In 2014, I spent some six or seven months seeing a clinical psychologist for hourly sessions once a week. You would think that this would be sufficient time to develop a rapport and for the psychologist to gain some understanding of the client's life and the reasons he or she became 'ill' in the first place, that some constructive treatment would occur. But it didn't. In this blog, I have often trumpeted the benefits of psychological approaches to mental illness over medical treatment and you would think seeing a psychologist would be exactly what I wanted (and it was, before I started seeing him). But the time I spent with Simon Judkins was a complete failure. Seeing a psychologist only helps if the psychologist is competent and genuinely empathic. The depth of my dislike for the man is evinced by the large number of posts I wrote about him in this blog in the past, an attempt I confess at character assassination. For some reason, Judkins never seemed willing to concede that I am heterosexual. In tonight's post, I want to try to offer a more objective account of the months I spent seeing him, to describe my side of the interactions I had with him, in order partly to get my side of the story on the record.
I knew a little about Simon Judkins before I started appearing in his office for hourly consultations. He had joined the Early Intervention staff in the first half of 2010, I think, and I remember meeting him for the first time at the Youthtown gym soon after, a location I went to once a month, I think, to play badminton, basketball, and indoor soccer with other youngish patients of the Taylor Centre. My immediate impression of him, based on nothing but my own sixth sense, was that his role in the Mental Health System was to help sexually confused young men and women accept their hitherto denied homosexuality or bisexuality. Over the years since, some small conversations with patients who had availed themselves of his services had provided me with some idea of his character, confirmation of what I had already guessed. I knew that he was egotistical, conceited. I would even say now that he is a narcissist. In 2012, I was temporarily free of the Taylor Centre, well, and only on 5mgs of Olanzapine daily, and then reentered the Taylor Centre voluntarily in around late February 2013, having become psychotic again. I recall sitting down with Judkins and the women who'd been my key worker, Kate Whelan, in a room at the Taylor Centre. Judkins asked me, in a cautious, delicate fashion, "Do you have any uncertainty about your identity?" This might be a slight mis-remembering of the question but his intention was clear – he was asking me if I was at all uncertain about my sexual orientation, and I knew he meant this at the time he asked me this question. I replied, honestly, "No."
After I was put under the Mental Health Act in early 2014, it was organised for me to start receiving therapy from Judkins. I didn't begin seeing him straight away – instead he organised for me to attend a Dealing with Distress Group, the second time I have done this utterly unhelpful and useless course (the first time was in 2007). Plainly my psychiatrist, Jennifer Murphy, thought I needed help navigating the choppy waters of sexual confusion, that I was a repressed homosexual who needed to discus and open up to someone about his hitherto denied homosexuality; plainly Judkins thought this too. I was thirty-four at the time, which surely should have set off alarm bells. How many latent homosexuals wait until they are thirty-four before they come out? Nevertheless, I suspect that Judkins thought I had been a gay man who hadn't known he was gay until then and that the process of coming-out, if only to him, would upset me emotionally. Thus the Dealing with Distress Group.
I knew all this before I began seeing Judkins and so, at my first appointment with him, I said I was straight a couple of times. His eyes took on a weird shifty look. He said, "You shouldn't divide the world into homosexuals and not-homosexuals." I said, "Do you mean homosexuals and heterosexuals?" He said, "No, I mean homosexuals and not-homosexuals." I said, "Do you mean homosexuals and bisexuals?" He said again, "No, I mean homosexuals and not-homosexuals." The whole reason I became involved in the Mental Health System again in 2013 was to get it on the record that I am heterosexual and always have been – and I was seeing a psychologist who couldn't even say the word "heterosexual". I believe now that because the purpose of my treatment was to help me deal with sexual confusion, he never recorded in his notes that I identified as heterosexual, even though all I wanted was for my heterosexuality to be publicly recognised.
The fact that Judkins asked me this question possibly suggests that he may have thought I believed the world to be full of closet homosexuals, that I myself divided the world up into homosexuals and 'not-homosexuals'. Now, Judkins may have known that when I first became 'ill' in 2007 I had formed this very delusion – just after I was put under the Act I wrote a very long essay describing much of my life, particularly my time working at bFM and my treatment by the Mental Health System since then, and had brought it into the Taylor Centre. On at least one occasion, Judkins said he had read this essay, and read it again. However his complete failure to grasp the nature and purpose of this essay has made me wonder since if he never received it, that he had possibly read another shorter essay I had written the previous year. (The longer essay, by the way, is not as clear about the causes of my 'illness' as the posts I have written in this blog.) For instance, the essay began by saying that the worst childhood trauma of my life was my parents' divorce when I was seven – but Judkins never brought up the issue of my parents' divorce once. I now think that he had read the essay but completely failed to understand it. (My lawyer, Paul Gruar, incidentally, I believe did read it and understand it.) For whatever reason, whether it arose from reading my essay or from his own prejudices and preconceptions, I think Judkins had decided I often leapt to conclusions about others' sexuality. When I re-entered the service, I had briefly seen a psychiatrist called Dharma, a locum, a man who, to some, might give off a gay vibe; Judkins asked me once if I thought Dharma was gay or straight. I immediately said, "A straight man with a high voice." Judkins ignored what I had just said and ploughed on, saying "Well, you might be surprised to learn that he is getting married!"
I admit that during my psychotic episodes, in 2007, to some extent in 2009 and again in early 2013, I had believed wrongly that people around me were secretly homosexual. When I am well however I take people at face value and only believe people to be gay if I have solid evidence of it. For instance, I had briefly believed in 2007 that my Key Worker, Kate Whelan, was a lesbian but had changed my mind in 2008 when she started talking about her partner Trent. It is indicative of the boundless hypocrisy of the Mental Health Service that I accepted Kate on face value whereas she, despite my talking about previous girlfriends and, later, the girl Jess, consistently refused to acknowledge that I am straight. In talking to Judkins, I restricted myself for the most part to talking about stuff in the public domain, such as the fact that Lou Reed was treated for homosexuality when he was a teenager and subsequently only had relationships with women, the most recent being Laurie Anderson. (Judkins said sarcastically, "Perhaps they cured him.") On another occasion, I told him that I had read an essay arguing that Oscar Wilde was straight, a provocative idea I have explored in this blog. I only cast aspersions on others' sexuality three times. I said that the music director at bFM, Jason Rockpig, was gay, something I regret now because I am pretty sure I was wrong. (Significantly, Judkins didn't challenge me but only said in response, "I didn't know Jason Rockpig was gay.") On another occasion, I said that I had my doubts about Leonardo DiCaprio and Judkins, for some reason a little relieved, said something like, "You shouldn't trust impressions." The third occasion, after I had spent a couple of weeks ruminating about it, I told Judkins that Jose Barbossa was gay, something I have suggested in this blog in the post "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM". In fact, I no longer believe Jose to be gay but rather suspect that the truth is too complicated to be put into the 'gay/straight' binary opposition, that possibly Jose was a little confused because he was confused about me. So any idea that I was outing people left, right and centre is quite false.
Yes, it is true that I talked about homosexuality with Judkins, in much the same way I talk about it in this blog (as I've said before), but I also talked about girls. From 2003 until 2008 I was in a relationship with a girl called Maya but was infatuated with her best friend Sara. I told Judkins that I was in love with one woman and sleeping with the other. (I am far from proud about this arrangement now.) On another occasion, I mentioned a female patient I knew from coffee groups organised by Kate, telling Judkins "She has a nice arse!" On yet another occasion, after I had attended a rock concert at which I had seen a gorgeous girl, I mentioned her to Judkins, describing her as "gamine". Judkins must have known that I had extremely strong feelings about the girl I have called Jess in this blog, a woman I had written a film about in 2012 and who had occupied my mind almost continuously for all of 2013. After Jess told me about her girlfriend, and told me that she was, in effect, bisexual, in 2014, I found it very upsetting and tried to communicate to Judkins how distressing I found it. He didn't seem to comprehend how bad it was for me.
Something I found vexing, upsetting, about Judkins's approach to therapy was that he never asked direct questions (and never brought up anything important such as the divorce). Rather he displayed a kind of deceitful, wheedling manipulativeness. He was trying to wheedle a confession of sexual confusion out of me. What he should have done was ask me directly questions such as, "Have you ever smoked cannabis?" or "Have you ever had a homosexual experience?" or "What are your feelings about your father?" But he never did. For instance, he brought up cannabis in a roundabout way by saying that some people enjoy relaxing after a hard day's work by smoking a joint. I readily admitted that I have smoked pot in the past; as I described in the post "Cannabis and the Causes of Schizophrenia", I very occasionally smoked pot when I was young but haven't used marijuana since January 2007. After I became a patient of the Mental Health Service I had vowed never to smoke pot again. In fact, I had told people in the Mental Health Service that I had smoked pot at the Big Day Out in January 2007 way back in 2008 but obviously it hadn't gone on my record. It is possible that Judkins wrote in my record that I still smoked pot when I was seeing him in 2014, yet another lie (potentially) that went into my notes. On another occasion, Judkins brought up 'incubi' I think to try to wheedle out of me a confession that I'd had sex dreams about men. I simply replied that I thought incubi were male versions of succubi. In 2013, I'd had a job as a Reader-Writer for the disabilities service at AUT and had worked with a severely physically handicapped boy who had masturbated publicly during a tutorial (he had done so by jerking his body up and down). When I told Judkins about this, he said, "How could you tell?" I replied, indignantly, "I'm not retarded!" At the time, I thought that Judkins was trying to insinuate that I myself had never masturbated but I suspect now that he was trying to wheedle out of me a confession that I had jerked off men. It is in connection to this malignant, madness-inducing strategy of Judkins that I made what I regard as my biggest error of my time with him, although he probably didn't regard it this way. The thing that eroded my sanity in the past was the habit of those treating me to ask questions to which there was no right answer. As I have mentioned several times in this blog, the evil faggot of a psychiatrist I was treated by from 2007 until the beginning 2012, Antony Fernando, never asked me if I was gay or straight but, at one consultation in 2009, asked me, "Do you stand up for yourself or are you a people pleaser?" He was asking me if preferred to blow men or be blown by men. At the time I replied, "People pleaser" because, at the time, I had no idea what he was talking about. At the beginning of 2013, my then key worker Kate Whelan, who had also never asked me if I was gay or straight, had said to me, "Don't you want to be part of a community?" Kate had been my key worker for six years. I knew she meant the gay community but because she didn't ask the question directly I couldn't tell her that I would rather die than become a member of the gay community. More recently, this year or last year, my current psychiatrist Nick Hoeh asked me about the Pub Quiz I attend weekly, saying, "Is it a recent thing?" I told him, quite truthfully, that I have been going to it since 2010. In legalese and philosophy, the types of questions mental health workers often ask are called leading questions or loaded questions, a famous example of a loaded question being, "When did you stop beating your wife?" People in the Mental Health System make assumptions, particularly often assuming that all patients are the same, and then look for evidence to support their assumptions, a clear case of confirmation bias at work. I tried to talk about this with Judkins and found myself in the position of saying that it is wrong to ask people if they are gay or straight, a position Judkins himself took. I knew even as I said it that it was wrong. I believe, rather, that if there is any doubt about a person's sexuality, it is appropriate to ask directly, and I wish I'd said this to Judkins. If Fernando had asked me right at the beginning how I identified and believed me, I would have recovered in a year.
There was a kind of insanity to Simon Judkins, especially in his attitude to homosexuality. One time he said to me, pointing to heaven,"Whether a person is gay or not is between him... and God!" Perhaps Judkins thought I was a fundamentalist Christian. (I'm fairly sure Judkins himself is an atheist.) Of course, Judkin's statement was crazy, idiotic, ridiculous. In the twenty-first century gay men and women should and do come out, to their families, their friends and, of course, to their lovers. Another time, at the end of a session, he said to me, "So you think homosexuals can't get sick?" Again this is crazy; I have no idea why he said it. I had already briefly met one openly gay male patient, a man called Jason, before I started seeing Judkins and have met two since, including the chap Julian that I wrote about in the post "Concerning Jacinda and Julian". I also saw signs of Judkins's underlying Narcissistic Personality Disorder. At one point he told me, "People think I'm gay. I think it's because I'm part of the caring profession." His notion that people generally think gay men and women more compassionate than straight men and women is of course also stupid. Tell that to Jeffrey Dahmer! Another time he told me that he didn't mind gay men hitting on him, that he found it "flattering". Only a narcissist could find being hit on by gay men flattering if the narcissist in question is heterosexual. (And I could sense that even as he said, in truth he found being hit on by gay men at least somewhat disturbing.) I was being treated by a psychologist who was madder than me.
Judkins was, as I've said, trying to manipulate me into coming out as gay or bisexual to him. His most overt attempt to push me into saying I'm gay occurred in relation to George Clooney. As I understand it, a gay magazine in the UK had splashed on its cover the claim that Clooney "is gay, gay, gay!" Clooney, who is obviously straight, issued a press release saying, "I don't want to offend the gay community by saying I'm not gay but the third 'gay' seems a little excessive. I may be gay, gay, but I'm definitely not gay, gay, gay." When I told Judkins this story, he said to me, "Why don't you say that?" At another time, I think early on, he told me that sexual identity is "fluid" (and called me "aspergerous' for refusing to believe him). Later, during a discussion of Sigmund Freud, Judkins told me that Freud had believed there was some homosexuality in everyone (although I myself think Freud was unclear about this because Freud also introduced the world to the idea of the latent homosexual). Towards the end of my time with Judkins I told him, unsolicited, about the time when I was twenty-three when a male coworker, a straight man I believe, had put his lips against mine and blown cannabis smoke into my mouth, an experience I neither wanted nor enjoyed and which I have talked about in the post "Concerning Some Experiences". When I told him this story Judkins said, in triumph, "You see? There's some homosexuality in everyone!"
Also toward the end, in either the ultimate or penultimate session I had with Judkins, he asked me, "Aren't you attracted to men?" It was of course another leading or loaded question, and impossible for me to answer for two reasons, the first being that even heterosexual men can recognise when another man is handsome and the second something I shall come back to later in this post. So I said nothing. I believe in the last session he asked me, "Are there any gay men you like?" I couldn't understand why he'd asked me this question but suspected it was somehow a trap. I believe now that he thought he could encourage me to embrace my hitherto denied homosexuality by identifying with the gay men I held in high regard. I replied that I liked Michel Foucault. I could equally well have said I liked Stephen Fry or Graham Norton or Grant Robertson.
The months I spent with Judkins, especially toward the end, were profoundly distressing. Sometimes I felt suicidal – the treatment I received from him made me worse rather than better. I recall sometime during the middle of year I was walking in Newmarket and I suddenly developed the feeling that Judkins had decided to start lying about me in my notes. It felt as though a weight had lifted from me – the worst had happened and there was literally nothing I could do about it, I just had to live it with rather than try to fight it. Perhaps this was another instance of clairvoyance. Nevertheless, in my sessions with Judkins, I ploughed hopelessly ahead, cleaving to the illusion that the truth as I understood it then was going in my record. Towards the very end of the year, I was lying in bed and I heard a thunderstorm; with every clap of thunder, I heard a voice in my head saying loudly, "I'm gay!" I felt I'd been put into the position of having outed myself in my sessions with the psychologist. In the period around New Year's, when 2014 switched over to 2015, I was as 'sick' as I'd ever been since I'd been forced to spend time in the truly terrible respite facility in Point Chevalier early in 2014 that I've mentioned before in this blog. At the beginning of the new year, I seriously considered suicide – I didn't hang myself but instead wrote the short story "A Refusal to Mourn", a story that I have published in this blog. And yet, around this time, the psychiatrist I was seeing, Jeremy Whiting, decided to reduce my medication from 300mgs a month to 210mgs a month. I welcomed this reduction because all I really wanted was for the Mental Health Service to apologise and let me go. However, as a result of a talk I'd had with Whiting, as a result of his reaction to something I'd told him, I decided, I think correctly, that they had decided to reduce my medication because they thought that through Judkins I had come to accept my hitherto denied homosexual proclivities. When I hadn't. When the whole reason I became involved with the Taylor Centre again in 2013 (voluntarily) was to get it on my official record that I am heterosexual and always have been. I had already terminated my professional relationship with Judkins by this time but out of deep frustration and anger I wrote an email to him. I told him that he was in denial of his True Self and that, if he didn't already fantasise about men when he masturbated, he should start. Whiting had left the Taylor Centre to go on honeymoon and I was then seeing a different psychiatrist called Sati – Judkins complained about me, and Sati ordered my dosage to be increased back to 300mgs. I'd had only had one injection at the lower dosage. The official reason given for increasing my dosage back to 300mgs was "weight loss".
As I mentioned in the previous post, 2015 was perhaps the worst year of my life. I felt when talking to people that I was somehow living a lie – it was on my official record that I was gay and I was masquerading as straight to the people who knew me. It has only been because of this blog and the decision I made at the end of 2015 to start writing about my own life that I have recovered. As for Judkins... I have crossed paths with him twice at the Taylor Centre in the years since. One time I just contented myself by calling him a "fucker". The second time, I said (this is not an exact quote but is very close), "You told me that sexual identity is fluid. But most people in the world don't think sexuality is fluid. Why don't you tell the world about your own fluid sexuality?" I was trying to suggest, sarcastically, that he could provide a service to society by opening up to people about his own bisexuality, if only to his wife and children. Judkins turned his head and expelled an awkward, uncomfortable laugh before saying, "For some people, it's fluid." I called him an incompetent shit but what I should have done is point out that there is a word for people whose sexualities are fluid, which is 'bisexual'. A couple of months ago, I wrote to Kate Whelan about Judkins, someone she probably still works with. I said, "Judkins told me that there is some homosexuality in everyone. I assume that he told me that there is some homosexuality in everyone because he himself is bisexual. Ask him a question for me. Ask him: When you fantasise about men, do you fantasise about fucking men up the arse or being fucked up the arse?" I went on in the email to state that I know Judkins is straight, and that he should have accorded me the respect, the courtesy, to believe me when I said I was as well.
I wish now to to return to the circumstances surrounding the brief period when my dosage was briefly decreased to 210mgs at the beginning of 2015. As I've said, I decided, at the time, that the reason they had decided to decrease my dosage was because they thought I had opened up to Judkins about my hitherto denied homosexuality. However, I now know that my idiot father had a role in it. Shortly after my dosage was re-increased, I brought up the fact that I didn't know why they'd decided to reduce it at an appointment with Sati and my father, who was present at the consultation, admitted that he'd had a hand in it. At my most recent Independent Review, in 2018, my father made a point of saying to the panel that I was present when he had discussed reducing my medication with Jeremy Whiting. But this is a lie; I didn't know why they had decided to reduce it. It behoves me to say a few words about my dad. My father is a fan of Ayn Rand, supported Donald Trump, and denies climate change. He is very right-wing and is in some ways quite socially conservative. I have been thinking about this recently and it has occurred to me that because homosexuality was only decriminalised in New Zealand in 1986, when my father was thirty-nine years old, he grew up in age when no-one came out as gay, obviously, because it was illegal. I believe my father is a relic of an age when gay men and women didn't choose, own, their sexual identities; rather it was chosen for them by those around them, usually through gossip. My father, I believe, is quite tolerant of homosexuality but doesn't believe that gay men and women should come out or talk about sexuality at all. Instead he believes that what goes on the people's bedrooms is nobody's business but theirs. I suspect that my father's attitude to sexuality in general and to mine in particular informed whatever conversation he had with Whiting that led to the dosage reduction.
There is something important I wish to talk about now, a topic that has taken me a lot of courage to decide to broach, although it is something I have written about before. The conventional, orthodox way of talking about sexuality is to say that heterosexuals are sexually attracted only to members of the opposite sex and that homosexuals are sexually attracted to members of the same sex. Gay Conversion Therapy, however, dismantles this convention, talking instead about Same Sex Attractions or SSAs for short. I have experienced SSAs. The first time was in 2007, at the age of twenty-seven, at the Big House, as I have described in the post "My First Psychotic Episode". The Same Sex Attraction I experienced at the Big House nearly resulted in me drowning myself. (I should note here that the post "My First Psychotic Episode" is slightly incorrect on some points but that I have corrected it in later posts.) I experienced an SSA again in 2009, in Wanganui, an experience that made me briefly wonder if I was gay after all. Both times an SSA occurred, I was psychotic. In 2013, I began to experience SSAs all the time. These SSAs manifested themselves as an impulse to kiss men (thankfully these experiences were never accompanied by any sexual arousal, and I never acted on any of these 'attractions'). Starting January 18 2014, I would wake up every morning terribly thinking about homosexuality. I couldn't talk about either subject with Judkins because I knew that if I mentioned that I experienced SSAs with him, it would be taken as evidence of homosexuality, that it would be tantamount to coming out. And at that time I lacked the vocabulary necessary to talk about them. All I really wanted was for my heterosexuality to go on the record; I felt strongly moreover that the reason I was experiencing SSAs was because the people who were treating me thought I was gay when I'm not, that these psychotic symptoms would go away if I said or did the right thing. And eventually they did. I have almost never experienced an SSA since the end of 2015 or beginning of 2016. (Of course, it is hard not to acknowledge that the male Olympic swimmers are very buff – I jest of course.) If one is willing to use the term SSA, it seems appropriate to also consider Opposite Sex Attractions, what we might term OSAs. Since I was twelve I have very, very often experienced OSAs. For me, an OSA is enjoyable whereas an SSA is emotionally stressful. Even during the periods when I was experiencing SSAs I was still very much sexually attracted women. But all this explains why when Judkins said to me, "Aren't you attracted to men?" I was unable to answer him. If he'd said, "Do you experience attractions?" I might have been able to.
The New Zealand Parliament is currently set to pass legislation criminalising Gay Conversion Therapy. Given the topics I discuss in this blog and in this post, the reader is entitled to wonder if I have an opinion. What does the author of Silverfish think about all this? If I could, I would suggest an addendum to the law. If it is to be illegal to try to convert a male or female who identifies as gay to heterosexuality, it should also be illegal to try to convert a male or female who identifies as straight to homosexuality. This sounds paradoxical or absurd but it hints at a deeper truth. If this law passes, what happens to men and women, or boys and girls, who experience SSAs but don't want to be gay? This law would mean it would be impossible to treat such people without risking a five-year prison term. It might strike people as unbelievable to suppose that religious therapy can alter a person's sexuality but there are people in the world who seem successfully to have changed their sexual orientations through prayer and faith. I am not a Christian myself but I believe people should be free to choose how they identify. In the post "Shoplifters of the World, Unite and Take Over" I proposed an idea that I still subscribe to. Suppose a boy or girl approaches a psychologist or psychiatrist or counsellor and says, "I think I might be gay!" The therapist should ask, "Do you want to be gay?" If the client say yes, the therapist should say, "Okay." If the client says no, the therapist should say, "You can't be gay unless you want to be."
Of course, my thinking about this has been forged in the furnace of over twelve years being treated by incompetent mental health workers who thought I was a gay man who didn't want to come out, by repeatedly being told, either directly or indirectly, that I should come out. (I hasten to add that I have had several good key workers who seem to have recognised that I am straight but precious few psychiatrists who have.) I feel, now, that I have successfully got it on the public record that I am heterosexual and always have been. But I am still single. On his show, Bill Maher often mocks incels, perhaps rightly because there is an overlap between the incel movement and the alt-right movement. But the term incel, short for involuntary celibate, has utility. It's all very well for Maher to say that men who have difficulty getting girlfriends lack game – he is a millionaire celebrity. I am middle-aged, fat, unemployed, and diagnosed schizophrenic. I don't blame women for my difficulties. If I was a girl, I wouldn't go out with me. I am no longer attractive. I have spent an awful chunk of my life simply trying to convince psychiatrists that I am heterosexual and it seems, in a perverse irony, that even though I have done so, I may never get a girlfriend again. Oh well. Perhaps my next life will be better.
