There is a great deal of misunderstanding around schizophrenia. The word itself literally means "split-mind" and people have historically confused schizophrenia with multiple personality disorder. Readers can look up definitions of schizophrenia on the Internet but, bear in mind, most are bullshit. For instance, schizophrenics are supposed not to be able to think clearly, to lack verbal fluency and to have difficulties with abstract thinking, but I certainly hope readers of my blog feel that this view doesn't hold true of me. In today's post I am going to try to give some idea of what schizophrenia is, what its cause is or at least what I think it is, at least as it applies to me.
In a way, the term split-mind is not inappropriate. I sincerely believe that every person has two selves – the self as the person sees himself and the self that others see. Neither self is unitary. I change day to day and the self another sees varies depending on who that other is. Schizophrenia often (I shouldn't say always because I'm sure there are exceptions) involves a mismatch between others' perceptions of the subject and the subject's perception of himself. The schizophrenic totalises the Other, says to himself "They are all out to get me." This is of course the definition of paranoia. I think of the moment in Watchmen when Night Owl asks Rorschach, "Don't you think you're being a little paranoid?" and Rorschach replies, "Paranoid? Is that what They're saying about me now?" The disjunction between the self as it knows itself and the self as it is known by others can take a drastic form, can lead to a complete split. In an earlier post I mentioned Yves, a man somewhat older than me who was treated by the same psychiatrist as me, Tony Fernando, and finally escaped of the system by, in his own words, "telling the psychologist what the psychologist wanted to hear". Yves is still schizophrenic, still very unwell. Last year I talked to him and he said to me "Have you considered cultivating a persona?" – something he obviously felt he had done himself. Yves is an extreme case but this mismatch between self and 'persona' is not uncommon. When I first became unwell, at the Big House, I believed briefly that I had multiple personality disorder. It was the only way I could make sense of the mismatch between my knowledge of myself and my sense of others' perceptions of me.
A person's sense of who he or she is is influenced by what other's think of him or her. Michel Foucault, someone who knew something about madness, argued that discourses create the objects they talk about. It is through discourse that the subject as it known to others becomes manifest. We might go a bit further and say "Bullshit discourses fuck people up". A couple of decades ago, the dominant theory of schizophrenia was that it was caused by a 'schizophrenogenic mother' – a mother who doesn't love her child. I think this theory is wrong or often wrong. I have only met one schizophrenic who expressed ambivalence about her mother and that was Jess, and I now think her ambivalence was simply the ambivalence all young women feel towards the mothers. But imagine a situation in which this theory holds sway among Mental Health professionals as it once did. Over time, the patient comes to blame his mother for his condition and his mother, feeling unfairly blamed by him and by others and feeling consequently angry or ashamed, will take it out on her child. In other words, the theory of the 'schizophrenogenic mother' may well have ruined the most important relationship in the lives of many young men and women, may have been a self-fulfilling prophecy. In early 2014 I was in a respite facility and I met an older schizophrenic, a man in his fifties or sixties who had probably been institutionalised when he was younger and had probably been treated during the heyday of this theory; over dinner one night he bluntly said that during a psychotic episode once he'd considered chopping up his mother with an axe. It scared the shit out of me and the next night I ran away from the respite facility back to my mother's house and didn't go back. I had only been at that respite facility two or three days. I'm sure that this man had been messed up by the discourse around schizophrenia current when he was younger.
This is not to say that all theories of schizophrenia are bullshit. One that may apply to me is the theory of the double-bind; I don't know that this is the root cause of my illness but it strongly featured in it. The double-bind theory of schizophrenia posits that schizophrenics are put in a situation where they must choose between two alternatives, both of which are bad. Naturally the schizophrenic is trapped, unable to make up his mind, driven mad by equally bad alternatives. I have hinted that this was the situation I was in in the post "Faith No More vs. Bruce Springsteen". I felt that the Mental Health Service had put me in a situation where I was being forced to choose between being a closet homosexual or coming out as gay. Both options were bad. I hated closet homosexuals – but I couldn't come out as gay because I'm not. This double bind didn't predate my illness. I'd been put in it by the Mental Health System because, for some reason, the people who were treating me refused to simply accept that I was straight.
The double-bind I was in follows naturally from attitudes prevalent among people generally nowadays and the Left in particular. It may also follow from whatever voguish theory of schizophrenia is fashionable among psychiatrists at the moment.. As readers will know, I am quite liberal but on one issue I now believe the Left is wrong. The Left believes that closet homosexuals are all bad, reprehensible, that openly gay men and women are good, honest, and that all gay people should come out. This is what I believed when I first became sick. It is a political position founded on an essentialist notion of sexuality. For instance, at the very end of 2014 I read an article in the Sunday Star Times, I think, in which a famous sportsman came out as gay; the article hailed him as "a hero" who would be a role model "for other young men struggling with the sexuality." This is typical of contemporary discourse about sexuality. As readers of my blog know, I do not regard sexuality as fixed any more. I think now that straight men can turn gay. It is a terrible thing to say I know but I believe it to be true.
For years, from the beginning of 2010 until the beginning of 2013, I dealt with the double-bind I was in by steering a course between the horns of the dilemma, by pushing it away rather than facing it. I was well then. I never kept a secret from anyone that I was straight but I didn't force the issue and pretty much allowed people around me to believe whatever they wanted. The film I wrote in 2012, "The Hounds of Heaven", was my way of publicly coming out as straight – because it was written about a woman I loved. It may not have gone down well. In early 2013 I became sick again, I think perhaps, and I speculate here, possibly because of public reaction my film. It became impossible then to avoid the double-bind any longer and I have suffered from severe anguish ever since. I had to make a choice. And the only choice I could make was to side with the closet homosexuals. This blog has been an inventory of people thought to be gay who have never come out – John Nash, John Ashbery, Lou Reed, Mike Patton, Virginia Woolf, Morrissey, Tom Cruise... And of course Kurt Cobain. There are others I could mention like Cliff Richard and David Bowie. The point, of course, is that just because a perception gets into circulation that someone is gay doesn't make it true.
It might seem as though I am dismantling the whole notion of 'closet homosexual' but I'm not. The question becomes, "How does one define the term 'closet homosexual'"? One way would be to say that a closet homosexual is a man who deliberately trawls for homosexual encounters by clandestinely visiting public bathrooms and disreputable parks to pick up men. This is the way people thought of homosexuality for much of the twentieth century– before it was legalised. I honestly don't believe this type of demi-monde exists anymore, that the world has changed. Furthermore I don't think this perception applies to the people I have listed above. But psychiatrists haven't realised that the world has changed. A couple of weeks ago I heard Jess in my head. She said, "Is it illegal for two consenting adults to have sex?" Of course the answer is 'no'. But psychiatrists still seem to think it is and often assume that patients have secrets to hide.
I have had two homosexual experiences in my life. Once, when I was twenty-two, a man got in my face. And once, when I was thirty, I had a delusion or hallucination about someone, an experience I have been unable to describe fully in this blog and that I repressed for four years. When I did remember it, in early 2014, it caused me profound distress for a long time after. I didn't want either experience. The perverse irony, though, is that these experiences, and the fact that I have talked about them, prove that I'm straight. If I'd never had a homosexual experience and told the psychiatrists this, they would have continued not to believe me, continued to think I was lying. When trying to prove one's heterosexuality, the other side of the coin is heterosexual experiences – but why should I have to talk about those? I believe sex is sacred; sex and love go together. To say that I had had two long term relationships with girls, one lasting four years and the other lasting around five should have been enough.
I would never have been trapped in this double bind if it wasn't for the Mental Health System. It was the Mental Health System that put me in it. I remember my first or second appointment with my first psychiatrist Tony Fernando. He leaned towards me and with an insincere shit-eating smile told me that he had a sister who was schizophrenic. I wish to make two points about this. First, it is grossly unethical to effectively diagnose a patient schizophrenic on the first or second appointment as he had implicitly done. Second, is it not reasonable to wonder that the reason his sister was schizophrenic was because of him? Perhaps he had driven her mad when she was young. Perhaps the reason he got into psychiatry was because he got a thrill from sadistically messing with people's minds as he had conceivably done with his sister. My New Zealand readers may doubt the allegation that Fernando might be a sociopath; he had a high public profile. I remember he would sometimes feature in the newspaper, often talking about "teaching doctors compassion". But, lest we forget, Rolf Harris fronted a campaign raising awareness of childhood sexual abuse even as he was serially molesting young women. It is what sociopaths do. For them life is a game. How much can I get away with without being caught?
I might finish by talking about the difference between sociopaths and schizophrenics, psychiatrists and patients. I like schizophrenics but I detest psychiatrists. The schizophrenic wants to bring the two sides of identity together, his public and private self; the sociopath wants to keep his public and private life separate. The schizophrenic, for all his delusions, is concerned with the truth, with integrity; the sociopath doesn't give a shit about the truth and basically lacks a moral core. This is perhaps the fundamental problem with the Mental Health Service. It is a war to the death between sufferers and sadists.
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