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?