It takes a lot of courage to talk about the experience of psychosis. There is a great deal of stigma associated with severe mental illness, because, even though research has shown that most people who experience psychosis are not dangerous, there is a public perception that psychotics can be unpredictable and threatening. I sometimes read articles in which people who have experienced psychosis are even cast as somehow subhuman. In tonight's post, however, despite the risk attending such disclosure, I wish to talk about the psychotic episode I experienced in 2007, fourteen years ago. Why? For three reasons. First, I think that people with open minds might find such an account interesting. Second, I am trying in this blog to build up a picture of my life and who I am and, although I have discussed this first episode before, I have not so far depicted in detail what I believed after I became a patient of the Mental Health System in around April of 2007 until the end of that year. Third, I believe that it is possible to recover from psychosis, that doing so involves talking about the delusions that have temporarily held one hostage and publicly disavowing them. The corrupt and mendacious psychiatrist I saw from 2007 until the beginning of 2012, Antony Fernando, once told me that delusions are "fixed, by definition". He told me this even though he didn't know what my principal delusion was. But the major delusions that possessed me in 2007 and reappeared intermittently in 2009 have never resurfaced in all the years since. The idea that delusions are "fixed, by definition", like the idea that "it is impossible to recover from schizophrenia, by definition", is a cruel insanity perpetrated on some human beings by other human beings who hold positions of power.
I often meet other patients and I have noticed a peculiar prejudice I have against them which I am sure others hold towards me. It is easy to assume that someone who has been given a diagnosis like 'schizophrenia' was always schizophrenic. This assumption comes from the widely held misconception that schizophrenia is a congenital disease that first manifests in late adolescence or early adulthood. However, I didn't experience psychosis until I was twenty-seven and had had a life before then – although the delusion I wish to discuss seized hold of me when I was twenty-seven, I had never even considered this paranoid conspiracy theory before then. I had studied for two years in Dunedin, living at Knox College, where I received an award for contributions to the College culture because of a play I had written, another I performed in, a film club I ran, and a chess match I won. I went on to get two degrees and had worked for years first at the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron and then for the TAB. I'd had two girlfriends, Danielle and Maya. (The status of my relationship with Maya was perhaps questionable and I shall come back to it in a moment.) I'd considered doing a PhD in English at an American University and had travelled for three months in Europe with the rather presumptuous ambition of learning the rudiments of French so that I could get a scholarship. I wasn't always 'schizophrenic'. This prejudice, that schizophrenics have always been schizophrenic, is another way society routinely dehumanises the 'mentally ill'.
I first started hearing voices in January 2009, at the age of twenty-nine, after I had been a patient of the Mental Health Service and on antipsychotics for over a year and a half. The reader may wonder: had you never heard voices before? Only once. In 2003 I recall going to the Parnell Rose Garden with Maya not long after we first started going out. We were sitting there together, her smiling happilly –– and I heard a little voice in my head that said, "You should break up with her." I listened to it, and told her that I wanted to break up with her and go out with her friend Sara instead. I recall sitting in the car driving around immediately afterwards with her sitting beside me weeping. For the next month I pursued Sara through text message without any reply. On my birthday, I went to the Big House, where Maya was living, and she gave me, as a present, a Magic Eight Ball. I was obsessed with Magic Eight Balls. I thought to myself, "This girl really knows me" and consequently decided to get back together with her. To this day, I don't know if the mistake I made was my listening to the voice that told me to break up with her or my deciding to get back together with her. I didn't finally break up properly with Maya until 2008 but, although we were having sex, she may have kept our relationship secret, told people and behaved as though we were not in a relationship. I was a closet heterosexual.
I have discussed the causes of my first psychotic episode in a number of posts: "My First Psychotic Episode", "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM", "Theory of Mind and The Big House", "Cannabis and the Causes of Schizophrenia" and "Schizophrenia and Rationality." If I were to sum up the causes of my first episode in a sentence, I would say that, as a result of working at bFM, I had decided that the station was full of closet homosexuals and that I couldn't tell anyone this publicly. If I were to add to this simple statement, I would say that, prior to forming this delusion, I had suspected that the other people working at the station thought I was gay when I'm not. The most important post of this list is the first and I wish now to correct an error I made in it. In that post, I said that I had felt an impulse to kiss a male flatmate, had gone for a walk during which I decided that everyone in the world was gay except me, and had considered drowning myself. This is not quite right. I found the impulse to kiss a man, an impulse I had never experienced before and which I was to re-experience, once, in 2009 and then again starting in 2013 profoundly distressing. During the walk what I was actually thinking about was bFM. I thought that either bFM had outed me as gay or that I had accidentally outed myself as gay simply by choosing to go work there. When I returned to the Big House, I remember sitting outside and talking to the enormous unseen audience I imagined was listening to me through listening devices installed in the House, telling them that the community I could belong to didn't exist. And then when my flatmates woke up, I recall telling one of them, Christy, "My father's gay but I'm straight!" During the next day, the feeling that I couldn't talk about homosexuality at all dropped away and I can remember telling people, in effect, in a somewhat panicky manner, that I thought Mikey Havoc was pursuing me romantically. That night my brother collected me from the Big House and brought me home to my mother's and shortly after, the next day I believe, my father drove me to the Taylor Centre.
It is at this point in the post that I wish to start talking about the two principal delusions that featured in my thinking that year: the delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals and the delusion that there was a microphone in my glasses.
I formed the delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals while I was still at the Big House that year. My logic was simple.
P2. Like the freemasons, closet homosexuals want to give each other a helping hand up the social ladder.
C1. Therefore, closet homosexuals percolate to the top,
C2. Therefore, the world is ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals.
This delusion of course emerged from my experience working at bFM. I had decided that not only had the people at bFM thought I was gay, that they had employed me because they thought I was gay. I had been, unwittingly, a kind of double agent – a straight man pretending to be gay to get a job in the media. I didn't talk about this at all for very many years. I also, as I have said before, formed the delusion at the Big House that there were listening devices in the fire alarms.
When I first made contact with the Taylor Centre, the delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals had gone into abeyance (although I still thought, wrongly, that my father was gay). I thought that in the Mental Health Service, issues to do with sexuality would be openly and honestly discussed. But I was wrong. After a couple of weeks, the delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals, the delusion that there were more homosexuals than heterosexuals in the world, returned, as did the feeling that I was under surveillance – I formed the delusion that there was a microphone in my glasses and that everything I said was being transmitted to third parties, perhaps the media. This paranoid delusion caused me to feel that if I outed anyone as gay or even simply used either the words 'gay' or 'straight' at all some kind of terrible repercussion would result. The reason I became more ill as a result of my initial treatment by the Mental Health System was two-fold. At my first appointment with Antony Fernando, I decided, at a glance, that he was a member of the homosexual conspiracy. Second, I sensed at that first appointment, I think rightly, that he had decided to diagnose me a latent homosexual. These stressors made my psychosis worse and it is a wonder, in retrospect, that I recovered from it at the end of the year.
In the gay community, there is a phenomenon known colloquially as 'bearding'. The online dictionary provides this definition: "One who serves to divert suspicion or attention from another, especially a person of the opposite sex who accompanies a gay man or lesbian to give the impression of heterosexuality." Bearding features in the film Dating Amber, a film I saw several months ago with my mother. I decided that year that the world was full of fake couples, beards; I thought gay men would marry lesbians and have children, even though the married couple didn't love each other. I thought that this was unnatural. I believed people were born one way or the other and I believed moreover that gay men and women were happier after they had come out and formed romantic relationship with members of the same sex. But I also believed that a very large number of gay men and women never came out at all. Very soon after I left the Big House, I had dinner with my father and stepmother and blew up at them, particularly at my stepmother: although I didn't use the words 'gay' or 'straight' I used the word 'unnatural' to describe their marriage. (I have two half-sisters by the way.) I think, now, that a part of what fed into that first episode was my sense that my father's marriage to my stepmother was unhappy.
Believing as I did that the world was full of closet homosexuals, I decided that openly gay men and women were honest, brave, heroic. During that year, I hated closet homosexuals but I liked openly gay men and women.
I recall some weeks after I first became a patient telling my key worker a story about the singer Darcy Clay. I had attended a Blur concert with my first girlfriend Danielle for which Darcy Clay was the support act in 1997. He had sung a countrified version of the song Candle in the Wind. I mistakenly thought, and told my key worker, that, after this performance, he had gone back to his girlfriend's house and shot himself. (This is factually incorrect. Darcy Clay didn't commit suicide until the next year.) I thought, although I didn't explicitly say this to my key worker, that he had killed himself because he had realised that the upper echelons of the music industry, the band Blur itself, were full of closet homosexuals. As the delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals took hold, it subsumed all of history and culture. I decided later in the year that the New Zealand historian Michael King, who had died in a car crash in 2004, had been assassinated by the homosexual conspiracy because he had threatened to expose it. I decided that the Green Party leader Rod Donald, who had died in 2005, had also been assassinated for the same reason. Perhaps most dramatically, after a very brief period of thinking that the Holocaust didn't happen (I thought that everything the media reported was made up), I decided that the Jews were all straight and that the Nazis were all closet homosexuals. I thought Israel was a paradise and that the bad press it received was a PR campaign designed to stop closet homosexuals moving there. I thought the Holocaust was evidence of a genocidal theme that ran through history: I thought heterosexuality was being systematically weeded out of the gene pool. Later, when I read that the Nazis had also tried to exterminate homosexuals, I decided that they had gone after openly gay men and women because they regarded them, in a sense, as class traitors.
Halfway through the year, my mother and I travelled down to the small city of Wanganui to visit my godmother and I want to spend a moment talking about this trip. On the way down, we were followed by a freight truck; this caused me to become panicky because I thought it might be an agent of the homosexual conspiracy and that it might run us off the road. Not long after we arrived, I decided that Wanganui was a small enclave of enlightened heterosexuals who had fled there to escape all the closet homosexuals who made up the bulk of the rest of the population. Like Israel, Wanganui was a heterosexual paradise; the bad press it sometimes received concerning gangs was a way of discouraging closet homosexuals from moving there. At this time, the mayor of Wanganui was Michael Laws, a right-wing conservative who sometimes argued in his role as a talkback radio host that there was a feral underclass who should all be sterilised; I decided that Laws was really a left-winger pretending to be a right-winger. I thought that my godmother and others that I met in Wanganui were only pretending to dislike him and secretly supported him. This rather strange delusion, that apparent left-wingers were secretly right-wing and that apparent right-wingers were secretly left-wing was, for some reason I don't fully understand, a large part of the delusional framework I built up that year.
An important word to be used in discussing psychosis is 'anosognosia'. Anosognosia is the condition of not knowing one is ill even though one is ill. I suffered from anosognosia at the beginning. I honestly believed that I had a cracked an enormous secret, that the world was full of closet homosexuals, and didn't realise that I was experiencing psychosis. There were a couple of rare occasions when I considered the possibility that I might be mentally unwell, but my delusions were preferable to the frightening prospect that I might have gone mad. I can remember going to Work and Income with my key worker, Kate Whelan, to apply for the Sickness Benefit; I felt that I had to pretend to be 'ill' (which I did very subtly) because I thought that this way I could conceal the fact that I had discovered the existence of a massive conspiracy governing the world. I thought that the treatment I was receiving from the Mental Health Service was the standard treatment given to those perspicacious enough to work out this terrible truth, that we had to pretend to be mad in order not to be silenced or destroyed by the homosexual elite. At other times, I thought that I had to pretend to be a closet homosexual (which again I did very subtly) because I thought that if I advertised my heterosexuality to the world something terrible would happen to me. I can remember, for instance, visiting the Sarjeant Gallery in Wanganui and walking around a replica of that famous Greek statue of two men wrestling, pretending to be attracted to it. The most ludicrous delusion I formed that year was that some heterosexuals would pretend to be visually impaired to hide the fact that they were perving at women. For instance, I thought that this was the case with James Joyce when he got older.
Although this blogpost is evidence that for a number of months in 2007 I had stepped outside reality, it is important for you to realise that I was never dangerous. The dominant emotion I experienced that year was fear; I never experienced any anger. I am not and never have been a violent person, (nor have I ever been a liar). Furthermore, the two principal delusions I experienced that year, the belief that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals and the belief that there was a microphone in my glasses, weren't there continuously. Sometimes they ebbed and sometimes they returned. My delusions also developed, changed, over the course of the year, particularly, for instance, with respect to religion. When I first became a patient of the Mental Health Service, I thought religious people were all closet homosexuals. (This delusion is in fact quite common – I believe the clinical psychologist I saw in 2014 shared it.) As the year progressed, however, religious themes in my thinking became more prominent. I thought that we might be living in the End Times and that, like Jesus, I had to divide the world into the Saved and the Damned, straight people and closet homosexuals. I recall one night a whole avalanche of names rushed into my head, one very insistent name being Patrick Swayze. I decided that I wanted everyone in the world to be saved. Shortly after, I saw on the news that Swayze had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Towards the end of the year, I became a day patient at the respite facility Mind Matters, an experience I wrote about, badly, in the post "Mind Matters". During this period, every night I would walk up to the Presbyterian Church at the top of the road and sit for a while in the pews. I felt as though there was a war going on between Good and Evil with my soul at stake. This particular delusion, of a spiritual battle for the soul of the sufferer, is not uncommon in psychosis. In the book Experiencing Psychosis, a book I talked about in the post "An Interpretation of 'The Hounds of Heaven'", research is discussed showing precisely this, that a common feature of psychosis is the sense of a war between Good and Evil. I suspect, for instance, that John Nash felt this way.
The delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals almost entirely went away in December 2007. The delusion that there was a microphone in my glasses didn't exactly go away – I thought rather that so long as I said nothing controversial, no one would be listening. The delusion that people were indeed listening to me through a microphone in my glasses returned at the beginning of 2009, featured for a short period and then mostly went away after I started hearing voices. In January 2009, I started to believe that I could communicate telepathically with people, beginning with George W. Bush; later in the year, I adopted Jon Stewart as an imaginary friend. The conversations I had with them and others is what I mean by the term 'hearing voices'. However, the delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals only featured very, very intermittently in 2009 and had gone away for good by the end of the year.
I have talked about all this before in the post "What Happened in 2007 and 2009".
I'll finish this post by making two remarks. Immediately after I was put under a Compulsory Treatment Order at the beginning of 2014 (an Order I am still under today), I wrote a long essay describing my life and my treatment. In that essay, I covered much of the material I have discussed in this post, although I have gone into more detail in this post. Although I had it put into my psychiatrist's pigeon hole, I don't believe the Key Worker I had at the time, Josh Brasil, ever read it. The incompetent clinical psychologist I saw in 2014 told me that he had read it but, if he did, I can't understand why he treated me the way he did. I don't believe my idiot psychiatrist, Jennifer Murphy, the woman who first diagnosed me schizophrenic in 2013 and had me put under the act, ever read it. If she had, she wouldn't have ended up having to resign. My lawyer, Paul Gruar, definitely read this essay which is why he has always been on my side, although he is very lackadaisical, even fatalistic, in attempting to present my case to the Independent Reviews I have repeatedly requested. I have wondered, as I discussed in the post "A Pigeon, A Motorcade, and a Sure Suspicion", if Antony Fernando had been intercepting the blogposts I occasionally printed out, brought into the Taylor Centre and asked to have put into the psychiatrist's pigeon hole. This might be paranoia; it might be that the psychiatrists are so overwhelmed with work that they just don't have time to read the blogposts I have brought in. The second remark concerns paranoid conspiracy theories in general. It seems to me that much of the world is in the grip of a mass psychosis, a psychosis fuelled by QAnon and anti-vax rhetoric. There may be conspiracy thinking on the Left as well as the Right. This is a topic for another post.
This post has kind of trailed off towards the end. I don't know whether I will need to talk about my life any more in this blog or if I will go back to talking about philosophy. If the reader is interested in some of the posts I have written that people seldom go back to, I recommend the posts "Identity Politics" and "Bruce Springsteen vs. Faith No More". Anyway, adios, my friends.
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