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.