An Interpretation of "The Hounds of Heaven"

In 2007, very soon after I first became a patient of the Mental Health System, I had a dream in which I was put on a gurney and loaded into the back of a waiting ambulance. It was a dream about becoming a patient of the medical system. When I woke up, I immediately disregarded this dream and its medical imagery – it didn't cohere with the delusional prism through which I perceived the world at the time. For much of that year (although not continuously) I believed that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals and that my treatment was the standard way of dealing with people who had penetrated through to this terrible secret. (I believed then that my best hope to survive was to show I could keep this terrible truth unspoken, to never talk directly about it.) I didn't consider myself 'ill'. In reality, though, I'd had a sudden and severe psychotic episode, at the age of twenty-seven, as I have discussed in many previous posts, and needed some kind of medical or, better yet, psychological intervention. If someone falls off a roof and breaks his leg, the ambulance staff take him to hospital, the doctors put his leg in plaster, and everyone waits for the broken bone to knit and the leg to heal. Something analogous is what should have happened with me. The episode should have been considered a temporary interruption in an otherwise healthy life in the same way a broken leg is (although of course treating an injured mind is different from treating an injured body). I should have been encouraged to talk about what had happened to me and provided with responsible, competent care by the people charged with looking after me. If this had happened I would have recovered in a year. However, the psychiatric profession does not regard psychosis as a mental injury inflicted on a person by circumstances as it should; instead psychosis is viewed as evidence of an underlying congenital disorder, namely 'schizophrenia' or, sometimes, 'bipolar disorder'. Serious mental illness is regarded as a lifelong condition, something one is born with and from which one cannot recover. I can remember at one of my first appointments with Antony Fernando, I asked him how long I was going to be on Rispiridone and he replied, "Two years", a prognosis I now know he plucked out of the air. I echoed him in dismay, "Two years?" It seemed like a life sentence. And, of course, it was. I have been on medication ever since, from the beginning of 2014 compulsorily. 

I hear my supposed condition described as being analogous to type-1 diabetes so often that I have become somewhat inured to it, although I still hate it, still think this an asinine and insane comparison. It still grates. The basis for this analogy is that type-1 diabetes is also a disease that is congenital, incurable, and requires daily medication. And that's it, that's the whole basis for the comparison. In conversation with my current psychiatrist, on one occasion I compared schizophrenia to type-2 diabetes, a disease caused by an unhealthy lifestyle in which fat builds up around the pancreas and which recent research has strongly suggested can be cured by sudden, dramatic weight loss. I don't think my psychiatrist appreciated my reframing of the issue this way very much.

Suppose for the moment that this thing, 'schizophrenia', does exist. The questions then are: what is its cause? And what is its cure? If we know the cause of a condition, this knowledge does not guarantee that we will be able to uncover a cure, but it takes us a significant way down the road towards a possible cure. In this blog, I have returned to two topics again and again – the causes and course of my own mental 'illness' and narrative theory (although, considering how modern narrative theory tends to focus on different issues than I have, I think I would prefer the term 'story theory'). These may seem two entirely different subjects but there is an intersection. In 2012, as part of a Masters in Creative Writing, I wrote a film, called The Hounds of Heaven, about a schizophrenic girl; the cause of her schizophrenia was the major theme of the screenplay. In the remainder of this post I shall discuss this film and the message I intended to communicate through it. If the reader is interested, a draft of this film is available on the Internet under its title. It was published by the Auckland University of Technology in 2016.

Before I talk about The Hounds of Heaven, I shall present my theory of story once more. The other day, I saw Neil Gaiman speak at the Auckland Writers' Festival; Gaiman is a man who understands how to tell a story – he has written over 25 books and is probably most famous for authoring The Sandman comic book series. I would like to suggest that Gaiman has an unconscious, instinctive understanding of story structure, as most story-tellers do. What I have attempted to achieve in this blog is an excavation of the creative process behind story-telling in general, a process that some authors can articulate to some extent but which, it seems to me, literature scholars have overlooked (although I could be wrong). I have attempted to make the unconscious conscious. In the posts "The Problem–Solution Model of Fictions", "Interpretations of This is the End and The Night Circus" and "Fictions and A Description of a Condition" I proposed a theory for an underlying structure behind all (successful) fictions.  A story presents a hypothetical scenario, a problem, that implies a question. Generally the problem is presented at the beginning, and the question is posed at Plot Point 1 at which point an answer is hinted at. At Plot Point 2, this question and possible answer are presented in their strongest form. And the story ends by answering the question definitively. This theory can be illustrated by some examples, examples I have used before. (I hope the reader will bear the repetition.) The film Star Wars presents the following hypothetical scenario and question: "If the galaxy is embroiled in a massive war between Good and Evil in which Evil is vastly more powerful than Good, how can Good triumph?" The film answers the question in the following way: "Good can triumph over Evil because it has the Force on its side." The film This is the End presents the following hypothetical scenario and question: "If the Fundamentalist christians are right and the Apocalypse is just around the corner, how can Hollywood stars, with their tolerant attitudes towards homosexuality and drug use, go to Heaven rather than Hell?" This is the End answers this question by saying, "The route to Heaven is platonic friendship between men." The film Nomadland presents the problem of poverty; the question it asks is, "What is the cause of poverty?" The film answers this question by saying, "Poor people are poor because they choose to be poor." (The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, who recently awarded Nomadland the Best Picture Oscar, might disagree with this interpretation.) My theory may seem reductive but, if we are to credit Aristotle's idea of dramatic unity with any utility at all, some notion of thematic simplicity must lie at the foundation of all successful stories. (Movies, by the way, are easier to interpret in this way than novels because novels tend to be looser and baggier than films.)

Does my theory apply to my own story? In very late 2012 or early 2013, I approached a family friend, Peter Sharp, a director, with the screenplay for The Hounds of Heaven. I wanted his opinion. Peter told me that the film was very well-written but lacked a story. What I want to do, now, is show that, according to the theory of stories I have spent years working out, it did have a story. In talking about the film I wrote, I will assume that the reader has some familiarity with it – I don't want to spend time writing a detailed synopsis of it. In talking about the film, I will, additionally, not be referring to my material copy but rather to my memory of it, perhaps an idealised version, perhaps the screenplay I wish I had written rather than the one I did.

What is the hypothetical scenario and question at the heart of The Hounds of Heaven? Like Nomadland, The Hounds of Heaven begins by presenting a problem: the problem in my film, however, is not the problem of poverty but rather the problem of schizophrenia. The opening chunk of the film is dedicated to showing that schizophrenia exists and what it is. The film begins by presenting Jess, the film's protagonist, in her doctor's office for a routine consultation. The first ten or fifteen minutes simply depict her ordinary, daily life (she is not psychotic at this time.) Admittedly, the first part of the film seems a little static – if I felt capable of returning to the screenplay and writing a second draft, I would put what Robert McKee calls the inciting incident earlier in the story. What I thought was the inciting incident when I wrote it, Jess's first encounter with Rick, wasn't; the real inciting incident occurs just before then. Jess is in the Auckland City Library and picks up the (real) book Madness Explained by Richard P. Bentall. In voiceover, she describes the disagreement between psychologists and psychiatrists about the causes of schizophrenia and says that she agrees with the psychiatrists, expressing the view that her condition is the result of a neurotransmitter imbalance that is genetic in origin. The central question, "What is the cause of schizophrenia"?" has been posed. When I wrote this I anticipated that viewers of the final film, ever alert to irony, would suspect that Jess is wrong and that the rest of the film would dramatise the consequences of her false belief. Immediately before Plot Point 1 (her first 'date' with Rick), Jess describes her eagerness to see a (fictional) psychologist called John Doe who is planning a public lecture on the causes of schizophrenia to promote his (fictional) book Insanity Demystified. At Plot Point 2, Jess, now deeply psychotic and believing herself the cause of the February 2011 Christchurch earthquake, still finds the courage to attend his talk. During the talk, Doe decries the stupid and absurd "dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia". (If I could go back in time and rewrite this part of the film I would express myself more strongly. I would say that the psychiatric profession simply pays lip service to the dopamine hypothesis without themselves believing it.) Doe goes on to argue, with the aid of statistics, that the cause of schizophrenia is childhood sexual abuse. Being effectively told that she was molested as a child (even though she can't remember it) precipitates a complete psychotic breakdown, and Jess ends up in hospital. In the third act of the film, Jess, mostly recovered, travels to Christchurch with her father who has gone there to assess the damage. The last scene of the film has them dining at a restaurant. Her father says, "You know that you weren't responsible for my divorce from your mother? You do know that, don't you?" Jess replies, "Of course, I know that. I'm not stupid." Her father says, "Somebody told me I should tell you that." After a little badinage about language, the film ends with a small aftershock causing the restaurant to shake.

There is always some ambiguity in the best fiction. I would like to say that the end of the film answers the question the film has asked: the cause of schizophrenia, at least for Jess, is her parents' divorce. However, to be absolutely honest, when I wrote the film I did deliberately leave open the possibility that schizophrenia could be as random and inexplicable as an earthquake. An alternative gloss on the last scene, perhaps, is that a parental divorce, from the perspective of the children, might be as inexplicably terrible as an earthquake – as it was for me. As I said, the last moment is intentionally equivocal. The final scene of the film was also partly a response to the end of Good Will Hunting, a film that was used as an example of good narrative during the course I took. Towards the end of Good Will Hunting, the psychologist played by Robin Williams repeatedly tells Will, "It's not your fault" until Will finally breaks down in tears. The resolution of Good Will Hunting has always seemed to me too pat and easy; furthermore, the premise of Good Will Hunting involves a good psychologist and, in my experience, good psychologists and psychiatrists are rare as hens' teeth. It wouldn't have rung true if Jess had broken down in tears and told her father, "Thank you." Nevertheless, I anticipated that the viewer, possessing some understanding of story-logic and absorbed in the central question, "What is the cause of schizophrenia?" would have experienced an "A-ha!" moment and left the theatre considering the possibility that schizophrenia can be caused by something as simple as a family breakup. 

If this blog does have readers who are familiar with The Hounds of Heaven, these readers may justifiably wonder, "If the question at the heart of The Hounds of Heaven is 'What is the cause of schizophrenia?' and the answer to this question is, 'It can be something as simple as a parental divorce', what is the purpose of all the business with Rick?" When I came up with the idea for the story, I was more or less familiar with the stress-vulnerability model of schizophrenia, the hypothesis that some people, for whatever reason, are vulnerable to psychosis and that psychotic episodes are the result of environmental stressors; I had decided that the story would depict Jess's descent into a psychotic episode as the result of something that happens to her. When I was working out a rough idea of the story, I considered various possibilities, such as the idea that the stressor that brings about the psychotic episode might be a fight with her mother. And then I decided that there was only one possible catalyst. Jess would have an upsetting experience with a man who wants to sleep with her. It is not just that Rick makes a move on her far too early in their relationship, is mainly interested in casual sex, it is that when Jess is unwilling to respond to his advances, he asks her if she is a lesbian. Being asked if she is a lesbian by a man she is genuinely attracted to is the proximate cause of her psychotic episode. Immediately before she descends into psychosis at the supermarket and starts hearing voices, she says (in voiceover), "Don't get me wrong. I'm not not a puritan. I'm not a prude. I know that people jump into bed with each other at the drop of a hat. I'm not like that but, then again, I'm a little odd." She was unable to reply to Rick when he had asked her the question at the time but, in her own mind, she has been ruminating subconsciously on the allegation Rick had levelled against her and trying to justify herself. She was unable to say that she is straight when he had asked but she can say it to herself later. It is possible that some readers of the screenplay may have decided I was portraying a latent or repressed lesbian in Jess. Very early in the film, Jess attends a coffee group for patients of the Mental Health System and says (in voiceover) about another female attendee, "Katrina is very attractive but I try not to notice that." I was trying very delicately to raise the question of her sexuality early in the film with the intention of answering it later; when I started writing it I very seriously considered the possibility that my heroine might be a latent homosexual but changed my mind over the course of writing it. It is possible that Peter Sharp, who is gay, may have decided that I was indeed telling the story of a lesbian before she has come out – I can remember him asking me why I didn't show her interacting with women more.

This post has taken me a long time to write and I have been ruminating on The Hounds of Heaven a lot myself over the last couple of days. It did have flaws. I wrote it nearly ten years ago and it has occurred to me that I could go back now and rewrite it a little so that the story is more evident. The basic problems with it were a result of issues in my own life that I had been unable to face at the time. It wouldn't take much. One problem I had is that the protagonist was based very closely on a real person, the girl I have called Jess in this blog and have written about extensively – although she was the inspiration for the story, I didn't know when I wrote the film the root cause of the real girl's 'illness' and still don't know it today. However, the fundamental origin of the real girl's schizophrenia is perhaps irrelevant because, in the end, The Hounds of Heaven is a fiction. In the last part of the second act, Jess ends up in a flat with a bunch of stoners discussing conspiracy theories while she remains silent. (I was trying to address the issue of paranoia indirectly.) Towards the very end of this long scene, Jess bursts out: "Everyone thinks I slept with him but I didn't sleep with him!" This exclamation is another key moment in the story, the moment when her core delusion is most at display – and I flubbed it. It would have made much more sense if she said, "Everyone thinks I'm a lesbian and I'm not!" a moment that is immediately followed by the explosion of one of the stoners' beer bottles in his hand. If I could find it within myself to go back to the screenplay and rewrite it, I would make this change. I would also add a scene to the third act, after Jess speaks to the seemingly sympathetic psychiatrist at the hospital, a scene in which Jess is not present, in which the psychiatrist says to another Mental Health worker, "She's a lesbian, of course." The film would immediately make much more sense – the root cause of Jess's illness is a true justifiable belief that people around her think she's gay when she isn't. Of course, this raises the question: what is the relationship between this core 'delusion' and her parents' divorce? Perhaps this would remain a problem or perhaps viewers would fill in the gap.

I would like now to turn to the event in my life that has motivated me to write this post. Relatively recently I met and had a couple of long conversations with a retired psychiatrist called Patte Randal. Patte is highly unusual because not only is she a qualified and once practicing psychiatrist, she has experienced psychosis herself, she told me seven times. Patte is the first good psychiatrist I have ever met. Not long after speaking to her I borrowed a book from the library that she had co-edited with Jim Geekie, Debra Lampshire and John Read, called Experiencing Psychosis. This book is fascinating; it it is divided into paired chapters, the first of each pair a chapter written by someone who has experienced psychosis or pre-psychotic symptoms focussing on an aspect of his or her experience (such as delusions, voice-hearing or negative symptoms) and the second a chapter written by a psychologist discussing research into that particular aspect of the condition. Experiencing Psychosis deliberately eschews using the word 'schizophrenic' preferring instead, when necessary, to employ the term 'diagnosed schizophrenic'. Experiencing Psychosis is part of a book series associated with The International Society for the Psychological Treatments of Schizophrenias and Other Psychoses, an organisation the mainstream psychiatric profession I think despises because most psychiatrists are absolutely committed to the idea that schizophrenia is a biological, inherited and congenital disease. I thought Experiencing Psychosis was brilliant and recommend it as a first step to any of my readers who are interested in understanding, or trying to understand, people who end up labelled 'schizophrenic'.

What is the connection between Experiencing Psychosis and The Hounds of Heaven? Quite simply, the character John Doe that I mentioned earlier is modelled after John Read. When I wrote The Hounds of Heaven in 2012, John Read was a Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Auckland. I can't remember how I first heard his name although I imagine it was in 2011; when I wrote The Hounds of Heaven, I had anyway formed an unfavourable impression of him. I imagine his name came up sometime and then I did a little research on the Internet, discovering from what I read that he had proposed that schizophrenia was caused by childhood sexual abuse on very little evidence. It seemed to me, at the time, a crackpot theory born from some kind of idee fixee. Something else that fed into my unfavourable impression of him was that in 2011 the girl upon whom Jess is based had told me that the psychologist she was seeing had got it into her head that 'Jess' had been sexually abused as a child, something 'Jess' found upsetting. I know I was never sexually abused and strongly feel that the girl I call Jess had never been sexually abused either. It seemed to me that if such a theory became accepted, became the new orthodoxy (in the same way that the now discredited theory of the 'schizophrenogenic mother' was once orthodoxy), it could cause incalculable harm to people diagnosed schizophrenic. I believed then and still believe today in the possibility of 'false memory syndrome'. In The Hounds of Heaven I didn't make this point clearly enough, which is why I wrote the story The Great God Pan, a story that I have published in this blog and which addresses this concern more directly.

Experiencing Psychosis contains two essays by John Read. Reading them I realised that I had completely misjudged the man. The first essay is titled "The subjective experience of the link between bad things happening and psychosis". The essay is short but persuasive, and resonates with my experience and what I have learned about the experiences of others diagnosed schizophrenic. I'll quote a couple of passages: "Research using a range of scientific methodologies has recently established that many social factors are significant risk factors for psychosis. These include: mothers' well being during pregnancy; insecure attachment in childhood; early loss of parents; witnessing inter-parental violence; dysfunctional parenting (often intergenerational); childhood sexual, physical and emotional abuse; childhood emotional or physical neglect; bullying; war trauma; rape or physical assaults as an adult; high levels of racist or other forms of discrimination; and heavy marijuana use during adolescence". Read goes on to say, later, when summarising the research, "It could be argued that the most important finding of all, albeit an obvious one, is that the causes are different for each person, depending on their personal life history and cultural context," a conclusion I had arrived at myself independently. Read also makes the following vitally important critique of the psychiatric profession: "Believing that one's difficulties are caused by life events is still often seen as proof that you are mentally ill. A current research scale, measuring 'insight', scores the item 'Denies mental illness and sees any problems as arising entirely from external sources' as the strongest possible example of 'poor insight'". This typifies the double bind patients of the Mental Health Service are put in: either accept that you are ill or we will force you to accept that you are ill. As I have attempted to show in this blog and in writings elsewhere that I have not published in this blog my own mental 'illness' was caused by my parents' divorce when I was seven, by bad decisions I made when I was a lot younger than I am now, and by adverse environmental factors, particularly my treatment by the psychiatric profession since 2007. If I have suffered mental illness since the beginning of 2014, it is simply a consequence of being under a Compulsory Treatment Order ever since then and being subject to the whims of psychiatrists and other mental health workers who are basically lazy, dishonest, hypocritical, and stupid. My own mental illness had causes. Read is, in my opinion, admirably restrained when criticising the psychiatric profession. I'm not.

A fair, informed, and unbiased take on John Read would show that his particular viewpoint is reasonable and probably right. Why then did I form such a bad impression of him in 2011? I think Read was the victim of something that amounts to an orchestrated smear campaign by the psychiatrists and many in the media. I say "amounts to" because I do not think it was organised or deliberate – I do not think Read was the victim of a conspiracy. I say this, that it wasn't an organised conspiracy, because, of course, I myself participated in the smear campaign. If people have read my screenplay who have some knowledge of the Mental Health scene in New Zealand, they would have immediately recognised that John Doe was a caricature of John Read. I think people are squeamish about Read's arguments because people generally are averse to the idea that mental illness is caused by adverse life experiences, by traumatic events, perhaps because it makes everyone culpable in the sufferings of others; this is why my film received such a bad reception. It is easier to just say to someone who has suffered from mental illness "You're mad" and put the victim into the too-hard-to-treat-responsibly category. I don't really know why the common-sense notion that there is link between bad things happening and serious mental illness is so difficult for so many people to accept – but, of course, it should be obvious. I was wrong about John Read when I wrote The Hounds of Heaven and if could I would apologise to him.

I'll close this post by describing another dream, one I had about a fortnight or three weeks ago after having finished reading Experiencing Psychosis. Before I describe the dream, I need to provide a little backstory. I once had a friend, Sara O'Brien, who was very dear to me and who, I understood, had been expelled from her high school for taking some junior students to a tinny house. In around 2002 or 2003, when we were both students at the University of Auckland, she mentioned to me very briefly that she had been sexually molested or harassed by her male music teacher when she was a high school student. I feel that I can talk about this now, her harassment, because she has finally gone public about it. An article, titled "Teacher at top girls' school and university forced to resign twice for sexual misconduct that carried on for decades", appeared recently on the Stuff news website in which Sara describes a little of her experiences. The article it seems to me wasn't quite correct. I have thought for a very long time that Sara was a victim of a coverup by her school, St Cuthberts, but the article understates this. Furthermore, the article doesn't report on the fact that Sara suffered mental illness as a result of her harassment and the consequent coverup. I visited her in Florence in 2004, where she was studying Italian, and believe that, at the time, she was taking the antipsychotic Rispiridone. Sara proves that there is a link between bad things happening and serious mental illness. I'll turn now to the dream, an extraordinarily vivid one. In the dream, I attended a party put on my best friend from when I was a student at Otago University studying in 1998 and 1999, Caleb, and his wife, Susan. In real life, these two have separated but, in the dream, they were still together. Bruno Mars was another guest at the party. In the dream, I was sitting at a table with a number of guests, among them John Read. I accused Read of causing Sara's illness; he blustered and tried to defend himself but couldn't and at last left the party in disgrace. After he was gone, in the dream, I realised that I had made a mistake and told the rest of the partygoers that the real villain in Sara's story was James Tibbles, the teacher who had harassed her.

In this post I have raised the possibility that I might return to The Hounds of Heaven and rewrite it. If I did go back to it, would I present John Doe in a more sympathetic light? As I said, the best stories are ambiguous and it serves the story to have, at Plot Point 2, a character who is partly right and partly wrong, so I would probably leave his presentation more or less as it is now. What I hope the reader takes away from this post, however, is the basic truth that psychosis has causes and that this is what I tried to show in The Hounds of Heaven and is something borne out by Experiencing Psychosis. "Knowledge" and "causation" were themes in the screenplay. Right after Doe's talk, Jess describes a dream. In the dream, she is standing on a hill overlooking a plain on which there is a great crowd of people, including John Doe, milling about. "And a terrible wind was blowing. And I was screaming. I was screaming, 'I'm here! Can't you see me? Can't you hear me?'" Patients of the Mental Health System are routinely ignored, routinely feel unheard – I certainly felt that way and Read cites evidence that this is a common experience for people diagnosed mentally ill. The psychiatric profession has no interest in understanding the patients who end up in their offices and seems, incredibly, not to believe that effects have causes. But perhaps the tide is turning. We can only hope.

[Note: I wrote to Patte Randal to tell her that I had mentioned her in this blog. She asked me to make a correction. "Your mention of me has an error in it - I probably didn’t emphasise clearly enough when we met but although I am trained in psychiatry and worked in psychiatry for 30 years as well as doing research which is published, I decided in the end not to complete my exam process so technically I am not a “fully qualified psychiatrist”. I was a psychiatry registrar and passed the first parts of the written exam process but after failing the clinical exam once (which is not uncommon) I eventually decided, for reasons that I explain in my upcoming book, not to re-sit the exams." Patte's book had the working title "It's About Time" although this is not its final title. When her book is published, towards the end of this year I think, I'll talk about it in this blog.]