I don't know if people are still reading my blog, but I hope so. In today's post I want first to clear up some slight errors in what I have written in previous posts, before talking about the attitudes towards mental health in this country. Bear with me. The first part of the essay is clerical but I may say something quite interesting later on, especially when I talk about celebrated New Zealand novelist Janet Frame.
One of the most important posts I have written is "My First Psychotic Episode"but I may have made a couple of slight errors in this. I said that while working at bFM I reported live from an "amphetamine lab explosion" on K Road. What I should have said was that it was a "metamphetamine lab explosion" – but my readers may have guessed that I meant this. I don't know for sure if the fire resulted from a P-lab explosion but it seems probable. Also in this post I described a series of mental events that occurred in the day or two prior to my considering drowning myself. These events were, in chronological order, 1. I felt the impulse I described in that post. 2. I decided that everyone in the world, including my father, was gay except me. 3. I decided that my father had divorced my mother when I was seven to stop me from being gay, to save me. I got these mental events out of order. In fact, it went 2, then 1 and then 3. This may seem a small difference but it is significant. In the post "Definitions of Sexuality Part 3" I said that the psychotic symptom I experienced started in 2013 or 2014 at the age of 33 or 34 but, although I still think it fair to say it started in 2013 or 2014, it definitely started when I was 33. I am born in August.
For around the last several decades, public attitudes towards mental illness in this country have greatly altered. One of the first people to come forward publicly as someone who had suffered depression is ex-All Black John Kirwan, a remarkable figure in that he became the 'face' of mental health. Kirwan fronted a campaign raising awareness of mental illness, advising the community that depression and anxiety are not things to be ashamed of and that it is okay to ask for help. Occasional newspaper columnist Deborah Hill-Cone suffered a severe bout of depression I think about ten years ago and reacted to this mid-life crisis by going back to university to study psychology; she writes now regularly about her life, her 'illness' and about recent psychological research. Mike King, an (ex?) comedian travels around schools speaking to students about mental health issues with the same message as John Kirwan, that depression and anxiety are not problems to be ashamed of and that it is okay to seek help. There has, in other words, been considerable work put into de-stigmatising the concept of mental illness. We don't need to look too hard to find a reason for all this government-funded publicity and all these individual initiatives. New Zealand has one of the highest youth suicide rates in the world. I don't think anyone knows why. It seems inexplicable – why should New Zealand have a higher suicide rate than the US when America is demonstrably so much more fucked up? It could be that the suicide rate in the States only seems lower because many more suicides might go unreported there than here. Or it could be something to do with the fact that New Zealand is one of the most secular, most atheistical, countries on the planet, as a friend of mine suggested just yesterday. For whatever reason, the issues of mental illness and the high suicide rate has been deemed an issue to be discussed publicly, a problem for which solutions should be sought, rather than shameful secrets to be swept under the carpet as they once were.
This concerted effort by the government and individuals to de-stigmatise mental illness has had an odd unintended consequence, a by-product that I don't think anyone anticipated. It has brought to the public's attention the inadequacy of the Mental Health System. In the 1950s and 1960s, say, a person who suffered one psychotic or depressive episode, one bout of post-natal depression, would be thrown in an institution for the rest of his or her life. He or she would be subjected to ECT, insulin shock therapy, ice baths (in Lake Alice), even lobotomised, all barbaric and ultimately ineffective and unjustifiable, indefensible forms of 'therapy'. Psychiatrists. little more than monsters, were believed infallible gods and the mentally ill were considered and treated little better than animals. The stigma surrounding madness made patients unwilling or unable to come forward with stories of mistreatment but all this has changed. The destigmatisation of mental illness that has occurred in the last decade or two has enabled, empowered, patients to tell their stories and has shone a spotlight on the failings of the Mental Health System, a system that, in fact, has never worked. It is an escapable fact that forty per cent of all suicides in the country are mental health patients, the ones who have actually sought help. Mike King, to his great credit, has made communicating this scandalous truth a part of his mission. On 7 Sharp a month or two ago he said (and this is an exact quote) "People can say over and over again that there's nothing wrong with the Mental Health System but that doesn't make it true." More recently the current affairs show Sunday reported on a young man, misdiagnosed with Narcissistic Personality disorder, who had killed himself while an impatient in a Mental Health Ward in Christchurch; King was interviewed about this and said, "Stories like this make a mockery of everything I do." Seeking help is useless if those who seek it don't receive it.
Mental illness and the Mental Health System seem set to be key issues in this year's national elections.
So, destigmatisation seems a very good thing. The attitude towards mental illness in New Zealand is not only more sympathetic and compassionate than it once was, it is better than in other countries, particularly the US. My impression is that the stigma associated with mental illness in America is terrible. Stephen Colbert in the past would often mock Donald Trump by saying that he had forgotten to take his pills and Bill Maher still regularly calls Trump a mental health patient. To say that Trump is a mental health patient is incredibly insulting to mental health patients – this sounds like a joke but I am only half joking. My feeling is that America has a serious, serious problem with suicide and mental illness but that Americans aren't in the slightest prepared to acknowledge it. And with all America's other problems, such as racism in the police force, the repeal of Obamacare, battles over gun control and planned parenthood, the 'opioid epidemic' and so on, improving the treatment of the mentally ill probably falls quite far down the to-do list.
If New Zealand has a different attitude towards mental illness than the US, this is partly attributable to a different culture. New Zealanders value fairness and tolerance highly, whereas Americans value freedom and rights more. But if I were to try to put a name on why New Zealand has a better attitude towards mental illness than the States, I would pick one person as a reason– Janet Frame. It is Janet Frame who will be the subject of the remainder of this post; I intend to talk a little about her life. As always I should say my sources. I have read a number of her novels, admittedly over ten years ago. Just yesterday I finished the first volume in her autobiography, "To the Is-Land." The second volume, "An Angel at My Table", is on my bed-side table but I haven't cracked it open yet. My main source though is the Wikipedia entry about her. When writing about other famous people, such as Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf and John Nash, I have relied heavily on Wikipedia but I do warn readers to be careful. The Wikipedia entry begins "Nene Janet Paterson Clutha ONZ CBE (28 August 1924 – 29 January 2004) was a New Zealand author who published under the name Janet Frame" implying that 'Janet Frame' was a pen name. This is false. Janet was born 'Janet Frame' but changed her name to Nene Clutha in 1958 because of an acute shyness or fear of public recognition associated with her fame (or notoriety). Generally though I feel and hope that Wikipedia is more or less reliable.
Frame was born in 1924 and spent most of her childhood in the small Otago town of Oamaru (near the bottom of the South Island). In 1945, at the age of twenty-one, while training to become a teacher, she attempted suicide by ingesting aspirin tablets. As a result she started receiving therapy from a junior lecturer at Otago University, John Money, a psychologist who would later develop an international reputation as a sexologist interested in gender reassignment. Money is seminal, in a way: he invented the term 'gender role' and paved the way for future study of transexuality, and much feminist and queer theory, such as the work of Judith Butler, is indebted to him. Money was also a horrible quack and a pervert (see his Wikipedia page if you don't believe me). In her sessions with Money, Frame developed a strong crush on him and started telling him things he wanted to hear (this last fact is not drawn from her wikipedia page but from something I read elsewhere). Later that year Frame had another breakdown after a visit from a school inspector and was admitted to a psychiatric ward for observation. Over the next eight years, she was in and out of a variety of mental asylums. According to Wikipedia, she was usually admitted 'voluntarily' but the word 'voluntary' in this context is slippery and I know from my own experience that people can often coerced or bullied into being hospitalised or receiving treatment. During this period, she was diagnosed schizophrenic. She received ECT and Insulin Shock Therapy. In 1951, she was scheduled for a lobotomy – but the lobotomy was cancelled when a book of short stories she had written, "The Lagoon and Other Stories", unexpectedly won the Hubert Church Memorial Award. Apocryphally, that elusive creature, the Good Psychiatrist, appeared at the asylum, took an interest in her, vouched for her, said, "This woman shouldn't be here in this madhouse" and this led to her eventual release.
Frame was discharged from Seacliff Lunatic Asylum four years later and went to live in a hut out the back of Frank Sargeson's house in Takapuna, on Auckland's North Shore. (Sargeson is another famous New Zealand short story writer.) There she wrote her first novel, "Owls Do Cry." Nine other novels, collections of short stories, poetry and the three volume autobiography would follow before her death in 2004. Frame is considered perhaps the greatest New Zealand novelist. When I was studying my MA in English Literature, one of my lecturers, who had been a friend of hers, told us that he had repeatedly nominated her, albeit unsuccessfully, for the Nobel Prize in Literature. (For readers interested in Frame, who don't have time to read her books, Jane Campion made a film about her in 1980s called 'An Angel at my Table".)
Much has been written about Frame. The revered New Zealand historian Michael King wrote a biography on her, "Wrestling with the Angel" which is probably very good, but which I haven't read. Can anything new be said about her? In an earlier post I wrote about Virginia Woolf and perhaps the two can be compared; Woolf and Frame are alike in that both were woman novelists who sometimes wrote formidably difficult books, and both, apparently, 'struggled with mental illness'. In all other respects, however, I feel that the two are totally different. For one thing, Virginia Woof, in Mrs Dalloway for instance, wrote about what it is like to be mentally ill, to be psychotic; in the novel Faces in the Water, Frame describes a very brief psychotic episode, an episode that resembles an acid trip more than anything else, and then a lifetime trapped as a sane woman in a lunatic's asylum. In other words, from all I've read about her so far, you could be forgiven for thinking Frame was never mentally ill at all.
In this blog I have often discussed sexuality and so the reader might be curious about whether I have anything to say about Janet's sexuality. From all I've read, one would have to say that Frame was totally heterosexual all her life. In this, too, she differs from Virginia Woolf. True, Frame never had any public relationships with men – but this is understandable because she suffered acutely from social anxiety and depression, partly, surely, because of her terrible experiences of incarceration, and lived most of her life a hermit. But issues of sexuality did play a role in her life however. She fell in love with a male psychologist whose specialty was gender reassignment and remained friends with him for much of her life. She lived for a time with Frank Sargeson, a gay man. And in the 'sixties, while in the States, she formed a close friendship with painter Theophilius Brown and his long time male partner, something she later described as "the chief experience of my life". This hint in Wikipedia, together with some coy insinuations made by a friend of mind more acquainted with Frame than I am, raise an interesting possibility – that Frame might have had a brief menage a trois with two males. To put it bluntly, I believe Frame was sexually attracted to gay men. All this may seem a shocking thing to say about a New Zealand literary icon but perhaps we live in a world now in which this may seem not scandalous but an indication of a free spirit.
Leaving aside the details of her life, the fact remains that Frame was diagnosed schizophrenic, spent over ten years on and off in lunatic asylums and was almost given a lobotomy, before being released and becoming one of New Zealand's greatest novelists. I should say, because I need to, that Frame never took medication – she lived in an age before antipsychotic medication. So if she was well it was nothing to do with pills. One wonders: how many sane men and women, men and women not lucky enough to unexpectedly win New Zealand's greatest literary prize in the nick of time, were wrongly lobotomised in this era? I suspect psychiatrists in New Zealand dislike being reminded of Janet Frame. In 2008, I mentioned Frame to my asshole psychiatrist; I believed then that Frame had probably been misdiagnosed lesbian as I felt I had been misdiagnosed homosexual. He told me patronisingly that she was 'bi-polar' (rather than schizophrenic). Where did he get this diagnosis from? He pulled it out of his arse, on the spot – even then, I knew more about Frame than he did. In 2007, after Frame had died, The New Zealand Medical Journal published an article by a medical specialist who proposed that Frame may have been on the Autistic Spectrum. Was Frame autistic? Of course not. Autistics lack verbal fluency and Frame was enraptured by the magic of language. Autistics have difficulty with theory of mind and Frame was a novelist always seeking to capture others' personalities in writing. Most importantly, Frame had a sense of humour and this is something autists lack. It seems that psychiatrists are completely unwilling to admit they fucked up with her, still regularly fuck up with others, and, even in death, they can't leave Janet alone.
I'll finish this post by saying something out that I have implied but not categorically said. Frame grew up in an ordinary poor family in a provincial New Zealand town, her pastimes being the reading of nineteenth century lyric verse, solving mathematical problems set by her teachers (something she enjoyed) and milking the family's cows. In 1945, she ended up the patient of a psychologist who was quite evidently homosexual and believed that gender was a social construct. This over forty years before homosexuality was decriminalised in New Zealand. Is it any wonder Frame went a little mad?
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