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.