In this blog, I often talk about quite dissimilar topics in the same post. I intend to do so again now. I want first to make some corrections to the previous post and to some earlier ones. Then I want to talk about my life some more. I may discuss structuralism and Derrida. Finally I wish to talk about my first psychotic episode, which I have discussed a number of times in the past, from a different angle. I know my tendency to shift gears, to swing wildly from one subject to another, may make for disjointed reading but, in a way, this blog is indeed a personal journal – if I have readers, and I hope I do, who have followed my journey over the course of the years and are interested in my life and thoughts, this is a bonus. So I make no apologies for this. I suggest, for those readers, that they plough through this post because some of the things I say later are important.
When I have written a post, I seldom go back and revise it. I take the attitude that once an essay is done, that's it, and then I move on. This means some of my posts are not of the same quality as others. For instance, I wrote three posts about Janet Frame, "Concerning Stigma and Janet Frame", "Concerning The Sellout and An Angel at My Table", and "Jon Stewart, Janet Frame, and Katy Perry". The first of these three posts was rubbish – I had not, at that time, started reading An Angel at My Table and that essay was based more on Frame's Wikipedia entry than her autobiographies. The next two were better and, since I wrote those posts, I have thought about her life story more and feel I understand the terrible stupid truth behind her 'illness' more clearly now, a truth that I only hinted at in those posts. A difficulty with any attempt to understand Frame is that I suspect her autobiographies may not be consistent with the life story presented by Michael King in his biography of her, Wrestling with the Angel, with respect, for instance, to the identity of the psychologist who treated her either immediately after or before her diagnosis of schizophrenia. Was it someone called John Fisher, as Frame says in An Angel at my Table, or was it John Money? I don't know the answer to this question but much hinges on it. Another post I wrote that is a little rubbish is "The Problem-Solution Model of Fictions". A couple of months ago I reread it and was ashamed of how badly it was written. If I have regular readers, they will know that a concern with fictional narratives was the original subject of this blog. I believe that I have now developed a sound understanding of what makes a story but expressed myself very badly in that post. Although I have not yet fully and clearly articulated this theory, I may yet do so in the future.
I turn now to the previous post. I made a number of small errors in it which I wish to to correct. I said that the Youtube clip featuring Rupert Sheldrake was called "Directional Scopaesthesia" when in fact it is called "Scopathaesthesia and Its Implications". I said that all four of Chuck's children have rejected him but in fact, as I understand it, Maudie hasn't. I said that Antony Fernando had told me that schizophrenia causes people's brains to shrink in either 2007 or 2009 but, in fact, I'm pretty sure it was 2007. It was a fairly vile and evil thing for a psychiatrist to say to someone who hadn't at that stage been diagnosed schizophrenic and had only experienced psychosis for a couple of months (at the age of twenty-seven). I said that I heard a voice telling me to "Accept consensus reality" in October 2009 but I think it possible it might have been November. I said that my young quiz teammate has been in a lesbian relationship for about two years but it might be less than that. I said that I saw the psychiatrist Dharma three times but, in fact, I think I only saw him twice. The conversation with him and Josh that I described is absolutely verbatim, although I said more at that appointment with him than I have indicated there or elsewhere. I also told him that, when I first got sick, I had decided that a couple of male bFM workers were having an affair although I didn't tell Dharma what I then knew, that I had made a mistake, that Mikey Havoc isn't gay. There may be other small errors with dates (although, for instance, I can date precisely the moment when I started experiencing terrible thoughts of homosexuality every morning the moment I woke up because it started the morning after the Big Day Out in 2014). Hopefully this list of small errors is most of the errors I made.
Some time ago I wrote a post, I think "The Causes of Schizophrenia Part 2", in which I said that both my previous step-mother and an aunt of mine were lesbians. With respect to my stepmother, I think the truth might be more complicated but it it was nevertheless necessary for me to talk about my belief that my stepmother might be a closet lesbian because, although I formed this suspicion about six years before my first psychotic episode, this belief factored into it. My aunt, who I described as a "late-in-life lesbian", isn't a lesbian at all. The reason I made this mistake is that I was dozing on the couch at my mother's house some time ago while she and my aunt were talking and I misheard something my aunt, for many years a single woman, said to my mother, and consequently leapt to the wrong conclusion. The proof that my aunt isn't a lesbian is that recently my mother and I visited her in Taupo and she asked us if Helen Clark had been pushed into marrying Peter Davis; she also asked us if David Seymour was attracted to women. The answer to the first question is 'no' and to the second 'yes'. (I know David Seymour a little.) In other words, my aunt was displaying rather typical right wing paranoid homophobia, an indication that she is straight. Interestingly, one of my aunt's grandchildren recently came out publicly as gay on Facebook.
Readers may justifiably ask, "If you made a mistake about your aunt, could you have a made a mistake about your young female quizmate? After all, you admit that she hasn't come out explicitly to you." I haven't made a mistake about this. I can observe the way she interacts with her girlfriend and my friend has told me that the girl she sees has written articles for LGBT magazines. They are about as openly gay as a couple of young women can be without actually saying the words "I'm gay". Sadly, I won't be seeing this young friend anymore because she and her girlfriend are moving to Wellington for a job.
I may have made other errors in this blog from time to time but the ones I mentioned above are the ones most salient in my mind.
Before I begin discussing Derrida and structuralism, I wish to clarify some possible confusion in the minds of my readers. I worry that people may think my psychotic episodes were somehow related to illegal drugs, like crystal meth. It is not uncommon for people to suffer psychotic episodes as a result of drug use. Truthfully, however, I have never used methamphetamine in my life, although I did smoke pot and take ecstasy very occasionally when I was much younger. As I discussed in the post "Cannabis and the Causes of Schizophrenia", I believe that my use of pot and ecstasy (what the kids today call MDMA), specifically at the Big Day Out in 2007, may have exacerbated that first episode but did not cause it. I was becoming ill prior to attending that festival. As I discussed in the post "My First Psychotic Episode", I brought a young woman in to bFM twice in the week prior to the festival; I recall some of the people at bFM, including Mikey Havoc, took Caroline out for drinks after the second morning show. I didn't go with them. Instead, I went and lay on a bench in the university grounds. When I had studied for my MA, I had learned the theory that some closet homosexuals loan their wives to men because they get an erotic kick out of it. I thought that, even though the reason I had brought Caroline into bFM was to woo or seduce her, it could be misinterpreted as I sign that I was giving her to Mikey – I thought that somehow Caroline's presence, rather than showing that I was straight, could be taken as evidence that I was gay. Obviously this was a crazy thing for me to think. So my paranoid anxiety that people at bFM might think I was gay when I'm not preceded the Big Day Out although the delusion that both Mikey and Jose were gay appeared about a fortnight or month later.
After I became a patient of the Mental Health Service in the middle of 2007, I vowed never to touch pot or any other illegal drug ever again, a vow I have kept. Therefore there is simply no way that the episodes I suffered in 2009 or 2013 were caused by the use of illegal drugs. There is an important point to be made here. Although my first episode was only exacerbated but not caused by pot, the psychiatrists could have diagnosed me with drug induced psychosis rather than schizophrenia if they had wanted. I didn't mention in 2007 that I had smoked a lot of pot at the Big Day Out earlier that year because, at the time, it didn't seem relevant. However, I mentioned it in 2008 to a nurse I was seeing for 'therapy'. Presumably, it didn't go in my record because, in 2011, after talking about the book "The Eden Express" by Mark Vonnegut to Antony Fernando, Fernando made a comment about how Mark Vonnegut's illness was drug related unlike mine. Even though I knew that Fernando didn't know the full truth, at the time it was easier simply not to correct him. In 2013, at an appointment with Jennifer Murphy, my father, who was present, brought up the fact that I had smoked pot at the Big Day Out in 2007 but couldn't remember the name of the other drug I took. I immediately supplied the correct label, "ecstasy". Murphy grimaced. In 2014, as I described in the post "Straight Conversion Therapy", the clinical psychologist I was seeing brought up cannabis use in a weaselly way. I immediately admitted that I had occasionally smoked pot when I was younger. He may have got it into his head that I still occasionally smoked pot then in 2014.
Psychiatrists want to believe that illegal drug use causes psychosis because it lets them off the hook. It's a way of blaming the patient. Furthermore they never ask direct questions such as "Have you ever taken P or speed or any other kind of illegal drug?" I met a smart youngish bipolar guy majoring in microbiology called Jeremy through the Taylor Centre some years ago who said to me that on one occasion he had told the psychiatrist that his manic episodes were like taking drugs. They put it in his record that he was a drug user. Jeremy had never touched illegal drugs in his life.
I wish now to bring up something very important. In the previous post, I said that at the beginning of 2009 I formed the belief that I had been outed as gay in my patient notes even though I had never used the words 'gay' or 'straight' at any time in my treatment except right at the beginning. The true story I want to tell now is something I have mentioned before in the post "What Happened in 2007 and 2009". In 2008, I saw a woman called Avril Scott, a Scottish nurse, for weekly 'therapy' although no therapy ever occurred. I never used the words 'gay' or 'straight' with her at all, never discussed my family, the delusions I'd experienced in 2007, or the causes of the episode I'd suffered. Instead I talked to her about David Letterman and the American election. At the end of 2008 or beginning of 2009, she decided that I should be put on antidepressants even though I had never complained of depression. I had an appointment with her and Fernando at which no member of my family or my key worker Kate Whelan were present. I asked why they wanted to put me on antidepressants even though I wasn't depressed and suggested I could take St John's-Wort instead. Fernando said, "I hear they prescribe St John's-Wort – in Gernmay!" and turned to Avril with a smirk. I had a sudden strong sense that they were colluding, conspiring somehow against me. In 2007, I had believed that the Nazis were all closet homosexuals and, although I had never used the word 'gay', I had indeed mentioned Nazis once or twice. They might have got the idea that I was a gay man with a persecution complex – they were treating me as a gay man who didn't want to come out. This moment, when I realised that they were treating me as a gay man even though I had never said I was gay, was traumatic and led directly to the psychotic episode that I suffered for the next eight months. At the time I believed that the antidepressants might somehow, together with the rispiridone, be part of the way they treated latent homosexuals, that it might make homosexuals happier about accepting their hitherto denied homosexuality. I only took antidepressants for about a week before I convinced the people treating me to allow me to go off them. In describing this experience, that appointment with Avril and Antony Fernando, I cannot do justice in word to the distress it caused me.
I'll turn now to a different time in my life. In previous posts, I have talked about how my dosage was doubled from 300mgs a month to 300mgs a fortnight in 2018. Although I may have talked about this before, I wish to discuss what happened again. First, it is possible that my dosage had already been increased from 300mgs a month to 410mgs a month without them telling me. I recall, I believe, that for some months before the dosage increase to 300mgs a fortnight I had felt like my skull was stuffed full of cotton wool for several days after the injection. At the end of 2015, I had accidentally been given a higher dose than I should have (a mistake I was told about immediately, for which I am grateful) and since then I have always asked and always been told that I am receiving a dosage of 300mgs. But some time after the increase the nurse who was administering the injection told me that she thought I had been receiving 410mgs. If this is right, that they increased my dosage without my knowledge, it is probably illegal.
In 2018, I requested an Independent Review to try to get out of the Mental Health Act. At this Review, the report my then psychiatrist gave to the panel was full of, to put it nicely, inaccuracies or, to put it more truthfully, outright lies. Jennifer Murphy told the panel that my dosage had varied in 2010 and 2011, sometimes being reduced to 7.5 and at other times being increased to 12.5; she said that in 2012 my dosage had been temporarily increased from 5mgs to 7.5. The truth, as readers will know from reading the previous post and others before it is that I was on 10mgs continuously during all of 2010 and 2011 and on 5mgs for almost all of 2012. And I was totally well for all three years. I think Jennifer Murphy was trying to imply that I was psychotic during those years to justify the argument she was trying to make that I have treatment resistant schizophrenia. She included in the report the fact that I would often go for walks for hours at night I think to insinuate that I was cruising for homosexual encounters, something which is obviously false. She included the fact that I had told her that Antony Fernando had diagnosed me homosexual without any acknowledgement that Fernando had made a mistake. She told them that I had a persecution complex. At the review, I corrected the mistakes Murphy had made about my medical history. My lawyer, who had read a long essay I had written early in 2014 not long after being put under the Act and has consequently always been on my side, asked me to clarify what happened immediately prior to my half-hearted suicide attempt in 2007. I said, "I decided that everyone in the world was gay except me, including my father. And I walked into the sea up to my shins and then walked out." Readers who have followed this blog will know that this is not quite right but it is close enough to the truth to make my point. Murphy burst out, "Persecuted by homosexuals" and immediately shrank back. I mentioned in passing that I had become sick again in February or March 2013 and she flinched, presumably because it implied that I had been well for a long time before then. In the end, the review went against me but, when they gave their judgment, none of the members of the panel would look at me and the psychiatrist on the panel made a point of saying that the decision was based on Murphy's notes.
A months or two after the review I had an appointment with Murphy. I brought along a friend of mine, a straight woman called Brenda who I have been attending a pub quiz with since mid 2010, because I wanted some support, some protection from the evil whims of the psychiatrists. I tried to talk with Murphy about bFM and about the reasons I had become 'unwell' with Brenda listening in. Shortly after, I visited Brenda and we discussed the appointment with Murphy. Brenda was appalled by the fact that Murphy had just sat there silently and had not asked a single question. Brenda said to me, "She's a lesbian, isn't she?" She had decided Murphy was a lesbian because Murphy was so badly dressed. I stuck up for Murphy, saying it was unlikely that she was a lesbian because she was pregnant when I first started seeing her. At the next appointment with Murphy I reported this conversation to her. Before I was able to say that I had stuck up for her, she threw me out of the room. I remember saying to the Taylor Centre receptionist, "I told her the truth and she threw me out of the room!" When I was allowed back in the consultation room, I told Murphy that she was an appalling excuse for a doctor. Murphy told me that she had decided to increase my dosage to 300mgs a fortnight. In the month prior to that appointment, I had made a complaint to the Health and Disabilities Commissioner about Jen Murphy; at my first injection under the new regimen I was given a letter (and you just have to believe me about this) in which Murphy told me that she had decided to increase my dosage because I had laid a complaint against her. That appointment was my last with Murphy and a little while later she resigned.
One of the supposed symptoms of schizophrenia is problems with memory. The reader may wonder, "Is that really what happened at that last appointment with Dr Murphy?" At an appointment with my present psychiatrist in August last year, he asked me about that appointment and I described what had happened much as I have described it in the previous paragraph. My key worker, a jerk, the worst or almost worst key worker I've ever had, said, "That's not what happened. And I was there!" However, the Taylor Centre has relinquished any credibility when it comes to telling the truth, as is evinced by the paragraph above in which I described the Independent Review I had in 2018 and by the posts "Corruption in the Mental Health Service" and "More Corruption in the Mental Health Service". The doctors and other workers often lie or distort the truth. I can give another example. In 2018, not long before my dosage was increased to 300mgs a fortnight, I was talking with my then key worker Debbie Smith over coffee and she asked me, seriously, if I thought schizophrenia was caused by a kind of magic. A little later I was in the waiting room at the Taylor Centre and I brought this up with her with others around. She said that I had misheard her and that she believed schizophrenia to be hereditary.
As I have made abundantly clear, I despise the psychiatric profession. Obviously, however, when I see my doctor, as I did recently, via zoom, I try to be friendly and to get on with him while making my points subtly, such as reiterating that the childhood trauma that made me vulnerable to psychosis later in life was my parents' divorce when I was seven. (In the fifteen years I have been a patient no doctor or health worker has ever brought up my parents' divorce once.) I only see my psychiatrist for an hour about once every four or six months and I never see my current key worker, a middle aged male Indian immigrant who speaks English poorly, at all. My dosage has been slightly reduced, not to 300mgs a month as I hoped (and suggested in the previous post) but to 410mgs a month. If I were to be difficult, the doctor could always reverse the decision to reduce my dosage and it is even within his power to send me to hospital: this is why I need to try to get on with him. (I recall in 2007 or 2008, Fernando had told me, "You know, I could put you in hospital if I wanted.") Nevertheless in this blog I can vent my true feelings. I have considered writing a short story about the psychiatric profession which I shall briefly summarise:
An idealistic young psychiatrist, new to the profession and still believing that his role is to help people, finds out one day that an error in a patient's record had led directly to that patient taking his own life. He wavers, considers reporting this to some relevant authority, and mentions it to a colleague. That evening he receives a phone call asking him to go round to the colleague's house. When he arrives, he finds a group of male psychiatrists there. They grab him, forcibly tie him to a chair and proceed to take turns raping him, saying, "This is what we do to rats!" One of the psychiatrists even says, "Blood and other men's semen make the best lubricant." After his ordeal, the young psychiatrist agrees, in tears, not to inform on his colleagues. Soon after this he returns to work, prepared now to psychologically rape his patients the way he has been raped himself.
The story synopsis above is crude but there is an element of truth to it. Psychiatrists never admit error and often act to protect each other, because, in truth, most psychiatry is bullshit. Workers who go against the prevailing psychiatric wisdom are removed or relocated, I believe – I think something like this might have happened to some of my previous key workers. In late 2013, I strongly believed that I was the victim of a coverup designed to protect Antony Fernando from charges of gross misconduct. This belief has never entirely gone away. I want to say that Antony Fernando is a closet homosexual who fantasises about raping his male patients when he jerks off– but this might not be true. Whatever his sexual orientation, I strongly suspect, nevertheless, that Fernando is a sociopath, a dishonest and sadistic shit who, in the past, would sometimes get himself into the newspaper talking about how compassionate he is, and who apparently ran seminars trying to teach doctors compassion. The hidden story about mental illness in this country, despite recent articles in the Herald by Matt Heath among others, is that doctors and others working in the system have a strong influence on the health of their patients – and usually do more harm than good.
I was intending to write about structuralism and Derrida in this post but I think I will leave this to another day.
Finally, as I said in the introduction, I want to discuss my first psychotic episode from a different perspective. Urban myths often feature in psychosis and even in wider society– we might consider the idea of microchips implanted in people's brains, a fear that often was once common among psychotics but apparently is not so prominent today. Another urban myth that people somehow pick up from the collective unconscious is the idea that men sometimes when under the influence of drugs like cannabis have homosexual experiences that lead to psychosis. The patient Julian, who I mentioned in the post "Concerning Jacinda and Julian", seemed to entertain this belief. Another urban myth, seemingly entertained by Jennifer Murphy, is that closeted gay men cruise the inner city late at night for homosexual encounters. (A lot of these urban myth relate to homosexuality, partly because the subject is so taboo.) Yet another urban myth is the idea of celebrities who are closet homosexuals but keep their homosexuality secret by entering into fake relationships with people of the opposite sex. Tom Cruise was a victim of this urban myth – many people, including for instance Seth Rogen, thought for a long time that Cruise's marriage to Nicole Kidman might be fake. The British broadcaster Philip Schofield relatively recently was forced to come out as gay by the British press at the age of 57 – he is married to a woman and has two daughters. When I worked at bFM, this urban myth was present in my mind. It didn't seem altogether impossible that Mikey Havoc might be secretly gay and that his marriage to Clair Chitham might be fake. When it seemed that Mikey and Jose had come out to me, I didn't think it was because they thought I might be gay as well but rather that I was being admitted into the exclusive cabal at the heart of bFM. As I've said, I told two people in confidence, my mother and my best friend at the Big House, that Mikey was gay, but I didn't widely disseminate this 'fact' about Mikey (fortunately, because I was wrong). Although the episode I experienced in 2007 had multiple components (including the belief that all the news reported by the media was fake), the paranoia, the feeling that I was under surveillance, was founded on my belief that many people in positions of power and influence were secretly homosexual and that I couldn't talk about this.
Earlier in this post I said that I could have been diagnosed with drug induced psychosis if the doctors had chosen to. A better diagnosis would have been brief reactive psychosis. If the people treating me had recognised that I'm heterosexual and if I'd felt that I was in a culture in which issues to do with sexuality could be openly and honestly discussed, I think I would have recovered in a year. Nobody, however, made the slightest attempt to understand my delusions or determine the causes of my illness. The one exception was a chap called Jurgen, a support worker (not an OT or social worker or nurse) who would visit me sometimes. One day in 2007 we walked up one of the hills in Auckland and he started pressing me about what had happened. At the time, I thought that George W. Bush might be secretly gay (a delusion that went away for good at the beginning of 2009) and that I was being watched by American satellites because the US government was concerned that I might reveal this fact. Nevertheless I somehow managed to tell Jurgen that I was the victim of a conspiracy orchestrated by Mikey Havoc. When we got back in the car, Jurgen asked me, "Who's Mikey Havoc?" I said, "He's the breakfast show host on the student radio station."
I don't need to spell out that this conversation may have made my situation worse rather than better. Jurgen didn't know that I had actually been working at bFM when I became 'ill'; I don't know if anyone treating me did. They may have thought that the radio was talking to me.
I'll finish this post by discussing a difficulty I have with respect to how I describe my life in this blog. I have been involuntarily celibate since 2011. Prostitution is legal in New Zealand but I find the idea of paying for sex too grubby to be a serious consideration. Suppose however I have a casual fling with a woman next week? Should I write about it in this blog? Wouldn't that make the woman uncomfortable? The solution is to enter into a serious relationship with a woman, a public relationship, something I can write about if it happens. Sometimes I feel that the third great love of my life, the girl I call Jess, was my last chance at true happiness. But, sadly, that train left the station without me on it.
