In this post I want to talk a little more about my first psychotic episode, an episode that continued from when I left the Big House until the very beginning of 2008. I also want to describe something that happened in early 2009 which may be significant to those interested in my situation.
I have described my first experience of madness in the post "My First Psychotic Episode" although there are some details I have omitted because they are difficult to express. It felt very much like a religious experience at the time, albeit a negative one: I felt the victim of a conspiracy although there were moments, bizarrely, when I thought it was a benevolent conspiracy. After my crisis at the Big House my psychotic symptoms went away away briefly. Upon first encountering Tony Fernando, I decided I wanted no part in the Service, but when my psychotic symptoms returned a week or two later (I had then moved home to live with my mother), I felt I needed help and the Mental Health Service was the only place I could turn to. I saw him again and was put on 2.5mgs of Rispiridone. I would continue to live at home with my mother until the beginning of last year.
The most important aspect of the episode I suffered in 2007 was that I had formed the delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals. I believed briefly, in fact, that everyone in the world was gay except me – Kurt Cobain was the first person I could think of who was also straight. The episode that year was often intense but I never heard voices. I can't do justice to all I experienced that year but one story may give some idea. I had formed the belief that heterosexuals had to keep secret their attraction to women, to conceal the fact of their heterosexuality from the all the closet homosexuals, and that some, such as James Joyce, would even feign blindness in order to hide the fact that they were looking at females. On the morning that New Zealand played France in the Rugby World Cup, an early intervention team member took me for a excursion to Cornwall Park. While there I hallucinated that a old friend of mine, who is blind, was sitting on a bench (this friend was then in reality completing a doctorate in the States); the woman sitting next to him said, "He saw someone in his room." I thought I had miraculously restored Rene's sight. Sometime later I would decide that such miracles were more harmful than beneficial and that I should revoke my gift. In the car on the way back from Cornwall Park, we heard on the radio that the All Blacks had lost. I decided I was personally responsible for their defeat because I hadn't watched the game.
The delusions that a psychotic can suffer are often an exaggeration of common delusions that many people share – psychosis is a kind of reductio ad absurdum. In 2007, I believed in a gay gene, as many people do. Consider the consequences of this hypothesis. If there is such a thing as a gay gene, it would mean that for hundreds of thousands of years gay men were marrying gay women and having gay children. I believed in 2007 in fact that homosexuals outnumbered heterosexuals. The heterosexual minority, the few who actually loved the opposite sex, were in the main unaware that the majority of people in the world were closet homosexuals; they had been brainwashed, were as it were repressing their knowledge of this homosexual conspiracy. Only a few could pierce through the veil to the truth. I believed furthermore that over time a slow genocide was being carried out. The closet homosexuals, indistinguishable in my mind from sociopaths, hated the heterosexuals and were systematically weeding out heterosexuality from the gene pool. I would believe, for instance, that the Jews were all straight and that the Nazis were all closet homosexuals; I thought the Holocaust evidence of this genocidal intent. My attitude to the Mental Health Service varied but often I thought that it was an instrument of this conspiracy. I didn't like being a patient of the Mental Health Service but felt I had no choice in the matter.
When I first became ill, in the Big House, I had formed the belief that I was secretly under surveillance. After my crisis there, this feeling went away for a period, but the feeling that I was under surveillance returned soon after my first appointment with Tony Fernando. I decided that there was a listening device in my glasses. It is impossible to stress how persistent and horrible this delusion was: I believed the Media were monitoring everything I said. This delusion lasted all of 2007. I believed that if I said I was straight or if I exposed the homosexual conspiracy, I would be killed. For all of 2008 this delusion sort of went away: I thought that if I said nothing controversial, people wouldn't be listening. But it came back in early 2009 and didn't vanish for good until the beginning of 2010.
Over the summer of 2007 and 2008 I spent some time, I think at least a whole month, as a day patient of a Respite Facility called Mind Matters. My psychosis abated. I had told no one of my delusions. I was almost totally well for all of 2008. I stopped believing in the homosexual conspiracy, although I continued to believe, correctly, that I had been misdiagnosed by my psychiatrist at the first appointment. I went back to university and studied some philosophy papers. Perhaps around September of that year my mother went to Britain for a holiday and organised for my sort of girlfriend Maya to come stay with me. We got into a fight and conclusively broke up. Shortly after, a old friend of mine called up; he had recently returned from the Czech Republic and needed some place to stay, so came to stay with me. Later during the rest of the year I would visit him occasionally at his house in Piha. I didn't like this chap particularly much, to be honest, but he was the only friend I had.
I should say something about my state of mind that year, 2008. I was still taking 2.5 mgs of Rispiridone which made me feel rotten all the time. Because of my terrible experiences the previous year and my residual delusion that I had a microphone in my glasses, I never used the words 'gay' or 'straight' – although I would occasionally try to find indirect ways, when speaking to Tony for instance, to say that I was heterosexual. That year I saw a middle-aged Scottish nurse called Averil for 'therapy' although no therapy ever happened. The only thing I felt able to talk about with her at the time was the David Letterman show and the American election. I remember my first appointment with her: she said, "I should be an attractive young woman!" At the time I did really know why she had said this. I needed counselling; her looks shouldn't have been relevant. The issue which I wanted to talk about was my parents' divorce when I was seven but she never raised it. I believed then and now that mental illness has a psychological cause and wanted psychological treatment. I talked about my friend with Averil.
At the very beginning of 2009, I decided that I should at least try to talk about my family and mentioned my dislike of my stepmother. At the next appointment with Averil she said, "You were telling me about your dislike of your mother." I said, "No, it's my stepmother I have problems with." All of a sudden I felt a kind of terrible darkness, that had been there since I had started taking Rispirdone, rising up all around me. A false statement that I disliked my mother had been put on my record. Almost immediately after this, I attended the Seven Worlds Collide concert with my friend and that night my psychosis returned. My belief in a homosexual conspiracy came back and I decided that I had to sever my ties with him. I have only seen him occasionally since.
I should say that I now know this friend was straight although that night I decided that he might be gay; in fact the night of the concert I met for the first time his new girlfriend. What I think now, and have thought for a long time now but have had difficulty expressing, is that the people who were treating me thought this friendship was a homosexual relationship. This because they had diagnosed me homosexual at the first appointment without ever actually finding out if I was gay or not. It seems the mental health service assumes that all relationships, including same-sex ones, involve fucking.
It is difficult for me now to get the events in the early part of 2009 in the right order. I became very ill indeed – it was shortly after this that I first began hearing voices. I have said the voices began in January but it might have been February. The first voice I heard, in fact, belonged to George W. Bush. (When I spoke with him I asked him if he was straight and he replied, "I think so.") At my mother's suggestion, I went back to university to study IT. It seems incredible that I was studying because I was in fact so extremely ill, but I seem able to function well even when ill. I even got an A in programming that semester. There is one particular event that has always seemed very important me – it occurred in the first month or two of 2009 just before I started attending AUT. Almost all of the appointments I had with Tony Fernando were in the company of my mother and often my father. Around this time I had an appointment with just me, Tony and Averil. They had decided to put me on anti-depressants as well as Rispiridone. At this appointment, I gained the strange impression that Tony and Averil were in a clandestine sexual relationship – a bizarre feeling to have because I was fairly confident that Tony was homosexual. What I think now was that this was an intuition that were, in fact, colluding. I asked why they wanted to put me on antidepressants when I wasn't depressed; I suggested that I could take St John's Wort instead. Tony turned to Averil with a smirk and said, "I hear they prescribe St. John's Wort – in Germany!" That appointment was the time I felt most strongly just how evil and sadistic Tony is. It is significant that my Key Worker Kate Whelan was not present at this appointment.
Shortly after, I started going to AUT – I remember Kate taking me, sick as I was, to the Disabilities Support Service. I had sensed from my first appointment with Tony, in 2007, that I had been misdiagnosed homosexual and I had been mortally afraid of being 'outed' ever since; I felt strongly then that this had actually happened. I think Tony had written in whatever secret record that psychiatrists keep about their patients that I had come out as gay; I think moreover that either Tony or Averil had told Kate that I had come out as gay and that she subsequently told other people. I only took antidepressants for a short time – after a couple of weeks I somehow convinced those treating me to let me go off them.
I had become very ill indeed. Every night I heard voices. It was just a couple of months later that I adopted Jon Stewart as an imaginary friend, a moment I have described in the post "Jon Stewart, Janet Frame and Katy Perry." I'll tell one story that gives some idea of just how sick I was before I went off the Rispiridone, a story I've told before but is worth telling again. One night I went into the back garden of my house – I thought that the garden was Gethsemane and that the tree in the garden was one of the tree of suicides from Dante's Inferno. I thought I was Jesus and that I was being called upon to save young mental health patients from suicide. I said to the voices, "Choose someone else!" They said, "Okay". When I went back inside the house I asked the voices, "Am I Jesus or am I in hell?" The voices replied, "What's the difference?"
I believe that what I was being called to do was save young people from being driven to either suicide or homosexuality by psychiatric misdiagnoses.
Rispirdone is a vile drug. I don't believe it helps at all in mitigating psychotic symptoms– all it does is make people feel sick and afraid all the time which psychiatrists probably like because it makes patients more pliable. On August 6, my mother's birthday, having been very unwell for some eight months, I contemplated suicide – I thought I was going to be on Rispiridone forever. When Tony found out the next day that I had written a suicide note, he panicked and permitted me to go off it, 0.5mgs a week over the course of about a month and a half. For a period I saw the Crisis Team daily. Around this time I became concerned about my testosterone levels – I thought the Rispiridone might somehow turn me gay by fucking with my hormones. Going off the Rispiridone was hard but fortunately I had Jon and Lily Allen as guardian angels. For about a month after I was totally off the Rispiridone, I was actually well – being allowed to get off this horrible drug had cured my psychosis. I went to Sydney with my mother for a wedding and there hit on a girl in a boat. Shortly after I got back, the psychosis suddenly returned, triggered, bizarrely enough, by seeing Iggy Pop on TV. I believe the reason I became psychotic again was a reaction to years of terrible stress. I ended up back in Tony's consultation room and was put on Olanzapine, my dosage gradually being increased to 10mgs. I continue to experience psychosis for the next few months, a psychosis perhaps slightly more intense but far less terrible than the psychosis I had experienced while taking Rispiridone. Around this time, I walked up Mt Hobson and asked the voices how I could escape my madness. I heard a voice say, "Accept consensus reality". I decided this was my only way out. On the way down the hill I saw a vagrant and heard two voices, one saying "The saved" and the other "The damned". I didn't know which of us was which.
Around November, I started attending a Hearing Voices group at which I met Jess. Over the summer of 2009 and 2010 I experienced the psychotic episode that I have described in other posts, the episode during which from the moment I woke to the moment I slept I spent talking with Jess, Jon and other people, including, from around January 5, Barack Obama.
Psychosis seems to me an escape from an unendurable reality. a way of coping. I remember in late 2009, before I met Jess, Jon speaking to me. He said, "You're long sighted!" I said, "No, I'm short sighted." He said, "You're long sighted!" I said, "No, I'm short sighted – I see well at short distances!" He laughed and said, "There's no hope for you." I told this story to Kate. She had no idea what I was talking about, but of course I was talking about what it was like to live with a misdiagnosis.
My psychosis ebbed away after a couple of months. I remained on 10mgs until the beginning of 2012. During this time I believe Kate thought of me as gay man who didn't want to come out. In 2011, I hung out with the real Jess on a number of occasions. In 2012, as I've said before, I was discharged from the Service and reduced my dosage to 5mgs. That year I completed an MA in Creative Writing through AUT, writing a film script about Jess. In early 2013, for whatever reason, reasons I can only surmise, but mainly I think because I had found out that Jess had spent eight months in hospital in 2012, I became ill again. I re-entered the service voluntarily in order to finally get it on my record that I was straight. And then, of course, as I described in the previous post, I was put under the Mental Health Act in early 2014 for doing so.
Readers may wonder, did you perhaps say you were gay at some time and this was put on your record? How else could the psychiatrists justify their misdiagnosis? All I can say is that it is impossible for me ever to have said it. It just never happened. I am very close to my mother and see her almost every day – I have never 'come out' to her. I have a good friend Sarah McConie who is bisexual, who has gone backwards and forwards between men and women her whole life, was in a Civil Union with a woman for some years and is now in a relationship with a man. I have never 'come out' to her. Why would I tell anyone in the Mental Health Service that I was muddled sexually and never tell my friend Sarah? They had diagnosed me either sexually muddled or homosexual without ever actually asking me, something I think psychiatrists do with many if not all of their patients.
This type of misdiagnosis occurs all the time. In previous posts I have talked about a man I know called Yves – Yves was also treated by Tony, was also put on Rispiridone first and Olanzapine later and, in his own words, got out of the Mental Health System by "telling the psychologist what the psychologist wanted to hear". He is still sick, still takes Olanzapine and now Lithium. I remember around New Years Eve 2015 I spent time with Yves and his family because I am friends with his younger brother Rene. Yves asked me, in a strange paranoid way, "Do you go to bars?" Evidently at some point in his treatment he had told people that he went to bars sometimes and they had decided he was going to bars to pick up gay men.
I watched the Daily Show every night during 2008 and 2009 – it went off New Zealand TV for several years and came back in 2014, just after I had been put under the Act. As I've said in a previous post, I felt my imaginary friend had returned at the moment when I most needed him, when I was being made to see the psychologist Simon Judkins. I want to say a little about Jon, not the Jon I spoke to my head but the real one. I remember in 2014, after having delivered an impassioned conflicted defence of marriage equality, a speech he obviously found difficult, him turning to the camera and saying, "We live in trying times, my friends – but we are blessed." This meant a lot to me because Jess's real name is Elizabeth which means "blessed by god"; I thought Jon was addressing all the other schizophrenics in the world. In 2015, during his last show, his final diatribe was about how official records are all bullshit. This may seem unbelievable but it actually happened and this moment is probably viewable on Youtube somewhere.
It seems to me that the current fashion in psychiatry is to assume that all schizophrenia is a form of repressed homosexuality. This is evil and stupid. The clever patients sense the psychiatrists think this and it drives them mad, drives them to either suicide or homosexuality. When a psychotic first presents what the psychiatrists should actually try to do is find out the reasons for his or her first episode, reasons that probably differ from patient to patient.
I'll finish this post by saying one last thing. The nurse Averil left the Taylor Centre in either 2010 or 2011. When she left she gave me a hug goodbye, something no other worker at the Taylor Centre ever did. I have wondered since if this hug was an indication of a guilty conscience.
Thursday, 21 September 2017
Wednesday, 13 September 2017
Why I Was Put Under the Mental Health Act
In today's post I want to talk about the circumstances surrounding when I was put under the Mental Health Act in early 2014. I have covered this period in a previous post "What Happened in 2013" but there are some details I left out. In today's post I want to try to say a little more about what happened in 2013 and 2014. This is a less well written post than some others and is possibly only of interest to the people interested in my case, but I wish to get it on the record.
I was a patient of the Mental Health Service from 2007 until early 2012, was discharged from the Service for a year and then re-entered it voluntarily just before Easter 2013. The reason I re-admitted myself was because I wanted to get it onto the record why I had become ill in the first place; I also wanted it finally on the record that I was straight. I had become 'ill' again about a month or two before. It may seem strange that I felt but driven to do this at the time, felt forced to, but I felt then and have felt since that something occurred at the beginning of the year which necessitated me getting the truth on the record. It may seem absurd that I could have been a patient of the Mental Health Service since 2007 and for the psychiatrists not to know that I was heterosexual but incredibly I believe this the case. Evidently many psychiatrists believe that all psychotics are sexually confused. I had said that I was straight in 2007 at my first engagement with the service but I believe it was thought that this was a delusion and the issue of my sexuality came directly only once, in early 2010, when I told my psychiatrist Tony Fernando that I had fallen in love. Fernando asked me, "A boy or a girl?" I said, "A girl." The girl was of course the one I call Jess.
From 2007 until early 2012 my psychiatrist was one Tony Fernando, a chap with a high profile in the media at the time; I knew at a glance, from my first appointment with him, that he was gay – although he never came out to me. When I first became 'ill' in 2007, I believed the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals, so having a psychiatrist who was one only exacerbated my condition. I was very ill indeed in 2007 and all of 2009. I knew also that I had been misdiagnosed from the first appointment with Tony, I intuited it, but simply never knew how to tell him he was wrong.
In 2013 when I re-entered the Service, I asked to see any psychiatrist other than Tony. I saw a locum called Dharma, an appointment that I have described in the post "Faith No More vs. Bruce Springsteen". When I saw him I said that I was straight and told him of the three women I had loved in my life. After two appointments with Dharma I saw Tony once (not at my request) and then began to see a psychiatrist called Jen Murphy. I was still trying to get it on the record unequivocally that I was straight and just before my first appointment with her I heard a voice saying, "Don't talk about love, talk about sex". So at that appointment I told her truthfully that the first time I had sex was New Years Eve 1997 and that the last time was a one night stand in Wellington in 2011. In fact, I've had two long term relationships in my life. From the age of 17 until the age of 21 I was in a relationship with a girl called Danielle Lander. From around the age of 23 until I was 28 I was sort of in a relationship with a girl called Maya Gilmour. I didn't completely break with Maya until 2008 – a year after I had become a patient of the Mental Health Service. Evidently neither relationship was in my record. (I should say that although the girl I call Jess is very dear to me, we were never in a relationship.)
When I told Jen this, I think she thought I was lying. It contradicted the diagnosis Tony had made of me, what was in my record, what she had been told about me. I think moreover that it was because she thought I was lying that she decided to diagnose me schizophrenic – up until then I had been diagnosed 'psychosis not otherwise specified'. I remember at one appointment her asking me sarcastically if I had a problem with 'phonies' – I thought of the The Catcher in the Rye and told her 'yes'. I knew at the time though that she was referring to me. I think in the intervening years they have been forced to realise that I wasn't lying and have confabulated other reasons for diagnosing me schizophrenic, I don't know what.
When it became apparent to me that, even though I had said I was straight, the shrinks didn't believe it, I decided that Tony must have lied about me. In fact, I thought this lie might have been made public. I tried to deal with this in the only way I could think of, by sending something like a short article to the journalist Steve Braunias effectively accusing Tony of being a homosexual sociopath who serially misdiagnoses his patients.
After this, having told Jen of the letter, I was coerced, under threat of being put under the Mental Health Act, into increasing my dosage of Olanzapine from 5mgs to 12.5 daily. I had never been on such a high dosage before. At this time, I was working as a Reader-Writer for AUT and, after my dosage was increased, I lost this job. I felt that I was the victim of a cover-up to protect Tony Fernando from charges of gross incompetence and the stress this caused me was the reason I lost this job. I no longer believed in the efficacy of medication and, although my mother in good faith ensured I took my dosage every night, I began to start vommiting it up. At an appointment with Jen I told her I was doing this; my mother said she couldn't be "a nurse and a mother at the same time" and Jen permitted me to go off the medication. I went from 12.5 to nothing – I would guess around November of 2013.
I admit I was ill in 2013. The psychosis started around January or February of that year, as I have recorded in earlier posts. As I have also said in earlier posts, my psychosis of that year entirely revolved around my concern for my friend Jess. After I was allowed to go completely off the drugs, as I said I think around November, I was almost well for several months. On January 17 2014, I attended the Big Day Out with my brother, sister-in-law, niece and some friends of hers. This was the last time for a number of years that I was happy – as I would say to my brother some time later, I liked seeing attractive young women in all directions. (At the time he replied, bizarrely and defensively, "Well, we all feel that way".) My mother was visiting Wanganui and so I slept that night at my brother's house. When I woke the next morning, lying in bed, I felt an incredibly unpleasant sensation – I felt as though there was a patina of gayness completely covering my skin. I got up and had a strange conversation with my brother in the kitchen – he had emerged from his bedroom wearing only boxers. I feel that he hadn't really enjoyed the festival the previous day, that it was a scene he didn't really understand. Later that day I travelled by bus to Wanganui, and felt some re-emergence of psychotic symptoms. I had written a story called "Misery" which I have not included in this blog but which I showed my god-mother. In the next week or two, my 'illness'' returned – I think the reason for this was that I sensed what was going to happen, that there was no escape, that whether I liked it or not I was going to be dragged back into the system. I had moments of discomfort around my mother and would go for walks into town to get away. Somehow I ended up back at the Taylor Centre, taken there by my mother – I can't remember precisely what immediately preceded this. I was dragooned into signing something, I don't know what, by Jen and about nine other people – it was either sign this form or run away, and the latter wasn't an option. This 'intervention' happened when my Key Worker was away on holiday. I was taken to a truly horrible respite facility at which I was forced to take Olanzapine, Lorazapam and Zopiclone. During this period women who I'd never seen before and would never see again would show up during the day to observe me and take note of my condition. I thought I was in hell – I only stayed at the respite facility for two nights. After this, after I had come home, for a period nurses would show up every night to force me to take my drugs and a week or two later I had a cursory judicial hearing and was officially put under the Mental Health Act.
I had committed no crime other sending a potentially libellous letter about Tony Fernando to a journalist and not wanting to take my medication, something permitted by my psychiatrist.
The unpleasant sensation I experienced the morning after the Big Day Out would continue to last for some time. Every morning, for years, I would awake with almost unbearable thoughts of homosexuality in my head, a 'symptom' that didn't stop entirely until the beginning of last year. These unpleasant hypnopompic thoughts and images began at my brother's house. I suspect, and this is the first time I've felt able to say this, that it is my brother who is ultimately responsible for the misdiagnosis I have lived with for the last ten years. My brother is fucked in the head.
I should say something more general about what it means to be a patient of the Mental Health Service. A patient has two main contacts with the service – his psychiatrist and his Key Worker. The Key Worker can be an Occupational Therapist, a nurse or a social worker. From 2007 until 2012 my Key Worker was an OT called Kate Whelan, a nice enough woman in some ways but I think with some serious psychological issues related to sexuality, a tendency to view all her patients as sexually muddled. When I re-entered the service in Easter 2013, I was given a new Key Worker, a social worker called Josh Brazil. My relationship with Josh began a little roughly but improved after some months. Josh, as I said, was away on holiday when I was put under the Act. I remember when I was seeing my insane psychologist Simon Judkins in 2014 Judkins saying to me, "Whether a person is gay or not is between him and God!" – I reported this exchange to Josh and Josh said, "Simon said that – to you, did he?". In mid 2015, I think, Josh left the Taylor Centre to go work at another DHB. My new key worker was a nurse called Terry. Once again my relationship with her began somewhat badly and improved when she got to know me. Terry performed the best service by me that any Key Worker I've had has ever performed. At an Independent Review in 2015 that I'd requested she told the Tribunal, "He hates people thinking he's gay because he's not." In 2016 Terry retired. It feels like since 2013 my Key Workers keep finding reasons to disappear. Since then I've had a new Key Worker, one like all the others I see infrequently, another social worker, this one called Daniel Moodley. Once again, the relationship started off tensely and has improved. At my last appointment with Jen he had to leave the room, as though he didn't want to be involved, didn't want to know what was said because that would make him complicit or culpable. My own feeling is that the ground level staff in the Mental Health System today are generally good, well-meaning people and that it is the psychiatrists (and psychologists) who are corrupt, who are more interested in protecting each other than treating their patients.
I'll make note of something else, something that may seem trivial but seems important. At the various reviews I've had, a supposed indication of my illness and my need to take medication is the fact that I would go for walks at night. Supposedly this was a sign that I was sick. Even though I am receiving monthly injections of Olanzapine, I still, even today, go for walks, sometimes at night. I live in Eden Terrace – often I'll walk along K Road, down Ponsonby Road and then back up Queen Street. I have been walking around town, sometimes at night, all my life. Jen Murphy has argued that these walks expose me to danger – but in all my years going for walks I have never been involved in a fight or even ever witnessed one. I have never been in danger. I know many of the homeless well enough to exchange greetings with them even though I don't know them by name. I fail to understand why walking is considered evidence of schizophrenia. Perhaps Jen wants to insinuate I am cruising for male prostitutes. I have never encountered a male prostitute once and of course wouldn't do anything even if I met one.
I'll conclude the post by saying something more general, something about the double bind all mental patients are in. When a diagnosis of schizophrenia is made, the patient must take drugs for the rest of his life; if he dares suggest that antipsychotics don't actually do anything he is considered to be showing lack of 'insight' and this is considered evidence that he should be forced to take them. It's a Catch-22. The fucked up thing is that antipsychotic medication doesn't work. The whole of psychiatry is based on a lie; this is the reason the psychiatric profession attracts stupid and dishonest people. My psychiatrist Jen Murphy, for instance, is an utter bigot and a liar. Psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical companies together have for decades been committing a crime against their patients, perhaps the greatest crime of the twenty-first century. I know from my own experience and from my observations of other patients that antipsychotics don't work; I suspect that they may even make people worse. John Nash believed that antipsychotics impede the process of recovery and I think he may be right. What better way to make someone ill and keep them ill then force that person to live a lie – to tell him repeatedly that the drugs he is taking help him when they don't at all and may even be making him sicker? As I have said before, I didn't start hearing voices until January 2009 after I had been on Rispiridone for a year and half; I was well in 2012 when I was only taking 5mgs; I was very ill just before I was put under the Act I admit but this was because I knew I was to be put under the Act; I was very ill again at the beginning of 2015, even a little suicidal, after I had been under the Act for a year. It's only in the last month or two that I've felt as well as I did in 2012. Jess would sometimes quote the Verve to me: "The drugs don't work, they just make things worse" and I know from my observations of her this to be true, that the drugs never worked for her. I think, incidentally, that just as I had been misdiagnosed homosexual, she had been misdiagnosed 'promiscuous' – the opposite of the truth. Yes, I admit I have been 'ill' sometimes but the my 'illness' has always been a result of others telling untruths about me, and of being trapped in a situation I can't escape.
Psychiatrists and psychologists didn't just invent homosexuality. They invented schizophrenia. If we go back over a hundred years, back to the time of Kraepelin, schizophrenics didn't hear voices. Instead they were more likely to hold delusions that they were people like Napoleon. In my ten years as a patient I have never met anyone who believes he was someone famous, someone he isn't. Schizophrenia has changed as the description has changed – psychiatrists create the condition they purport to describe. It's no science at all. The whole of psychiatry is just quackery.
Although my first psychotic episode wasn't caused by the Mental Health System, every subsequent episode was. And a big part of that was being stuck with a pervert psychiatrist who gets sexually excited whenever he has a male patient in his consultation room.
I was a patient of the Mental Health Service from 2007 until early 2012, was discharged from the Service for a year and then re-entered it voluntarily just before Easter 2013. The reason I re-admitted myself was because I wanted to get it onto the record why I had become ill in the first place; I also wanted it finally on the record that I was straight. I had become 'ill' again about a month or two before. It may seem strange that I felt but driven to do this at the time, felt forced to, but I felt then and have felt since that something occurred at the beginning of the year which necessitated me getting the truth on the record. It may seem absurd that I could have been a patient of the Mental Health Service since 2007 and for the psychiatrists not to know that I was heterosexual but incredibly I believe this the case. Evidently many psychiatrists believe that all psychotics are sexually confused. I had said that I was straight in 2007 at my first engagement with the service but I believe it was thought that this was a delusion and the issue of my sexuality came directly only once, in early 2010, when I told my psychiatrist Tony Fernando that I had fallen in love. Fernando asked me, "A boy or a girl?" I said, "A girl." The girl was of course the one I call Jess.
From 2007 until early 2012 my psychiatrist was one Tony Fernando, a chap with a high profile in the media at the time; I knew at a glance, from my first appointment with him, that he was gay – although he never came out to me. When I first became 'ill' in 2007, I believed the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals, so having a psychiatrist who was one only exacerbated my condition. I was very ill indeed in 2007 and all of 2009. I knew also that I had been misdiagnosed from the first appointment with Tony, I intuited it, but simply never knew how to tell him he was wrong.
In 2013 when I re-entered the Service, I asked to see any psychiatrist other than Tony. I saw a locum called Dharma, an appointment that I have described in the post "Faith No More vs. Bruce Springsteen". When I saw him I said that I was straight and told him of the three women I had loved in my life. After two appointments with Dharma I saw Tony once (not at my request) and then began to see a psychiatrist called Jen Murphy. I was still trying to get it on the record unequivocally that I was straight and just before my first appointment with her I heard a voice saying, "Don't talk about love, talk about sex". So at that appointment I told her truthfully that the first time I had sex was New Years Eve 1997 and that the last time was a one night stand in Wellington in 2011. In fact, I've had two long term relationships in my life. From the age of 17 until the age of 21 I was in a relationship with a girl called Danielle Lander. From around the age of 23 until I was 28 I was sort of in a relationship with a girl called Maya Gilmour. I didn't completely break with Maya until 2008 – a year after I had become a patient of the Mental Health Service. Evidently neither relationship was in my record. (I should say that although the girl I call Jess is very dear to me, we were never in a relationship.)
When I told Jen this, I think she thought I was lying. It contradicted the diagnosis Tony had made of me, what was in my record, what she had been told about me. I think moreover that it was because she thought I was lying that she decided to diagnose me schizophrenic – up until then I had been diagnosed 'psychosis not otherwise specified'. I remember at one appointment her asking me sarcastically if I had a problem with 'phonies' – I thought of the The Catcher in the Rye and told her 'yes'. I knew at the time though that she was referring to me. I think in the intervening years they have been forced to realise that I wasn't lying and have confabulated other reasons for diagnosing me schizophrenic, I don't know what.
When it became apparent to me that, even though I had said I was straight, the shrinks didn't believe it, I decided that Tony must have lied about me. In fact, I thought this lie might have been made public. I tried to deal with this in the only way I could think of, by sending something like a short article to the journalist Steve Braunias effectively accusing Tony of being a homosexual sociopath who serially misdiagnoses his patients.
After this, having told Jen of the letter, I was coerced, under threat of being put under the Mental Health Act, into increasing my dosage of Olanzapine from 5mgs to 12.5 daily. I had never been on such a high dosage before. At this time, I was working as a Reader-Writer for AUT and, after my dosage was increased, I lost this job. I felt that I was the victim of a cover-up to protect Tony Fernando from charges of gross incompetence and the stress this caused me was the reason I lost this job. I no longer believed in the efficacy of medication and, although my mother in good faith ensured I took my dosage every night, I began to start vommiting it up. At an appointment with Jen I told her I was doing this; my mother said she couldn't be "a nurse and a mother at the same time" and Jen permitted me to go off the medication. I went from 12.5 to nothing – I would guess around November of 2013.
I admit I was ill in 2013. The psychosis started around January or February of that year, as I have recorded in earlier posts. As I have also said in earlier posts, my psychosis of that year entirely revolved around my concern for my friend Jess. After I was allowed to go completely off the drugs, as I said I think around November, I was almost well for several months. On January 17 2014, I attended the Big Day Out with my brother, sister-in-law, niece and some friends of hers. This was the last time for a number of years that I was happy – as I would say to my brother some time later, I liked seeing attractive young women in all directions. (At the time he replied, bizarrely and defensively, "Well, we all feel that way".) My mother was visiting Wanganui and so I slept that night at my brother's house. When I woke the next morning, lying in bed, I felt an incredibly unpleasant sensation – I felt as though there was a patina of gayness completely covering my skin. I got up and had a strange conversation with my brother in the kitchen – he had emerged from his bedroom wearing only boxers. I feel that he hadn't really enjoyed the festival the previous day, that it was a scene he didn't really understand. Later that day I travelled by bus to Wanganui, and felt some re-emergence of psychotic symptoms. I had written a story called "Misery" which I have not included in this blog but which I showed my god-mother. In the next week or two, my 'illness'' returned – I think the reason for this was that I sensed what was going to happen, that there was no escape, that whether I liked it or not I was going to be dragged back into the system. I had moments of discomfort around my mother and would go for walks into town to get away. Somehow I ended up back at the Taylor Centre, taken there by my mother – I can't remember precisely what immediately preceded this. I was dragooned into signing something, I don't know what, by Jen and about nine other people – it was either sign this form or run away, and the latter wasn't an option. This 'intervention' happened when my Key Worker was away on holiday. I was taken to a truly horrible respite facility at which I was forced to take Olanzapine, Lorazapam and Zopiclone. During this period women who I'd never seen before and would never see again would show up during the day to observe me and take note of my condition. I thought I was in hell – I only stayed at the respite facility for two nights. After this, after I had come home, for a period nurses would show up every night to force me to take my drugs and a week or two later I had a cursory judicial hearing and was officially put under the Mental Health Act.
I had committed no crime other sending a potentially libellous letter about Tony Fernando to a journalist and not wanting to take my medication, something permitted by my psychiatrist.
The unpleasant sensation I experienced the morning after the Big Day Out would continue to last for some time. Every morning, for years, I would awake with almost unbearable thoughts of homosexuality in my head, a 'symptom' that didn't stop entirely until the beginning of last year. These unpleasant hypnopompic thoughts and images began at my brother's house. I suspect, and this is the first time I've felt able to say this, that it is my brother who is ultimately responsible for the misdiagnosis I have lived with for the last ten years. My brother is fucked in the head.
I should say something more general about what it means to be a patient of the Mental Health Service. A patient has two main contacts with the service – his psychiatrist and his Key Worker. The Key Worker can be an Occupational Therapist, a nurse or a social worker. From 2007 until 2012 my Key Worker was an OT called Kate Whelan, a nice enough woman in some ways but I think with some serious psychological issues related to sexuality, a tendency to view all her patients as sexually muddled. When I re-entered the service in Easter 2013, I was given a new Key Worker, a social worker called Josh Brazil. My relationship with Josh began a little roughly but improved after some months. Josh, as I said, was away on holiday when I was put under the Act. I remember when I was seeing my insane psychologist Simon Judkins in 2014 Judkins saying to me, "Whether a person is gay or not is between him and God!" – I reported this exchange to Josh and Josh said, "Simon said that – to you, did he?". In mid 2015, I think, Josh left the Taylor Centre to go work at another DHB. My new key worker was a nurse called Terry. Once again my relationship with her began somewhat badly and improved when she got to know me. Terry performed the best service by me that any Key Worker I've had has ever performed. At an Independent Review in 2015 that I'd requested she told the Tribunal, "He hates people thinking he's gay because he's not." In 2016 Terry retired. It feels like since 2013 my Key Workers keep finding reasons to disappear. Since then I've had a new Key Worker, one like all the others I see infrequently, another social worker, this one called Daniel Moodley. Once again, the relationship started off tensely and has improved. At my last appointment with Jen he had to leave the room, as though he didn't want to be involved, didn't want to know what was said because that would make him complicit or culpable. My own feeling is that the ground level staff in the Mental Health System today are generally good, well-meaning people and that it is the psychiatrists (and psychologists) who are corrupt, who are more interested in protecting each other than treating their patients.
I'll make note of something else, something that may seem trivial but seems important. At the various reviews I've had, a supposed indication of my illness and my need to take medication is the fact that I would go for walks at night. Supposedly this was a sign that I was sick. Even though I am receiving monthly injections of Olanzapine, I still, even today, go for walks, sometimes at night. I live in Eden Terrace – often I'll walk along K Road, down Ponsonby Road and then back up Queen Street. I have been walking around town, sometimes at night, all my life. Jen Murphy has argued that these walks expose me to danger – but in all my years going for walks I have never been involved in a fight or even ever witnessed one. I have never been in danger. I know many of the homeless well enough to exchange greetings with them even though I don't know them by name. I fail to understand why walking is considered evidence of schizophrenia. Perhaps Jen wants to insinuate I am cruising for male prostitutes. I have never encountered a male prostitute once and of course wouldn't do anything even if I met one.
I'll conclude the post by saying something more general, something about the double bind all mental patients are in. When a diagnosis of schizophrenia is made, the patient must take drugs for the rest of his life; if he dares suggest that antipsychotics don't actually do anything he is considered to be showing lack of 'insight' and this is considered evidence that he should be forced to take them. It's a Catch-22. The fucked up thing is that antipsychotic medication doesn't work. The whole of psychiatry is based on a lie; this is the reason the psychiatric profession attracts stupid and dishonest people. My psychiatrist Jen Murphy, for instance, is an utter bigot and a liar. Psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical companies together have for decades been committing a crime against their patients, perhaps the greatest crime of the twenty-first century. I know from my own experience and from my observations of other patients that antipsychotics don't work; I suspect that they may even make people worse. John Nash believed that antipsychotics impede the process of recovery and I think he may be right. What better way to make someone ill and keep them ill then force that person to live a lie – to tell him repeatedly that the drugs he is taking help him when they don't at all and may even be making him sicker? As I have said before, I didn't start hearing voices until January 2009 after I had been on Rispiridone for a year and half; I was well in 2012 when I was only taking 5mgs; I was very ill just before I was put under the Act I admit but this was because I knew I was to be put under the Act; I was very ill again at the beginning of 2015, even a little suicidal, after I had been under the Act for a year. It's only in the last month or two that I've felt as well as I did in 2012. Jess would sometimes quote the Verve to me: "The drugs don't work, they just make things worse" and I know from my observations of her this to be true, that the drugs never worked for her. I think, incidentally, that just as I had been misdiagnosed homosexual, she had been misdiagnosed 'promiscuous' – the opposite of the truth. Yes, I admit I have been 'ill' sometimes but the my 'illness' has always been a result of others telling untruths about me, and of being trapped in a situation I can't escape.
Psychiatrists and psychologists didn't just invent homosexuality. They invented schizophrenia. If we go back over a hundred years, back to the time of Kraepelin, schizophrenics didn't hear voices. Instead they were more likely to hold delusions that they were people like Napoleon. In my ten years as a patient I have never met anyone who believes he was someone famous, someone he isn't. Schizophrenia has changed as the description has changed – psychiatrists create the condition they purport to describe. It's no science at all. The whole of psychiatry is just quackery.
Although my first psychotic episode wasn't caused by the Mental Health System, every subsequent episode was. And a big part of that was being stuck with a pervert psychiatrist who gets sexually excited whenever he has a male patient in his consultation room.
Sunday, 3 September 2017
Jon Stewart, Janet Frame and Katy Perry
Something that may have caused some misunderstandings in some of my posts, and in my interactions with friends and with people in the Mental Health Service, is my claim that I was 'imaginary friends' with Jon Stewart, that I used to talk with him in my head (and still occasionally do). 'Surely', people must wonder, 'wasn't this just a voice in your head that you decided to call 'Jon Stewart'?'. In fact, I feel almost as though I do know him and in today's post I want to try to explain why I feel this way. I also want to discuss Janet Frame again and talk a little about Katy Perry.
I started watching the Daily Show in 2008. (Contrary to my medical records, I was well that year.) The Daily Show screened four nights a week and those familiar with the show will remember that Jon didn't just talk about politics and Fox News but would also talk a lot about himself. So I picked up a lot of information about him. I knew early on, for instance, that Jon was Jewish, married to a Catholic woman and had a couple of kids. I remember an interview he conducted in 2008 with Tony Blair. Blair had converted to Catholicism, perhaps because of guilt about his involvement the invasion of Iraq, perhaps as a reaction to the public opprobrium he had endured since. Jon told Blair that his wife was Catholic. Blair was surprised and brought up the subject of Jon's children. He said, "How's that working out?" Jon replied, "We're raising them to be sad."
When I became ill again in 2009, the facts I had learned about Jon Stewart informed the presence I mentally invoked. If I'm to pretend to be rational about it. This is why I felt like I was genuinely speaking to him, particularly over the summer of 2009 and 2010. Some facts, such as his marriage, were obvious (although I didn't know Tracy's name at the time). Other facts I somehow intuited. In very late 2009 or early 2010, he told me, for instance, in my head, that he was uncomfortable around Wyatt Synach, that he didn't like the way Wyatt looked at him. Just today, I found out from a friend that Jon and Wyatt in reality did indeed have a difficult relationship and that Wyatt has opened up about this publicly afterwards.
A long time ago in this blog I described the evening Jon first spoke to me and though I have told this story before it is worth telling again. I had been hearing voices, typically when I was in bed, since around late January 2009 (although my records state that I was well during this period). Usually the people I heard, such as Helen Clark, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton among others, seemed already to know who I was. One night, however, sometime in 2009 before I went off the Rispiridone, I heard Jon in my head. He said, "Who the hell are you anyway?" I said, "Just a poor little schizophrenic living in New Zealand." He said, "Are you straight?" I said that I was, or at least I thought I was. He said, "What's the time difference?" I said, "About eight hours." We chatted for a bit. The next night, on his show, in his opening remarks, he referred to the conversation we'd had the previous night and then said, "Meanwhile, back here in America." It was extraordinary, unbelievable. Jon was the only person who ever spoke back to me in real life. It was after this and partly because of this that I adopted him as an imaginary friend.
At this point I need to go deeper than known facts. I believe that Jon was then secretly, or perhaps not too secretly, homophobic. I believe in fact that Jon even suffered a little from a paranoia that many of those around him were covertly gay. I know this sounds like projection but I believe something like it to be true. The Daily Show went off the air in New Zealand at the very end of 2009 and came back in early 2014 – and that year I saw Jon change, or try to. All that year he was presenting the case for gay marriage to the straight community; arguably Jon's advocacy in 2014 was instrumental in getting Marriage Equality passed into law in the States a few years ago. Perhaps the stress this advocacy caused him personally, this cognitive dissonance, was why he retired in 2015 to go live in 'a cabin in the woods' (as they say). It seems fucking obvious when you think about it. Not only did he have to battle to overcome his own homophobia, I believe there may have been rumours circulating about him which only made it worse. He had to make the case for gay marriage to the straight community, deal with this rumour and try not to seem a hypocrite while doing so; his choice that year was to argue that people are born one way or the other which is what the straight community believes. In fact, as I have said in an earlier post, his show helped me get through another awful year. It felt as though he had made the decision to argue that people are born one way or the other to help me personally. It was as though he had returned to New Zealand TV to save me.
I consider myself fairly intuitive. I suspect I intuited things about Jon and I suspect I also intuit things about others. I want now to talk about Janet Frame again and discuss my intuitions with respect to her. Frame couldn't be more different from Jon in some ways, for reasons I will discuss later. In other ways they are similar. I have discussed Frame in previous posts but I need to clarify what I have only intimated in those other posts, what my alert readers may have guessed. The first, and most obvious thing to say about Janet was how wonderful a person she was. She was sweet, innocent, sensitive, intensely shy, perhaps naive and for much of her life painfully lonely. She spent I think eight years in and out of lunatics' asylums even though she was never mad – I know there is differences of opinion about Frame on many matters such as the exact nature of her condition but I have decided to believe what she herself wrote in her autobiography rather than what others have said about her. Her treatment in hospital was awful. She received ECT over a hundred times; in those days, inmates were often given ECT as a punishment for misbehaviour. No psychiatrist at any time ever sat down and had a real conversation with her. She wrote a letter to her sister June in which she described the gorse as having a "peanut-buttery smell" – all letters dispatched from the asylums in those days were vetted and the doctors who read it decided her use of this metaphor was further evidence of her insanity. She was quoting Virginia Woolf.
What I believe or intuit is that the psychiatrists had, probably as the result of the sessions she'd attended with the arsehole psychologist John Money in 1945, diagnosed her as a lesbian – and declared her schizophrenic for this reason. I know this sounds unbelievable but I think it true. I think they had diagnosed her as a lesbian but she had no idea they had – and what makes this conjecture even more horrible is that Frame evidently didn't even know what lesbianism was herself. She only found out that homosexuality existed at all in the first few few years after she was formally released from the asylums, in the mid 'fifties, and living in a hut out the back of Frank Sargeson's house in Takapuna. She learnt Sargeson was gay then and met gay men and lesbian women for the first time in her life through him. She says about this period, "My life with Frank Sargeson was for me a celibate life, a priestly life devoted to writing, in which I flourished, but because my make-up is not entirely priestly I felt the sadness of having moved from hospital where it has been thought necessary to alter the make-up of my mind, to another asylum where the desire was that my body should be of another gender. The price I paid for my stay in the army hut was the realisation of the nothingness of my body. Frank talked kindly of men and of lesbian women, and I was neither male nor lesbian. He preferred me to wear slacks rather than dresses. I, who looked on Frank Sargeson as a saviour, was forced to recognise, through the yearning sense of gloom, of fateful completeness, that the Gods had spoken, there was nothing to be done."
When I wrote my previous post about Frame, I hadn't, unfortunately, quite finished An Angel at My Table. There is a chapter towards the end which is significant and which I'll talk about now. A friend of Frank, a woman who calls herself Paul, appears on the scene. Frank tells Frame, "She's a lesbian, you know." Frame goes to stay with Paul at Mt Maunganui. Prior to going, Frank explains to Frame what lesbianism actually is (she would then be about thirty or thirty one.) At Mt Maunganui, Paul makes the point of telling Frame, "I'm a Lesbian" (spelt with a capital L). They discuss poetry and Paul's life. Paul lends Frame The Well of Loneliness, the first book ever written about lesbianism, published in the Victorian Era and the cause of a considerable stir at the time, perhaps one of the books that invented lesbianism. Paul talks of past loves. Frame says of this brief stay the following: "I decided that I liked Paul, that she was just another of the misunderstood misfits of the world. I was repelled by the idea of both male and female homosexuality yet I was learning slowly to accept the sacred differences in people although I was then ignorant of biological and hormonal facts. I knew then only that such sexual differences threatened and hurt those who loved the opposite sex."
The passage requires some comment. First Frame's use of the word "repelled" sounds horribly un-PC to modern ears but, still, it is true that most heterosexuals have an aversion to homosexuality although people don't like to say this out loud today. Second, although Frame talks of "biological and hormonal facts", when she wrote An Angel at my Table doctors then didn't know the cause of homosexuality – and they still don't today. The medical profession is stupid. What I think is that someone provided Frame with a serviceable theory which she clung to to reassure herself that she wasn't a lesbian. Third, when I read this, it also struck me as profoundly sad: Frame clearly loved the opposite sex but apart from one short-lived fling, news of which emerged only after her death (and which I know little about), I don't believe she ever had any relationships with men at all.
The difference between Jon Stewart and Janet Frame is that Jon 'knew' what homosexuality was from childhood whereas Jean didn't find out until she was thirty.
The last person I want to talk about is Katy Perry. Katy has had a horrible year this year I think. In 2007 she became famous for the record "I Kissed A Girl" and I can remember in 2008 or 2009 Perry coming to Auckland and being asked by a reporter if that song was based on a real-life experience. Perry denied it. In the years since she has had a number of high profile relationships with men, including a two-year marriage to Russell Brand. In March of this year, Perry, during an acceptance speech at an LGBT awards ceremony, 'confessed' for the first time that the song was in fact based on a real life lesbian encounter, a relationship which she said had gone further than a kiss. In the months since, she has cut her hair short and dyed it peroxide blonde; she has talked of suffering terrible mental anguish. Perhaps she can't talk explicitly about has happened to her. It seems 'coming out' has caused her dreadful pain.
Queer theorists may at the moment be trying to convince the world that sexuality is 'fluid' but the heterosexual community simply doesn't seem to want to believe it.
I have said that my illness was a choice between Katy Perry and Lady Gaga. Katy actually featured briefly in my imaginings back in 2009 and I have for a long time liked Katy Perry more than Lady Gaga. In the end I decided to choose Perry over Gaga. Lady Gaga was wrong and Katy Perry was right – but it is Perry who has been punished. It seems, and this is the point of this post, that the world we live in routinely does terrible things to good people.
I started watching the Daily Show in 2008. (Contrary to my medical records, I was well that year.) The Daily Show screened four nights a week and those familiar with the show will remember that Jon didn't just talk about politics and Fox News but would also talk a lot about himself. So I picked up a lot of information about him. I knew early on, for instance, that Jon was Jewish, married to a Catholic woman and had a couple of kids. I remember an interview he conducted in 2008 with Tony Blair. Blair had converted to Catholicism, perhaps because of guilt about his involvement the invasion of Iraq, perhaps as a reaction to the public opprobrium he had endured since. Jon told Blair that his wife was Catholic. Blair was surprised and brought up the subject of Jon's children. He said, "How's that working out?" Jon replied, "We're raising them to be sad."
When I became ill again in 2009, the facts I had learned about Jon Stewart informed the presence I mentally invoked. If I'm to pretend to be rational about it. This is why I felt like I was genuinely speaking to him, particularly over the summer of 2009 and 2010. Some facts, such as his marriage, were obvious (although I didn't know Tracy's name at the time). Other facts I somehow intuited. In very late 2009 or early 2010, he told me, for instance, in my head, that he was uncomfortable around Wyatt Synach, that he didn't like the way Wyatt looked at him. Just today, I found out from a friend that Jon and Wyatt in reality did indeed have a difficult relationship and that Wyatt has opened up about this publicly afterwards.
A long time ago in this blog I described the evening Jon first spoke to me and though I have told this story before it is worth telling again. I had been hearing voices, typically when I was in bed, since around late January 2009 (although my records state that I was well during this period). Usually the people I heard, such as Helen Clark, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton among others, seemed already to know who I was. One night, however, sometime in 2009 before I went off the Rispiridone, I heard Jon in my head. He said, "Who the hell are you anyway?" I said, "Just a poor little schizophrenic living in New Zealand." He said, "Are you straight?" I said that I was, or at least I thought I was. He said, "What's the time difference?" I said, "About eight hours." We chatted for a bit. The next night, on his show, in his opening remarks, he referred to the conversation we'd had the previous night and then said, "Meanwhile, back here in America." It was extraordinary, unbelievable. Jon was the only person who ever spoke back to me in real life. It was after this and partly because of this that I adopted him as an imaginary friend.
At this point I need to go deeper than known facts. I believe that Jon was then secretly, or perhaps not too secretly, homophobic. I believe in fact that Jon even suffered a little from a paranoia that many of those around him were covertly gay. I know this sounds like projection but I believe something like it to be true. The Daily Show went off the air in New Zealand at the very end of 2009 and came back in early 2014 – and that year I saw Jon change, or try to. All that year he was presenting the case for gay marriage to the straight community; arguably Jon's advocacy in 2014 was instrumental in getting Marriage Equality passed into law in the States a few years ago. Perhaps the stress this advocacy caused him personally, this cognitive dissonance, was why he retired in 2015 to go live in 'a cabin in the woods' (as they say). It seems fucking obvious when you think about it. Not only did he have to battle to overcome his own homophobia, I believe there may have been rumours circulating about him which only made it worse. He had to make the case for gay marriage to the straight community, deal with this rumour and try not to seem a hypocrite while doing so; his choice that year was to argue that people are born one way or the other which is what the straight community believes. In fact, as I have said in an earlier post, his show helped me get through another awful year. It felt as though he had made the decision to argue that people are born one way or the other to help me personally. It was as though he had returned to New Zealand TV to save me.
I consider myself fairly intuitive. I suspect I intuited things about Jon and I suspect I also intuit things about others. I want now to talk about Janet Frame again and discuss my intuitions with respect to her. Frame couldn't be more different from Jon in some ways, for reasons I will discuss later. In other ways they are similar. I have discussed Frame in previous posts but I need to clarify what I have only intimated in those other posts, what my alert readers may have guessed. The first, and most obvious thing to say about Janet was how wonderful a person she was. She was sweet, innocent, sensitive, intensely shy, perhaps naive and for much of her life painfully lonely. She spent I think eight years in and out of lunatics' asylums even though she was never mad – I know there is differences of opinion about Frame on many matters such as the exact nature of her condition but I have decided to believe what she herself wrote in her autobiography rather than what others have said about her. Her treatment in hospital was awful. She received ECT over a hundred times; in those days, inmates were often given ECT as a punishment for misbehaviour. No psychiatrist at any time ever sat down and had a real conversation with her. She wrote a letter to her sister June in which she described the gorse as having a "peanut-buttery smell" – all letters dispatched from the asylums in those days were vetted and the doctors who read it decided her use of this metaphor was further evidence of her insanity. She was quoting Virginia Woolf.
What I believe or intuit is that the psychiatrists had, probably as the result of the sessions she'd attended with the arsehole psychologist John Money in 1945, diagnosed her as a lesbian – and declared her schizophrenic for this reason. I know this sounds unbelievable but I think it true. I think they had diagnosed her as a lesbian but she had no idea they had – and what makes this conjecture even more horrible is that Frame evidently didn't even know what lesbianism was herself. She only found out that homosexuality existed at all in the first few few years after she was formally released from the asylums, in the mid 'fifties, and living in a hut out the back of Frank Sargeson's house in Takapuna. She learnt Sargeson was gay then and met gay men and lesbian women for the first time in her life through him. She says about this period, "My life with Frank Sargeson was for me a celibate life, a priestly life devoted to writing, in which I flourished, but because my make-up is not entirely priestly I felt the sadness of having moved from hospital where it has been thought necessary to alter the make-up of my mind, to another asylum where the desire was that my body should be of another gender. The price I paid for my stay in the army hut was the realisation of the nothingness of my body. Frank talked kindly of men and of lesbian women, and I was neither male nor lesbian. He preferred me to wear slacks rather than dresses. I, who looked on Frank Sargeson as a saviour, was forced to recognise, through the yearning sense of gloom, of fateful completeness, that the Gods had spoken, there was nothing to be done."
When I wrote my previous post about Frame, I hadn't, unfortunately, quite finished An Angel at My Table. There is a chapter towards the end which is significant and which I'll talk about now. A friend of Frank, a woman who calls herself Paul, appears on the scene. Frank tells Frame, "She's a lesbian, you know." Frame goes to stay with Paul at Mt Maunganui. Prior to going, Frank explains to Frame what lesbianism actually is (she would then be about thirty or thirty one.) At Mt Maunganui, Paul makes the point of telling Frame, "I'm a Lesbian" (spelt with a capital L). They discuss poetry and Paul's life. Paul lends Frame The Well of Loneliness, the first book ever written about lesbianism, published in the Victorian Era and the cause of a considerable stir at the time, perhaps one of the books that invented lesbianism. Paul talks of past loves. Frame says of this brief stay the following: "I decided that I liked Paul, that she was just another of the misunderstood misfits of the world. I was repelled by the idea of both male and female homosexuality yet I was learning slowly to accept the sacred differences in people although I was then ignorant of biological and hormonal facts. I knew then only that such sexual differences threatened and hurt those who loved the opposite sex."
The passage requires some comment. First Frame's use of the word "repelled" sounds horribly un-PC to modern ears but, still, it is true that most heterosexuals have an aversion to homosexuality although people don't like to say this out loud today. Second, although Frame talks of "biological and hormonal facts", when she wrote An Angel at my Table doctors then didn't know the cause of homosexuality – and they still don't today. The medical profession is stupid. What I think is that someone provided Frame with a serviceable theory which she clung to to reassure herself that she wasn't a lesbian. Third, when I read this, it also struck me as profoundly sad: Frame clearly loved the opposite sex but apart from one short-lived fling, news of which emerged only after her death (and which I know little about), I don't believe she ever had any relationships with men at all.
The difference between Jon Stewart and Janet Frame is that Jon 'knew' what homosexuality was from childhood whereas Jean didn't find out until she was thirty.
The last person I want to talk about is Katy Perry. Katy has had a horrible year this year I think. In 2007 she became famous for the record "I Kissed A Girl" and I can remember in 2008 or 2009 Perry coming to Auckland and being asked by a reporter if that song was based on a real-life experience. Perry denied it. In the years since she has had a number of high profile relationships with men, including a two-year marriage to Russell Brand. In March of this year, Perry, during an acceptance speech at an LGBT awards ceremony, 'confessed' for the first time that the song was in fact based on a real life lesbian encounter, a relationship which she said had gone further than a kiss. In the months since, she has cut her hair short and dyed it peroxide blonde; she has talked of suffering terrible mental anguish. Perhaps she can't talk explicitly about has happened to her. It seems 'coming out' has caused her dreadful pain.
Queer theorists may at the moment be trying to convince the world that sexuality is 'fluid' but the heterosexual community simply doesn't seem to want to believe it.
I have said that my illness was a choice between Katy Perry and Lady Gaga. Katy actually featured briefly in my imaginings back in 2009 and I have for a long time liked Katy Perry more than Lady Gaga. In the end I decided to choose Perry over Gaga. Lady Gaga was wrong and Katy Perry was right – but it is Perry who has been punished. It seems, and this is the point of this post, that the world we live in routinely does terrible things to good people.
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