Friday, 27 October 2017

Some Additions and Clarifications

In today's post, I want to clarify some aspects of my life, things I have alluded to in previous posts and which I want to elaborate on.

First I want to talk a little more about a chap I know, Yves, someone I have discussed a little in other posts. I am friends with Yves's younger brother Rene and have met Yves several times through Rene. As I have said in previous posts, Yves became unwell some years before I did at the same age as I did, was also treated by the same psychiatrist as I was, one Tony Fernando, was also diagnosed schizophrenic and was also put on Risperidone first and then Olanzapine later. I first met Yves a couple of years before I became 'ill' myself, at a party at Rene's house. I remember Yves, then a tall bulky guy with a paranoid mien, staring at me and blinking repeatedly as though he was trying and failing to work me out. At one point during the party he menacingly approached my girlfriend Maya as though he wanted to kiss her. I have since forgiven him for this invasion of my girlfriend's space. Yves is, I should say, heterosexual. In 2014 I hung out with Yves and Rene again and I remember him saying to Rene, "Well, you've had a woman more recently then I have!" In 2015 I asked him if he'd studied at University and he said that he did for a time because he was chasing a girl whose "pants he wanted to get into". I've actually met one of his ex-girlfriends, a woman who told me that Yves was very good looking when he was younger. Yves must now be around 42 or 43.

In 2014, just before New Year's Eve, I stayed with Rene, Yves and their father at their father's holiday home up north. While I was there, I told Yves about the satirical piece I had sent journalist Steve Braunias in which I strongly suggested that Tony Fernando was a homosexual sociopath who serially misdiagnoses his patients and falsifies patient records; when I told Yves this he seemed to fall into a state of profound confusion, as though he couldn't quite understand what I was telling him. Later that evening he stepped towards me as though he wanted to kiss me. I don't think this was a homosexual advance but rather a psychotic impulse he couldn't quite control. It was later that night that he asked me, in a paranoid sarcastic way, "Do you go to bars?" As I have said in an earlier post, I believe that Yves had told people in the Mental Health System that he sometimes went to bars and that they had decided he was going there to pick up gay men.

During this stay, at dinner once, Yves raised a toast to me, saying, "Here's to Andrew – let's hope they can understand him." I believe, to put it bluntly, Yves had been misdiagnosed homosexual by Tony, that this was the reason for his continuing illness. As I have said in earlier posts, Yves had told me that he got out of the system by "telling the psychologist what the psychologist wanted to hear". I believe he had lied to the psychologist he had seen, saying that he was gay even though he wasn't (or words to that effect), because this was the only way he could get out of the system. Unlike me, Yves had been hospitalised repeatedly.

I now want to turn to dates and events. In earlier posts, I have said that I started hearing voices in January 2009, after I had been on Risperidone for over a year and a half. In the post "What Happened in 2007 and 2009" I backtracked, and said that it might have been February. To be clear, the psychotic episode I experienced for all of 2009, except for a month in September, began the night of the Seven Worlds Collide concert at the Powerstation on January 7th. It was in full force on January 20th, the day of Barack Obama's inauguration, although I was then still to hear voices. It was between a week and a fortnight later I believe that I first heard a voice – specifically George W. Bush.

I haven't really heard voices for several months now but, a couple of weeks ago, while lying in bed, I briefly spoke with Stephen Colbert (telepathically of course). He asked me, "How did you know they had diagnosed you homosexual?" When I first made landfall at the Taylor Centre in 2007, I had told the first shrink I saw, a woman called Trish Van der Krallen, and the woman who was to become my key worker, Kate Whelan, "My father's gay, he divorced my mother when I was seven because he didn't want me to be gay and I want to come out as straight!" I was wrong about my father but the important part of the statement I made that day was the wanting to 'come out as straight' – a reaction principally to my terrible time at bFM and at the Big House, as I have described in the post "My First Psychotic Episode", but something I had needed to do for many years, ever since I was twenty-one and had written a gay spy film and ever since I had written an academic essay about the poet John Ashbery at the age of 23. I simply wanted it known publicly that I was straight; I wanted to be recognised by those around me as heterosexual. At my first appointment with Fernando, he told me that I had "suffered a dopamine explosion" and advised me to "stop avoiding". Of course, I knew at a glance Fernando was gay and could only conclude from what he had said that I had been diagnosed as a latent or closet homosexual – although of course he didn't tell me this explicitly. I would often think in later years that the term "dopamine explosion" might be a euphemism for "homosexual experience" – something I'd never had. I could only surmise that he thought I was gay because I'd said my father was gay, that the gay gene must be carried on the Y chromosome. Shortly after my first appointment with Fernando, I returned briefly to the Big House and told some of this to my best friend there. He said, "Do you want to know about my homosexual experiences?" When he asked me this, the darkness of the Homosexual Conspiracy descended all around me. I believed then that the only people who could have homosexual experiences were homosexuals, and the fact that my best friend could say that he'd had homosexual experiences without actually coming out as gay made him one of Them, yet another closet homosexual.

In the post "What Happened in 2007 and 2009" I recounted two experiences that occurred at the beginning of 2009 – the first being the moment when the nurse Avril I was seeing for 'therapy' falsely put in my record that I had issues with my mother and the second being when she and Fernando decided to put me on antidepressants even though I wasn't depressed. In that post, I put these two events in that order but I think now it was the other way around.

In that same post, I said that I had gone back to AUT to study IT in February 2009 and that I received an A in programming. I was then on 2.5mgs of Respiridone. After I was allowed to discontinue this horrible drug, I dropped out. This could be taken as evidence that I was well when I was on Respiridone and became ill when I discontinued it – but the reverse is true. When I was studying the programming paper, I had no contact with other people and was able to function despite my psychosis. Sometimes I thought others' thoughts were being projected into my mind. I remember one time in a computer lab imagining that the asian girl sitting across from me had telepathically broadcast the threat, "You will fail!" into my mind. My decision to drop out in the second semester, after I had gone off the Respiridone was because, having recovered some measure of sanity, I asked myself why I was studying IT when I didn't have the slightest interest in it. I made the decision to drop out because the decision to take this course in the first place had been a mad decision.

During my appointments with Tony Fernando in 2009 I was so sick as to be virtually catatonic. I was sometimes bombarded by voices on all sides. During 2010 and 2011 I was well, as I have said in other posts, but, because I disliked Tony so much, at my appointments with him I would stick with superficialities and get out of the room as quickly as possible. I didn't like being in his presence; he just struck me as someone false and mendacious. I only saw Tony once every few months and always with my mother and sometimes my father in attendance.

In the post, "What Happened in 2007 and 2009", I suggested that Fernando, colluding with Avril, had falsely put in my record that I had come out as gay and that this happened in January of 2009. If this was the case, as I believe it was, it illuminates something that happened later that year, before I went off the Risperidone. Fernando never asked me if I was gay or straight but at one appointment he asked me, with my parents in the room, in a deliberately off-hand manner,  "Do you stand up for yourself or are you a people pleaser?". I had no idea what he was talking about but opted for "people pleaser" – I was afraid of him, you see. The cunt smirked. I now realise that he was asking me if prefer to give or receive blowjobs from men. Can you imagine the sadism and brutality of a psychiatrist, a psychiatrist who had put me on 2.5mgs of Rispiridone, who had said to me on one occasion, "You know, I can put you in hospital if I want," asking me, a straight man, if I preferred to give or receive blowjobs? He was deliberately putting me in a false position, a double-bind. Is it any wonder I think all psychiatrists are going to burn forever in hell when they die?

To sense that one has been diagnosed as a latent or closet homosexual is a terrible thing because it is impossible to tell the doctor that he is wrong. It is also a terrible thing when the psychiatrist refuses to change his mind.

There are other additions and clarifications I would like to include in this blog but I can't include everything. I will try to mention one or two things though. One thing for instance that bothers me is that in 2013, when my current psychiatrist Jen Murphy diagnosed me schizophrenic (I can only assume because I had said that I was straight), I came very close to forming a relationship with the girl I call Jess. My shrink knew about it and about her. The relationship never came into existence and I have never worked out what happened to sabotage it. Towards the end of the year I met another girl, a girl called Heidi Brickle, a painter who I had discovered through a Poetry Open Mike night. I told my shrink about her as well. In fact I told the shrink, "I have good luck with ELAM girls". (Maya had also been an ELAM student.) There was simply no justification for Jen Murphy to continue to maintain the lie that was my misdiagnosis, a misdiagnosis I had lived with ever since my very first appointment with Tony. Since I have been under the Act I have had no luck with women whatsoever. I have always felt that I wanted it finally and definitively on my record that I'm straight before I get myself a real girlfriend.

I'll finish this post by talking a little about one last thing. Towards the end of January or the beginning of February 2014 I was bullied into going to stay at a truly horrible respite facility near Pt Chevalier, three days that paved the way for my being officially sectioned a week or two later. I have talked a little about this period in the posts "On Religion" and "The Double Bind Theory of Schizophrenia". This period was terrible for two reasons. First, I sensed that I was going to be put under the Mental Health Act regardless of anything I said or I did. Second, a memory of a delusion or hallucination that I had experienced in very early 2010 had returned, an experience I have referred to indirectly in the post "The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name"; I had talked about it in an email I had sent to Jess. The world was ending around me. My time at this Respite Centre was not characteristic of my health generally, was not characteristic of the previous year. In fact, I thought I was in hell (I was being forced every night to take three different types of drug). It was said about me at my first legal hearing, when I was officially put under the Act, that while I was at this respite facility I would go for walks and not return until 4 in the morning. This never happened. Every night I was in bed by 8:30. One night I woke up at 4AM and went out into the yard for a cigarette. It was then that I saw God. When I went back to bed, another patient followed me to my room and I think was dissuaded from coming in by the man in charge of the respite facility. The next night I ran home, partly by bus and partly by train. I was scared to death. I was returned to the Respite facility by my mother but ran away again, this time calling Heidi on my cell-phone, in a panic, knowing I needed somewhere else to stay and only thinking of her to call. I knew I couldn't remain another night there in that hellhole. I think this call frightened Heidi off and I have never spoken to her again since. I ran home again to my mother instead and this time was allowed to stay there.

I don't know how much longer I will need to keep writing this blog. Obviously I can't share every detail of my life and at some point I will have to get back to writing fiction. Perhaps this is the last post I will need to write.

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