Why I Am So Clever (complete draft)

[Note: for some reason, the last post I published only included half the essay I'd written. It doesn't include mention of the Postgraduate Diploma of Communications I completed last year. If you've already read the first part, skim through it (I may have revised it a little) until you find the paragraph dealing with MA in Creative Writing. I hope this post was written well enough. I didn't do a fine edit.]Once again I am in two minds about what to write about. I originally thought to write something about the concept of "mental illness". I regard "mental illness" as a metaphor, that one should more honestly talk of people experiencing sadness or madness or anxiety, usually occasioned by life experiences. Today, however, most people, influenced by the current vogue in language use, tend to regard this metaphor as a literal truth rather than a figure of speech, to assume that "mental illness" is literally an illness, to be treated like an illness. Like I said, this was originally what I intended to write about. Instead, however, I want to talk about my life again, following on from the previous post. I hope it will be interesting.

I want instead to talk about my academic history. I sometimes think that others out there in the wider world know a little of my grades and I wish to furnish some explanation for why they are so uneven. The intention is to justify a claim to cleverness – "Why I Am So Clever" was the title of the last book Nietzsche wrote before he completely lost the plot in 1888. Hopefully, I won't descend into catatonic insanity as a result of writing this post.

After leaving school, having received an A Bursary, I went to study in Dunedin. In seventh form, I had started 'going steady' (as the Americans say) with my first girlfriend, Danielle, but I had made up my mind to study at Otago the next year before I'd met her and for reasons I can no longer remember stuck to this plan. I lived in Dunedin for two years at the Hall of Residence, Knox College. For the first term, Danielle and I were in a long-distance relationship; during the holidays we broke up (oddly enough because I accidentally told her that I loved her) and I was single for a term. Then we got back together again at the next holidays and remained in a long-distance relationship with her for the rest of my time in Dunedin. Danielle was two years younger than me. We spoke on the phone for hours at least once a week; I saw her every holiday; she came skiing with me and my family on one occasion; her mother even flew me back to Auckland in 1999 so I could accompany her to her seventh form ball. I think she regarded my life in Dunedin as glamorous or exciting because, at our age, a two year difference seems like a lifetime.

I loved Dunedin. I'd hated being forced to go to school, being given detention repeatedly for failing to do my homework, being continually in trouble with the teachers, being graded and ranked. In Dunedin, I could skip lectures if I wanted to. I performed badly academically, and even failed a few papers, not because of a lack of aptitude, but because of the number of lectures I missed, often by sleeping right through until lunchtime. I did a film paper, which I should have loved, but which I failed because I only attended one lecture. In the first year, I was enrolled in a conjoint, first English and Biology, then English and Physics, then finally just English after I dropped out of the BSc altogether. I now regret this waste of money and squandering of educational opportunity very much, this failure to engage with the University. But my time in Dunedin was far from a waste. Knox had a vibrant culture and social life, much of it revolving around binge drinking. I made friends, my best friend being a chap called Caleb, from Whangarei, who started off doing an LLB and BA in Philosophy and dropped out of the LLB in second year. We drank whiskey, played chess, listened to Jeff Buckley and Radiohead (when I had control over the stereo) and Bob Marley (when he was in control of it) every night. It was, by and large, a good time in my life.

Knox College had a friendly rivalry with another Hall of Residence, Selwyn College. The two colleges would compete through 'sports' and through cultural activities. There was a drama competition. In my first year, 1998, I wrote a kind of extended skit about a scarfy flat, featuring the devil, and performed in it alongside a friend who was known at Knox by the moniker "The Eighties Man" because he only liked hair metal. At the beginning of 1999, I asked if for that year's competition I could write a proper, real half-hour play, and the student in charge of Cultural Affairs allowed me. I would spend hours, often very late at night, writing it, over several months. It was my first serious sustained effort to write a story; it took me a chunk of the year. The play, called "Skimmers" was totally straight: it was about the breakup of a relationship between a boy and girl, both second year students at Otago University. I can remember, when writing it, having an insight into the protagonist's character: I decided after struggling with the writing for a while and failing to find an authentic feel, that she should be self-aware enough to almost know that she was a character in a play. It was in this way that I found her voice. The play was rich with references to Dunedin, to the pubs, to university, to the cultural scene. When it was performed, to the other students at Knox and the students at Selwyn, I noticed that the audience burst into coughs at every scene change; I worried that this meant they were bored but my friends told me afterwards that the people watching were holding their breath and waiting for scene changes to cough. A little later, I was in at the English department and a lecturer, who had attended the play, decided to introduce me to another lecturer as "the next Roger Hall". I hope this was intended as a compliment. The Master of Knox College even wrote a glowing tribute, pinned to the cork wall that messages were pinned to, saying something about how the play was a true depiction of student life and saying that I had depths that he hadn't expected.

At the end of second year, I had a choice. Either I could stay in Dunedin with my friends or I could go back to Auckland to be with Danielle. I chose my love for Danielle over my friendship with Caleb. My mother sometimes says that I made a mistake coming back to Auckland, that I was making a name for myself in Dunedin, but coming back to Auckland did have some beneficial effects. I started going to lectures regularly and, in the second semester of third year, received my first A+. It was in a paper called Critical Thinking. This was a fantastic paper: at every lecture a different lecturer would present a summary of some facet of modern theory, such as Derrida's theory of deconstruction, Said's theory of the Orientalism, or Lacanian ideas about desire. I learned that they way to approach the study of English literature was through the prism of Theory. The essay that I wrote for this paper was about desire and in the exam I wrote about rhetoric, using a scene from the Lord of the Rings as an example.

Danielle and I would at least once a week go to play pool at a pool hall, and sometimes went clubbing with her friends. I think this was the best year of my life.

When I finished the BA, I went to London to visit my brother. I had made up my mind to do an MA in English Literature, largely because I enjoyed it and because it just seemed natural to remain at the University for a little while longer. I decided to enrol in a screen-writing paper. When applying, you had to provide a brief outline of a short film and a feature film. I had an idea for a feature film about a failing stand-up comic who makes friends with the devil. I had two ideas for a short film. One was about God, in which God is a motel owner living in Tolaga Bay. The other was a gay spy film. I sent my application from London, I think.

When I returned to New Zealand, Danielle broke up with me. She had met someone else.

For the next two years, I studied for the MA. I received fairly good grades, usually As and sometimes A+s. However, as I said in the previous post, I believe that my decision to write a short film about gay characters rebounded badly on me. The screen-writing course was taught by Schuchi Kuthari (I may have spelt her name wrong). I think the short film led her and the other lecturers to believe me to be gay. In fact, none of the essays I wrote over those two years had the slightest relation to sexuality. I tended to try to come up with my own theories and my own interpretations of the books we studied. For instance, when writing about Huckleberry Finn, I devised a theory of humour. I wrote an essay about a poem by Alan Curnow, "Spectacular Blossom" in which I argued that the influential interpretation of it by CK Stead was wrong. I didn't engage with Queer Theory at all – my knowledge of Foucault was then limited, inaccurate, based mostly on hearsay.

Although I mainly received excellent grades, I did fail one paper, the paper on New Zealand Literature. I failed it because I sensed that the lecturer, Terry Sturm, didn't like me – I didn't show up for lectures and didn't hand in an essay. Sturm had been a friend of Janet Frame and this may be partly why he took a dislike to me. Because of that failed paper, I didn't get a First Class Honours and had to return to Auckland University for another semester in 2003. In 2003 I did a paper on Old English and Middle English for which I received an A+. For that paper, I wrote a Lacanian interpretation of Sir Gawain and The Green Night.

Even during my MA, I wasn't always the best student. But then none of us were. I remember at the beginning of a lecture on Modern Poetics the lecturer, Wystan Curnow, asking the class, "What did you think about Creeley's essay?" We had been tasked with reading Creeley's important manifesto "Projective Verse." We all looked at each other. Wystan said, "None of you have read it?" and then stormed out of the class. He returned after a couple of minutes and resumed the lecture anyhow. However, neither was I an altogether bad student. An MA in English involves a considerable amount of reading – for instance, when studying Herman Melville, we had to read a novel a week (we had a fortnight for Moby Dick). It was tough enough reading the required texts, let alone the supplementary readings, but, in the main, we succeeded.

In 2003, I decided that I wanted to become a lecturer I was told that I really needed a PhD from an American University. In 2004, I went to Europe and, when I returned, completed a Certificate of Proficiency researching the poet John Ashbery, with Wystan as my supervisor. The reason I decided to write about Ashbery was that I had never really 'got' postmodern poetry, and I thought that if I undertook an intensive study of his work, I could understand one of the pioneers. As I said in the post "Bullshit" and the previous post, I decided, after reading his incredibly long and difficult poem Flowchart, that in it he was coming out as gay. The essay I ended up writing about Ashbery was convoluted, impenetrable. Aside from the gay-spy film I wrote in 2001, this was the only work I wrote which tackled gay topics at all.

Although I didn't think much about this at the time, in the years since I completed my study at the Auckland University English department, I have worried about a terrible question. Did I receive the grades I did out of merit? Or was it because they thought I was gay? To put it another way, was I perhaps the victim of reverse-discrimination or affirmative action? When I look back, I seek evidence that I was indeed quite clever. I gave a presentation on James Joyce's "The Dead" which was well received. I had worked out my interpretation of it the morning before I gave it. Afterwards, one of my fellow students said, "You worked that all out this morning?" When wanting to go study in the States, I had to sit a series of examinations for prospective postgraduate students there, a set of exams called the Graduate Recruitment Examinations. I sat three multiple-choice exams, one testing my knowledge of literature, one testing the size of my vocabulary, and one testing my mathematical abilities. I also had to write a short essay testing my ability to construct an argument. I did badly in the essay for some reason but quite well in the other three exams. Shall I tell you my marks? I'll tell you my marks. In the literature test, I think I beat 94% of the other applicants. In the vocabulary test, I beat 99% of the other applicants. In the mathematics exam, I only beat 95% of the other applicants – but then I got 100% and so this only shows that 5% of those sitting this test also got 100%.

Using my results in the GRE and my essay on Ashbery, I applied to five or six American universities. I only applied to top tier universities, Harvard, Yale, MIT, Berkeley... This may seem arrogant but in fact my self-esteem was direfully low. Subconsciously, I didn't want to go and so I sabotaged myself by only applying to universities that wouldn't accept me. It was an act of self-sabotage. I have a good friend who applied for scholarships to a few American universities but had a back-up school, Perdue, to which he was accepted. He would go on to complete a PhD specialising in disability studies.

I floated around for six months, worked briefly as a Barista (I should add that I'd worked at the Royal New Zealand Yacht squadron between 2001 and 2004) and then, halfway through 2005, my father and step-mother effectively coerced me into studying to become an English teacher. I decided that I wanted to try to teach Physics as well, and went back to University in the second semester. I did papers in the Philosophy of Science, in Physics, and in Pure Math. I scraped a pass in the Physics paper and failed the Math paper – I failed it because I thought I could jump straight into a second year course but didn't understand matrices.

In 2005, I also started working as phone-bet operator for the TAB, a job I held until the phone-bet centre was shut down in 2013.

In 2006, I went to the Teachers Training College run by AUT. It wasn't really a graded course and so I don't remember my grades.  I dropped out in the second semester. The reasons I dropped out are various. That same year I went to live at the Big House and it was hard to juggle my social life, the intense work schedule of the one year postgraduate course in teaching, and my job at the TAB. Plus, I didn't really want to be a teacher at all. When I was on placement, I would wake up at 4AM, go to my mother's house, and plan the day's lessons there, with little idea of what I intended to tach. At night, I would deliberately put the next day's lessons utterly out of my mind, because I disliked teaching so much.  The support I received from other teachers at the school was utterly inadequate. The third school I was sent to was my old school, Auckland Boys Grammar, and I taught there, or tried to teach there, for six weeks. During my placement, my father had his sixtieth birthday party, which was held in Sydney. I was flown to Australia for a week-end, time I really couldn't afford to spend on something frivolous. At the party, my father sat with the bigwigs of the Commonwealth Bank (he was then Chairman of the ASB Board of Directors); my older brother and half-sisters sat at a table near him. I was stuck in a corner of the room with my father's younger brother Ian – we both sensed we were somehow redundant to proceedings. The seating plan had been arranged by my step-mother. Now, I don't talk much about my family in this blog but I think I need to say that my then step-mother is Jan Doogue, who is currently New Zealand's chief district court judge. I never liked her and she never liked me. I think it fair to say that the only member of my family with whom I've never had tension is my mother.

I hated being back at Auckland Boys Grammar and this party utterly ruined my self-confidence. I was only studying to become a teacher because I had been emotionally blackmailed into studying it by my father and step-mother, and then they didn't even have the courtesy to sit me near my father at his birthday. I also believe that the rumour that I was gay followed me to Teachers Training College and then to the schools at which I taught. I remember during a class on the North Shore one of lecturers, not at my instigation, asked me to explain Foucault to the class. I did a very ham-fisted job because, at that time, I knew very little about Foucault at all.

In September I dropped out. For a period, I didn't know what to do with myself, and then decided that maybe I should go to bFM, to reacquaint myself with Jose Barbossa and maybe help out at the radio station. My reasons for doing so weren't clear to me but it was partly that I thought that bFM represented a kind of community, a culture that would accept me, a culture totally different to the one I had found myself in at Teachers Training College and particularly at Auckland Boys Grammar. It was after I worked there that I went nuts. I have talked about this in the posts "My First Psychotic Episode" and "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM".

In 2007, of course, I was 'unwell'. I recovered in January 2008. I was now a patient of the Mental Health Service and on the sickness benefit and so I felt licensed to do what I wanted, which was simply to study. I went back to Auckland University and took a philosophy paper on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. I wrote an essay about the Platonic aspects of Schopenhauer's philosophy and, although I passed, think I only got a C+. I couldn't understand why I'd got such a low grade. This essay was at least as good as the ones I'd written during my MA. My friend Jess, who also took the same paper, had a similar experience: I think, like me, she had been penalised for not simply regurgitation the lecturer's trite banalities. In the exam, I left after an hour because I couldn't think of anything more to say about Nietzsche. In the second semester, I did papers on French and German philosophy but dropped out, although I continued to attend lectures.

In January 2009, I again became 'unwell' and for the first time began hearing voices. Back then, my mother and I both believed that my 'illness' was temporary (which it would have been if I had been treated better by the Mental Health System) and we were still thinking in terms of a future career. My mother had heard that there was lots of jobs in IT, so I went back to AUT to study computing. In the first semester, I did a paper on Programming for which I received an A. In the second semester, I dropped out. Now, if someone were to compare my periods of wellness and illness to my academic transcript, it would be reasonable to assume that during the first half of 2009, when I was taking rispridone,  I was well, and that I became ill in the second half of the year after I went off it, and this is the reason I dropped out of AUT. Incredibly, the reverse is true. I was quite psychotic during the first semester. I have experienced visual hallucinations perhaps two or three times and one of those occasions was in early 2009 – I thought my fellow students were wizards from the discworld series. On another occasion, I was in a computer lab and I thought an Asian girl had telepathically projected the thought, "You will fail" into my mind. I was allowed to discontinue rispiridone in August 2009, and was very close to sane for a month or two. It was during this period of sanity that I decided to drop out, because I had realised that I simply didn't want to go into IT.

In 2010 and 2011, I didn't study, although I was well. In 2012, I went to AUT and completed a Masters in Creative Writing. I have talked about this before, particularly in the post "Screenplays and Their Reception." It was a pointless degree; the only thing I got out of it was that I finished a draft of the film about Jess. The lecturers were uninterested. The truth is, either a person is a writer or a person isn't. I can't remember my grade (it was probably some kind of B) but I think the lecturers and examiners didn't know much about film and didn't know how to grade the film I'd written.

Last year, 2017, I went back to AUT again, this time to study a Postgraduate Diploma in Communications, a degree that can pave the way for work in advertising, journalism and PR, among other fields. My marks again weren't brilliant but, although I withdrew from a paper, I passed everything else. My best mark, an A-, was in Brand Management, ironically the subject I knew least about and for which I just regurgitated one of the set texts. The subject I knew the most about, Popular Culture, was the one for which I got the lowest mark. A number of the essays I wrote for this degree I included in this blog; I think I wanted my actual essays in the public domain so that readers could judge for themselves whether the marks I received were reflective of the quality of the essays. In fact, I suspect, without hard evidence, that the reason I received such a bad mark for the first Pop Culture essay, one I have included in the blog under the title "Genre and The Much Reported Death of the Author", is that it was so original my lecturer thought I'd plagiarised it. Later in the year, I think the department decided that I might have self-plagiarised. In fact, although I'd thought about the films I talked about a lot, such as the sequel to Trainspotting, I'd never written about them before.

If I did badly in this degree, there were a number of factors in play. I was a mature student; I had low-self esteem; I was tranquillised; I didn't put in all the required work. I missed lectures, didn't do the homework and wrote the essays a day or two before submitting them. I didn't see how I could translate this degree into any kind of real employment.

Because I'd withdrawn from a paper, I decided to complete the degree by doing a Research Paper on Narrative Theory through the University of Auckland at summer school, and I want to say something about this paper. My supervisor, Brian Boyd, is a very nice man but I am going to be a little critical of him in discussing this experience. Brian is, I think, best known for writing a book called The Origin of Stories and is the department's resident expert on narrative theory. After consideration, Brian decided to take me on as his student, based on my grades from my MA, and in our first email communication told me in effect of his dislike of pop culture texts like The Lord of the Rings. At AUT, I'd been taught by a lecturer who was a pop-culture partisan, a woman who I think looked down on high-culture fans as pretentious snobs, who had contemptuously dismissed me, without evidence, as a devotee of WH Auden; back at the University of Auckland, I was being taught by a high-culture snob who looked down on pop-culture fans and who had dismissed me as a fan of Star Wars and fantasy books likewise without knowing anything about me. The truth, in fact, is that I don't distinguish between high-culture texts and popular culture texts – I like them both. I have just finished Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler but I also enjoy Rick and Morty and Family Guy. I suspect in fact that, even though I'm not gay, I was the victim of homophobia, from both ends of the spectrum. Both high culture partisans and popular culture partisans want to see gay men as stupid, both seek to distance themselves from it – intelligence is confused with pretension by some, while others cling to their pretensions because their self-image depends upon it.

In the Humanities, fashions in philosophy come and go, and success as an academic depends upon hitching one's horse to the right theory, the currently in vogue. During my MA, I once told a lecturer that I liked Baudrillard. She put in my place by saying, "Oh, no one reads Baudrillard any more" – as if whether a person is read has any bearing on whether that person is right or not. Twenty years ago, the fashion in the Humanities was postmodernism, that strain of thought that began perhaps with Nietzsche and stretches through Derrida and Foucault, among others. Today, although there are still postmodernists around, the fashion is neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, a reaction against postmodernism in favour of science. I don't like either. Neuroscience is still far too underdeveloped to have any bearing on literary interpretation, if it ever will, and evolutionary psychology is all speculative and unfalsifiable, in the same way that Karl Popper said that Freud was unfalsifiable. Brian had hitched his horse to the evolutionary psychology bandwagon. I read a little of his book because he kindly sent me a chapter. I found it rich in reference to subjects like zoology and anthropology but unconvincing – Brian seemed to be seeking to show a continuum between animals and humans, and between story-telling and other forms of communication. At one point, he suggests that reading competence is genetic but that there are probably many genes involved (as there are many genes involved in stature) and approving cites "selfish gene theory". I think to the contrary that if I, for instance, am a highly competent reader, it isn't because of my genes but because I've read so much. And, as I've already said in this blog, I don't agree with Richard Dawkins (the architect of selfish gene theory). In fact, I believe that Dawkins, in recent years, has been disproved, as a Lamarckian view of hereditary supplants Mendelian genetics.

Brian and I approach literary interpretation from two entirely different perspectives. There is something paradoxical in both our positions. Brian is, in a sense, more 'objective', more 'scientific' than I am– but at the same time he seems to believe that there is no such thing as a correct interpretation. I am more postmodern in the sense that I believe reality is mostly composed of our beliefs about it – but at the same time I believe there is always a best interpretation of a book, film, or poem. Brian seems to regard stories as representations of more or less realistic characters in more or less realistic settings acting in more or less realistic ways, as a 'display of a state of affairs'. I see stories as having a subterranean logic, as being rhetorical arguments, instantiations of an interplay between abstract ideas. For instance, I believe There's Something About Mary dramatises an uncertainty in the public mind as to difference between 'love' and 'sexual obsession' – the humour and conflict arises from this uncertainty. Are the two perhaps the same thing? The film ends, reassuringly, by providing a criterion for the difference – true love puts the love-object's happiness first while sexual obsession doesn't. Star Wars is a rhetorical argument dedicated to the premise, "Good always triumphs over evil." Joyce's "The Dead" concerns 'vanity' – it dramatises the way Gabriel Conroy, who egotistically views himself as the centre of the universe, finds his vanity threatened and then finds a way, through self-pity, to restore his vanity. A Beautiful Mind is a rhetorical argument in favour of the idea that 'schizophrenia' is a causeless disease that can only be treated with medication. More recently, Bohemian Rhapsody presents an argument that a heterosexual man can turn homosexual – a position that has led it to be attacked from both ends of the spectrum, has offended both right-wing homophobes and many members of the LGBT community. In other words, I see stories as emerging from the culture and speaking back to it, as being rhetorical in the sense that they seek to persuade the community of the truth of some set of propositions.

Brian and I communicated a couple of times by email and I tried to give him some sense of my philosophical position. He told me that the postmodern assertion that there is no such things as objective truth is self-refuting – a sentiment I had heard before which I regard as a trite banality (it had been expressed by the Nietzsche lecturer as well). He lent me Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction. I wrote a draft in which I interpreted Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, There's Something About Mary and The Shining. I worked out my interpretation of The Shining after watching it again – my conviction was that, if my approach was valid, it should be applicable to all 'good' (i.e. popular and successful) stories, including ones I hadn't already analysed. When I sent my draft to Brian, I said that I also wanted to interpret Joyce's "The Dead" and he wrote back to say that he didn't think "The Dead" would fit with an essay "of this sort". He also said, rightly, that I hadn't done enough research and suggested Levin's "New Readings of Old Plays". Levin's work was crushing, I think deliberately so. Brian thought my approach was basically a kind of thematic reading, was pointing out that thematic interpretations were old-hat, and trying to convince me that nothing new can be said about anything. I think he possibly dislikes thematic readings on principle.

So I borrowed a couple of books from the library on narrative theory to try to get some sense of the state of the field. I discovered a discipline with no idea of its subject. The word "narrative" is defined so broadly as to be virtually meaningless. Narrative is "a report of connected events" and some have even argued that a narrative can consist of a report of a single event. I found that the theorists accepted this definition and would then move on to interpret writers like Proust and Homer, when they could just as justifiably have been discussing newspaper articles, advertisements, and anecdotes, even obituaries. I found that the theory I wished to formulate didn't fit with the concerns of modern narrative theory at all, with concepts like sujet and fabula, with problems to do with reference and verisimilitude. I abandoned my original essay entirely. Having noticed that a weakness in narrative theory is that it doesn't consider stories from the author's perspective, doesn't account for where fictions come from, I suggested to Brian that I write interpretations of two of my own stories, the films "Bruce Sells Out" and "The Hounds of Heaven" explaining the creative process behind them. If I'd pursued this plan, it would have made for a very odd essay indeed. Brian, knowing that I was interested in narrative as rhetoric, had recommended two books by modern theorists, one of them The Rhetoric of Fictionality by Richard Walsh. When I plunged into Walsh's book, I found it almost incomprehensible. But I noticed that he had used, as examples, Kafka's The Trial and an excerpt from Gaiman's The Sandman, two works I had loved as a teenager. I took this as a sign. I wrote to Brian and said that I had decided to write about Walsh instead.

I wasn't altogether well during this period. From the beginning, I felt that Brian was trying to squash me. Perhaps it is is the attitude of a well-respected, tenured professor to an upstart nobody who has pretensions to originality without being versed enough in all the scholarly literature. Perhaps the English Department knew something of my situation and he was trying to squash me deliberately. Perhaps I am just stupid. Re-reading Walsh, I made more sense of it. There were reasons I had difficulty understanding it, though. First, Walsh references a number of narrative theorists I knew little about. Second, although the book is dense, interesting, and thought provoking, it is fundamentally incoherent. Walsh defines 'fiction' differently at different times and never defines the term 'rhetoric'. Although I think most people view 'rhetoric' as a form of 'persuasive speech' (employing devices like irony, analogy, figurative language, and so on), Walsh never addresses the idea of 'persuasion' at all. Although his ostensible intent is to draw a line between fiction and non-fiction, to reintroduce fictionality as a necessary term in narrative theory (which often doesn't draw the distinction between fictional and non-fictional narratives), Walsh often seems to be suggesting that everything is fiction, that there is no distinction between dreams and reality, that narrative is a way of imposing order on chaos when everything is chaos. Walsh is postmodernism in narrative theory taken to its logical conclusion. In my essay I said that I thought Walsh was "on the lip of a precipice he couldn't bring himself to look over."

My essay was partly a summary of the book and partly an extension of the book. I raised the problem at the books heart, the problem of definitions. What do the words 'fiction', 'rhetoric' and 'narrative' actually mean? Central to Walsh's argument, is his notion of 'relevance theory' – after the essay was marked, Brian told me that he thought I had misunderstood the notion. In fact, I think Walsh's idea of 'relevance theory' is also unclear, incoherent, and in the essay I had tried to improve upon it. I discussed biopics and concluded by suggesting that to make sense of fiction, of stories, one requires a fusion of Karl Jung and Michel Foucault.

I want to say something about why I ventured to bring Foucault into an essay on narrative theory. People with a rudimentary idea of Foucault know him only as a gay philosopher or social historian who wrote about madness, the prison system, and homosexuality. In fact, what I get from Foucault is the idea that society's understanding of the world is informed by abstract concepts (like 'schizophrenia' and 'homosexuality') and that these concepts have a history. Foucault is a 'nominalist' – that is, he denies the existence of abstract objects. As I understand him, perhaps imperfectly, he argues that the concept of 'homosexuality', homosexuality itself in fact, was invented in the late nineteenth century by psychiatrists, and didn't exist before then. In the essay, I suggested that Walsh was groping towards an 'aesthetic' understanding of narrative and, although I didn't spell this out in the essay, my decision to bring aesthetics into the essay was stimulated by my thinking about Foucault. It had occurred to me that if the concept of 'homosexuality' only came into existence in 1888 or 1893, whenever it was, and didn't exist before then, perhaps there were concepts that once existed but now no longer do. After pondering this question for a little while, it occurred to me that the concept of the 'aesthetic' is a good candidate for an idea that once meant something but which disappeared sometime in the early or mid twentieth century. "Aesthetics" literally means "the study of beauty" and is completely absent from modern narrative theory and almost completely absent from the study of English literature today. One could perhaps write a whole a book about how and why 'aesthetics' as a concept vanished.

Brian gave me a B, a middle of the road grade suggesting he wasn't really sure what grade to give me. In a way, we were always too different. I think Brian relates to the characters in the fiction he loves, characters like Emma Bovary or the characters in Shakespeare, as though they are real people; I see films, TV shows, novels, and poetry as physics problems to be solved or puzzles to be deciphered, and treat all fictions, whether Moby Dick or an episode of Friends in the same way. My attitude can suck the joy out of fiction consumption among those who live vicariously through the novels they love. Ironically, however, although I am not a copious writer of fiction, I have written enough to understand fiction from the author's point of view. Many English professors don't. (This includes Walsh.)

I want to make two general observations about Universities today. Successive governments have promoted the policy that the role of tertiary institutions is to prepare people for work – this has put the squeeze on subjects like philosophy, sociology, anthropology, English lit, classics, and art history, subjects that don't clearly point people in the direction of jobs. Even during my MA, a long time ago, I felt that there were only three careers open to me – becoming an English teacher at a high school, becoming a university lecturer... or becoming a writer (a career that makes no money at all). I wish to make a plea for the benefits of these 'soft' subjects. The study of English literature teaches reading comprehension and critical thinking. Most importantly, though, it teaches empathy – a good novel takes one inside someone else's mind. The medical schools these days encourage trainee doctors, who are good at rote-learning which antibiotic to prescribe for a boil but often lack social skills, to watch The Simpsons, because research has suggested fiction consumption can improve a person's understanding of others. If watching The Simpsons can bolster a person's ability to empathise, perhaps reading Woolf and Joyce and Hemingway, would help even more.

But there is a problem in these soft subjects. How can we objectively assess the quality of an essay? During my brief stint working as a trainee teacher at Auckland Boys Grammar, I set as homework for a class of extremely bright Year 9 students the task of writing a short story. This school has the ridiculous system of placing students in classes ranging from A to M, in some years, based on their aggregated exam results. At the end of each semester, each student receives a report stating his relative position in the class for every subject and his place in the class overall. The night after I received the boys' stories, I sat for hours in the school staff-room, by myself, long after darkness had descended all around me, trying to put thirty mostly excellent and totally heterogenous short stories in order from best to worst so that I could grade them – an impossible task. If I could go back in time to those terrible days, I would have just given them all Excellences for having completed the assignment.

In this blog, I have written multiple posts about the clinical psychologist I saw weekly for about eight or nine months in 2014. At one of the last appointments, he said to me, "Are there any gay people you like?" I couldn't understand why he'd asked me this question and said, "I like Michel Foucault." I could have easily said that I liked Stephen Fry, or Graham Chapman, or Michael Stipe. But I sensed I was in a trap – there was no right answer. To say you like Michel Foucault, among many people, is seen as a sign of homosexuality (the wikipedia page on Foucault is enough to show this bigotry). To say that I didn't like any gay men at all would have made me a homophobe. And homophobia is also considered a sign of homosexuality. It's the trap I've been in for much of my life. This is yet another reason why I hated him.

Cannabis and the Causes of Schizophrenia

In America, a number of states have legalised cannabis and the same move is being considered here in New Zealand by parliament. In fact, just a day or two ago, the Drug Foundation called for the decriminalisation of all illicit drugs so that addiction can be considered a health issue rather than a legal issue. If this proposal were to be accepted, New Zealand would be following in the footsteps of Portugal, a country that some years ago decriminalised the possession and use of all drugs, with beneficent results for Portuguese society and their justice system.

I suspect that the ordinary Joe Bloggs, who enjoys the occasional reefer with his beer after knocking off work at the construction site, wouldn't oppose this move (and most New Zealanders don't) but that it would be opposed by many doctors. In particular, there is an hypothesis, embraced by I think a lot of psychiatrists, that cannabis use is a major cause of psychosis, even schizophrenia, an hypothesis now supposedly supported by recent research. I have known several psychiatrists who at least pay lip-service to this received wisdom. Of course, I believe this hypothesis bullshit and the point of this post is to say why it is bullshit. I also want to state more categorically the reason I became 'ill' myself.

When I studied in Dunedin, I had an acquaintance, a marijuana user, who had a psychotic episode, during which he shaved off all his hair, including his eyebrows, because he believed his hair was acting as small antennas through which aliens were controlling him. Stories about cannabis-fuelled psychotic episodes, and even more stories about metamphetamine fuelled psychotic episodes, circulate widely through New Zealand society, in the same way that in Janet Frame's day, schizophrenics were all thought to be axe-welding maniacs. If there does seem to be evidence of a causal link between pot-use and psychosis, it is probably the fact that very many young people diagnosed with a mental illness have tried wacky-backy. Doctors, by contrast, tend to be people who have never tried pot and don't socialise with those who have. A significant cultural difference exists between the medical profession and those that they treat, and this culture difference is a part of the reason that there can be conflict between doctors and patients.

The problem with the hypothesis that cannabis-use causes psychosis is that it fails to take into account all the people who have tried pot, or use it regularly, who never become 'ill' at all. During the course of my life, all my friends, all my peers, had at least tried pot, and some smoked it every day; only a couple of them ever experienced a drug-induced psychosis. The stereotype of the stupid stoner dude who likes surfing and talks in a drawl, typified by Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, is only that, a stereotype; Bill Maher, a long time campaigner for marijuana law reform who, a little while ago, after cannabis was legalised in California, brazenly lit up a real joint live on his TV show, is far from stupid, and Barack Obama himself has admitted to smoking pot. Some months ago, TV1 news reported on a survey indicating that 85% of New Zealanders under the age of twenty-five had tried cannabis. If 85% of the patients who show up in psychiatric offices having experienced psychosis have tried pot, one might suspect a causal connection – but only if one discounts the rest of the population, the 85% of people who have tried pot without ever flipping out at all.

The simple equation "Cannabis use causes psychosis" requires fine-tuning. One might say, as many people do, that cannabis-use causes psychosis in the small minority who have a vulnerability to psychosis, a predisposition to schizophrenia that is either genetic or incurred as the result of childhood experiences. There is a problem even with this refinement, however, and, as evidence, I will draw upon my own life-experience. Yes, it is true that just prior to my first psychotic episode, at the Big Day Out in 2007, I smoked a lot of pot (while high on Ecstasy). It is also true that after becoming a patient of the Mental Health System, I vowed never to smoke pot again. But that concert I attended at the age of twenty-seven wasn't the first occasion I had smoked cannabis. I was never a heavy cannabis user but I did smoke it, a couple of times a year, from the age of about fifteen, with friends. The period in my life when I smoked the most was during seventh form, when I was seventeen. My best friend Shannon and I would get stoned, go to the video shop, and wander around lost looking for David Lynch films. If I had a vulnerability to psychosis that was triggered by cannabis use, my condition would have manifested when I was seventeen. Not twenty seven.

I have another reason for disliking the simple formula "Cannabis use causes psychosis". It is another way of blaming the victim. I have a friend, diagnosed bi-polar in his early twenties, who smoked pot prior to his diagnosis and still smokes pot today. I saw him recently and gently tried to gauge his opinion on the possibility that his illness might be in some way related to his drug use; he grew angry and defensive, I think rightfully so, because I was suggesting that his condition might be his fault. He knows his 'illness' better than I do, I think. The simply formula "Cannabis use can cause mental illness" can have other pernicious consequences. I know another patient, also diagnosed bi-polar, who once told his psychiatrist that his manic episodes were like taking drugs. They put down in his notes that he was a drug-user. He had never touched illegal drugs in his life.

Although it seems an simple (even dismissive) explanation for the cause of a person's 'illness', in my own case, the primary cause of my psychosis wasn't in fact the drugs. In the post, "My First Psychotic Episode", I summed it up. The causes of my illness has always been people thinking I'm gay when I'm not. The belief a person might entertain that others around him think him gay when he isn't sounds like a paranoid delusion but I have adduced evidence for it that this happened with me. In the post I just mentioned and the post "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM" I showed that there must have been a misperception of me at the radio station at which I worked; in "Concerning Dreams" I showed that something like a rumour about me must have even found its way into my flat. (In that post, by the way, I said that the party I talked of was held after I left bFM. I think now that it happened after the Big Day Out but before I left bFM.) For the longest time, I couldn't work out why people around me thought I was gay. Was it a rumour? Or was it something about my voice and body language, or even the brand of beer I chose to drink? I can turn off and on a gay voice almost at will, and in the early years of my 'illness' was paranoid mostly about how others perceived me. Recently, I discussed this problem with a good friend. During our conversation, he conceded that, in all likelihood, a rumour about me must have existed prior to my first episode. My friend, who is straight, also reassured me that I didn't give off a gay vibe, saying "I'm camper than you are."

I believe that something like a rumour did circulate about me and, if this did occur, it started as a result of a short film I wrote in 2001 at the age of twenty-one as part of a screenwriting paper, the gay spy film I have described in "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM." I believe that the English faculty at Auckland University decided I might be gay because of this film – and I want to adduce some evidence for this. I studied for my MA between 2001 and 2003. During a class on Joyce, I gave a presentation about "The Dead" in which I focussed on the idea of 'performance' as a theme in this story. When I named the theme, the lecturer flinched. I sensed that he thought my presentation was going to tackle this story from a gay perspective; I sensed this but didn't know why – I now realise that he thought I was going to relate "The Dead" to Judith Butler's theory of gender-performativity. When he realised that my presentation had nothing to do with queer theory at all he showed signs of visible relief. (In fact, I knew nothing about Judith Butler's theory of gender-performativity at all until just last year.) In another class, another lecturer, Alex Calder, who has a high voice, exhibited his anxiety about others' perceptions of him, an anxiety common among many academics in this country, by saying, "The reason I talk this way is because I had prostate cancer." Many lecturers in the Humanities have been made uncomfortable by the rise of queer theory and feminist theory. In 2004, I wrote an essay about the poet John Ashbery, having decided, after reading his incredibly long and difficult poem Flow Chart, after I had made the decision to write about him, that he was gay. My supervisor, Wystan Curnow, asked me what I liked about Ashbery and I was only able to say that we shared a similar world-view. That year I applied to do PhD at several American universities; Wystan sarcastically suggested I go to Berkeley.

Although I knew that the English department thought I might be gay, none of them was brave enough to ask directly, and so I was never able to set them right. For many years, this was also my experience of the Mental Health System (and then, when I finally was asked, in Easter 2013, I wasn't believed). Back then, though, it didn't cause me to go mad. Knowing that my lecturers thought I might be gay impacted corrosively on my self-esteem but I didn't go nuts until 2007, when it seemed that everyone in the world thought I was gay, including I think members of my own family.

I believe. now, that the cannabis I smoked at the Big Day Out exacerbated the psychotic episode I suffered about a month and a half later, but that it wasn't the cause. The cause we know. The only 'crime' I committed in my life, if you can call it a crime, is that I wasn't homophobic enough. Over the course of my life, I have known many gay men, both before and after they came out, and have several close friends who are lesbians. I had known gay men prior to writing the film in 2001. I remember, when I was seventeen, I went to the Hero parade with my girlfriend of the time. I wore an extremely tight t-shirt that belonged I think to a kid sister, because I thought it would be fun to pretend to be gay for a night. Unlike John Nash who, if reports about him are to be believed, behaved badly in many ways when he was young, the reason for my 'illness' was that I was too good, too left-wing.

I should bring this essay back to its original topic. A problem in psychiatry is that there is this thing, this condition, called 'schizophrenia' and it simply must have a cause, but no one knows what the cause is. Because schizophrenia is literally considered an illness,  it is assumed it must have a physical cause, and a leading candidate today for this cause is 'cannabis use' (even though, in Janet Frame's day, schizophrenics existed but cannabis-use didn't).  In reality, there is no such thing as 'schizophrenia'. People go mad for a time and then recover. The causes are different for every different person. But the reasons are seldom something simply physical. Often the madness has a spiritual dimension. And, in order to recover, the person needs to make sense of his experiences and talk about it with people. This is what I've learned, and what I am trying to share.

I might finish with a line from a song by the fantastic Kurt Cobain. "Just because you're paranoid, don't mean they're not after you." Perhaps not the best sentiment to end this post with but a wonderful line anyhow.

[Note: I have included my interpretation of "The Dead" in this blog, under the title "Exhuming James Joyce's The Dead.]

Mind Matters

In some ways I feel that this blog is finished, but there are still some stories I want to tell. I would love to write as well as Steve Braunias, with his sense of humour, but when I am not descanting about philosophy or physics, I am just trying to get the facts down 'on paper'. It's all been a bit workmanlike recently. The purpose of this post is to describe my time as a day patient at a Respite facility called Mind Matters in (I think) November and December 2007 and at last describe the kind of culture I was in. Just for the sake of completeness. For the sake of giving some clearer idea of what it is like to be a Mental Health patient here in this county.

In New Zealand (I don't know about the US), Respite facilities are places where Mental Health patients can stay when they are acutely unwell or when they are having difficulty looking after themselves. Respite facilities are not hospitals. Often they are simply anonymous houses in ordinary suburbs, or out in the sticks, with a number of bedrooms, and with an office staffed by some Mental Health worker containing his computer on which he takes notes. I don't know whether the caretakers of Respite facilities tend to be Social Workers, Occupational Therapists, or nurses, or whether they are just hired off the street. I have been in Respite twice in my life – the second time at a house in Point Chevalier in early 2014, just before I was put under the Act, a truly horrible institution which I believed at the time to be Purgatory. The caretaker's principal role, seemingly only role, was to cook meals, administer medication, and take notes on the patients. I had been coerced into going there and was only at this place two nights before running home to my mother. I have described a little of this Respite facility in the post "On Religion" and "Schizophrenia and the Double Bind Theory". But this is not the Respite Facility I want to talk about in this post. Rather I want to talk about a house that has since been disestablished, Mind Matters, out in Titirangi.

As far as I know, there are four official Respite facilities in Auckland, although there may be other unofficial ones. Of course, Respite facilities came into existence because the old insane asylums were abolished in the 'eighties and it was decided that something intermediate between hospitalisation and living in the community was required. Typically, patients only spend a week or so at one of these places but I have a little conspiracy theory that patients judged incurable may be shuffled between different facilities their whole lives. My experience of the second respite facility was truly terrible – the slum-like house felt indistinguishable from an insane asylum and I wonder today if the evil psychiatrist treating me had decided, against the evidence, that I was an incurable schizophrenic and accordingly sent me to a Respite facility for impossible cases. However, many respite facilities, I understand from other patients, may be quite pleasant, and often patients seek respite care voluntarily, although this may partly be because many of those who were diagnosed 'mentally ill' in their teenage years are in a sense institutionalised.

It is difficult for me to give precise dates but, I think, around early November 2007 my psychiatrist Tony Fernando thought it would be in my interests to become a day patient at the house out at a Titirangi. I had been more or less intensely psychotic since February or March of that year, since shorty after the Chilli Peppers concert; my mother was still working and I think a part of the reason I was sent there was because she felt like she couldn't look after me during the day. Every morning I was picked up by a Taylor Centre employee whose name I've now forgotten but who came from Melbourne, was a genuinely good person, and was taken to Mind Matters where I spent the day. I was picked up by my mother around four-thirty. From an outsider's perspective, Mind Matters seemed idyllic. It was a lovely house with multiple bedrooms, a beautiful view out over the Manukau heads, and was well-staffed principally by youngish women. It was intended for young people, teenagers and those in their early twenties, as a place where psychotics newish to the system could maybe make friends. From the beginning, I felt too old to be there – I was twenty-seven. But I was always an anomaly, a problem for the Mental Health Service, because I had never experienced a psychotic episode before that year. Schizophrenics tend to become 'ill' in their late teens or early twenties, rather than at twenty-seven. I was under the aegis of the Early Intervention Team but I didn't fit, have never fitted the profile of a 'typical' schizophrenic, if such a thing exists.

When I was sent to Mind Matters, I didn't then know anything about respite facilities, and didn't fully realise that I was delusional. In fact, I believed, that year, that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals; the name "Mind Matters" itself got tangled up in the delusion. I thought that it was a place to send geniuses, either those geniuses who had discovered the secret of the homosexual conspiracy, or those geniuses who were to be recruited to the homosexual ruling elite. Upon first arriving at the facility, I was primed to see my fellow inmates in a negative light. I was introduced to a teenage patient and, encouraged by a worker, we played table tennis. At the time, I believed that the Nazis were all closet homosexuals; I decided to thank the young man for some small gesture he had made by replying to him in his own language, "dankershern". He flinched in fear. This young man evidently had his own paranoid conspiracy theory; I picked up from some small signs that he believed in a Chinese plot; I speculate that he also had Fernando as his psychiatrist and had mistaken Fernando for Chinese (although Fernando is in fact from the Philippines). One of the workers at Mind Matters was Asian and he was convinced that she was part of the Chinese conspiracy, despite her continued protestations that she was actually Japanese. One of the other workers tried to get us to play Trivial Pursuit together– patients were supposed to be having fun and making friends, but this is obviously a quixotic hope when the two patients who are supposed to be making friends are both in the grips of extremely powerful paranoid delusions. The next day, we played Last Card with another patient, a Maori boy who had come to Mind Matters directly from hospital. The Maori boy and I started to blatantly cheat, abandoning any pretence of following the rules. The young man with the Chinese conspiracy theory panicked, abandoned us, phoned his father and asked to be taken home. I fell subject to a panic attack myself and asked if I could go wait on the street for my mother (it was close to the time when she picked me up). The Maori boy, the only one remaining of the three of us, went downstairs and began beating on the pipes, yelling, "I am the powerfullest!"

Before he left, the young man delivered a parting shot at me. I was sitting at a table in the front yard talking to a staff member when he emerged on the balcony and yelled out, "I'm still smarter than you are!". He never came back.

That first week at Mind Matters was the worst. I thought I was going to be the victim of human sacrifice. Despite its salubrious layout and environs, Mind Matters always felt to me like a kind of institution. A chimney flue ran from the lower floor up into the upper floor, transmitting sounds from the rooms below to the rooms above, exacerbating the feeling that one was under observation all the time, living in a panopticon. Although the situation improved after the first week, I was at some level sane enough to know that the other patients around me were crazy, that the house was more asylum than holiday camp. I felt a need to prove that I wasn't stupid – so I borrowed Fear and Trembling by Kierkegaard from the library and sat all day on the veranda pretending to read it. I remember spending time with a teenage girl who, for her part, sat all day reading Janet Frame's The Goose Bath. I told her I liked Douglas Adams and she instantly warmed to me, saying "My father likes Douglas Adams!" Later, during my stay, I borrowed Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, although I didn't get round to reading that either.

Many years ago the psychiatric profession apparently performed a fascinating experiment. A number of trainee doctors were told to pretend to be mad and were admitted to an asylum. The factotums who worked there couldn't tell the difference between the mad patients and the sane ones. But the patients themselves could always tell the difference. The situation was the same at Mind Matters. Although I didn't hear voices, I was profoundly 'unwell' – but the Social Workers and OT's who worked there had no idea how unwell I was, why I warmed to some people and kept others at arm's length. On one occasion I overheard one of the workers saying to another, "Remember the DSM? Borderline Personality Disorder..?" I piped up from the couch and said that I'd diagnosed myself a long time with Avoidant Personality Disorder.

The staff at Mind Matters was quite large – I would say about four women were there all the time and others, men and women, would come and go during the day. The staff had their own private space, an office in a separate building off-limits to the patients, which contained a number of computers. I imagine it was the place they went to discuss the kids trapped there, and take notes on them. Of course, the workers had access to my own notes from that year, although my notes were inaccurate and tended to extrapolate traits and dispositions wildly from stories I had told and from some cryptic and in reality inconsequential comments and and reactions I had made and performed. I suspect the workers there were trying to work out if I was gay or straight – when the obvious method to find out would have been simply to ask. On one occasion, I went for a walk with a woman who I think was a kind of untrained support worker. I was becoming slightly panicky about my situation and told her about the trip I took to Europe in 2004 and all the attractive young women I has seen there. She said sarcastically, "Did you like what they were wearing?" Evidently a story I had told earlier in the year had led them to believe wrongly that I was a transvestite. I said, "No, I liked the girls!" On another occasion, she took me to the waterfront and showed me an artwork. A rocky formation in one of the cliffs resembled male buttocks, and an artist had highlighted this resemblance by painting speedos on it. Now, I'm not so stupid that I can't tell the difference between a male arse and a female arse and I pointed out that I knew it was the posterior of a man. The worker said, sarcastically, "Very smart!"

What condition precisely had they diagnosed me with? I strongly suspect, now, and I've had years to think about this, that many psychiatrists (and even the psychologist I saw in 2014) think that everyone is bisexual, and that a cause of mental illness among some intelligent men and women is the realisation of this 'fact'. Some people who work in the system are aware of this theory but know its bullshit, struggle with the insane ideology that prevails– hence, the hostility of the woman I have described above. I too think its bullshit. I was totally heterosexual. In fact, as I have suggested indirectly in this blog, I think 'homosexuality' was invented by the psychiatric profession. This may seem a bizarre claim but, although he doesn't say this explicitly, it is Michel Foucault's position and the position adopted by David Halperin in his book One Hundred Years of Homosexuality.

Although the workers couldn't understand my condition, the other patients always understood it, understood me, and also intuitively knew just how ill I was. They always knew I was straight. I sincerely believe that psychotics and schizophrenics are all a little bit psychic. During the first week or two of my stay, I used to sit and listen to a young Maori girl endlessly and incomprehensibly, smilingly, tell stories about her family. On one occasion she said, "Do you want to have children?" Now, one of the first questions asked of Mental Health Patients is if there is any mental illness in the family, and so patients understand from the beginning, even if it is not made explicit, that mental illness is considered hereditary and that they are in a culture in which they will be tacitly discouraged from getting married and having kids. I understood her immediately, although I related it to my delusion that homosexuals were outbreeding heterosexuals, and told her, "I don't know. I have a lot of cousins though." On another occasion, another Maori boy, this one wearing a crucifix on a chain around his neck, appeared on the scene and came into the yard where we were sitting. I sensed immediately that he was sexually muddled. The Maori girl pointed to him and me and said, "I wish you and he could switch places!" Over the next couple of weeks, this boy formed an intense friendship with a Pakeha boy his own age and became inconsolable when his friend left.

The philosophy behind Mind Matters was to provide a space in which smart but mentally ill kids could have fun and make friends in a safe environment. It never worked for me. The workers there knew from my notes that I had lived in a flat with twenty other people and on one occasion compared Mind Matters with the Big House. I felt like saying, "This place is nothing whatsoever like the Big House."

I was a day patient at Mind Matters for a really long time, perhaps as long as two months. After the first week, things became easier – patients less acutely unwell and closer to my own age started staying over at the place. Men and women in their mid-twenties would appear, stay a couple of days or a week and then disappear again. However, I never became friends with any of these other patients, even going so far as to actively avoid them. I didn't like the house and would escape it every day by going for walks down to the shore or up to Titirangi shops for coffee. During the rest of the day, I would sit in a quiet corner where there was not chance of any interactions with other patients or with the workers, and spend the whole day laboriously completing the cryptic crossword. Basically, I spent eight hours a day waiting to be picked up by my mother and taken away from the place. Weekends were better – they were my respite from respite. I would lie on the couch at home all day watching the various Star Trek spin-offs, which I regarded as 'straight camp'. I was, of course, incredibly sedated by the drug I was being forced to take.

During the long period I was a patient at Mind Matters, I recovered from the psychotic episode that had begun perhaps at bFM, perhaps a little later after the Chilli Peppers Concert. The delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals went away and, although I experienced psychosis again in 2009 and 2013, this particular paranoid delusion never returned, although I still recognised that, as a patient of the Mental Health System, I was trapped in a perverse world that had entirely different rules to the real world. I stopped believing in the homosexual conspiracy over ten years ago – although this hasn't stopped my previous hateful psychiatrist, who I only got rid of recently, from implying at the Independent Reviews I've has since that I still believe in it.

I feel however that I need to explain this delusion a little. Yes, a delusion that the world is ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals is repugnant. This is why I couldn't talk about it for so long. What makes it even more repugnant is that I believed that homosexuals were procreating and that heterosexuals weren't. I knew immediately that I was subject to a discourse in which smart people were all considered bisexual and that I was being treated by a psychiatrist who I sensed from the first appointment was a closet homosexual. It sounds like a right-wing delusion to say that one believed in a homosexual conspiracy – but in fact my delusion was left-wing. I thought openly gay men and women were heroes. I thought Democrats were all either straight or openly gay; I thought Republicans were all closet homosexuals. At heart, I thought people on the Left followed their hearts and chose love and truth over fear and lies; I thought people on the Right chose fear and lies over love and truth. The psychosis I experienced in 2007 and 2009 wasn't principally concerned with sexuality but rather with politics. Tomorrow, America is to have its mid-term elections. I know, of course, that Trump is 'straight' – but he is the archetypal example of someone who has chosen lies and fear over truth and love.

So, this is my fairly workmanlike post about the time I spent in a Respite facility over eight years ago. Like many of the posts I have written, it found its subject as it went along. It seems evident to me, now, that what I intuited back then was the truth. The young man who seemed on the surface to believe in a Chinese conspiracy really believed in a homosexual conspiracy – and I have seen the same delusion again and again over the last ten years. It is a delusion that is natural response to psychiatric discourse itself. Foucault argued that discourses create the objects that they talk about. Another vile secret of psychiatry is that psychiatry created homosexuality and is still today turning straight people gay. Terrible, unbelievable. But true. The cause of homosexuality is the idea of homosexuality. If, dear reader, you are ever in a situation where a psychiatrist or psychologist tells you that there is some homosexuality in everyone, ask him if he gets sexually excited around men or fantasises about men when he jerks off.

I'll finish this post with two last comments about Mind Matters. The girl I call Jess had also been a patient there on several occasions before I met her and, unlike me, had enjoyed her time there. Unlike me, she'd been a patient of the Mental Health System since she was seventeen and its culture was the only culture she knew. Second, on my last day at Mind Matters, I was given a questionnaire sheet asking if I had made friends during my time there. I wrote, "No". And I did so with pleasure.