In this week's post, I shall return to the topics that I have been centrally concerned with for a long time: mental illness (specifically 'schizophrenia') and sexuality. I know it is strange for a straight man to write about homosexuality and bisexuality so much, and I probably have readers who are turned off by it, but a great deal of mental illness could be alleviated by speaking about matters to do with sexuality openly and honestly. I used to have misconceptions about homosexuality and bisexuality that fed into the mental illness I suffered. I recall that in early 2010, when I was talking to people in my head a lot, I heard Michel Foucault (the only dead person I spoke with). He advised Jess and me to write a book called "A History of Sexuality: The Other Side". This is what I am trying to do – to write about homosexuality and bisexuality from a heterosexual perspective and for a heterosexual audience (although I may well have gay readers also).
Before I tackle the core topics I wish to address, I want to say something about the previous post in which I talked about Maori-Pakeha relations and Three Waters. I didn't realise, when I wrote that post, that the Three Waters legislation was about to be passed. For a week or two after the post and the enactment of this legislation by Parliament, the Herald was full of articles about co-governance and Maori-Pakeha relations. I became aware that I made a number of factual errors. I said that Abel Tasman set foot on New Zealand soil in 1642 but apparently he didn't; the first was James Cook in 1769. There may be a number of other small errors in the essay (such as calling Three Waters 3 Waters). I believe that my description of the Treaty of Waitangi was accuarate – I had good history teachers at school. I also believe my description of the Wanganui/Whanganui farrago and the debate about matauranga Maori that played out in the Listener and elsewhere was accurate. The gist of the essay I stand by. The previous post was problematic for me more because the argument I made could be used to support the Act party rather than because of the small errors it contained – David Seymour has called for a referendum on the Treaty of Waitangi and I believe has made this a non-negotiable policy plank in future negotiations with the National Party, assuming that the Right wins a majority. Temperamentally, in terms of tribal allegiance, I have tended to side with the Greens. Perhaps the problem here is that political affiliation obscures rather than illuminates the actual issues – many people support Three Waters because Labour and the Greens do rather than because they have rationally analysed the problem. It is a kind of 'short cut'. But it is possible for the right party to be on the wrong side. In his final Daily Show appearance (in the between the scenes Youtube clip), Trevor Noah pointed out that even Donald Trump could sometimes do the right thing, such as his implementation of criminal justice reform. What is really going on with Three Waters? I have wondered over the last couple of weeks if Parliament as a whole is involved in some kind of skulduggery, that there are hidden plots at work, but I won't pursue this line of thinking because it will make me sound conspiratorial.
The most important topic I wish to address in this post is the role my parents' divorce when I was seven played in the psychotic episode I suffered when I was twenty-seven and the episodes I experienced subsequently. I have suggested, perhaps most clearly in the post "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM", that this divorce created a vulnerability to psychosis and that the stress of what happened at bFM and the Big House resulted in a complete psychotic break. The issue I am stressing here is that psychosis has psychological causes – it is not a neurological disease caused by a 'schizophrenia gene' or a virus or a difficult childbirth or any of the candidate hypotheses proposed by idiot psychiatrists. The causes of 'schizophrenia' are different for every single person diagnosed with the condition. To prove this, I need to talk about the divorce, and to talk about the divorce, I need to talk about my family. I don't believe anything I have to say will be particularly scandalous.
My father comes from Kaiwaka and boarded at Mt Albert Grammar in the 'sixties. While there, he was taught by my mother's oldest brother, Tom Newman. I have talked about Tom before, in 2016, but I suspect that that post was quite badly written. Tom was an amazing person. He had been a radio DJ when he was younger and then gone on to teach English at Mt Albert Grammar, becoming Head of Department, and then later worked for the teachers training college. He was diminutive, smoked like a train and, during his younger years, drank a bottle of whiskey a night and popped pills to stay awake. He was possibly a little 'fey' – he loved astrology and believed in ghosts and other supernatural phenomena. He was a playwright, penning a play called "The Crucifixion" in which he presented Jesus as a left-wing political revolutionary. Importantly, he was almost certainly gay. My mother is a lot older than me and Tom was a lot older than her – because homosexuality didn't become legal in New Zealand until 1986, Tom never came out, but everyone in the family, including me as a child and later teenager, sensed that he was gay. (Just before my first psychotic episode in 2007, I asked my mum, for this first time, if Tom was gay and she confirmed it.) When I was very young Tom was diagnosed with severe emphysema and retired. We would see him every Sunday for a roast dinner and he would lie on the couch and talk about history and poetry and politics. Tom died in 1997, coincidentally the morning after the night when I first kissed my first girlfriend, Danielle.
My father thought very highly indeed of Tom and it was at a party hosted by Tom, possibly a Labour Party event, that my father met my mother. He courted her through letters and they married in 1969. (My elder brother was born in 1970.) Mum and Dad, like Tom, were both very involved in the Labour Party and sometimes hosted the Mt Hobson Branch of the Labour Party, among the members of which were Helen Clark and Jim Anderton. (I hope that this is right.) My foreign readers need to know a peculiar fact about New Zealand political history. From 1984 until 1990, New Zealand was governed by the Labour Party, mostly under David Lange. Under the stewardship of finance minister Roger Douglas, New Zealand lurched towards the libertarian right, reducing income and corporate taxes, corporatising and sometimes privatising state owned assets, floating the dollar, and so forth. Americans had Reaganomics and the Brits had Thatcherism – in New Zealand, we had Rogernomics. The bizarre thing was that these significant Friedmanite policies were carried out in New Zealand by a political party that had its roots in Socialism. It eventually tore the Labour Party apart. I have often viewed my parents' divorce in 1986 as being a reflection or microcosm of the split in the Labour Party. Tom and my mother remained true to the traditional version of the Labour Party while my father went with Roger Douglas, Michael Bassett, and Richard Prebble, and today is an ardent supporter of the Act Party and is close to David Seymour. (If you tell kids today that the Act Party has its roots in the Labour Party, they are frequently astounded.)
And now I come to the divorce. My readers may imagine it was preceded by fighting or acrimony. What in fact happened is that one day my father was there and the next day he wasn't. My mum said recently that they had planned to hold a party for the law firm he worked at and, the day before they were due to hold it, dad just left. What had happened was that my father had fallen for a young and ambitious family court lawyer, Jan Doogue, a woman much younger than my mother. But when I was seven I didn't understand this. It is not uncommon for children of divorces to blame themselves – and this is exactly what I did. I thought that I was responsible. I briefly saw a child psychologist. (I have a hazy memory of unhappily playing with toys in his office.) In 2015, my mother dug up the report he had written. I had apparently told him that I was afraid that if my father had left, my mother might as well. My mother often tells a story that at this time, while she, my brother, and I were walking upstairs to bed, I apparently said something like, "Now there are three where once there were four." My mother also said recently that the child psychologist had told her, "They've lost one parent, they can't afford to lose both." For me, when I was seven, the divorce was something completely inexplicable and this is why I blamed myself.
After that I was for many years deeply troubled and unhappy. I had behavioural issues. I used to chew my shirt. I had no friends. Life was a constant source of anxiety – I hated school and lived for TV and books. Of course, I was still a highly intelligent and creative child. I read adult literature and, for my favourite teacher, started a novel. My writing was indecipherable but this teacher, Mr Hurchibese, would have me read the story I was writing to him and then write it down more legibly. The first chapter, typed out, was hung in the teachers' staff room and this teacher even started a creative writing class, I think because of me. Nevertheless my childhood, particularly Form 1, were passed in a haze of anxiety and misery. I spent every second weekend with my father and Jan and we went on occasional holidays to places like Bali and Noosa (in Australia). I cannot fault my father for not making the effort to do the right thing by me – but he should have realised that the divorce had traumatised me and sat down with me to talk about it. In many ways the father lacks some social skills. Things started to improve for me in Form 2, something I will come back to in a moment.
I turn now to the most important thing. I believe that when I was seven I decided that my father had left because he thought I was gay. Children are more precocious than we give them credit for and I was a particularly precocious child. I have a hazy memory that supports the idea that I formed this belief and the whole course of my life supports it. Recall that the year of my parents' divorce was the same year that homosexuality was legalised in New Zealand so there would have been conversations about it on the news and in my social environment. However, I didn't even know what the word 'gay' meant. A couple of weeks ago, I saw the documentary "Why Am I Gay?" – in it, the documentary maker, Angelo Tedoldi, says that he knew that he was gay when he was seven. It seems cruel for me to suggest Tedoldi is deceiving himself but he must be. Homosexuality is defined as a sexual attraction towards members of the same sex and seven year olds, despite what Freud said, do not experience sexual attractions. Children can't be gay or straight (or bisexual). Nevertheless I strongly suspect that, prior to or after the divorce I formed the belief that my father had left because he thought I was gay. This seems incredible but I still think it is true.
I hit puberty in Form 2 when I was eleven. In this blog, I often discuss sexuality and so I have to be a little crude here. I didn't have wet dreams – rather I started masturbating and from the beginning fantasised. My fantasies came partly from the books I read and resembled anime movies. As I've said before I only fantasised about women and didn't even realise there was an alternative. I didn't then, still, know what the word 'gay' meant. Gay men often ask, "Why am I gay?" I'm in the strange position of asking myself, "Why am I straight?" I suspect that a part of the reason I am straight is that I hit puberty before I understood what homosexuality was. By the time, I was fourteen and had gay people in my peer group, my sexuality was established. I never considered the possibility that I might be gay. I knew I was straight although I was probably still quite fuzzy about what the word 'gay' meant. Although Auckland Grammar was then and probably still is a rubbish reactionary institution, even though I never did my homework and was constantly in trouble with the teachers, my life followed an upwards trajectory – in seventh form I had one of my better friends, Shannon Singh, and through him met my first girlfriend, Danielle. Funnily enough, although my memories of Auckland Grammar are mostly negative, some of my peers may well have respected me and recognised that, although I was deeply lazy, I hung on by virtue of my intellect. I was teased, in a good humoured way, because I would start so many conversations by saying, "I have a theory". I apparently asked the physics teacher a question that stumped him. I had a chemistry teacher who would say, "Judd, you are a schlacker!" something my peers remember. I usually hated myself at high school but, perhaps towards the end, my fellow students didn't hate me.
The other important thing that happened, and I cannot be certain if it happened with puberty or before then, was that I changed the story I had invented to make sense of the divorce. I decided that my father had left my mother because he had fallen in love with Jan. However, the subconscious belief I had formed when I was seven didn't altogether go away. In the post "Wokeism and What the Shrinks Knew" I described how in my first year studying in Dunedin, in 1998, I had bought a Cleo magazine because it was Danielle's favourite magazine (we were then in a long distance relationship). My best friend had teased me about it and I told him that I was secure enough in my sexuality that I could buy a woman's magazine without it bothering me. He said, "By that logic, you can prove beyond doubt that you're straight by dressing in women's clothes." I took up the challenge, put on a dress, wig and high heels and was photographed by our lesbian friend who lived down the hall. Obviously, I have always been trying to prove that I'm straight. After two years at Otago, I transferred back to Auckland so that I could live in the same city as my girlfriend. At the beginning of 2001, after I had spent a month in the UK, I came home and Danielle broke up with me, something I found very painful. That year I did a screenwriting paper through the English Department at the University of Auckland and wrote a gay spy film and a film about a comedian who befriends the devil and sells his soul for love. By this stage in my life, I had known many gay men and women. The second film (a film I wrote about in the post "Bruce Sells Out") was really my way of mourning Danielle. At one point in the film, the comedian's girlfriend suggests he see a psychologist. He says, "What is he going to tell me? My mother dropped me down a well when I was seven – thus my obsession with buckets!" The Freudian innuendo was intentional.
As my readers know from previous posts, I suspect that as a result of the short gay spy film, a rumour got out that I was gay. I sensed that some of my lecturers thought I was gay and somehow this rumour followed me to teachers' training college in 2006. There was nothing I could do about it because my relationship with Maya was not, in some ways, a real relationship – it wasn't a love relationship. And in the real world people never usually need to say, "I'm straight." This misperception followed me to bFM, perhaps because of the gay spy film, perhaps because of something I'd said, perhaps even because of the clothes I was wearing when I first rocked up to bFM. I volunteered at bFM a couple of mornings a week writing news stories. As I've said a number of times, at first I endured the worry that the people at bFM thought I was gay when I wasn't and then later, perhaps a fortnight after the Big Day Out, formed the delusion that bFM was full of closet homosexual and after perhaps a fortnight or month of forming this delusion, abruptly left. I formed the delusion that the world was full of closet homosexuals – and then partly as a result of thinking about the Lacanian notion that the name of the father is the centre of the system, decided that my father was gay as well. I have gone into all this in more detail in other posts. What is important here is that when I decided my father was gay, the comforting belief that my father had left my mother because he had fallen in love with Jan was stripped away. Partly this 'disillusionment' resulted from my knowledge that their marriage was unhappy. The deeply buried belief that my father had left because he thought I was gay came back. I decided, when I reached crisis point, that bFM had outed me or that I had outed myself accidentally simply by going to work there; I considered drowning myself but thought that this would only bring more shame on my family. Two days later I was in the Taylor Centre telling people "My father's gay, he divorced my mother when I was seven because he didn't want me to be gay and I want to come out as straight!" My belief then was that that the world was full of secretly gay men marrying secretly gay women and raising secretly gay children – I thought that homosexuality arose in some way from family dynamics, from the family situation. This might explain why I thought that my father had left to 'save' me. It is important to note here that although I thought my father was gay I still loved him. In fact there were times later in the year when I thought he was a double agent – I thought that he might be a straight man who had infiltrated the conspiracy of closet homosexuals who ruled the world by pretending to be a closet homosexual. (In reality, my father is about the least camp man imaginable.)
The episode that began at the Big House lasted until the end of the year. It was, as my readers know now, an acute psychotic episode not helped by the vile antipsychotic I was put on. (I was briefly on 2.75mgs Rispridone before I complained of akathisia and it was reduced to 2.5mgs.) In 2008, I was close to well. The belief that my father was gay had gone away but I still believed that my father had divorced my mother because he thought I was gay. I didn't tell anyone this partly because I simply couldn't say the words 'gay' and 'straight'. In 2008, I had 'therapy' with a Scottish nurse called Avril. She told me that she had young children and I can remember asking her old they were. I didn't say this out loud to her but I can remember thinking that it is impossible to tell if a seven year old is gay or straight – so the belief must still have been there. In 2009, I became psychotic again. It is difficult to summarise the psychotic episode I suffered that year but it was partly a result of the belief that I had been outed as gay in my notes even though I had never said I was gay and partly a result of my fear that the drug I was on might somehow turn me gay. I won't go into all the details here because I have done so elsewhere. In 2010, 2011 and 2012 I was quite well. In 2012 I wrote the film script about my friend Jess which, as the reader will recall, ends with her father saying, "You know you weren't responsible for the divorce? You do know that don't you?" Jess replies, "Of course I know that. I'm not stupid." I was perhaps being too clever or too ironic for my own good. Unlike Jess, I have always known that the cause of my illness was the divorce.
In 2013, I became psychotic again. I worried that somehow rumours about me had gone through the media again, partly as a result of a letter I had written to the Herald, a letter the Herald published, about lead exposure, and partly as a result of the screenplay I had written. It also partly resulted from my discovery that Jess had spent eight months in hospital in a psychiatric ward in 2012 and through into 2013; I became very afraid for her. The delusion that my father was gay came back. A lot of buried resentment against him also surfaced. Just before Easter I approached the psychiatrists again, asking to see any psychiatrist other than Antony Fernando. I told the new psychiatrist, "My father's gay and he divorced my mother when I was seven because he thought I was gay as well." My new key worker, Josh Brasil, asked me, "How do you identify?" the first time anyone at the Taylor Centre had asked me that question. I said, "Straight". He said, "When did you know you were straight?" I replied, "Since puberty." I experienced very unpleasant psychotic symptoms over the next couple of months and I can remember saying to Jess, who I saw in the middle of the year, that I thought it might be unhealthy for me to hate my father. After perhaps six months I stopped believing that my father was gay – in an essay I gave to my then psychiatrist Jennifer Murphy describing the closest I've ever come to a homosexual experience, I told her this. The delusion that my father was gay has never returned. However, the idea that my father might have thought I was gay when I was seven or that I had mistakenly decided this at the age of seven is something that has stuck with me, even though I have only mentioned it once before in this blog.
My relations with my father are fairly good now. These days I see him as a man with both positive and negative qualities. I see his flaws (for instance, he was for a long while and perhaps still is a climate change denier) but love him anyway. I worry though that because of certain limitations in his emotional intelligence, he doesn't understand me.
The point I am making is that my life quite clearly shows that mental illness often, perhaps always, has psychological causes, such as childhood trauma and environmental stressors. The current paradigm in psychiatry, that mental illness is, say, the result of a neurotransmitter imbalance, is both evil and fucking stupid – it is because the psychiatrists can't see what's right in from of them that patients never recover.
I'll turn now to a different but related issue. Earlier in this post, I mentioned the documentary "Why Am I Gay?" In this documentary, a supposed expert says that while women can be bisexual, men are almost always either gay or straight. This is also just profoundly fucking stupid. I am not bisexual myself but I have known many bisexual men. What I want to do now is list some examples.
The first gay man my own age I ever knew was a chap called Jonathan. I had known him since Primary School. We sat next to each other in Physics when I was about fourteen or fifteen and he used to rabbit on about his sexual adventures while away touring with the school orchestra. I didn't know then that he was gay, probably because I wasn't paying attention. One day he said, "With all this sex I've been having, I hope I don't get AIDS!" I said, trying to be reassuring, "I wouldn't worry about that Jonathan. It's only gay people who get AIDS." He said to me, like I was an idiot (which I was), "Andrew, I'm gay." It surprised me. I can vaguely remember walking home that afternoon feeling somewhat unsettled or perturbed and reflecting on Tom and the divorce. What is relevant to the present discussion is that my friend Shannon (a straight man) stayed at Jonathan's house in Seventh Form and told me, "For a gay man, he sleeps with a lot of women!" I should, therefore, have realised that men who identify as gay sometimes sleep with women as well but for some reason this insight didn't sink in. Interestingly, the last time I saw Jonathan was on TV1 News in 2019. I believe he was interviewed in relation to AIDS medication and awareness. He had AIDS.
In late 2017 or early 2018, I bumped into a friend of a friend in Ponsonby Road, a straight man called Seth who worked in a bar there. Because it was late on a weeknight, we ended up at the Eagle in K Road, a gay bar, to continue drinking and talking, the Eagle being the only bar still open. (This is the only time I've been to the Eagle although I occasionally walk past it.) After the area out the front was closed, Seth and I went out the back to continue drinking and talking. A tall muscular gay man approached us and said, "Are you gay and he's your straight friend or are you gay and he's your straight friend?" Both Seth and I had trouble saying we were both straight, but eventually the gay man cottoned on and said, in astonishment, "So you're two straight men at a gay bar?" I like telling this story because I think it is amusing. My friend and I had an interesting, frank, and informative conversation with the gay man. He said, among other things, that it is impossible to tell the difference between a gay man and a straight man. He also said, and this is the relevant remark, "I sleep with women as well – but I love cock!" This further corroborates the idea that many men who we think of as gay and who may identify as gay should really be described as bisexual. Another example is Peter Ellis, a man we think of as gay but, as Steven Braunias pointed out in an article a little while ago, had romantic or sexual relationships with women as well as men. If Bohemian Rhapsody can be trusted, the love of Freddy Mercury's life was a woman, a women he'd had a sexual relationship with. And Oscar Wilde had two sons.
There are many other examples. A friend of my nephew came out as gay in 2012 or 2013. He'd had a girlfriend before then and I asked my nephew, back in early 2013, "Did he and the girlfriend have sex?". Apparently they had. In 2011, I tutored a fourteen or fifteen kid in maths whose father had left his mother for another man. This kid said one day, out of the blue, "My mother's not a lesbian, you know." When ordinary heterosexuals hear stories like this, about men who have had romantic or sexual relationships with women before coming out as gay, they tend to assume that these men were in denial. But there are problems with this story that people like to spin. In 2013, I'm pretty sure that a regular at a bar I go to for a weekly pub quiz came out as gay to me– he is now married to a woman and living in Hamilton. In the post "my soul is an irritant" I described a friend of mine who had experimented with homosexuality while studying at Otago University, then had a string of girlfriends and eventually married and had a child. A couple of years ago I learned that Richard Pryor had slept with Marlon Brando and, more recently, that David Bowie had slept with Mick Jagger; these stories were confirmed, respectively, by Pryor's wife and Bowie's wife. Clive Davis, the man who managed Whitney Houston, famously came out as bisexual. In 2013, he said in an interview that bisexuality was 'maligned and misunderstood'. (An article about this can be found on the Guardian Online.)
Despite overwhelming evidence that men can be bisexual, most ordinary heterosexuals find this hard to believe – I found it hard to believe myself. Furthermore, many in the gay community push the idea that men are one way or the other, perhaps to counter more conservative narratives that sexuality is the result of nurture not nature and to fight practices like gay conversion therapy. It is not just the documentary I mentioned above: it is films like Rocketman and Dating Amber. There is a concept called 'bearding' that has got into the collective imagination through Glee, Rocketman and Dating Amber, among other books and films, the idea that gay men and women enter into fake relationships with members of the opposite sex to hide their genuine sexual orientations from the world. Perhaps sometimes this happens but, from what I have observed in the world I live in, I don't think it is particularly common. Rather I think there are many bisexual men who either, if they come out as gay, allow people to think their relationships with women were fake or, if they don't, hide their relationships with men.
The reason I am talking about this is that the idea that men can't be bisexual is pernicious. For one thing it is just obviously factually wrong. For another thing, if people believe that men can only be gay or straight, it means that men who have had homosexual experiences have to choose between coming out as gay or keeping them secret. I would like a world in which men can, like Clive Davis, come out as bisexual. It would alleviate a lot of mental illness if bisexual men could come out as bisexual and if heterosexuals who are privy to the secrets of bisexual men and women could feel free to tell others. And it would mean that heterosexuals who are falsely thought to have had homosexual experiences, people like me, would be believed, would not be suspected of keeping secrets that would no longer be necessary to keep. I am aware that in arguing that bisexuality is perhaps more common than homosexuality, I am swimming against the tide, that people may simply refuse to accept it. But we all do need to accept it.
I'll finish this post by saying something about my 'condition' and my current treatment. I feel totally well these days, believe that I have fully recovered, that I recovered many years ago, but I am fighting against a medical establishment that thinks it impossible to recover from schizophrenia. Apparently, in I think the 'seventies, a couple of good progressive psychiatrists devised the Stress-Vulnerability Model of Schizophrenia. In the article they wrote (an article given to me by Simon Judkins, the only good thing he ever did), they described a study. People diagnosed schizophrenic were divided into three groups: label deniers, label acceptors, and label rejectors. Label rejectors, people who accepted the label 'schizophrenic' for a time and then later rejected it, were found to have the highest rate of recovery. In 2015, I told my then psychiatrist, Sati, about this study – she reacted in astonishment as though she had never heard about it. Psychiatrists today don't believe people can recover from schizophrenia and I don't know why attitudes have regressed since the 'seventies. Perhaps it is because the quality of people who become psychiatrists is lower – most psychiatrists I've met seem to be pretty stupid people, lazy and dishonest. Two or three years ago I requested a second opinion and saw a retarded psychiatrist called Andrew Russell. He said that it is impossible to recover from schizophrenia "by definition". In saying this he was unknowingly echoing what I had a psychiatrist say in the film I wrote in 2012.
About three weeks ago I had an appointment with my current psychiatrist Nick Hoeh and, partly at my mother's suggestion, he agreed to a reduction in my medication from 405mgs of Olanzapine a month to 300mgs of Olanzapine a month, the dosage I'd been on from when I was put under the Act in early 2014 until early 2018. About a fortnight ago, I had my first injection at the lower dose. I'll say something about the side-effects I have suffered since then. Immediately after the injection, I had a feeling that there was cotton wool in my skull, a feeling that lasted just over a week, although it was mercifully absent on Christmas Day. (That night, though, I couldn't sleep until dawn.) I worried for a while that despite saying that they had lowered my dosage, they had actually increased it or given me another drug without telling me. What I suspect now is that nurse who gave me the injection (a Filipino called Manny) might not have properly prepared the drug, that a lot of Olanzapine had got into my system all at once rather than incrementally as it is supposed to. I had to deal with some anxiety during this period. After that I felt better although I experienced nausea and a headache, symptoms that I have read on the Internet are consistent with Olanzapine withdrawal. Right now, and for the last number of days, I have felt quite well. I have not experienced any psychotic symptoms, any 'rebound psychosis'. For the last week, I have not only been sleeping well but sleeping more than I did prior to the reduction.
I'll finish this post by telling a story I have told before, a story that I am telling again because I find it so rankling or aggravating. In 2015 or 2016, I had an Independent Review at which I said to the psychiatrist on the panel, "What do you think the cause of schizophrenia is?" He said something about it being caused by illegal drugs. The reason I asked him this question is that I knew what was making me sick – being treated by people who thought that I was secretly gay when I'm not. This wasn't something I could say explicitly at the review. This psychiatrist wrote in the decision about me, "He said somewhat poignantly that if he knew the cause of his illness, he would ague his case better." I never said this. This illustrates a general point about the psychiatric profession: it is full of arseholes. The problem is that there is supposedly this thing "schizophrenia" and supposedly it is a unitary thing with a single cause but no-one knows what that cause is. Supposedly we are all waiting for some genius to come along and explain the cause of schizophrenia. It doesn't take a genius to work out what the real problem is. Every person diagnosed schizophrenic is different from every other person diagnosed schizophrenic and the causes are different for every person. This is why the search for the 'cause of schizophrenia' is doomed in advance. And the psychiatrists would have worked this out decades ago if they weren't all such fucking cretins..
No comments:
Post a Comment