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.
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