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.
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