Rationality and Schizophrenia

At the end of the last month, a report was released by the Pentagon about encounters between airforce pilots and UFOs. This eagerly anticipated document has had the commentariat in an uproar – how would it change our view of life, the universe, and everything, if aliens have been flying erratically around in the vicinities of human fighter pilots for over fifty years as some conspiracy nuts have opined? Should we now seriously consider, at last, the possibility that little green men have indeed been buzzing airplanes and abducting rural folk, giving them anal probes and then depositing them back on the ground, since at least the 1960s? What, really, is hidden away in Area 51? The something lacking in the discussion is a little rationality. In this post, I shall begin by discussing some logical implications of the 'alien hypothesis' and then move onto describing serious mental illness in the context of causality. I shall finish by returning to the issue of rationality and its relationship to psychosis, an issue I touched on a long time ago in a post called "Rationality vs. Mysticism". I shall argue that, at its heart, the underlying cause of psychosis is the attempt to impose rationality on a world that is thoroughly irrational. I shall be echoing Hamlet when he observed, "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

Let us take the alien hypothesis at face value for a moment. The nearest star to Sol is Alpha Centauri, a solar body some 4.4 light years away. Assuming that the aliens who have been occasionally observed by the American Air Force have flown from Alpha Centauri at a speed close to the speed of light (generally accepted as the universe's speed limit), spent a few weeks or months buzzing about in American airspace, and then returned to their home planet, that is a round trip of over ten years. It seems a long way to go to mutilate a few cattle and draw some crop circles. And it seems likely that if other advanced alien civilisations exist, they must be at least tens of thousands of light years away, not four – a prohibitive distance to travel for so little payoff. Alternatively, we could suppose that the aliens have established an accessible base somewhere on Earth or close to Earth, in unexplored Antartica or on the far side of the moon, and have been stationed there for some time. This seems more likely than the possibility that aliens are commuting here from their home planet and then returning. However, if aliens have a base on Earth or near Earth, how has it remained undetected for so long? And presumably the aliens communicate with each other using a channel somewhere on the electromagnetic spectrum – how could this go unnoticed? Another problem with the alien hypothesis relates to motive. Why come all the way to Earth for a few scattered surreptitious field trips? Back in 1951, the film The Day the Earth Stood Still imagined the first contact between humanity and an advanced alien civilisation, a film in which Klaatu has come to Earth with a message of peace for world leaders. The 2008 remake had Keanu Reeves as Klaatu coming to earth to counsel terrestrials to stop wrecking the environment. The 1997 film Contact also similarly imagines the first meeting between humans and an advanced alien life form. War of the Worlds, Species, The Blob and Mars Attacks! depict a far less rosy picture of the first contact between people and aliens, but, however it is portrayed, the first contact between humanity and intelligent extraterrestrials has always been presented as a big deal. Since the 1950s, people have imagined an alien spacecraft descending into Central Park, and an alien or robot emerging to say, "Take me to your leader!" (In Douglas Adams's novel So Long and Thanks for all the Fish, the robot says, "Take me to your lizard!" because he comes from a world ruled by lizards.) It seems hard to envisage a situation in which aliens have been flying around in national airspaces for many years and so few people have noticed, and when they have, notice only a weirdly moving blob in the radar display. Why would the aliens not make contact? Of course, hardcore UFOlogists like to argue that the government has known about aliens for decades and has been covering it up. But four years of a Trump presidency and over a decade before that the botched lead up to the Iraq invasion show quite clearly that the American federal government isn't competent enough to manage a coverup of this magnitude. The Pentagon report on UAPs itself is the evidence that the US federal government hasn't been covering anything up – because otherwise why would the Pentagon come forward with the little evidence it has?

Neil deGrasse Tyson has argued, on Bill Maher's show, that a far more plausible explanation for these phenomena is technological glitches. Now, we can't entirely rule out the idea that aliens have been hanging around this neck of the woods for some significant period of time but a part of being rational is accepting conventional wisdom. As Sherlock Holmes said, "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." I will go out on a limb to say that I think it is conventionally accepted that aliens haven't been buzzing US pilots for decades, that this is impossible, and that the improbable idea that these apparent encounters might all be the results of faulty instruments must either be the truth or a good candidate for the truth, certainly a better candidate than the idea that little green men are hiding somewhere near or on the Earth and have been studying us for a long time. And yet.... The issue of rational vs. irrational explanations for phenomena is something I will come back to later in this post.

What is the most rational explanation for schizophrenia? In the previous post I discussed the stress-vulnerability model of schizophrenia, a model I regard as coming far nearer the truth than the orthodox view of schizophrenia. The stress-vulnerability model holds that schizophrenia is episodic. Although the stress-vulnerability model seems to me to be a very helpful way of looking at schizophrenia, many psychiatrists, perhaps most, seem to think that schizophrenia is not only congenital but permanent, chronic, constant. My first psychiatrist, Antony Fernando, told me on one occasion that delusions are fixed "by definition" and my current psychiatrist seems to think that schizophrenia is a personality disorder. The stress-vulnerability model proposes by contrast that schizophrenia can be defined as a tendency to psychosis – people diagnosed schizophrenic are those who have experienced psychosis, those who are susceptible to it. People incur a vulnerability to psychosis when they are young, either because of trauma or because of bad genes (the jury is, for some, still out) and then experience psychosis as a reaction to adverse life experiences. It is useful to look at the stress-vulnerability model in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. A necessary condition is one that must be present for a given effect but is not alone sufficient; a sufficient condition is one that necessarily causes the condition but is not alone necessary – there may be multiple possible sufficient conditions. If we accept the stress-vulnerability model, both the vulnerability and the presence of a stressor are necessary conditions for the emergence of psychosis and together are sufficient. Presumably, we can deduce, it is possible for a person to have a vulnerability to psychosis who is never exposed to the stressors that result in a psychotic episode and thus never ends up in a psychiatrist's office to be diagnosed as schizophrenic; it is also possible that a person who lacks the vulnerability might be exposed to stressors that for a vulnerable person would result in psychosis but doesn't suffer one because he or she lacks that vulnerability. Consider my film The Hounds of Heaven, a film script I discussed in the previous post. My protagonist Jess has a vulnerability to psychosis caused by her parents' divorce when she is young and suffers a psychotic episode because a man who wants to sleep with her has asked her if she is a lesbian. If Rick hadn't asked her this question, Jess would never have become psychotic. But if she didn't possess the vulnerability, Rick's question would have been upsetting but not psychosis-inducing. Both the vulnerability and the stressor together are necessary to engender the episode she suffers. 

There is perhaps a better way to look at psychosis. A number of years ago, during the observation period after receiving my Intramuscular Injection, I had the opportunity to talk to a trainee doctor. I told him that I believed that anyone could suffer a psychotic episode if exposed to enough stress. He said, "So you think everyone carries the schizophrenia gene?" It was a ridiculous question to ask, a question that shows the bullshit young doctors are taught about mental illness. If everyone carries the schizophrenia gene, the whole idea of a 'schizophrenia gene' is rendered otiose, redundant – it is deprived of all explanatory power. Furthermore, many years ago, geneticists and psychiatrists tried to find the schizophrenia gene and failed. The hypothesis of a 'schizophrenia gene' has been debunked. I believe, by contrast, that there are no necessary conditions for psychosis, only sufficient conditions. A psychotic episode may be caused by methamphetamines, by sexual or physical assaults, by discrimination, by isolation or loneliness... the list is endless. Like John Read, I believe, now, that the causes of psychosis are different for every single person who experiences it. Schizophrenia isn't congenital. What I intend to argue in the next section of the post is that, even if I possessed a vulnerability to psychosis, I wouldn't have suffered an episode if I hadn't volunteered at the student radio station bFM, that the psychotic episode I experienced had causes.

I won't rehash all the details of my stint as a news writer for bFM because I have discussed them before. I refer the reader to the posts "My First Psychotic Episode", "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM" and "Theory of Mind and the Big House". What is significant for the purposes of this post is the exact nature of the role I had at bFM. I would arrive at the station at 5:30AM, browse through internet new sites such as Stuff, the Herald website (I think it existed then), Russell Brown's Hard News site and overseas news outlets such as The Sun and CNN, and try to summarise the stories I found into thirty second items to be read every half-hour during Mikey Havoc's breakfast show. It was all very fast paced. There were generally two of us writing news pieces and we tried to find a couple of new news items for every fresh broadcast. My co-worker was the one who would read the stories live – I believe I myself was only put on the air once and it was a disaster. An aspect of my tenure volunteering there was that the two advertising boys who worked at the station, a couple of guys who had the most important jobs at bFM because their work was what brought the money in, would just sit silently and watch us work, something that made me uncomfortable. Nevertheless I ploughed on, tried to impose my personal stamp on the items we were writing. I often tried to find ridiculous stories and write them up in such a way as to accentuate their absurdity. After I had been working for a little while at bFM, in early 2007, I began to get the feeling that the news items had started indirectly referring to me. This feeling reached its peak when I found a news item by Hard News which contained the line, "If you let in a flamboyant homosexual, you may as well let in a Catholic," a story I wrote up but which the station manager wouldn't let me run with. He was hanging around near me when I wrote the story. I thought this item was a message to the others in the station. I believe now that, when I started volunteering at bFM, people in the media had thought I was gay and then, perhaps because I had written items describing the Pope's popemobile as "Popetastic" and comparing Tom Cruise to Jesus Christ, had decided later I was a devout Christian, both mistaken impressions. It is even possible, as I shall discuss later, that people in the media had decided I was homophobic even though I had been writing news items in support of gay marriage.

My understanding, before I started volunteering at bFM, was that it was a small student radio station, a shoestring operation that was in a sense parasitic on the mainstream media. I was aware that some of those who had started at bFM had gone on to enjoy stellar careers, people such as Mikey, Marcus Lush, Jeremy Wells, and Wallace Chapman. But I still regarded bFM as a a little student radio station and didn't realise that other people in the media might take an active interest in the little goings on that happened at bFM. I thought I could have fun and not take the job too seriously. I admit that I was sometimes warping the news stories I was writing, without making anything up but with the intention of finding the funny angle. The Tom Cruise story, for instance, indirectly made fun of Mikey himself. What I didn't expect was that the items I was drawing from began to seem warped as well, and that I myself seemed to become the butt of the joke. It wasn't just that the news stories I found at work that seemed to be referring to me. Sometime during this period in 2007 I read an article in the Herald, a silly gossipy piece that didn't use names, that seemed to imply a love triangle between Mikey, Jose, and me, with Jose in the middle. I guessed that I was being referred to because one of the vertices of the triangle was described as "a Greenpeace supporter" and I often wore a Greenpeace t-shirt at bFM. I left bFM quite suddenly, around March of 2007 I think, of my own volition, as I have described before. I told the music director, Jason Rockpig, that I "wasn't cool enough to work at bFM". I had decided that bFM was full of closet homosexuals; I worried that I had outed myself accidentally simply by choosing to work there or that people at bFM had outed me. I can't remember the items I wrote that last morning unfortunately but I know that when I wrote them that I was trying to make a kind of public statement that I was straight even though I couldn't directly use either the word 'gay' or 'straight' or talk explicitly about myself. The only way I could say that I was straight was by outing everyone else. I wish I could remember or somehow recover the last couple of news items I wrote because I believe that these last items put the full stop to the scandal I had brewed up. What is significant, here, is that the news sites I was drawing from had provided me with the ammunition.

I had started to become psychotic at bFM but leaving alleviated the symptoms. I was close to well for around a month and then started to experience signs of psychosis again living at the Big House. I left the Big House very suddenly, when my episode had reached its crisis point and I had told some of my flatmates, "My father's gay but I'm straight!", moved back in with my mother and became a patient of the Taylor Centre. I continued to experience psychosis for the next six or seven months. It is difficult for me to date when I became a patient of the Mental Heath Service, although there are of course notes I could access that would tell me, notes I haven't consulted, but I know this first episode faded away in December 2007 or January 2008. During this time, one of my delusions was that everything reported on the radio or television as news was fictional, made-up. I can remember sitting in a car in the supermarket carpark while my mother did the shopping and hearing a news item on National Radio about how provinces in China were using cloud seeding technology to steal neighbouring provinces' rain. I had something like a panic attack, a fit of exasperated outrage, because it seemed to me that the radio stations, when making stories up, weren't even bothering to invent plausible news items. I would never have formed this delusion, that news networks simply made up the stories they reported, if I hadn't worked at a radio station writing news stories myself. The delusion that everything reported by the media was fictional went into abeyance in 2008. It didn't come back in 2009 – what happened early that year was the lead up to the Tony Veitch trial, a continuing story that affected me almost viscerally. Something about this story impressed upon me the truth that the events journalists write about are indeed actually real. The delusion that everything reported by the media was invented had gone away for good. It might reflect badly on me to say this but I felt sorry for Veitch. I pitied him for being at the centre of a journalistic maelstrom. For much of that year (2009) I thought I could communicate telepathically with people and early in the year tried to beam the thought, "I love you" into his head. Interestingly, the judge who presided over Veitch's trial was Jan-Marie Dougue, my stepmother.

During the first part of 2009, I adopted Jon Stewart as an imaginary friend. It seems a significant example of serendipity or synchronicity that the imaginary friend I adopted specialised in putting a comedic spin on the news.

A second aspect of the first psychotic episode I experienced was that I thought there was gossip about me in the media and among some of my acquaintances. I have already touched upon this earlier in the post. Again I wouldn't have experienced this belief (I hesitate to call it a 'delusion') if I hadn't worked at bFM. There were multiple signs leading up my first episode that there was gossip about me among some people I knew a little, and I want to tell a true story from early on in 2007 that illustrates this. It is only a small story. I attended the Summer Series on either 28th January or 11th of February, a rock festival held at Albert Park and organised by bFM. I was there dancing with some flatmates, one of whom (Peter, a straight man) said, in his German accent, "Andrew, why don't you take off your shirt?" I didn't remove my t-shirt because I felt like I was living in a soup of not knowing who was gay and who was straight, and I felt that disrobing might go too far in the gay direction in terms of optics. An acquaintance, not a flatmate or someone I knew well, a chap in fact I thought might be gay, made a bee-line for me and addressed me by name, not something I believe he would have done if I hadn't been working at bFM and he hadn't known this. I felt at the time that people who knew me a little had decided that I was incredibly cool, not only for volunteering at bFM but also because I lived at the Big House. However this view wasn't universally held. I believe I saw the famous New Zealand musician and media cartoonist/commentator Chris Knox at the festival and that he was unimpressed with me. Later on he made a statement, I think in one of his cartoons, that "they were playing his music now". I believe Knox, who might perhaps have been at least a little homophobic, was referring to homosexuals via the pronoun "they" and that somehow he had learnt that I often played his song "Not Given Lightly" on the guitar and piano at the Big House.

I strongly suspect, as I have already suggested, that whatever happened at bFM, particularly in the last few months, amounted to a scandal. However, it was a scandal inside the media as opposed to one that received public reportage. A week or two after I left the Big House and moved back home, I think, the Herald published an editorial cartoon showing a turkey labelled "Ian Wishart" with the caption, "The only turkey that deserves to be plucked." I felt that this cartoon was once again referring to me. Ian Wishart is a reasonably famous journalist in New Zealand who is known as a homophobic right-wing born-again christian who once tried to suggest Helen Clarke's husband Peter Davis was a closet homosexual. Perhaps people in the media had thought I was like Ian Wishart, heard about how I'd had a complete break-down at the Big House, changed their minds, and felt sorry for me and for their treatment of me. Of course, the news cycle being what it is, the scandal died away quickly for lack of fuel. For the second half of 2007, the belief that there was gossip about me in the media didn't in fact feature strongly in my thoughts. One of my two central delusions in 2007 was that there was a microphone in my glasses and that everything I said was being transmitted in real time to the media. This delusion didn't follow logically from my time working at bFM but it definitely resulted from the stress I had been under while working at bFM and from the stress I had suffered at the Big House later. As I've said my first psychotic episode faded away in December 2007 or January 2008. I was close to well throughout 2008 and then became psychotic again in January 2009, a psychotic episode that resulted directly from my treatment by my psychiatrist Antony Fernando, and by the mental health workers assigned to me, Kate Whelan and Avril Scott. I was again well from around March 2010 until around February 2013. At the beginning of 2012 I was discharged from the Taylor Centre and transferred into the care of my GP; for almost all of 2012 I was only on 5mgs of Olanzapine daily and was completely well. Early in 2013, I wrote a letter to the Herald proposing a possible historical link between crime and lead exposure, a letter inspired by an article in Mother Jones titled "Lead: America's Real Criminal Element", a letter which the Herald published. I suspect now that this letter, together with the screenplay I had written in 2012, brought me to public attention again. I had raised my head above the parapet and become again the target of media fire. At the beginning of 2013, I thought that people in the media had read my screenplay and hated it; I thought as well that there was still public doubt about my sexuality. I voluntarily re-entered the Mental Health System with the intention of getting it on the public record that I am heterosexual and always have been. Although I had started seeing the shrinks again, I didn't want to increase my dosage from 5 back to 10mgs, was bullied after some months into taking a daily dosage of 12.5mgs, and then in around November was permitted to go off the drugs completely. And then in early 2014, I think around February, I was sent against my will to a truly horrible respite facility in Point Chevalier and shortly afterwards put under a Compulsory Treatment Order. I am still under a Compulsory Treatment Order today.

I have discussed all this before in this blog. It bothers me that I cannot exactly date when I was sent to the respite facility in Point Chev although I can date many other significant moments in my life. What is pertinent to this post however is that the stressor that brought about the psychotic episode I experienced in 2013 was the feeling that there was gossip about me in the media again. This gossip might only have taken the form, "He's that gay man who worked at bFM several years ago". If my screenplay had any role in informing the gossip, it can't have been because many people had actually read the whole thing but rather because people in the media had simply heard about it. It was far from being a perfect script but they might have thought it was saying something it didn't, got the wrong idea. Early in 2013, I can remember John Campbell announcing the Owen Glenn inquiry into family abuse – I thought that Campbell's sudden focus on childhood sexual and physical abuse was sparked off by the scene in my screenplay in which psychologist John Doe pontificates about the prevalence of such malignant behaviour in New Zealand and around the world. It upset me because I thought people in the media had misunderstood what I was trying to communicate through my film. When I look back on this today, I feel quite sure that my feeling that the Owen Glenn inquiry had something to do with my film script was a delusion of reference. People experiencing psychosis often imagine that they are famous, usually wrongly. A feature of the psychosis I experienced in 2007 and 2013 was that I couldn't be sure which signs I received from the universe were indicative of others taking an interest in me and which were simply instances of coincidence, synchronicity. Nevertheless I have believed for some time that there was gossip about me in 2007 and 2013 and this belief has provided a foundation for much of my actions since – specifically this blog. I started writing Silverfish in early 2015 with the intention of writing about narrative theory; towards the end of that year, perhaps the worst year in my life, I was ruminating painfully on the situation in which I found myself and heard a little voice saying, "Talk about it." So I made the decision to start writing about schizophrenia, homosexuality, and my life in this blog. For many years now I have received small signs that people in the media, not only local journalists but pundits and commentators overseas, read my blog, although these signs have mostly faded away over the last two years. These signs haven't caused me distress because I feel that, if there is 'gossip' about me today, it is true gossip. Recently, for instance, the Herald published an opinion piece about progress and LGBT rights written by Shane Te Pou that seemed to indirectly refer to this blog. I don't have this article at hand but I can remember Te Pou saying something like, "Despite some people's pet theories about nature vs. nurture, LGBT rights are here to stay." This is not an exact quote – an exact quote would in fact do a better job of proving that he was referencing my blog than the mangled-by-memory restatement I have reproduced above. 

It is because of this blog, rather than any medication, that I am so well today.

While I am on the topic of LGBT rights, I need to make something clear. While I now believe homosexuality to be a choice, I do not believe it to be immoral. This is a tough needle to thread. The idea that homosexuality is itself congenital, that gay men and women are born gay, was necessary to battle prejudice and to force through societal change around LGBT visibility and pride at a time of much greater animus against homosexuals and bisexuals; saying it is a choice was a strategy employed by religious conservatives to block progress. But I think, today, many young people would be receptive to the idea that homosexuality is a choice that is not immoral because young people are far less bigoted than they were twenty years ago.

In the introduction to this post, I foreshadowed that I would discuss the idea that psychosis is caused by the endeavour to impose a rational explanation onto irrational phenomena. The stress-vulnerability model is itself such an endeavour, and thus has its limitations. I have experienced many peculiar moments in my life, particularly during the periods when I was psychotic, but I won't make the attempt to list all of them here; rather, I shall single out two because they relate to what I have been talking about in this post and because they highlight the inadequacy of an overly rational approach. Very shortly after the Herald published my letter about lead poisoning in early 2013, I was in my house in the evening listening to Mikey Havoc on Radio Hauraki. During his show, Mikey seemed to allude to the letter I had written – he even said sarcastically, "Nice referencing!" (In the letter I had referenced a Herald article reporting on the steep decline in crime among young people. Mikey held a grudge against the Herald.) He then played the song "Gaskrankinstation" by the Headless Chicken, a song which (as I argued in the post "Some New Zealand Songs I Like") is concerned with the very thing I had talked about in the letter, that prior to its phasing out, lead additives in petrol had been causing widespread brain damage. Mikey seemed relieved that the song supported my thesis. Now, it is entirely rational to suppose that Mikey had read the letter and recognised my name. This moment, when Havoc seemed to talk to me out of the radio, I took as strong evidence that the letter had hit its mark, that people were taking it seriously (although over the following weeks, no one in the media addressed the issue directly). What can less rationally be explained is the coincidence that I was listening to him when he seemed to allude to the letter, and that he seemed somehow to know that I was listening to him at that instant. Whatever happened at bFM had bound me to Mikey in a way, as both victims of the same scandal. I can remember shortly after I left the respite facility in Point Chev, I was listening to Mikey on the radio and he said, in some consternation, that that morning he had hallucinated a dead cat on the foot of his bed. It is possible, from the little I know, that Mikey Havoc feels some guilt in relation to me, a remorse suggesting that he might, as I have always feared, have publicly outed me as gay way back in 2007. The second moment I wish to describe involves Ian Wishart. In 2013, same sex marriage was legalised in New Zealand, and early in the year Michelle Hewitson had interviewed Wishart and sounded out his view on homosexuality. Wishart had told her that he believed homosexuality to be a choice. Later that year, I was lying in bed listening to talkback radio, the first time I tuned in to this station in six years, and heard a little of a show Wishart was doing with a like-minded colleague whose name I can't remember and haven't been able to retrieve from the Internet. The co-presenter seemed a little agitated, and at one point asked Wishart, apropos of nothing, how many children he had. Wishart replied, honestly, "Nine". I heard a little voice in my head that said, "There is no way out." Then I switched off the radio and tried to go sleep. A day or two later, I read in the Herald that Wishart's co-presenter had suffered something like a breakdown live on air the night I had listened in and had even started talking about how old he was when he first started masturbating. I think that many people hold the view that the only people who believe homosexuality to be a choice are themselves closet homosexuals – I believed this myself when I was younger. Wishart's co-presenter, for reasons I can only speculate about, had felt the need to prove his heterosexuality publicly on air. Of course, the bit of the show I heard didn't relate directly to me. But what is significant here is that the only time I have ever listened to talkback radio since 2007 I heard a show controversial and newsworthy enough for the Herald to write an item about it a day or two later.

A couple of days ago, I woke with the song "Israel's Son" by the band Silverchair stuck in my head. This is not a song I think about much. When I climbed into my car and turned on the radio, this very song was playing, a song that the Rock radio station does not play often. This coincidence struck me forcefully and positively: it made me feel that the universe isn't indifferent to me. Twelve years ago, though, I would have found a coincidence of this sort disturbing, frightening. A concept that I have already alluded to in this post is 'synchronicity', a term coined by Carl Jung. I refer the reader to the Wikipedia article on synchronicity for more detailed description of this term than I can provide here. What is important for my present purposes is that the existence of synchronicity is not something that can be rationally explained and in fact Jung used the term 'synchronicity' to argue in favour of the paranormal. Back in 2007, I experienced synchronicity all the time and formed the delusion that there was a microphone in my glasses to rationally explain why the media seemed to be aware of everything I did and said. In 2009, I went one step further and decided that everyone was telepathic, a pseudo rational explanation for occurrences I couldn't explain any other way. A semi-Jungian way of looking at psychosis is that it arises initially from a set of synchronous events which forces a person to construct some delusional structure, often conspiratorial, to make sense of them. This is what I had done. A quote from Jung is relevant here: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

If the key to understanding psychosis is the irrational concept of 'synchronicity', where does this leave the psychiatric profession? Psychiatrists are the apostles of rationality. Often people diagnosed schizophrenic are embarked on spiritual journeys, are negotiating territories that can only be described as mystic, the border between the sacred and the profane; the psychiatric profession calls this 'religiosity' and regards it as a symptom of a neurological disease. Moments of synchronicity, with their attendant feelings of the numinous, are labelled 'delusions of reference'. Schizophrenics, who might once have been society's holy fools, clairvoyants, seers, or saints, are routinely belittled, called sick, stupid, dangerous, burdens to their families and to the wider community. The interface between patient and doctor is one in which the paranormal rubs up against cold, hard materialism. And the psychiatrists know this. When dealing with psychosis, ordinary psychiatrists know that they are out of their depth. The vaunted rationality of the psychiatric profession is, in the final analysis, utterly irrational, more insane than the supposed insanity of the patients. It is the madness of an atheistical, materialist, and pseudo rational civilisation that finds its expression in a label 'schizophrenic', a label for those who think too much.

Perhaps UFO sightings are neither signs of visiting aliens, nor technological glitches. Perhaps it is the intrusion of the paranormal into the seemingly rational world of US airforce pilots.

I wish to finish this post by talking about my last appointment with my psychiatrist Nick Hoeh. Nick has asked me not to write about him in this blog but I feel it is necessary to say a little about it. I saw him several months ago. At the appointment, at which my key worker was present, a man nicknamed Sri who I almost never see, Nick said to me, "Why do you mind if people think you're gay?" I said, "Because it's not true!" A part of me wanted to say, "How would you like it if I thought you were gay?" Nick said to me not to worry, "Neither Sri nor I think you're gay." It was a serious misstep. He should have said, "Sri and I both know you're not gay." As I have tried to make clear, it is people in the mental health service thinking I'm gay when I'm not that has been the cause of my mental illness. My friends and acquaintances all know now that I'm straight. Nick Hoeh is just another fraud, worse in some ways even than Antony Fernando, another mendacious, lazy, and corrupt psychiatrist who should have found some speciality other than psychiatry to make his career, a man who, despite having an agreeable manner, does far more harm than good. I wish to God I could get the hell out of the Mental Health System.

And I wish that all other patients of the Mental Health Service, who are currently so badly treated, will one day be treated better.