A month or so ago, I was talking with a girl I know, Sarah, who stays with my mother a couple of days a week. During the conversation among the three of us, the fact that when I was a child I had a pet dog called Rosie came up. The conversation turned to fiction – my mother opined that I should start writing stories again. I said that I didn't currently have any ideas for stories. Sarah said, "Why don't you write about Rosie?"
If I have, among my readers, any authors or anyone who knows something about fiction writing, this anecdote may make them cringe. Sarah is lovely but like almost everyone who doesn't write, she is stupid about authors – ordinary people assume that writers write autobiographically, that fiction is 'self-expression'. I had a pet dog called Rosie who I was fond of and so I should write about her. The truth is that there is a gap between fiction and its writer's life. Authors write about problems that they observe in the world around them, they write about conflict, and, most importantly, they make stuff up. This should be obvious but to people who don't write and don't read much, it isn't.
Authors, and I include screen-writers among this coterie, want most of all simply to write a good story. An author will be trucking through life and an idea will occur to him or her – it may be inspired by something that happens in his or her life, it may be something that he or she reads in the newspaper, it may be inspired by something that happens to a friend. It may be that he or she is thinking about something abstract, a philosophical or psychological issue, and wants to try to express this abstract idea concretely through characters, locales, and actions. From this idea, a story grows. In fact, both Stephen King and Stephen Donaldson have said that the genesis of a story is the collision between two different ideas. Donaldson had the an idea for a man plucked from the real world and put into a fantasy world in which he is unable to believe. But the story didn't get going until this idea collided with a second idea– that this protagonist should be a leper. Lincoln in the Bardo quite obviously also grew from a collision between two ideas – the author's fascination with the idea of an intervening stage between death and rebirth as described in The Tibetan Book of the Dead and his fascination with Abraham Lincoln. The two germinal ideas behind every story may sometimes be easily identified, and may at other times be very difficult to identify indeed.
The obvious truth that authors make stuff up, or, to put in another way, draw from material outside their own lives, is simple to demonstrate. Bret Easton Ellis wrote American Psycho even though he wasn't a serial killer. David Foster Wallace wrote Infinite Jest even though he wasn't a drug addict. Nabokov wrote Lolita even though he wasn't a paedophile. Obviously Tolkien wasn't a hobbit and had no experience of orcs and elves. Donaldson wrote The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant even though he wasn't a leper. David Lynch wrote and directed Mulholland Drive even though he isn't a lesbian; Annie Proux wrote Brokeback Mountain even though she isn't a gay man. The novel Trespass by Rose Tremain, which I'm reading at the moment, features a gay man, his lesbian sister, and a woman driven partly insane by childhood sexual abuse. I am sure Tremain herself is none of those things. What happens, obviously, is that a story idea occurs to an author and then the author explores the idea and draws it to its logical conclusion.
Of course, aside from fantasy works, stories require a real-world backdrop. My godmother wrote a novel called Waiting for Elizabeth set in Renaissance-era Ireland; before and during her writing of it she carried out extensive research into the time and place it was set. Proust and Flaubert both sought to realistically depict the culture and society of respectively mid and late nineteenth century France. Darkness at Noon is intended to be a believable depiction of the mock-trials that occurred in Stalinist Russia. Although Donaldson isn't a leper, his father worked with lepers, and so Donaldson understood this disease. Of course, autobiographical material does creep in – authors write best when they write about what they know. Stephen King features alcoholic protagonists in several of his works, such as The Shining and The Tommyknockers, I am sure because he battled with alcoholism himself. Often, such as in The Shining, Misery and The Dark Half his protagonists are themselves authors. Frame's Faces in The Water could only have been written by someone who had spent time in a mental asylum as a patient. Joyce's "The Dead" was inspired by Joyce's own reaction to a disclosure by his wife that she'd passionately loved another man before she'd met Joyce – however, Gabriel Conroy, the protagonist of the story, is in no way a self portrait (in fact, I think Joyce disliked Gabriel). The point I am making is that it takes a skilled reader, perhaps even a reader who has written fiction him- or herself, to distinguish the autobiographical from the purely fictional in a novel, film, or story, written by someone else.
I think all of the stories I have written have resulted from a collision between two ideas. The gay spy film I wrote emerged from the juxtaposition of John Le Carre type spy stories and the games played in the homosexual underworld, a world I knew nothing about but had heard of. Bruce Sells Out grew from a collision between the idea of a misanthropic, failing comedian who befriends the devil, and the idea of a rocky relationship between a man and a woman. (In this film Bruce accidentally kills his girlfriend at plot point 2 and sells his soul to bring her back to life at the film's end. I have discussed this film in the post "Bruce Sells Out".) The story "A Refusal to Mourn" (included in this blog) also grew from two ideas: the idea of a youthful adventure recollected in adulthood, and the idea of a seduction and casual sex. (This is a bad summation of the story. You can read the actual story by looking up the post "A Refusal to Mourn".)
I think the fundamental reason for the 'illness' I have experienced is people's reactions to some of the screenplays I have written. The gay spy film was pure invention but I think people decided it was autobiographical. The film "The Hounds of Heaven", by contrast, was an accurate depiction of a girl I knew but I think people thought I had made it up and had done a bad job presenting the main character, Jess. In fact, although many people didn't know this when I wrote it, "The Hounds of Heaven" is a roman a clef and is largely an accurate picture of a real person. I'll list briefly some of the details in the film that were in fact true. The real Jess did keep an enormous poster of Syd Barrett on her wall. She did study neuroscience. She did have a jacket she wore because she thought it could magically ward of other people's thoughts. She did go through a period of not brushing her teeth because she thought someone was putting poison in her toothpaste. On one occasion when I was with her, when putting on makeup she justified it by saying, "the male gaze and all that" (an utterance that only makes sense if you know something about feminist film theory); I put this in the film. She did have an obsession with Nietzsche – in fact, in late 2011 the real girl had a quote from Nietzsche tattooed somewhere on some part of her body. Many aspects of the film were inventions. Rick is almost entirely fictional and the real girl's father is a lawyer rather than a civil engineer – I made him a civil engineer to provide an excuse for him taking her to Christchurch in March 2011. One of the mistakes I made is that I allowed people to think that Jess was intended as a 'typical' schizophrenic when in fact there is no such thing as a typical schizophrenic. I was describing a real person, but a person so unusual readers couldn't believe she was real.
There is a link between creativity and mental illness. Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, and David Foster Wallace all killed themselves. Van Gogh famously cut of his ear and sent it to a prostitute. However, the link is not simple or intuitively obvious. Psychiatrists and other mental health professionals deal with 'abnormal psychology' as though normalcy is easily identifiable and unproblematic, as if there is such a thing as a normal person. Often creativity itself is seen as a sign of abnormality, of mental illness. I met a patient once, new to the service, who told us that she had written a sci-fi film in which great clouds of methamphetamine descend on the citizenry – I suspect that, even though she wasn't fully conscious of this fact, even though it was just an intuition that she had which she was trying to express, her illness may have in some way resulted from this film she wrote. The people treating her may even have decided she was a meth addict because of it. (I know this seems unlikely but, trust me, psychiatrists are stupid.) I also suspect it possible that a cause of this illness that the real Jess suffered may have had something to do with something she wrote, perhaps a poem that others misinterpreted.
I found it quite difficult writing this post. There may be mistakes (solecisms?) in it that I have overlooked. Since the increase in my dosage and my change of psychiatrist, I feel often as though there is no point in fighting, that it is impossible to escape, that I am trapped forever by other people's errors. It has taken me days to muster up the motivation to finish this post – I originally intended to say more about the authorial imagination but I have forgotten what I intended to say. In the next post, however, if I can summon up the will to write it, I want to add to the post "Cannabis and the Causes of Schizophrenia" and explain finally the nature of my illness – supposing that people have not already worked it out from what I have already said. I can't save myself. Somehow, someone else has to save me. But I don't know anyone willing to.
Saturday, 29 December 2018
Monday, 17 December 2018
Tying Up Some Lose Threads Part 2
My previous post was a little badly written, and I don't think this one will be any better. But I still hope I gave some idea of my situation. In tonight's post, I want to add a little to that previous post. I should get back to talking about philosophy but this post is going to be a pure rant.
I have to deal with psychiatrists and Mental Health workers so incompetent Darwinian evolution should have weeded them out of the gene pool long ago. In this blog, I have described how around February or March 2007, I suffered a complete psychotic breakdown. During this first episode, I divided my flatmates into angels and demons and though I was under surveillance, that there were listening devices in my flat and that everything I said was being relayed to third-parties. When I last saw my psychiatrist, a new one (because I laid a complaint against the last one), he seemed not to be aware that what happened to me back in 2007 was a complete psychotic break. It was a reaction, as I've spelt out in the posts "My First Psychotic Episode" and "My First Psychotic Episode and BFM", to misperceptions of me by people working at bFM and the my flatmates. I mentioned to my new psychiatrist how stupid it is to suppose people "present with delusions and hallucinations for no reason at all" and he seemed surprised, as though he didn't know that I was psychotic when I first came into the Taylor Centre. Oddly enough, the fact that I was quite mad back in 2007 works in my favour, because my behaviour and reports then were uncharacteristic of my behaviour and reports when I am well. The psychiatrists want to downplay just how sick I became as a result of my experiences. At my last independent review, for instance, there was no mention of the fact that, starting at the Big House and continuing through 2007 and then 2009, I believed people were listening to everything I said, that shorty after my first appointment with the sadistic quack Tony Fernando I formed the belief that there was a listening device in my glasses. My whole treatment has been a farce. Since Easter 2013, I have been saying that I'm straight, perhaps not at every appointment but often enough to show it isn't a delusion, and to every new key worker I've ever had. How often does a person have to say he is straight to be believed? I suspect that Fernando stuck his foot or some other appendage in his mouth in 2013, and ever since the fucking Mental Health System has been covering up his utter inadequacy, as a doctor and as a human being.
In the previous post, I said that there was no justification for the fuckwits treating me to think that I was gay. I never used the words "gay" or "straight" with any of them from shortly after my first contact with the system around March 2007, until Easter 2013. I know I didn't because, as I've said, for a significant period of time I believed that there was a listening device in my glasses and that if I used either word I would get into trouble. I would like to adduce some further evidence that I never used either word.
In July 2009, so after I'd been on Rispiridone for close to two and half years, and after I'd been hearing voices for about six or seven months, I started hearing voices saying "I'm gay! I'm gay!" I thought it was everyone in the world taking Rispiridone coming out as gay. It was truly terrible. I was scared I might say it aloud – even though I wasn't in the slightest homosexual. (I had always been only sexually attracted to women. In fact, I was very attracted to women.) Hearing these voices was part of the reason I experienced suicidal ideation. I told that arsehole Fernando about my suicidal ideation shortly after August 6, although I didn't mention the voices, and was allowed to discontinue Rispiridone. I never mentioned these voices to anyone then or since.
In December 2014, after I'd been seeing a narcissistic clinical psychologist for some seven or eight months, I was lying in bed during the day and heard a thunder storm. With every thunderclap, I heard a voice, the voice of Old Testament God, saying, "I'm gay!". For Christmas, my mother and I drove to Wanganui and I felt a compulsion to say that sentence out loud. I didn't. These experiences prove that 'coming out' is a one way street. If I'd ever said "I'm gay" to my mother, or father, or brother, or anyone in the Mental Health Service, it would have gone in my record as evidence of sexual confusion, sexual confusion I didn't feel. You sometimes hear stories of gay men who deliberate with themselves long and hard before deciding to come out (one such is Ricky Martin). This wasn't the case with me. I was terrified of accidentally coming out because I knew that even if it was accidental, I wouldn't be able to get back in again.
In the post "Definitions of Sexuality Part 3" I described a terrible psychotic symptom I experienced from 2013 or 2014 until late 2016. I never discussed it with anyone at the time because I knew that this symptom would go away eventually, and also knew that the people treating me would assume it was a permanent trait or feature of my personality. No one knew that during this period I felt I might be attracted to men (this description of the psychotic symptom is inexact but I have difficulty describing it). I made the decision to talk about it in mid 2017 in this blog as a consequence of a truly dreadful lecture I attended about Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity. I had never talked about it before then.
Obviously, it might seem that I am getting myself into trouble by writing about this. I have no choice – the truth will find its way out even if the labour pains are agony, even if the truth is still-born. The truth is that the cause of my illness has always been other people thinking I'm gay when I'm not. You see, when you sense that other people have decided that they think you are a latent or closet homosexual, it is impossible to say that they're wrong. Since Easter 2013, I have been saying that I'm straight but the cunts treating me evidently decided that this was either a lie or a delusion.
I wish now to describe again some interactions I had with the narcissistic incompetent clinical psychologist I saw in 2014. He was unable to even say the word "heterosexual", told me that sexuality was "fluid" (and called me aspergerous for refusing to believe him) and proposed that there was some homosexuality in everyone. Logically, he must be talking to about himself so one can only conclude he's fucked men up the arse from time to time or at least fantasises about buggery when he jerks off. The truth, of course, is that even though I had said I was straight at my first appointment wit him, he spent eight months trying to convince me that I was gay or sexually confused – as though the route to recovery is for heterosexual men to admit that they are really bisexual. Judkins is going to hell when he dies. On one occasion, I gave him the story "69" that I have published in this blog under that title: he said, "Why do you always write stories about yourself?" I think now that he was referring to the gay spy film I wrote when I was twenty-one. This question was indicative of his stupidity. Judkins seemed not to know that authors make stuff up. Judkins made another couple of insane remarks during that year. On one occasion he said, "Whether a person is gay or not is between him... and God." He'd obviously decided I was an evangelical Christian. On another occasion he said, "So you think gay men can't get sick?" This was another insane remark because I had known openly gay patients as well as other patients whose sexual identities had been fucked up by their treatment.
On one occasion, I told Judkins a true story about George Clooney. A gay magazine in the UK had run a front-page article saying that Clooney was "Gay, gay, gay". Clooney, who is obviously straight, responded with the following statement. "I don't want to offend the gay community by saying that I'm not gay but the third gay seems a little excessive. I may be gay, gay, but I'm definitely not gay, gay, gay." Evidently, Clooney tried to deal with the predicament he'd been put into through humour.
When I told Judkins this story, he said, "Why don't you say that?"
My eight months with Judkins as a psychologist were a complete failure. In order to make sense of why I'd become ill in the first place, I needed the person I was talking to to recognise that I was heterosexual first. He never did. Instead he'd decided, even before meeting me, that the most helpful treatment he could provide for me was to try to convince me of my hitherto denied homosexuality.
Readers of this blog will know that about a month or two ago, my medication was doubled. I was well, sane, when this decision was made – the reason for the doubling was that I had laid a complaint with the Health and Disability Commissioner against my former psychiatrist. Readers may want to know the effects of this increase. My weight has increased even as, ironically, my appetite has diminished. I suffer from some anhedonia sometimes, the feeling that the activities that once gave me pleasure no longer do. The other night I had a nightmare about zombies again, a nightmare I hadn't experienced for a long time, in which the pestilence was spread between victims through vomit. In the post "The Dopamine Hypothesis of Schizophrenia" I tried to give an account of what antipsychotics actually do but I have reconsidered it a little. If we went back to the 'seventies, people in fact did recover from schizophrenia. What I think happens today is that the brains of people diagnosed schizophrenic adjust to the medication – antipsychotics are in a sense addictive by which I mean people become neurologically dependent on them. This is the reason some people become psychotic again when they try to go off them. Sufferers suffer withdrawal effects when they attempt to discontinue the medication. The idiot psychiatrists interpret these withdrawal effects as the reappearance of the condition; consequently schizophrenia today is considered a life-long condition when any rational appraisal of real people diagnosed schizophrenic shows that this idea is bullshit. In the same way millions of Americans have been turned into opioid addicts by prescription painkillers, millions of 'mentally ill' people have been coerced and bullied into becoming addicts to antipsychotics and antidepressants.
I do not know if this hypothesis is true. In January 2012 I reduced my medication from 10mgs daily to 5mgs with no ill effects at all, and remained well until February of 2013. But it is more logical to assume that the brain adjusts to the major tranquilliser patients are encouraged to take and that consequently patients become dependent on it, than to suppose that madness is a life-long, causeless, congenital disease that can only be treated by putting the sufferer on tranquillisers for the rest of his or her life.
I once wrote a post about the film "A Beautiful Mind" in which I said how much I hated it. I recently bought the biography on which it is based and, although I haven't read it, had already learnt how much it departs from the facts. For a long time now I've wanted to say what I really think of this film and its director, Ron Howard. When Howard made this film, he might as well have gone around and fellated the psychiatric community and the executives in charge of the pharmaceutical industry. During my dark times, I console myself by thinking that, if there is a hell, the whole psychiatric profession is going there.
I have to deal with psychiatrists and Mental Health workers so incompetent Darwinian evolution should have weeded them out of the gene pool long ago. In this blog, I have described how around February or March 2007, I suffered a complete psychotic breakdown. During this first episode, I divided my flatmates into angels and demons and though I was under surveillance, that there were listening devices in my flat and that everything I said was being relayed to third-parties. When I last saw my psychiatrist, a new one (because I laid a complaint against the last one), he seemed not to be aware that what happened to me back in 2007 was a complete psychotic break. It was a reaction, as I've spelt out in the posts "My First Psychotic Episode" and "My First Psychotic Episode and BFM", to misperceptions of me by people working at bFM and the my flatmates. I mentioned to my new psychiatrist how stupid it is to suppose people "present with delusions and hallucinations for no reason at all" and he seemed surprised, as though he didn't know that I was psychotic when I first came into the Taylor Centre. Oddly enough, the fact that I was quite mad back in 2007 works in my favour, because my behaviour and reports then were uncharacteristic of my behaviour and reports when I am well. The psychiatrists want to downplay just how sick I became as a result of my experiences. At my last independent review, for instance, there was no mention of the fact that, starting at the Big House and continuing through 2007 and then 2009, I believed people were listening to everything I said, that shorty after my first appointment with the sadistic quack Tony Fernando I formed the belief that there was a listening device in my glasses. My whole treatment has been a farce. Since Easter 2013, I have been saying that I'm straight, perhaps not at every appointment but often enough to show it isn't a delusion, and to every new key worker I've ever had. How often does a person have to say he is straight to be believed? I suspect that Fernando stuck his foot or some other appendage in his mouth in 2013, and ever since the fucking Mental Health System has been covering up his utter inadequacy, as a doctor and as a human being.
In the previous post, I said that there was no justification for the fuckwits treating me to think that I was gay. I never used the words "gay" or "straight" with any of them from shortly after my first contact with the system around March 2007, until Easter 2013. I know I didn't because, as I've said, for a significant period of time I believed that there was a listening device in my glasses and that if I used either word I would get into trouble. I would like to adduce some further evidence that I never used either word.
In July 2009, so after I'd been on Rispiridone for close to two and half years, and after I'd been hearing voices for about six or seven months, I started hearing voices saying "I'm gay! I'm gay!" I thought it was everyone in the world taking Rispiridone coming out as gay. It was truly terrible. I was scared I might say it aloud – even though I wasn't in the slightest homosexual. (I had always been only sexually attracted to women. In fact, I was very attracted to women.) Hearing these voices was part of the reason I experienced suicidal ideation. I told that arsehole Fernando about my suicidal ideation shortly after August 6, although I didn't mention the voices, and was allowed to discontinue Rispiridone. I never mentioned these voices to anyone then or since.
In December 2014, after I'd been seeing a narcissistic clinical psychologist for some seven or eight months, I was lying in bed during the day and heard a thunder storm. With every thunderclap, I heard a voice, the voice of Old Testament God, saying, "I'm gay!". For Christmas, my mother and I drove to Wanganui and I felt a compulsion to say that sentence out loud. I didn't. These experiences prove that 'coming out' is a one way street. If I'd ever said "I'm gay" to my mother, or father, or brother, or anyone in the Mental Health Service, it would have gone in my record as evidence of sexual confusion, sexual confusion I didn't feel. You sometimes hear stories of gay men who deliberate with themselves long and hard before deciding to come out (one such is Ricky Martin). This wasn't the case with me. I was terrified of accidentally coming out because I knew that even if it was accidental, I wouldn't be able to get back in again.
In the post "Definitions of Sexuality Part 3" I described a terrible psychotic symptom I experienced from 2013 or 2014 until late 2016. I never discussed it with anyone at the time because I knew that this symptom would go away eventually, and also knew that the people treating me would assume it was a permanent trait or feature of my personality. No one knew that during this period I felt I might be attracted to men (this description of the psychotic symptom is inexact but I have difficulty describing it). I made the decision to talk about it in mid 2017 in this blog as a consequence of a truly dreadful lecture I attended about Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity. I had never talked about it before then.
Obviously, it might seem that I am getting myself into trouble by writing about this. I have no choice – the truth will find its way out even if the labour pains are agony, even if the truth is still-born. The truth is that the cause of my illness has always been other people thinking I'm gay when I'm not. You see, when you sense that other people have decided that they think you are a latent or closet homosexual, it is impossible to say that they're wrong. Since Easter 2013, I have been saying that I'm straight but the cunts treating me evidently decided that this was either a lie or a delusion.
I wish now to describe again some interactions I had with the narcissistic incompetent clinical psychologist I saw in 2014. He was unable to even say the word "heterosexual", told me that sexuality was "fluid" (and called me aspergerous for refusing to believe him) and proposed that there was some homosexuality in everyone. Logically, he must be talking to about himself so one can only conclude he's fucked men up the arse from time to time or at least fantasises about buggery when he jerks off. The truth, of course, is that even though I had said I was straight at my first appointment wit him, he spent eight months trying to convince me that I was gay or sexually confused – as though the route to recovery is for heterosexual men to admit that they are really bisexual. Judkins is going to hell when he dies. On one occasion, I gave him the story "69" that I have published in this blog under that title: he said, "Why do you always write stories about yourself?" I think now that he was referring to the gay spy film I wrote when I was twenty-one. This question was indicative of his stupidity. Judkins seemed not to know that authors make stuff up. Judkins made another couple of insane remarks during that year. On one occasion he said, "Whether a person is gay or not is between him... and God." He'd obviously decided I was an evangelical Christian. On another occasion he said, "So you think gay men can't get sick?" This was another insane remark because I had known openly gay patients as well as other patients whose sexual identities had been fucked up by their treatment.
On one occasion, I told Judkins a true story about George Clooney. A gay magazine in the UK had run a front-page article saying that Clooney was "Gay, gay, gay". Clooney, who is obviously straight, responded with the following statement. "I don't want to offend the gay community by saying that I'm not gay but the third gay seems a little excessive. I may be gay, gay, but I'm definitely not gay, gay, gay." Evidently, Clooney tried to deal with the predicament he'd been put into through humour.
When I told Judkins this story, he said, "Why don't you say that?"
My eight months with Judkins as a psychologist were a complete failure. In order to make sense of why I'd become ill in the first place, I needed the person I was talking to to recognise that I was heterosexual first. He never did. Instead he'd decided, even before meeting me, that the most helpful treatment he could provide for me was to try to convince me of my hitherto denied homosexuality.
Readers of this blog will know that about a month or two ago, my medication was doubled. I was well, sane, when this decision was made – the reason for the doubling was that I had laid a complaint with the Health and Disability Commissioner against my former psychiatrist. Readers may want to know the effects of this increase. My weight has increased even as, ironically, my appetite has diminished. I suffer from some anhedonia sometimes, the feeling that the activities that once gave me pleasure no longer do. The other night I had a nightmare about zombies again, a nightmare I hadn't experienced for a long time, in which the pestilence was spread between victims through vomit. In the post "The Dopamine Hypothesis of Schizophrenia" I tried to give an account of what antipsychotics actually do but I have reconsidered it a little. If we went back to the 'seventies, people in fact did recover from schizophrenia. What I think happens today is that the brains of people diagnosed schizophrenic adjust to the medication – antipsychotics are in a sense addictive by which I mean people become neurologically dependent on them. This is the reason some people become psychotic again when they try to go off them. Sufferers suffer withdrawal effects when they attempt to discontinue the medication. The idiot psychiatrists interpret these withdrawal effects as the reappearance of the condition; consequently schizophrenia today is considered a life-long condition when any rational appraisal of real people diagnosed schizophrenic shows that this idea is bullshit. In the same way millions of Americans have been turned into opioid addicts by prescription painkillers, millions of 'mentally ill' people have been coerced and bullied into becoming addicts to antipsychotics and antidepressants.
I do not know if this hypothesis is true. In January 2012 I reduced my medication from 10mgs daily to 5mgs with no ill effects at all, and remained well until February of 2013. But it is more logical to assume that the brain adjusts to the major tranquilliser patients are encouraged to take and that consequently patients become dependent on it, than to suppose that madness is a life-long, causeless, congenital disease that can only be treated by putting the sufferer on tranquillisers for the rest of his or her life.
I once wrote a post about the film "A Beautiful Mind" in which I said how much I hated it. I recently bought the biography on which it is based and, although I haven't read it, had already learnt how much it departs from the facts. For a long time now I've wanted to say what I really think of this film and its director, Ron Howard. When Howard made this film, he might as well have gone around and fellated the psychiatric community and the executives in charge of the pharmaceutical industry. During my dark times, I console myself by thinking that, if there is a hell, the whole psychiatric profession is going there.
Saturday, 1 December 2018
Tying up some loose threads
In tonight's post, I want to try to finish what I've started. I want to summarise the situation I've been in for the last eleven years, pull together threads from various posts and express a little better the meaning behind my experiences. I hope that Jess reads this blog from time to time.
A couple of times in the blog I have said that when I first became psychotic, back in 2007, I decided that my father was gay. I have talked about this in the posts "My First Psychotic Episode" and "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM". I need to try to explain why I formed this delusion. At the Big House, in my madness, I had decided that the world was full of closet homosexuals. I thought of Lacan and his theory that the Name of the Father is the centre of the system – I decided that my father must be also gay. I went for a walk and decided that the reason that my father had divorced my mother when I was seven was because he didn't want me to be gay as well. In other words, I decided that my father had divorced my mother because he loved me and wanted to save me.
There were other things entering into for this delusion, some of which I can't talk about. I can say, however, that my mother's oldest brother, Tom, was probably gay, but that gay men and women of his generation didn't come out. He had died, of emphysema, when I was seventeen. In fact, to go back in time a little, after I had decided that Mikey and Jose were gay, I had asked my mother, for the first time, if Tom was gay, and she had confirmed it. It's always possible he wasn't.
I get so tired of using the word 'gay' all the time.
After I decided that my father was gay, I returned to the Big House and told them "My father's gay but I'm straight!" It was the first time I had used the words out loud when talking to anyone during the entire psychotic episode. And saying this cured the psychosis. I stopped believing there were listening devices in the flat and stopped dividing my flatmates into angels and demons. I told them that I either had schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder. My flatmates called my family to tell them they were concerned about me and the next evening my brother came and picked me up.
The next day I was taken into the Taylor centre. At my first contact with the staff there I asked them if we were under surveillance and decided that we weren't. I could use the words 'gay' or 'straight' if I wanted now – I was under the protective umbrella of caring, intelligent professionals after all. (How wrong I was.) I told them about my father and why I believed he had divorced my mother; I said that I wanted to "come out as straight" by which I meant that I was always straight and that I wanted people to know. I told them how I'd had some gay friends in high school. In the post "Cannabis and the Causes of Schizophrenia" I said that the only real crime I ever committed was that I wasn't homophobic enough; back then in March 2007, at some level, I knew this, that I'd fallen ill because I was less homophobic than other people; I thought that the explanation for my lack of homophobia was because my father was gay and I loved him. I know now that my lack of homophobia probably had more to do with my uncle and the fact that, despite appearances to the contrary, I was basically a good person.
Shortly afterwards I had my first appointment with Fernando. I immediately got a bad vibe off him. I discussed my symptoms, said that I thought the flat was under surveillance, that the horoscope seemed to be uncannily accurate, that the radio had been directing songs at me. I ran through a checklist of psychotic symptoms, all of which were true, but never used the words 'gay' or 'straight' at all. I didn't mention that I had formed the delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals. He asked me if I heard voices and looked surprised when I said "no". At the end of either the first or second appointment he told me to "Stop avoiding". I had intuited immediately that he was a closet homosexual. To be told by a closet homosexual to "Stop avoiding" only had one possible meaning. He had decided, out of the boundless compassion of his Philippino heart, to diagnose me as a latent or repressed or closet homosexual.
I was put on 2.5mgs of Rispiridone. After seeing Fernando, the delusion that I was under surveillance returned; I decided that there was a listening device in my glasses. The delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals also returned, stuck with me for the rest of the year, and returned intermittently in 2009.
I will return to my father briefly. I should say about my father that he and I, although sharing some traits such as a strong capacity for abstract reasoning, are very different. I support the Greens; he supports ACT. If I was American, I would be a Democrat and would have voted for Hilary; he would be a Republican and even today still supports Donald Trump. I believe in anthropogenic climate-change; he is a still a climate change denier. I like Noam Chomsky; he has an almost fanatical devotion to the novels and philosophy of Ayn Rand. For much of my life, I have found it challenging continuing to love and respect him when I disagree so entirely with his politics. Back in 2007, there were times, in fact, when I thought he was a double-agent – a heterosexual who had infiltrated the ruling homosexual elite by pretending to be a closet homosexual.
In 2007, I believed that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals and sometimes thought that there were more homosexuals in the world than heterosexuals. This was partly a result of having Fernando as a psychiatrist. I was almost well in 2008. In January 2009, after I'd been on 2.5mgs of Rispiridone for over a year and a half, that I first started hearing voices. The first voice I heard belonged to George W. Bush. I asked him the reason why he had invaded Iraq and was told some bullshit about the clash of civilisations. In 2009, my principle delusion was that I could communicate telepathically with other people. For instance, after Tony Veitch was subjected to intense public condemnation after allegations that he had physically abused his partner, I tried to project the thought "I love you" into his head. In 2007, I had believed that everything reported in the news was made up, but it was thought Veitch's case that I started believing some of the news was true. My psychosis that year often had an almost religious dimension; I sometimes thought I was being picked to save the world. I visited a nunnery with my mother and a friend of hers at one point, picked up a book by St Thomas Aquinas and decided that he was gay. I thought one of the male priests there had projected the thought into my head, "None of them?" During this year I thought I could psychically know who was gay or straight.
My psychosis in 2009 involved sexuality but not in an obvious way. I wasn't in the slightest sexually muddled. I sometimes thought, in fact, that I might be the straightest man in the world. In late 2009, I think after I was put on Olanzapine, I decided that the world might be ruled by a heterosexual elite and that the second tier down consisted of homosexuals, in the same way that Smithers is the personal assistant to Mr Burns.
I have said that if I had been treated better by the mental health service I would have got better in a year. The reason I was so sick was because I sensed that I had been diagnosed as a latent or closet homosexual at my first appointment; when someone senses that people around him think him a latent or closet homosexual, there is no way to tell them that they are wrong. This was the cause of my psychosis in both 2007 and 2009. I know I should adduce evidence, and there is some, but it is easier if you just trust me. I knew. The question is – why did they think me gay? I never used the words 'gay' or 'straight' with anyone in the Mental Health system until 2013, apart from a couple of times right at the very beginning. (For a description of the one time I used these words, see the post "An Anecdote; and A Description of a Condition".) I certainly have never said I was gay or even that I was sexually confused – because I wasn't. For much of 2007, I believed there was a listening device in my glasses and that if I used either word something terrible would happen to me. In 2008, this delusion receded; I thought that so long as I said nothing controversial no one would be listening. It came back in early 2009 and was succeeded by the delusion that everyone was telepathic. From early 2010 until 2013 I was totally well – but I had made a kind of bargain with the devil to simply allow people to think whatever they wanted of me. I was well but I was vomiting every day. In 2011, I made no secret with my Key Worker or with the other patients that I was pursuing the girl Jess – but I believe that my Key Worker thought of me as a gay man who didn't want to come out.
So why did they decide I was gay? In late 2008, I re-established a friendship with a man I'd known some years earlier, who had just recently returned from the Czech Republic. He wasn't even a particularly good friend. I would call him 'straight' but he was actually a little fuzzy around the edges, something I sensed that sometimes made me uncomfortable. He had been married to a woman I'd known in Dunedin. Sometimes I would go and hang out with him at Piha. I made the mistake of telling those treating me about this friendship – I believe that they decided it was a homosexual relationship. And this is why I went completely nuts for all of 2009.
The most generally accepted definition of homosexuality is that it is a sexual attraction towards members of the same sex. Heterosexuality is when a person is sexually attracted towards members of the opposite sex. The mistake I have made when talking to people in the Mental Health Service is that I sometimes talk about catching up with male friends. Sexuality has nothing to do with who a person likes and everything to do with who a person wants to fuck. In this blog I have found it difficult to talk about sex. But with both my longtime girlfriends I had sex with them a lot. It is a cause of deep despondency that I haven't had sex since 2011 (a one night stand in Wellington with a girl who was deeply enamoured of me). I am approaching middle age, am unemployed, and am officially diagnosed schizophrenic. So even if I meet girls, which is difficult, I am not a fetching prospect. Nevertheless, I have always been profoundly attracted to women – it is a basic aspect of who I am. From 2013 or 2014 until 2016, I thought I might be attracted to men as well, as I described in the post "Definitions of Sexuality Part 3", but fortunately this incredibly unpleasant psychotic symptom went away some years ago.
How can you can describe an aspect of consciousness, sexual attraction, to others, especially when the others are all sexually squeamish?
A mistake the arseholes who run the Mental Health System make is that they do not consider that mental illness has a cause – sometimes they will decide an experience is a delusion simply because they have decided that the patient is delusional. In 2013, I was called a fag in the New Zealand Herald. This sounds like a delusion but it actually happened, and I want to detail the circumstances around it.
From mid 2010 until 2013 I was well. In January 2012, I was discharged from the service; for the whole of that year I was on 5mgs of Olanzapine. That year I completed an MA in Creative Writing through AUT. In early 2013, I became 'ill' again – I thought that people in the Media knew something about the film I'd written in 2012 and also thought that a rumour that I was gay had got into the media. I have talked about this in the posts "What Happened in 2013" and "Screenplays and Their Reception". My psychosis in 2013 totally revolved around Jess ˀ– I was scared she might turn into a lesbians. Aside from the fact that Jess was intelligent and pretty and cool, she was also the proof that I was straight. By the middle of the year, my psychosis had pretty much abated. In September 2013, I went to the Wanganui Literary Festival – the speakers included Witi Ihimaera, Grant Smithies, and Joe Bennett. One evening, patrons had the opportunity to have dinner with the guests. I was sitting near Smithies. He seemed uncomfortable around me. I went outside for a cigarette and Joe Bennett came out to have one as well. He said, "I have a small erection! Of course, there's no such thing as a small erection." Now, this is an deeply fucked up way to start a conversation. I decided that he must be gay. He asked me which authors I liked and I mentioned The Catcher in the Rye which I had recently read for the first time. He disparaged Salinger, saying that Salinger was a fraud for thinking he could understand, as an adult, what it is like to be teenager. He suggested that if I wrote any fiction, I send it to him for advice and criticism.
Shortly after the Festival, Smithies wrote a column in the Herald about it. In the column, he mention that the first time he'd slept with a woman occurred in Wanganui. 2013 was the year gay marriage was legalised in New Zealand, and I think, after his experience in Wanganui, Smithies wanted it on the public record that he was straight. In the column, he talked about the dinner. And about Joe Bennett "going outside for a fag."
Shortly after this I saw my psychiatrist Jen Murphy. I told her that Joe Bennett had made a pass at me and described him as "openly gay". I didn't mention that Grant Smithies had called me a fag in his column.
In the post, "Cannabis and The Causes of Schizophrenia", I said that I didn't know if the reason people thought me gay was the result of a rumour or me giving off some kind of gay vibe. After Smithies's column, and after Fernando had been interviewed in the Herald saying "There are signs you learn to look for", I decided that Fernando had spread a rumour about me. Perhaps Fernando spread it deliberately because he'd heard about my film and realised that it could be damaging to the psychiatric profession. He was then a darling of the media. This is why I sent Steve Braunias a kind of letter, a letter in the style of his "Secret Diary" column, strongly suggesting Fernando was a homosexual sociopath who serially misdiagnoses patients and falsifies patient records.
In early 2014, of course, I was put under the Mental Health Act, and have been receiving Compulsory Treatment ever since.
In the years since I have struggled with the problem of gay-vibe vs. rumour. You must remember that in 2012, I didn't think I was famous, so to be subject to media attention was incredibly distressing. I now think it was a rumour. There were two possible sources for this rumour, Tony Fernando. Or Jose Barbosa. But it is almost impossible for me to confirm that this rumour existed. Earlier this year, I wrote to Duncan Greive, who runs the internet news site The Spinoff, to ask him if he knew of any gossip about me. I had gone to school with Duncan and knew him as a man who had always understood that the way to get ahead in life is to play the game and suck up to the teachers. He said, "I can honestly say I have not heard any false rumours about you." I believe, now, that he was being disingenuous. What I didn't know when I wrote to Duncan is that Jose works for The Spinoff. So Duncan almost certainly had heard something about me, and it was probably false.
Incidentally, in the posts "My First Psychotic Episode" and "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM", I said that Jose was either uncertain of my sexual orientation or thought I was gay. Jose is a fuckwit. He should have known that I was straight. A couple of years before I went to work at bFM, I bumped into him at a party. I suggested he meet my girlfriend – I brought up the fact that I had a girlfriend because I was unsure of his sexual orientation and I wanted him to know that I was heterosexual. The world is full of stupid cunts, I think.
I'll finish this post by making an observation about the Mental Health System. It is all founded on lies. The good people get out; the rest know that to keep their jobs they must stick to the party line. This means that if a person is, for instance, diagnosed schizophrenic, no one is willing to say that the psychiatrists made a mistake. And they look for evidence to justify the diagnosis. I think New Zealand would be a healthier and happier place if we just got rid of the psychiatric profession entirely.
I know by the way that this post is not brilliantly written. But I hope it conveys something of my life.
A couple of times in the blog I have said that when I first became psychotic, back in 2007, I decided that my father was gay. I have talked about this in the posts "My First Psychotic Episode" and "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM". I need to try to explain why I formed this delusion. At the Big House, in my madness, I had decided that the world was full of closet homosexuals. I thought of Lacan and his theory that the Name of the Father is the centre of the system – I decided that my father must be also gay. I went for a walk and decided that the reason that my father had divorced my mother when I was seven was because he didn't want me to be gay as well. In other words, I decided that my father had divorced my mother because he loved me and wanted to save me.
There were other things entering into for this delusion, some of which I can't talk about. I can say, however, that my mother's oldest brother, Tom, was probably gay, but that gay men and women of his generation didn't come out. He had died, of emphysema, when I was seventeen. In fact, to go back in time a little, after I had decided that Mikey and Jose were gay, I had asked my mother, for the first time, if Tom was gay, and she had confirmed it. It's always possible he wasn't.
I get so tired of using the word 'gay' all the time.
After I decided that my father was gay, I returned to the Big House and told them "My father's gay but I'm straight!" It was the first time I had used the words out loud when talking to anyone during the entire psychotic episode. And saying this cured the psychosis. I stopped believing there were listening devices in the flat and stopped dividing my flatmates into angels and demons. I told them that I either had schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder. My flatmates called my family to tell them they were concerned about me and the next evening my brother came and picked me up.
The next day I was taken into the Taylor centre. At my first contact with the staff there I asked them if we were under surveillance and decided that we weren't. I could use the words 'gay' or 'straight' if I wanted now – I was under the protective umbrella of caring, intelligent professionals after all. (How wrong I was.) I told them about my father and why I believed he had divorced my mother; I said that I wanted to "come out as straight" by which I meant that I was always straight and that I wanted people to know. I told them how I'd had some gay friends in high school. In the post "Cannabis and the Causes of Schizophrenia" I said that the only real crime I ever committed was that I wasn't homophobic enough; back then in March 2007, at some level, I knew this, that I'd fallen ill because I was less homophobic than other people; I thought that the explanation for my lack of homophobia was because my father was gay and I loved him. I know now that my lack of homophobia probably had more to do with my uncle and the fact that, despite appearances to the contrary, I was basically a good person.
Shortly afterwards I had my first appointment with Fernando. I immediately got a bad vibe off him. I discussed my symptoms, said that I thought the flat was under surveillance, that the horoscope seemed to be uncannily accurate, that the radio had been directing songs at me. I ran through a checklist of psychotic symptoms, all of which were true, but never used the words 'gay' or 'straight' at all. I didn't mention that I had formed the delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals. He asked me if I heard voices and looked surprised when I said "no". At the end of either the first or second appointment he told me to "Stop avoiding". I had intuited immediately that he was a closet homosexual. To be told by a closet homosexual to "Stop avoiding" only had one possible meaning. He had decided, out of the boundless compassion of his Philippino heart, to diagnose me as a latent or repressed or closet homosexual.
I was put on 2.5mgs of Rispiridone. After seeing Fernando, the delusion that I was under surveillance returned; I decided that there was a listening device in my glasses. The delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals also returned, stuck with me for the rest of the year, and returned intermittently in 2009.
I will return to my father briefly. I should say about my father that he and I, although sharing some traits such as a strong capacity for abstract reasoning, are very different. I support the Greens; he supports ACT. If I was American, I would be a Democrat and would have voted for Hilary; he would be a Republican and even today still supports Donald Trump. I believe in anthropogenic climate-change; he is a still a climate change denier. I like Noam Chomsky; he has an almost fanatical devotion to the novels and philosophy of Ayn Rand. For much of my life, I have found it challenging continuing to love and respect him when I disagree so entirely with his politics. Back in 2007, there were times, in fact, when I thought he was a double-agent – a heterosexual who had infiltrated the ruling homosexual elite by pretending to be a closet homosexual.
In 2007, I believed that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals and sometimes thought that there were more homosexuals in the world than heterosexuals. This was partly a result of having Fernando as a psychiatrist. I was almost well in 2008. In January 2009, after I'd been on 2.5mgs of Rispiridone for over a year and a half, that I first started hearing voices. The first voice I heard belonged to George W. Bush. I asked him the reason why he had invaded Iraq and was told some bullshit about the clash of civilisations. In 2009, my principle delusion was that I could communicate telepathically with other people. For instance, after Tony Veitch was subjected to intense public condemnation after allegations that he had physically abused his partner, I tried to project the thought "I love you" into his head. In 2007, I had believed that everything reported in the news was made up, but it was thought Veitch's case that I started believing some of the news was true. My psychosis that year often had an almost religious dimension; I sometimes thought I was being picked to save the world. I visited a nunnery with my mother and a friend of hers at one point, picked up a book by St Thomas Aquinas and decided that he was gay. I thought one of the male priests there had projected the thought into my head, "None of them?" During this year I thought I could psychically know who was gay or straight.
My psychosis in 2009 involved sexuality but not in an obvious way. I wasn't in the slightest sexually muddled. I sometimes thought, in fact, that I might be the straightest man in the world. In late 2009, I think after I was put on Olanzapine, I decided that the world might be ruled by a heterosexual elite and that the second tier down consisted of homosexuals, in the same way that Smithers is the personal assistant to Mr Burns.
I have said that if I had been treated better by the mental health service I would have got better in a year. The reason I was so sick was because I sensed that I had been diagnosed as a latent or closet homosexual at my first appointment; when someone senses that people around him think him a latent or closet homosexual, there is no way to tell them that they are wrong. This was the cause of my psychosis in both 2007 and 2009. I know I should adduce evidence, and there is some, but it is easier if you just trust me. I knew. The question is – why did they think me gay? I never used the words 'gay' or 'straight' with anyone in the Mental Health system until 2013, apart from a couple of times right at the very beginning. (For a description of the one time I used these words, see the post "An Anecdote; and A Description of a Condition".) I certainly have never said I was gay or even that I was sexually confused – because I wasn't. For much of 2007, I believed there was a listening device in my glasses and that if I used either word something terrible would happen to me. In 2008, this delusion receded; I thought that so long as I said nothing controversial no one would be listening. It came back in early 2009 and was succeeded by the delusion that everyone was telepathic. From early 2010 until 2013 I was totally well – but I had made a kind of bargain with the devil to simply allow people to think whatever they wanted of me. I was well but I was vomiting every day. In 2011, I made no secret with my Key Worker or with the other patients that I was pursuing the girl Jess – but I believe that my Key Worker thought of me as a gay man who didn't want to come out.
So why did they decide I was gay? In late 2008, I re-established a friendship with a man I'd known some years earlier, who had just recently returned from the Czech Republic. He wasn't even a particularly good friend. I would call him 'straight' but he was actually a little fuzzy around the edges, something I sensed that sometimes made me uncomfortable. He had been married to a woman I'd known in Dunedin. Sometimes I would go and hang out with him at Piha. I made the mistake of telling those treating me about this friendship – I believe that they decided it was a homosexual relationship. And this is why I went completely nuts for all of 2009.
The most generally accepted definition of homosexuality is that it is a sexual attraction towards members of the same sex. Heterosexuality is when a person is sexually attracted towards members of the opposite sex. The mistake I have made when talking to people in the Mental Health Service is that I sometimes talk about catching up with male friends. Sexuality has nothing to do with who a person likes and everything to do with who a person wants to fuck. In this blog I have found it difficult to talk about sex. But with both my longtime girlfriends I had sex with them a lot. It is a cause of deep despondency that I haven't had sex since 2011 (a one night stand in Wellington with a girl who was deeply enamoured of me). I am approaching middle age, am unemployed, and am officially diagnosed schizophrenic. So even if I meet girls, which is difficult, I am not a fetching prospect. Nevertheless, I have always been profoundly attracted to women – it is a basic aspect of who I am. From 2013 or 2014 until 2016, I thought I might be attracted to men as well, as I described in the post "Definitions of Sexuality Part 3", but fortunately this incredibly unpleasant psychotic symptom went away some years ago.
How can you can describe an aspect of consciousness, sexual attraction, to others, especially when the others are all sexually squeamish?
A mistake the arseholes who run the Mental Health System make is that they do not consider that mental illness has a cause – sometimes they will decide an experience is a delusion simply because they have decided that the patient is delusional. In 2013, I was called a fag in the New Zealand Herald. This sounds like a delusion but it actually happened, and I want to detail the circumstances around it.
From mid 2010 until 2013 I was well. In January 2012, I was discharged from the service; for the whole of that year I was on 5mgs of Olanzapine. That year I completed an MA in Creative Writing through AUT. In early 2013, I became 'ill' again – I thought that people in the Media knew something about the film I'd written in 2012 and also thought that a rumour that I was gay had got into the media. I have talked about this in the posts "What Happened in 2013" and "Screenplays and Their Reception". My psychosis in 2013 totally revolved around Jess ˀ– I was scared she might turn into a lesbians. Aside from the fact that Jess was intelligent and pretty and cool, she was also the proof that I was straight. By the middle of the year, my psychosis had pretty much abated. In September 2013, I went to the Wanganui Literary Festival – the speakers included Witi Ihimaera, Grant Smithies, and Joe Bennett. One evening, patrons had the opportunity to have dinner with the guests. I was sitting near Smithies. He seemed uncomfortable around me. I went outside for a cigarette and Joe Bennett came out to have one as well. He said, "I have a small erection! Of course, there's no such thing as a small erection." Now, this is an deeply fucked up way to start a conversation. I decided that he must be gay. He asked me which authors I liked and I mentioned The Catcher in the Rye which I had recently read for the first time. He disparaged Salinger, saying that Salinger was a fraud for thinking he could understand, as an adult, what it is like to be teenager. He suggested that if I wrote any fiction, I send it to him for advice and criticism.
Shortly after the Festival, Smithies wrote a column in the Herald about it. In the column, he mention that the first time he'd slept with a woman occurred in Wanganui. 2013 was the year gay marriage was legalised in New Zealand, and I think, after his experience in Wanganui, Smithies wanted it on the public record that he was straight. In the column, he talked about the dinner. And about Joe Bennett "going outside for a fag."
Shortly after this I saw my psychiatrist Jen Murphy. I told her that Joe Bennett had made a pass at me and described him as "openly gay". I didn't mention that Grant Smithies had called me a fag in his column.
In the post, "Cannabis and The Causes of Schizophrenia", I said that I didn't know if the reason people thought me gay was the result of a rumour or me giving off some kind of gay vibe. After Smithies's column, and after Fernando had been interviewed in the Herald saying "There are signs you learn to look for", I decided that Fernando had spread a rumour about me. Perhaps Fernando spread it deliberately because he'd heard about my film and realised that it could be damaging to the psychiatric profession. He was then a darling of the media. This is why I sent Steve Braunias a kind of letter, a letter in the style of his "Secret Diary" column, strongly suggesting Fernando was a homosexual sociopath who serially misdiagnoses patients and falsifies patient records.
In early 2014, of course, I was put under the Mental Health Act, and have been receiving Compulsory Treatment ever since.
In the years since I have struggled with the problem of gay-vibe vs. rumour. You must remember that in 2012, I didn't think I was famous, so to be subject to media attention was incredibly distressing. I now think it was a rumour. There were two possible sources for this rumour, Tony Fernando. Or Jose Barbosa. But it is almost impossible for me to confirm that this rumour existed. Earlier this year, I wrote to Duncan Greive, who runs the internet news site The Spinoff, to ask him if he knew of any gossip about me. I had gone to school with Duncan and knew him as a man who had always understood that the way to get ahead in life is to play the game and suck up to the teachers. He said, "I can honestly say I have not heard any false rumours about you." I believe, now, that he was being disingenuous. What I didn't know when I wrote to Duncan is that Jose works for The Spinoff. So Duncan almost certainly had heard something about me, and it was probably false.
Incidentally, in the posts "My First Psychotic Episode" and "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM", I said that Jose was either uncertain of my sexual orientation or thought I was gay. Jose is a fuckwit. He should have known that I was straight. A couple of years before I went to work at bFM, I bumped into him at a party. I suggested he meet my girlfriend – I brought up the fact that I had a girlfriend because I was unsure of his sexual orientation and I wanted him to know that I was heterosexual. The world is full of stupid cunts, I think.
I'll finish this post by making an observation about the Mental Health System. It is all founded on lies. The good people get out; the rest know that to keep their jobs they must stick to the party line. This means that if a person is, for instance, diagnosed schizophrenic, no one is willing to say that the psychiatrists made a mistake. And they look for evidence to justify the diagnosis. I think New Zealand would be a healthier and happier place if we just got rid of the psychiatric profession entirely.
I know by the way that this post is not brilliantly written. But I hope it conveys something of my life.
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