simultaneous lure and peril of the peer group. The vampire lifestyle stands as a metaphor for drug and alcohol use, for rock and roll, for casual sex, flouting of authority, risk-taking, staying up past one’s bedtime, all the gestures adolescents value as the highest form of freedom. Both films concern a dalliance with a teen culture that must finally be rejected.

And then in 2008 we had Twilight (Hardwick, 2008). This film features a family of good vampires who do not burn when exposed to sunlight but sparkle instead. It marks a complete inversion of the original vampire films, the vampires now being heroes instead of monsters. Twilight has been classified as a “romantic fantasy film” in stark contrast to earlier vampire films which traditionally were horrors. It is possible the vampire genre may recover from this film but it has dealt the genre a grievous blow.

This brief discussion of different varieties of genre points to the fact that even within a genre there is significant room for variation and innovation. Arguably, to suppose that the creators of genre films and the consumers of genre films are unconscious of a genre’s societal implications is to underestimate the critical and intellectual capacities of writers, directors and audiences. Sleepless in Seattle deliberately alludes to An Affair to Remember (McCarey, 1957) and Scream (Craven, 1996) is a slasher film featuring characters who themselves know the conventions of the slasher film genre. This intertextuality and metatextuality evinces the fact that the creators of genre fiction are quite consciously aware of the rules of their chosen genres and recognise that their audiences similarly know the rules. They know when the rules are being followed– and when they are being broken. Creators innovate deliberately and audiences appreciate innovation. The Author is not really dead.

Berger argues that genres change as a result of social change, that pop culture texts are epiphenomena mirroring an underlying and temporally prior social reality. In this his view resembles the idea in Orthodox Marxism that the base (conditions of class and of economic production and exchange) determines the Superstructure (a structure that includes Popular Culture). I would like to propose a radical counter-argument – that popular culture is quasi-independent of social reality. Popular culture continually reproduces itself independently of the ‘real world’. When authors create new texts they engage in “What if?” type scenarios: for instance, before Kathryn Bigelow and Eric Red conceived the film Near Dark, they probably asked themselves, “What would happen if we mixed vampire and western iconographies?” and the story emerged as an answer to that question. This innovation did not follow, or reflect, a social change. Every new story arises from an interplay between conventional, established narrative forms and innovation that is essentially speculative and aleatory. Changes in society do not bring about genre change; rather creative minds hit upon lucky accidents. 

Popular Culture analysts are interested not only in genres but in the audience particular genres attract. In this relation, it is interesting to consider the film Trainspotting (Boyle, 1996). This film can not be easily situated within any particular genre and yet found its own sizeable audience and is considered a great success – it was ranked 10th greatest British film of all time by the British Film Institute in 1999. The fact that this text could be so successful without belonging to any recognisable genre shows the limitation of approaching popular culture entirely in terms of genre. Nevertheless, one could argue that Trainspotting does draw on a kind of formula – it is about a young man who is faced with a choice between his peer group and with teenage rebellion on the one hand, and growing up and ‘choosing life’ on the other. Most of the film shows the consequences of his continuing decision not to grow up – but at the end Renton turns his back on heroin and his former friends and ‘chooses life’ instead. The film dramatises a choice between teen culture and adulthood, and in this way closely resembles both The Lost Boys and Near Dark. The difference is that it substitutes heroin addiction for vampirism as a metaphor for youthful rebellion. All three films appeal to adolescents, particularly male adolescents, who feel a wish to rebel but are anxious about the consequences of rebellion. 

In 2017, a sequel to Trainspotting was released. T2 Trainspotting (Boyle, 2017) is not aimed at the same demographic as the original – rather it is intended for the exact same audience as the original, males who saw the first film in their teens and early twenties and are now in their late thirties and early forties. T2 does not concern a character who must reject teen culture and grow up; rather it is concerned with nostalgia for lost youth. It is just as non-generic as the original.(Arguably the recent Star Wars film The Force Awakens (Abrams, 2015) also exploits the power of nostalgia to  engage its audience.)  In an interview Robert Carlye said of T2 that it “is going to be quite emotional for people. Because the film sort of tells you to think about yourself. You are going to be thinking: 'Fuck. What have I done with my life?’ ” (Levine, 2015).  Neither Trainspotting nor its sequel can be considered generic.

Another pop cultural example that shows the limitations of viewing all pop cultural texts in terms of genre is the Harry Potter series. Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling, 1997) is not admittedly sui generis; it is indebted to Fantasy fiction (a school for young wizards had featured in Ursula Le Guin’s 1968 novel A Wizard of Earthsea), to boarding school stories and to teen mysteries such as The Famous Five by Enid Blyton. But it was sufficiently different from what was considered usual children’s fiction at the time it was written that the novel was rejected by eight publishers before being picked up by Bloomsbury. The Harry Potter series was entirely different from the rest of contemporary children’s fiction then being published. Nevertheless it became an enormous success over a few short years. If we accept Berger’s view that popular culture reflects society then we have to suppose that in the period just prior to the publication of the first Harry Potter novel, significant social change had occurred around the world which would explain its success– but no such significant change is in evidence. Presumably, furthermore, if successful pop cultural texts reflect society, publication and production companies should be able to predict which books and films will succeed through market research – but the fact that Rowling’s manuscript was rejected by eight publishers suggests either that these publishers were very poor at judging the market or that the success or failure of a work to reach an audience is only tenuously connected to real world conditions.

This essay has sought to show the limitation of an approach to popular culture in which all texts are viewed as belonging to fixed genres. Berger is representative of a strand in popular culture analysis beholden to Structuralism and Post-Structuralism based on the idea that texts reflect society as a whole, mirror society, and which emphasises the similarities between texts; in this essay I have attempted to show how even texts within a single genre can differ markedly from each other and how important Pop Culture texts, such as Trainspotting and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, can be almost entirely non-generic. Audiences value novelty as well as familiarity. The author remains important. As Grazian points out in “Mix It Up: Popular Culture, Mass Media and Society” (Grazian, 2010), “After all, in the end, all hits are flukes, and nobody knows anything.” (p.118). If this is true, it undercuts the assumption that a knowable causal connection can be found between society and popular culture, the premise of Berger’s argument. Grazian argues that genres are not natural but artificial, are convenient marketing devices: the creative industry is risk-averse and selects and promotes cultural commodities that are similar to past successes, a conservatism that expresses itself in the selection of directors with proven track records, actors with proven track records and genres with proven track records. Perhaps if the profit motive were taken out of the creative industries, genres themselves might either disappear or greatly diminish in importance.

The issue of the relationship between popular media and genre is related to an age old question in narrative theory. Is there only a finite number of possible stories or is there an infinite number of stories? If we apply Structuralist and Post-Structuralist ideas to popular culture, we may be led to believe the former, but in fact the latter is true. Innovation is always possible and the number of possible stories is limitless.