It has been a long time since I've written a post. For some reason, I have found it difficult to bring myself to write the essay that I've been intending to write for many weeks, a piece about schizophrenia. I think I wish to talk about the definition of schizophrenia and the failures of the psychiatric profession to accurately understand and treat patients– although, at this point in the writing of this post, I don't have a clear idea what I will end up saying about all this. As usual I will approach the topic laterally, first by talking about members of the Intellectual Dark Web, and then moving on to my main subject. Bear with me.
The failure of the medical model of mental illness has recently been demonstrated by what befell famed public intellectual Jordan Peterson over the last year. Peterson had suffered from anxiety for many years following "a severe autoimmune reaction to food" and had taken the benzodiazepine Clonazepam to combat this anxiety. In April last year, after he found out that his wife had terminal cancer, he had increased his dosage. Presumably, he started taking anti-anxiety medication and had increased it with the consent or even recommendation of his doctors. After that, he began to experience "paradoxical side effects" but had extreme difficulty discontinuing the benzos because of severe withdrawal symptoms. Unable to find suitable treatment in North America, his family sent him to a Russian rehab facility where he was put in an induced coma for a fortnight. For a long time he was unable to talk, walk, or write. A clip on Youtube by Sam Seder discussing Peterson, with the title "What's Going On With Jordan Peterson?" can be found under the URL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xsh0fheNpts .
The shocking and terrible truth is that the medical profession, principally psychiatrists, are creating a generation of people addicted to prescription medications. It isn't just benzodiazepines, which psychiatrists dish out as if they were lollies, nor just benzodiazepines and opioids – a person can become dependent on any medication that he or she takes daily over a long period of time and which affects neurotransmitter levels and receptors in the brain. Over time, a person's brain adjusts to the medication which makes it very difficult for the person to come off it. This is simple logic. The same argument applies to anti-anxiety medication, antidepressants, and antipsychotics. Not only do all these medications pose risks (it is a documented fact that antipsychotics cause brain shrinkage over the long term), if a person tries to stop taking them it is quite possible that he or she will experience withdrawal symptoms that can be mistaken for a reemergence of the 'condition' for which the drugs were originally prescribed. And yet we live in an era in which the solution to 'mental health issues' are little white pills, pills that in the end do more harm than good.
Another clip that brings together this type of argument and Jordan Peterson is "The Hidden Epidemic, full Robert Whitaker Interview" at the address https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQvN5aFcBr8 . It is well worth viewing.
I feel sometimes that a kind of malign conspiracy exists to prevent the truth getting out. Recently Sam Harris interviewed Robert Plomin, a behavioural geneticist working at Kings College London. Harris has made a habit of interviewing assholes, most famously Charles Murray; Plomin is just another asshole, a signatory to the editorial "Mainstream Science on Intelligence" which was written in the wake of the controversy about Murray's book The Bell Curve. In the interview, Plomin repeatedly strongly implies that schizophrenia is genetic although he never says so explicitly. This is just plain wrong. In 2015, I saw a psychiatrist who told me that, although the psychiatric profession had thought schizophrenia was genetic, despite years of searching they had failed to find any genes responsible for schizophrenia. I don't believe that in the last five years the scientists have had any more luck identifying schizophrenia alleles. And yet it is in the interests of certain commercial and medical elites to push the false story that schizophrenia is genetic, that it is hereditable, that it is a chronic and incurable inborn condition. Voices opposing this bullshit narrative can be found if one looks. The clinical psychologist Jay Joseph has written a book, Schizophrenia and Genetics: The End of an Illusion, in which he strongly disputes the received wisdom that schizophrenia is a congenital disease. I haven't read this book yet (I only found out about it yesterday) but I intend to borrow it from the library at the earliest opportunity.
I wish to talk about schizophrenia more generally. Wikipedia is a highly unreliable source but it provides a window into what passes for common wisdom about many subjects – the Wikipedia article on schizophrenia (at the time I am writing this) begins in the following way. "Schizophrenia is a mental illness characterized by continuous or relapsing episodes of psychosis. Major symptoms include hallucinations (often hearing voices), delusions (having beliefs not shared by others), and disorganized thinking. Other symptoms include social withdrawal, decreased emotional expression, and lack of motivation." The article goes on to state that schizophrenics exhibit severe cognitive impairments and have problems with episodic memory. The article fails to provide any account of the causes of schizophrenia although it offers some hypotheses. I wish to use this article as a springboard for discussing this 'condition', to relate it to my own experience and to my observations of other patients.
I'll start by discussing the supposed cognitive impairments schizophrenics suffer from. Readers of my blog I hope have formed the impression that I am quite clever or at least not stupid. For instance, I have argued that the neo-Darwinian synthesis is incorrect. I have argued that when a significant mutation occurs in a species, it occurs in a number of individuals in the same population at the same time. I have argued against the neo-Darwinian principle that cooperative and altruistic behaviour in humans arises from kin selection or, as it alternatively known, inclusive fitness. Now, the positions I have taken on evolution are heterodox and readers of my blog may disagree with me, but you cannot deny that the conclusions I have reached arise from well considered, reasoned arguments. I sometimes like to pretend that Bret Weinstein reads my blog and, if he does, I would like him to reconsider his basic notion that we have evolved to protect and extend 'lineages' – he and Heather Heying often speak about returning to first principles but they both need to consider the possibility that some of their first principles may be wrong. Readers of my blog may wonder: yes, he seems mental compos mentis but maybe he turns into a blithering idiot when he is in the consultation room? I don't. Back in 2007, the psychiatrists thought schizophrenics lack verbal fluency and have problems with abstract thinking: at my first or second appointment, my psychiatrist Antony Fernando said, "Well, you're certainly verbally fluent!" But this didn't stop the sociopath from leaning towards me and telling me that his sister had schizophrenia, leading me to believe that I had been diagnosed schizophrenic.
Not only do I not suffer, as far as I'm aware, from any cognitive impairments, in all my years as a patient I have never met another patient who seems noticeably stupid. I used to talk a lot in this blog about another patient I have known and loved, referring to her as Jess; I strongly believe this girl to be a genius, although she expresses her erudition and insight through poetry and fiction rather than through philosophical prose. I have met and conversed with many other patients and none of them seemed at all imbecilic. The intelligence of patients seems to me to lie on a bell curve, the same bell curve exhibited by the population generally. There is a major reason to doubt the claim that people diagnosed schizophrenic are stupider than others deemed sane. In order to say that people diagnosed schizophrenic are more intellectually retarded than the rest of the population, we would need to give everyone, the ones diagnosed schizophrenic and all the rest, IQ tests. But in practice only a small minority of the general population take IQ tests, and these people are more likely to be clever than the people who don't; nor is it common practice to require people diagnosed schizophrenic to take IQ tests. Intelligence is assessed, in practice, subjectively, by doctors, an assessment that is the result of the inevitably imperfect judgement formed by a psychiatrist with his or her own biases, including confirmation bias. I can remember, to digress, that when I first started to become psychotic in 2007, one of my friends at the Big House said to me, "Have you ever taken an IQ test?" He didn't ask me this because he thought I was stupid. He asked me this question because he thought I was quite possibly a genius.
Another symptom of schizophrenia is, supposedly, thought disorder. I do not believe I have ever exhibited thought disorder although the reader is justified in wondering: How would he know? In 2007 and 2009 I did sometimes speak cryptically, elliptically – in 2007 this was because I believed that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals who would kill me if I exposed them, and in 2009 this was because I sensed strongly that if I used either the words 'gay' or 'straight' to anyone in the Mental Health Service I would get into trouble, that these words were somehow taboo. Consequently, when I talked about homosexuality, I did so without ever using the appropriate terminology. I can remember, in 2009, I came up with an interpretation of Shakespeare's Othello according to which Iago was a closet homosexual who hated Othello because he loved him. I have talked about this interpretation in an early post in this blog, "Iago's Twisted Love". In 2009, I tried to discuss this interpretation with my Key Worker but had to do so without ever saying I thought Iago gay. What may have passed for thought disorder in those days was really the result of my needing constantly to censor myself. More to the point, I have almost never met another patient who displayed thought disorder in the thirteen years I have been a patient of the Mental Health System, although, in the interests of complete truth, the patient I have described in the post "Concerning Jacinda and Julian" was sometimes a little hard to follow – but only, I think, because he assumed greater knowledge on my part of his situation than I had. Another supposed symptom of schizophrenia is paraphasia or word salad. I have never once met any patient who exhibited paraphasia.
Another supposed indication of schizophrenia is problems with episodic memory. Again, this blog proves that I have no problem with remembering important moments in my life although, like everyone else, I don't have perfect recall of everything that has ever happened to me. I wish to talk a little now about another event that occurred in 2009. In this blog I have repeatedly said that I never used the words 'gay' or 'straight' to anyone in the Mental Health Service from shortly after I became a patient in 2007 until just before Easter 2013. This is literally true – I never used either word out loud. But in 2009, I wrote a very short film script, a comedic story much like a Family Guy skit, about a man who is mistaken for gay when he's not who kills himself as a result. In this story, the man is given a shirt with a design on it that, unbeknownst to him, is emblematic of homosexuality, the same way a pierced right ear lobe signifies gayness. As a result a rumour that he is gay spreads around the people who know him and he ends up, feeling himself a victim of an inexplicable conspiracy, hanging himself in a closet. When I wrote this story, it induced a partial amelioration of the distress I had been feeling – I had expressed, in fictive form, the cause of my illness. I showed this short film to my Key Worker. And shortly after I became even more ill than I'd been before. The reason my showing this short screenplay to my Key Worker made me worse is because I hadn't specified in it that the story's protagonist was straight. Insofar as the story could be read autobiographically, it was ambiguous. Was the protagonist a gay man who killed himself because he'd be outed? Or was he a straight man who was the victim of false gossip? I intended the second interpretation but I believe my Key Worker latched onto the first.
Other supposed negative symptoms of schizophrenia include lack of emotional expressiveness, known as blunted affect, and diminished motivation. It is true that I don't cry. The last time I shed tears was when I was about thirteen and the victim of bullying; at the time, they were tears of anger rather than sadness. But I don't believe I suffer from any less emotional expressiveness than anyone else I know. It is also true that I have problems with motivation, but with good reason. For six years, I have been butting my head against a brick wall, trying to get the psychiatrists who have been treating me to recognise that I am heterosexual and always have been, until recently with no effect. The label 'schizophrenic', which was first applied to me in 2013, is itself a powerfully demotivating influence. I feel, though, that I have turned a corner. Recently I applied for my dream-job, as an in-house screenwriter, and although I probably won't get it, the possibility exists that I may get paid work doing what I love.
One of the chief symptoms of schizophrenia is voice-hearing, and I wish to spend a little time talking about this feature. Psychiatrists and lay-people alike consider voice-hearing a type of auditory hallucination, but this is not my experience and not the experience of many other patients I have met. Rather, for me and others, voice-hearing consists of conversations with unseen interlocutors – the deeper truth about voice-hearing is captured by the way it is popularly described, as "voices in the head". Consider: if voice-hearing were actually an auditory hallucination, a person who heard voices would attribute them to others in his or her environs. Suppose I am in a crowded place and I hear a voice saying my name – I would look around to see who had said it. But this is not how people who hear voices interpret their experiences. Rather it is a voice in the person's head who either talks to the person or to the other voices. In this blog, I have several times said that the first person I spoke with in my head was George W. Bush and that this conversation occurred in January 2009, after I had been on the antipsychotic Rispiridone for over a year and a half. While it is true that I didn't experience voice-hearing until January 2009, George W. Bush was not quite the first person I communicated with. As best as I can remember, what happened was as follows. In 2007, shortly after I had become a patient of the Taylor Centre, I had formed the delusion that there was a microphone in my glasses and that everything I said was being disseminated to third parties, I thought the media. This delusion went into abeyance in 2008 (I thought that if I said nothing controversial, no one would be listening) but came back strongly right at the beginning of 2009. I remember driving with my mother at this time and saying to the invisible committee eavesdropping through the bug in my glasses, quoting Johny Rotten, "You cunts, I am not queer!" Almost immediately after this, I heard John Key in my head, saying, "Shut up, shut up, shut up!" At this time, I realised something bizarre: that it didn't matter what I said, people could hear my thoughts whether I verbalised them or not. I formed the belief that everyone was potentially telepathic. The delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals went away for good around this time, while the delusion that I could communicate with others telepathically started in January 2009 and went away for good around January 2010.
Another highly pertinent truth about voice-hearing is that the voices heard by someone experiencing psychosis are not meaningless noise, but rather have semantic content. In this blog, I have described some of the conversations I've had with Jon Stewart and the girl I call Jess. I'll tell a story about another conversation I had, I think around November 2009. Walking home from Newmarket one evening, I heard a voice say, "You're long-sighted." I replied, "No, I'm short-sighted". The voice said again, "You're long-sighted." I replied again, "No, I'm short-sighted". It repeated itself again. I said, "No, I'm short-sighted – I see well at short distances!" The voice laughed and I realised that I was talking with Jon Stewart. He said, "There's no hope for you." A quality of the voice-hearing I experienced over the summer of 2009 and 2010 was that it was often humorous; this conversation was referring facetiously and indirectly to my sure and painful knowledge that I had been diagnosed as either a latent or closet homosexual when I was neither. Starting in January 2009, I heard an occasional voice saying "I love you" – ordinarily, psychotics often hear abusive voices but none of the voices I have ever heard have been at all derogatory. I believe that the psychosis I experienced starting in January 2009 was the result of being outed as gay in my patient notes when I'm not (the nurse and psychiatrist treating me had misinterpreted a platonic friendship I had with a straight male friend in late 2008 as a homosexual relationship). The reason I was well from around February or March 2010 until February 2013 is something I have gone into in an essay I sent the Herald and won't recapitulate here. During those years, I very occasionally heard a little voice saying "I love you" but otherwise was totally well. I started hearing voices again in 2013, possibly because I had been outed as gay publicly. I have occasionally heard voices in the years since I was put under the Act, particularly I think in 2018. The little voice in my head would tell me about the people treating me, saying things like, "Today, Simon Judkins died" or "Today, Tony Fernando's existence winked out" or "Today, Nick Hoeh's world ended" or "Today, you've won". A couple of weeks ago I heard a voice saying, "Today, Jennifer Murphy resigned". Jennifer Murphy was the psychiatrist who diagnosed me schizophrenic in 2013 and had me put under the Mental Health Act at the beginning of 2014. When I was at the Taylor Centre last week for my injection, I found out that Murphy has indeed resigned.
The Wikipedia article on schizophrenia states that schizophrenics harbour 'delusions', beliefs not shared by others. I feel I should say something about the delusion I held in 2007, the belief that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals, that there were more homosexuals in the world than heterosexuals. It is difficult for me to reconstruct what was going on in my mind the night I reached crisis point, a day before I was removed from the Big House by my brother and two days before I had my first contact with the Taylor centre, the night I walked into the sea up to my shins and then walked out. But I feel quite sure that my suicidal ideation that night did not spring from this paranoid delusion. At the time, I believe, I felt that I had been outed as gay by bFM or had accidentally outed myself as gay simply by choosing to go work there. In my mind, everything got tangled up with my parents' divorce when I was seven, and this was why I walked into the sea. Also at the time, I believed that the Big House was bugged and that everything I said was being broadcast to a vast gay fanbase; when I returned home from my half-hearted suicide attempt in the early morning, I sat outside and delivered a soliloquy to my unseen audience about community, about how I had decided to go work at bFM because I wanted to participate in a community of like-minded people but that the community I could belong to didn't exist. When my flatmates woke up, I told them, "My father's gay but I'm straight!" It was imperative I tell my flatmates that I was straight (I strongly believe a rumour that I was gay had got around my flat) but why, you might ask, did I decide, wrongly, that my father was gay? I have had an interest in homosexuality my whole life, even though I am straight, and have had a number of gay friends – I had decided that my father being gay was the explanation for my interest in homosexuality. It was because my father was gay, I decided, that I had got myself into the mess in which I'd found myself. When I first made contact with the Taylor Centre, I tried to talk about this. I thought that, in the Mental Health System, matters to do with sexuality and childhood trauma would be discussed openly and honestly; at my first appointment with Antony Fernando, however, I realised that this was not the case. I had said that I was straight and I sensed that he didn't believe me. I also strongly suspected, at my first consultation with him, that he was yet another closet homosexual. The delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals, which I had formed a week or two prior at the Big House and which had gone away, returned a week or so after my first meeting with Fernando. I think that, in 2007, the true fact that my psychiatrist thought I was either a latent or closet homosexual was the fuel that powered my paranoid delusion that a conspiracy of closet homosexuals ruled the world.
Not long after I became a patient of the Taylor Centre, one of the Support Staff I saw regularly said that, in the Mental Health Service today, people don't go back into the past but try to focus on the present. This modern credo evinces the utter moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the psychiatric profession. In order to recover from mental 'illness', a person needs to identify and address the causes of his or her 'illness'. But today the bullshit story holds sway that mental illness is literally a physical illness, a neurotransmitter imbalance, and so no effort is made to establish the precise environmental and situational influences that caused the 'illness' in the first place. This is why so very few people recover. A patient can even be made sicker by those treating him or her if the people doing the treating exacerbate the original cause of the distress, as happened with me. Not only the psychiatrists but also the clinical psychologists subscribe to this evil and insane fiction, that mental 'illness' is a physical illness. If we went back a couple of decades, before the neurotransmitter imbalance hypothesis became entrenched as the dominant paradigm, the most popular explanation for 'schizophrenia' was the 'schizophrenogenic mother' – a loveless mother. This was also bullshit. I have always got on perfectly well with my mother. The other day I told her that she was the only person in my life who has always known that I'm straight. She pointed out that she has always known I am straight because, when I had girlfriends, I would bring them home. The truth is that the causes of 'schizophrenia' are different for every single person diagnosed with this condition. Sometimes it's illegal drugs, sometimes it's physical or sexual abuse during childhood, sometimes it can be something as simple as dysfunction, narcissism and sociopathy, within the sufferer's family. In my case, the cause of my illness was people around me, particularly people in the Mental Health Service, thinking I'm gay when I'm not. And the cure for my illness has been getting it onto the public record that I am heterosexual and always have been.
The New Zealand comedian and Mental Health campaigner Mike King has said the cause of mental illness is "other people". The serious blindspot that the Mental Health System has is that the people who work in it fail to realise the extent to which they are culpable in creating and worsening the conditions that they are supposedly treating. You only need to talk with a few patients to hear horror stories about psychological abuse perpetrated by psychiatrists and others working within the system. For me, the stressor that has amounted to psychological torture is the utter corruption and mendacity of the psychiatric profession – it's my life they are lying about. I'll give an example. I think around the middle of 2018, my dosage was doubled from 300mgs every month to 300mgs every fortnight. A month ago, I went in for my injection and was told that, according to my notes, I had been on 410mgs monthly prior to the dosage increase. I know that I had only been on 300mgs. I know this because, in early 2016, the nurse giving me the injection had accidentally given me a higher dosage and had told me about her mistake; since then at every injection I have always sought reassurance that I was receiving the proper amount. The nurse carrying out the injection had always said that I was receiving 300mgs. Two possibilities exist. The first is that sometime prior to my official dosage doubling, they increased my dosage to 410mgs and didn't tell me, in fact lied to me about what dosage I was receiving. It is true that in the first half of 2018, after my injection I would feel for a week like my skull was stuffed full of cotton wool; I came into the Taylor Centre a couple of times to ask if I'd been given an overdose by mistake. The second possibility is that they retroactively changed my notes to say that I had been on 410mgs monthly rather than 300mgs monthly. Why would they do this? In this blog I have repeatedly stressed that the psychiatrists have lied on multiple occasions about my medical history. Perhaps they wish to cast doubt on my credibility. "He said that he was on 300mgs when he was really on 410. So he can't be trusted." I don't know which possibility is correct. Either way, the psychiatrists have perjured themselves. I am a great respecter of the truth; if there is any justice in the world, all psychiatrists will burn in hell after they die.
I'll finish this post with a little housekeeping. During the three years I was completely free of psychotic symptoms, from early 2010 until February 2013, I was well, I believe, because I unconsciously allowed people around me, in particular my key worker, to believe that I was gay when I'm not, that I had come out when I hadn't. I have a couple of serious regrets from this period. Starting in late 2010, I went to Youthline to attend a personal development course and to train as a phone counsellor, at my key worker's suggestion. I believe my key worker thought that I was going to come out as gay to my fellow workshop attendees. Of course, I didn't. Early on during the personal development course, each of us was required to give a short history of his or her life, with the unspoken understanding that we should discuss traumatic experiences with the group. I told them that the traumatic childhood experience that had affected me was my parents' divorce when I was seven and mentioned the fact that I had been diagnosed schizophrenic, but didn't mention anything to do with sexuality at all. Everyone in the group cried when he or she told his or her story except me. In 2011, one of the training sessions was focussed exclusively on sexuality. I missed this session – this wasn't deliberate but rather because I had a prior commitment. Since 2009 I have been patronising the Wanganui Literary Festival, held every two years, and this held priority over Youthline. I wish very much that I had attended this session because it probably would have given me the opportunity to say, if only indirectly, that I'm straight. Another regret I harbour concerns something that happened in 2012. During the period I was writing my film about Jess, I saw the the woman who'd been my key worker until the beginning of that year, Kate Whelan, on one occasion and showed her the first act of the film. This first act might have given Kate the false impression that Jess was a lesbian, a misconception that would have been corrected if she'd read the whole screenplay. I deeply regret this. I'll say one last thing that may be important. When I re-entered the Taylor Centre in 2013, I was deeply concerned that people thought Jess was a lesbian and that she might consequently turn into one; I thought getting it on the official record that I'm heterosexual would somehow prove that she was heterosexual as well. I failed on both counts.
In the 1970's, I think, the psychiatrists who came up with stress-vulnerability model carried out a survey. People diagnosed schizophrenic were divided into three groups: label acceptors who always accepted the label 'schizophrenic', label deniers who never did, and label rejectors who accepted the label for a time and then rejected it. It was found that label rejectors had the highest rate of recovery. Nowadays, the psychiatric profession no longer believes people can recover at all, by definition But I recovered years ago, in fact before they doubled my dosage. Therefore, because I recovered, by definition, I must never have had schizophrenia at all. This is the only conclusion that can be drawn.
