As I've said before, I sometimes receive small signs from the universe that point me towards topics to discuss in this blog. The other day I watched a Darkhorse livestream, the Youtube program hosted by Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, in which Bret posited that paranoid schizophrenics lack theory of mind. Now, I am diagnosed schizophrenic; so, consequently, a reader might justifiably wonder if this is true of me. Does the writer of the Silverfish blog lack an understanding that other people might have different beliefs, cognitive processes, knowledge, and emotional dispositions than he does? Readers of my blog, people who have for instance read the short stories I have published in it, will know the answer already. My problem, as this post will indirectly show, is not that I lack theory of mind but that I have too much theory of mind. This may seem an extraordinary claim to make but I can justify it. An important point, before I move on to discussing theory of mind in the context of my own life, is that, although I am diagnosed schizophrenic, I no longer believe that I ever had schizophrenia. By definition, schizophrenia is a condition from which it is impossible to recover (this is the psychiatrists' own definition). But I recovered many years ago – in fact, I don't believe I have experienced delusions since 2013 and even then, they weren't serious delusions. Therefore, by definition, I don't have schizophrenia at all and never had it.
In the livestream, Bret Weinstein makes two mistakes with respect to schizophrenia. First, he implies that the film A Beautiful Mind is an accurate picture of schizophrenia, or at least an accurate portrayal of the mathematician John Nash. It isn't. As I've discussed before, A Beautiful Mind is a compendium of untruths. When Ron Howard made it, he might as well have gone round and fellated the psychiatric profession. The second mistake Weinstein makes is that he implies that schizophrenics always lack theory of mind, that it is a fixed immutable feature of the natural kind of person denoted by the term. What I would like to suggest is that a psychotic episode can be caused by a breakdown in theory of mind, that it can be a temporary aberration in an otherwise normal mental continuum. What I want to do in this post is to describe some moments in my life when my theory of mind failed me, focussing particularly on my time living at the Big House, moments when I simply couldn't understand the things people said, thought, or what they were trying to communicate to me. Before I engage in this task, I need to make clear my situation. I have been under the Mental Health Act and receiving Compulsory Treatment for nearly seven years now. I see my psychiatrist less than once every three months, for an hour. I have a key worker, a social worker, who I also see extremely infrequently, usually only when I see the psychiatrist. Every fortnight I go to the Taylor Centre for an injection of 300mgs of Olanzapine and have the opportunity to talk to other patients and other mental health workers. This at least is something but not much. When I do see the psychiatrist, he asks me few questions: in fact, I would have consultations with my previous psychiatrist, Jennifer Murphy, at which she would ask me no questions and in fact said nothing at all. I had to guess what to talk about. The people who work in the system take extensive notes about the patients but I don't think that they even read their own notes. I have a sense, crucially, that, although I have been saying that I'm heterosexual often enough to make my point ever since just before Easter 2013, they don't record the fact that I'm heterosexual in the official record, perhaps because it goes against some obscure policy. As someone under the Mental Health Act, I have the right to request my notes, and did, in 2015. I was given a stack of papers about the size of the bible, and read only the very beginning.
I will start with something that happened relatively recently. My previous key worker was a woman called Debbie Smith. We would go out for coffee to talk sometimes in late 2017 and early 2018, before I got rid of her and my dosage was doubled from 300mg every month to 300mgs every fortnight. I only saw her a handful of times. One time, I remember, when we went to a cafe, she was wearing dark glasses – I think she was wearing dark glasses because she was subconsciously trying to distance herself from me, was looking at me from a clinical vantage. Even though I was completely sane, she had decided, presumably based on my notes, that I was crazy. I mentioned in passing that I had lived at the Big House. When I said this, she whipped off her sunglasses and said, in some surprise, "You lived at the Big House?" I said, "Yes" and she said, seemingly astonished, "I know the Big House! They're good people!" It turns out she had lived on the same street as the flat I had lived at. What I suspect, and suspected even then, is that in my notes there must have been some misrepresentation of the place I was living in when I first became 'sick' in 2007 and that this was why she was so surprised. Perhaps the psychiatrists and other mental health workers thought I'd lived in a flat full of gay men. In fact, in the fourteen months I lived at the Big House, a house with twenty flatmates, we only ever had one gay flatmate. (His boyfriend was a frequent visitor and I can remember another flatmate, a straight man, saying, "I hate to imagine what's going on in the room next door!") Alternatively, she may have thought that my abode in 2006 and early 2007 was full of homophobes, an inference equally false. Everyone living at the Big House was very liberal politically. I admit that I didn't understand then and still can't understand now what she meant when she said that the people living at the Big House were 'good'. It all rather depends on what Debbie Smith means by the word 'good'.
In this post, I intend to talk a little more about about my first psychotic episode. This post follows on from the previous posts about my first psychotic episode, "My First Psychotic Episode" and "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM." I intend to focus on the Big House in this post but I wish to begin with a scene that I only pointed towards in the first of the two posts just mentioned and described in more detail in the second, a scene that occurred at bFM. I wish to describe the moment that I first became delusional. As I said in those previous posts, on that morning I was working at bFM in a side-room writing news stories while Mikey Havoc manned the studio desk in the room next door. There were two of us writing news items, the advertising boys were sitting nearby, and other important functionaries were about in the premises. I had known for a long time, if only subconsciously, that the other people working at bFM thought I was gay when I'm not, even though a fortnight previously I'd brought in a girl I was wanting to get with to sit in during Havoc's breakfast show. I no longer remember this morning perfectly but I had a sense that Havoc was acting up in the studio during his morning slot. Picking up on the frantic, agitated vibe in the station, I found an item in Russell Brown's Hard News site that contained the line, "If you let in a flamboyant homosexual, you may as well let in a Catholic" and wanted to run with this story because I thought it would tell the other bFM staff, and the public generally, that I'm straight. The station manager, who was floating around near me at the time, wouldn't let me run with it. When the breakfast show finished, I went into the studio proper to talk to Mikey and Jose and found them looking at themselves via webcams on their laptops. I remember turning towards Jason Rockpig and him saying, "I only play guitar." The station manager, who was there as well, sarcastically quoted the item he didn't let me run with, "If you let in a flamboyant homosexual, you may as well let in a Catholic!" I asked Jose if I could have a word with him and he said, "When I've finished messing around with these dicks!"
What I realise now, but didn't realise at the time, was that the people who worked at the station, particularly I think Jose, thought I was there because I was sexually or romantically interested in them (wrongly, of course, because I'm heterosexual) and were trying to rebuff me. But right at that moment my theory of mind failed me. I decided instead that both Mikey and Jose were coming out as gay to me. In fact, I decided that they were having an affair. On the walk home to the Big House back from bFM, I felt a sense of elation, as though I'd been admitted into a privileged club. A casual acquaintance that I'd known a little several years before, Wiremu, a chap I strongly suspected was gay, approached me on the street and asked me for my phone number. I politely rebuffed him, saying that I didn't have my phone on me. I said that I was working at bFM and he reacted in astonishment.
The sense of elation soon faded. I told my best friend at the Big House, a chap called Simeon, that Mikey Havoc and Jose Barbosa were gay and having an affair. I told him this in confidence, in his room. I visited my mother. Now, I'd had an uncle, who had died in 1997 when I was seventeen, a man considerably older than my mother who had worked as a radio DJ back in the 'fifties and then later as a English teacher, called Tom Newman. I had long suspected that Tom was gay. I asked my mother, for the first time in my life, "Was Tom gay?" She confirmed it. I said, "So's Mikey Havoc."
It is difficult to get this post in the right order. I am talking about moments in my life when my theory of mind failed me, but, to put these moments into context, I need to talk about my first psychotic episode in more detail. I think it necessary also, now, to try to describe the Big House to people unfamiliar with it in more detail. Essentially the Big House was a kind of hippie paradise, something a little like a commune comprised of Green supporters. The people who lived in it came from all backgrounds, although they were often professionals or students. We had several Maori, a couple of Germans, a French girl, a Dutch girl, and a Chinese girl. About half of the crew smoked pot every day and the other half almost never smoked pot at all. In a flat with twenty flatmates, it is impossible for a person to get on with everyone else who lives there but I had some friends, particularly Simeon and a chap called Harry. Although I have some memories from my time living there that cause me to wince with shame retrospectively, largely related to the facts that I was incapable of keeping my room clean and took inordinately long showers, I believe most of the others in the flat liked me, because I was clever and had a quirky sense of humour. (My 'illness' killed my talent for being funny.) All House decisions, such as who did the grocery shopping and when we would have another one of the enormous parties we sometimes held, were made at House meetings and required unanimous support, which meant that some meetings could drag on almost interminably. The story "Starlight", which I have included in this blog, was inspired by my time living at the Big House. The Big House was fairly famous around Auckland and a person was quite fortunate to become a flatmate, although the turnover rate was high. We would select a new flatmate every couple of months. The flatmate who had lived there the longest was a man called Logan, a Greenpeace and environmental activist quite far up the ranks of the organisations he belonged to; Logan was often not around because he was up north attending to his orchard that produced feijoa wine, his main source of income. I believe that he had lived there for over twenty years when I lived there, and that he is still living there now. Logan was the unofficial captain of the ship. A final important detail: my sort-of girlfriend Maya had lived in the Big House for several years prior to when I moved in at the beginning of 2006. In fact, it was Maya, who had by that time moved to Katikati, who told me that a vacancy had opened up at the flat.
As I said in the previous two posts about my first psychotic episode, I left bFM quite abruptly, explosively. Over the next several weeks, I dealt with some depression and then, after the Red Hot Chilli Peppers concert I attended, I started to become psychotic. It began small. I started to believe that the media was full of closet homosexuals. At my most recent Independent Review, my psychiatrist said about me that, during this period, I told my flatmates that many celebrities were gay. This is untrue. I was incapable of saying either the word "gay" or "straight" at the time. I may have implied on one occasion that the famous New Zealand broadcaster, Paul Holmes, was gay, but partly as a joke, to make people laugh. I also started to believe that I was under surveillance, a paranoid delusion that gradually metastasised into the idea that there were listening devices in the fire alarms and that everything I said was being broadcast to a vast gay fanbase. I believe this all happened over the course of about a month. The delusion that I was under surveillance was the most salient feature of this first psychotic episode but, inexplicably, my psychiatrist didn't mention this at all at the Review. I also started to divide up the flat into angels and devils, heterosexuals and closet homosexuals, inexpertly however because I couldn't be sure which was which. I recall one time during this period I went downstairs into the dining room of the Big House, feeling that I was in a fog of pervasive, oppressive, and threatening unreality, and found the bFM advertising boys there. They seemed to be deliberately adopting gay mannerisms. Previously, the people at bFM had had no contact with the Big House at all except occasionally, perhaps, at parties. I speculate, now, that the two advertising boys had decided to foster some kind of relationship with the Big House to protect the bFM brand and to deal with the scandal that I suspect I had created. But at the time it just seemed to me more evidence of some kind of malign, inexplicable conspiracy. I avoided them. Right before things reached crisis point and I considered drowning myself, I decided that all the men living at the Big House were gay except me.
Obviously, a feedback cycle was at work. The stranger I became (and I was a little manic over this month long period), the stranger my flatmates became around me. They had no idea I was having a psychotic episode. Their strangeness worsened my paranoia and made me stranger still.
In the post "My First Psychotic Episode", I mentioned how a Frenchman had moved into the Big House after I left bFM. I am no longer sure if he moved in before or after the Chilli Peppers concert. I wish to talk a little more about him now. I remember when he first appeared on the scene: I was on the front verandah with Logan when he appeared and started making conversation. He expressed his wish to move into the Big House; I remember feeling flattered because he seemed to be addressing himself to me. He was quite good looking (even though I'm straight I am capable of noticing when another man is handsome; at the time I thought he was 'cool'). Logan seemed less pleased with him. At the House Meeting when it was decided that the Frenchman should be admitted into the House, Logan strenuously argued against making him a flatmate but was overruled. I missed this House meeting because I was in bed, but heard about it later. Perhaps Logan had an intuition that there was something fishy about the Frenchman. On several occasions after he had become a flatmate, the Frenchman and I would sit outside and, as far as I can recall, discuss philosophy. I never discussed sexuality or bFM or any of the other things that preoccupied me with him at all. As I described in the post, "My First Psychotic Episode", when things reached crisis point, just after I considered drowning myself, I returned to the Big House and told my flatmates, those who were awake that early in the morning (a girl called Kirsty was there I remember), "My father's gay but I'm straight!" The Frenchman was around at the time. He said, "Don't you know you have to be a member of a group to make fun of it?" I suddenly realised two things. The first was that the Frenchman was gay. The second was that the Frenchman must have had knowledge of me prior to his moving into the Big House. I suddenly surmised that he had thought I was making fun of gays when I was working at bFM even though, in fact, I hadn't been. I conjecture, now, that perhaps the Frenchman even had knowledge of the gay spy film I wrote when I was twenty-one, six years prior to meeting him.
At this point in the post I wish to indulge in a little conspiracy theory. New Zealand has two spy agencies, the SIS and GCSB. I sometimes hear recruitment advertisements on the radio for these two intelligence organisations. I found out a couple of years ago that there is a connection between the spy agencies and the Mental Health System – my key worker at the time, Daniel Moodley, told me that the Taylor Centre had received information from the Prime Minister's office about one of the patients. The SIS and GCSB fall under the Prime Minister's purview. What I would like to suggest, now, is that the Frenchman might have been an intelligence operative who had been assigned to the Big House because, as a result of my time working at bFM, I had been flagged as a person of interest. There is a second possibility. Perhaps there were indeed rumours about me circulating in the gay community and the Frenchman had heard these rumours, and decided to get into the Big House perhaps to find out for sure. I don't know which possibility is correct but I feel certain that there was definitely something fishy about this man.
I left the Big House quite suddenly the next day after I had considered drowning myself, and moved back home to my mother's, my brother having come round to collect me from the Big House. The day after that, I first made contact with the Taylor Centre, the Mental Health provider I have been with for most of the last thirteen years. Soon after, one of my former flatmates, Sam, phoned up to say that they had decided to keep my room at the Big House vacant in the expectation that I would soon move back in. I remember speaking to my psychiatrist, Antony Fernando, at one of the first appointments I had with him and saying that I wanted to move back into the Big House. He said, "So soon?" Of course, Fernando didn't have the foggiest idea about the nature and cause of my 'illness' but I guess he indulged in speculation, easy assumptions. In those early days, I was manic and was living with the delusion, quite false, that my father was gay, but the feeling that I was under surveillance had gone away as had the delusion that the Big House was full of homosexuals. As a result of my treatment by Fernando and I believe the drug I was prescribed, Risperidone, my paranoia and delusions came back after a week or two. The delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals which I had formed at the Big House and which had temporarily gone into abeyance returned; I decided that there were more homosexuals in the world than heterosexuals, that homosexuals were having children and that heterosexuals weren't. These delusions lasted about eight or nine months and didn't go away entirely until December 2007 or January 2008. In reality, I was too unwell to go back to the Big House, and too ashamed. Very occasionally I see former flatmates on the street but I have had almost no contact with the Big House in all the years since.
A couple of weeks after I left the Big House, when I still felt capable of doing so, I returned for a visit. I remember sitting outside with several of my former flatmates at night smoking. Everyone was agitated. One flatmate, Peter, a German (and a straight man) said something like, "If you have something you need to confide, Andrew, use me." This is not an exact quote but it gives the gist. The Frenchman, who was also there, burst into laughter and made fun of Peter for his choice of words, "use me". I suspect, now, and in fact suspected at the time, that although my flatmates knew I had confided something to Simeon, they didn't know precisely what. They may have thought I had come out as gay to Simeon or had perhaps disclosed a report of a homosexual experience to him. Why Peter felt he was a better choice of confidant than Simeon is something I still don't understand. I also strongly suspect that the Frenchman, even though he knew I was straight, felt it served his purposes somehow to allow the false impression that I was gay or sexually confused to get around my former flatmates. Probably, as well, he was keeping his homosexuality secret from the rest of the flat. That same night I went upstairs to the attic of the Big House, where Simeon had moved to, to talk to him. Simeon had been my best friend in the house, the one I had the most to do with. At my first few appointments with Antony Fernando, I had received the strong impression that he had decided to diagnose me as a latent homosexual, presumably because I had said that my father was gay. I told Simeon, "My father's gay. And it's genetic!" I thought that maybe the gay gene was carried on the Y chromosome. Simeon said, "Andrew, do you want to hear about my homosexual experiences?" At the time, my theory of mind failed me again. I could sense that this was Simeon's way of saying he was straight but I couldn't understand why he felt the need to tell me that he was straight when I hadn't questioned his sexuality at all. At the time I felt that his willingness to disclose stories of homosexual experiences without coming out publicly as gay made him another one of Them, yet another closet homosexual. It felt then as though a curtain of darkness had descended all around me, something that often occurred to me during that first terrible year and again at the beginning of 2009.
This post is a little sloppily written, a little digressive, but I hope I have made my point. Yes, I formed the delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals but the root cause of my 'illness' was people around me thinking I'm gay when I'm not, something I was subconsciously aware of. Consider: if a rumour goes around that a person is gay, that person can either ignore it or find some way to say and prove he or she is straight. And in the real world straight people are never put into the position of having to say that they are straight.
In this post, I have focussed on the time when I became psychotic at the Big House, but I also wish to tell a story about another moment my theory of mind failed me. It is a story I have told before, several times, but it is so indicative of the sadism and corruption of the psychiatric profession that it is worth repeating. Antony Fernando never asked me if I was gay or straight or brought up sexuality directly at all but, on one occasion, in 2009 before I went off the Risperidone, he asked me, in a deliberately offhand manner, with my parents in the room, "Do you stand up for yourself or are you a people pleaser?" I had no idea what he was talking about but opted for "people pleaser" because I was afraid of him. The sociopath smirked. I now realise that he was asking me if I preferred to be blown by men or to blow men, a truly disgusting and evil question to ask a heterosexual male especially by someone in a position of power.
I'll close this post with a general point about the New Zealand political scene, at least as it was back in 2006 and 2007 when I volunteered at bFM. Back then, the Prime Minister was Helen Clark, leader of the Labour Party, and the opposing contender for the top job was John Key, leader of the National Party. Both had weekly interviews on bFM. One time, when writing a news item that summarised an interview with Key, I chose a soundbite from the interview that made it seem that Key was a dunce. I felt that bFM was a lefty station and that I could get away with it, that I could wear my colours on my sleeve; what I didn't realise at the time was that bFM was trying to be a fair and balanced medium for the daily news, that there is such a thing as journalistic integrity. Now, in those days, the Labour Party was seen as being closely aligned with the gay lobby, a perception exacerbated by the fact that Clark had a deep voice and, although married to a man, had no children. The National Party exploited this perception, used homophobia to attract voters. The homophobic vote was part of the reason Key was elected in 2008. Fortunately for everyone, New Zealand is a different country now than it was twelve years ago. Our finance minister, Grant Robertson, for instance, is openly gay and the general public seems to think that this is fine. A change in cultural attitudes didn't stop the National Party from trying to exploit homophobia for political advantage in the last election. The National Party radio advertisements usually tended to begin with Judith Collins saying, "New Zealand, let me be straight with you." The National Party lost resoundingly. I leave it to the reader to conjecture if the political culture that existed back in the period when I first got 'sick' was a part of the reason a nightmare descended around me. All I can say is that it is possible.
[Note: Rereading this post, I feel very keenly aware that an unsympathetic reader might perceive signs of thought disorder in it. I have reflected on it overnight, and wish to amend one of my conclusions. Maybe, at that moment in bFM when I decided that Mikey and Jose were gay, it wasn't that they thought I was gay and were trying to rebuff me, but were rather prepared to admit that I was straight. An explanation for my illness hinges on Jose Barbossa's sexuality. Was he gay or straight? And, if he was gay, did Mikey Havoc know? I don't know how to answer this question. But everything depends on it.]
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