Suppose you flip a fair coin. Of course, you know the probability that it will land heads is 1/2 and the probability that it will land tails is 1/2 – everyone knows that, just as we all know that if we throw a die, it will land on a 6 1/6 of the time, and that if we spin an American style roulette wheel it will land on a zero 1/19 of the time. Most of us are introduced to the notion of probability as children or teenagers and most adults assume they understand what probability is. When I was younger I thought I understood probability and now realise that I completely misunderstood it. As I shall discuss in this essay, a proper theory of probability requires us to reevaluate our common-sense understanding of chance, the common sense understanding we pick up as children. This is true of me as well – I had to think about probability and revise my understanding of it. The particular understanding I have arrived at may run counter to the views we form of it as children or teenagers but this does not mean it is wrong. In this post I shall return to arguments I made, I think in 2018, in the posts "Probability and Schrodinger's Cat" and "Probability and Schrodinger's Cat Part 2". As a contribution to philosophy, I think these posts were the most important I've written. In this essay, I shall spend some time discussing probability in relation to the Sleeping Beauty Problem and then talk about quantum physics and the nature of time. I shall discuss climate change and Covid 19 in relation to probability and governmental responses to these challenges. In the second part of this essay I shall, as promised in the previous post, discuss the bad science surrounding schizophrenia. I shall relate this to my own life and experiences. This essay may end up quite long but it should be interesting.
Let us begin with one of the basic exemplars used to teach the idea of probability to school students, the exemplar I mentioned above, a coin toss. If you ask a child or teenager (or indeed most adults) what the statement "The probability of the coin landing heads is 1/2" means, he or she would probably say something like, "If you toss a coin a dozen times, it will land heads six times and tails six times". People with a slightly more sophisticated background in mathematics will realise that this is incorrect. If you toss a coin twelve times, it is most likely that you will obtain a heads result 6 times but it is quite possible you might get heads five times and tails seven times. You might even get twelve heads in a row. All combinations are possible although some are more probable than others. The ordinary or naive understanding of probability leads to what is known as the Gambler's Fallacy. Suppose you obtain a heads result six times in a row – you might naively imagine that you are due a few tails, even that the next six should all be tails, to 'even things out'. This is a fallacy because each coin toss is 'statistically independent' – what happened the previous six times has no effect on the next toss. This is something that more sophisticated mathematicians realise.
What even more sophisticated mathematicians do not realise is that this problem strikes right at the heart of our understanding of probability. How do we know that the probability of getting a heads when we toss a coin is 1/2? Some theorists of probability, those known as Objectivists, say that the probability of a coin yielding a heads result is the number of heads results divided by the number of tosses in the limit as the number of tosses approaches infinity. In other words, to know for sure that the probability is 1/2, we would have to perform an experiment in which we toss a coin an infinite number of times. But this is an impossible experiment to carry out. (Perhaps in the past people have tossed a coin a million times and then tabulated the results but I doubt it.) Despite the fact that it has not been empirically proven, everyone accepts that the probability of obtaining a heads is 1/2. This belief is not based on experimental evidence but on a kind of naive or intuitive understanding of physics that everyone possesses. We make the justifiable assumption that the heads case and the tails case are virtually indistinguishable and so should be treated as equally likely. Furthermore, we assume that the two outcomes exhaust all possible outcomes – we do not, for instance, assign a probability to the outcome in which the coin lands and remains on its edge (an outcome that is, in fact, possible although very, very, very unlikely.) This naive or intuitive understanding of physics is the real basis for our confidence that the probability is 1/2.
There is a second issue raised by the coin toss. If I tell you that I am about to toss a coin and ask you the probability that it will land heads, you are justified in saying, "50%". However if I tossed a coin yesterday and you saw me obtain a heads and I ask you the probability that I landed a heads yesterday, you would say, "100%". If I asked you the probability that it landed a heads yesterday in the scenario in which you didn't see me land a heads, you would again have to say, "50%". You would be justified in saying this even if I know that it landed heads. This leads us to suppose two things about probability: first, that is subjective rather than objective and that an individual assessment of the probability of an outcome is based on the amount of information that the person possesses. I can illustrate this even better with an example, the example I employed in the two other posts I mentioned above. Suppose we have four people and a recently shuffled pack of cards. We ask Person A the probability that the card at the top of the deck is the Queen of Hearts. Person A, knowing only that that this is a typical deck of cards, estimates the probability as 1/52. Person B knows a little more – she knows that the first thirteen cards are all hearts. She therefore estimates the probability as being 1/13. Person C knows that the first 12 cards are all face cards and so estimates the probability as 1/12. Person D however knows that the top card is definitely the Queen of Hearts and so assesses the possibility as a certainty, 100%. It is tempting to say that Person D is correct and all the others wrong but I think, rather, that all four estimates are justifiable given the amount of information each person possesses when he or she makes the estimate.
These considerations lead us to make the following claims about probability. First, that it often based on folk or intuitive science. Second, that it is subjective rather than objective. And third, that an assessment of probability made by a person depends on the amount of information that person possesses.
I turn now to the Sleeping Beauty Problem. I found out about this problem recently through a video by Veritasium which can be found on Youtube if you hunt it out (although, annoyingly, the words "Sleeping Beauty" do not appear in the title to the clip). I will quote Wikipedia's description of the problem.
Sleeping Beauty volunteers to undergo the following experiment and is told all of the following details: On Sunday she will be put to sleep. Once or twice, during the experiment, Sleeping Beauty will be awakened, interviewed, and put back to sleep with an amnesia-inducing drug that makes her forget that awakening. A fair coin will be tossed to determine which experimental procedure to undertake:
If the coin comes up heads, Sleeping Beauty will be awakened and interviewed on Monday only.
If the coin comes up tails, she will be awakened and interviewed on Monday and Tuesday.
In either case, she will be awakened on Wednesday without interview and the experiment ends.
Any time Sleeping Beauty is awakened and interviewed she will not be able to tell which day it is or whether she has been awakened before. During the interview Sleeping Beauty is asked: "What is your credence now for the proposition that the coin landed heads?"
Before discussing the problem, I need to say something about 'credence'. Credence is a numerical value between 0 and 1 representing how much an agent believes something to be true where 1 represents complete certainty and 0 represents complete incredulity. According to the Principal Principle, the degree of credence an agent has in a proposition should be the same as its 'objective' probability. As this essay has already suggested, I subscribe entirely to the Principal Principle – in fact, I think credence and a probability estimate are exactly the same thing. So rather than talk about credence, I shall in this essay talk entirely about probability. The question being asked is: upon being awakened what value should Beauty assign to the probability that the coin landed heads?
This problem has aroused considerable debate since it was first publicly presented by Adam Elga in 2000. People fall into two camps: thirders or halvers. The argument for the thirder position runs, in a nutshell, as follows: upon awakening and being interviewed Beauty is in one of three situations. Either the coin came up tails and it is Monday, or it came up tails and it is Tuesday, or the coin came up heads and it is Tuesday. Beauty has no way to distinguish between the three outcomes. According to the Principle of Indifference, if we we have three outcomes and no reason to favour one over any other, we should assign all three the same probability. Because the three outcomes are exhaustive, this leads us to believe that the all three situations have the same probability of 1/3 and that, thus, the probability that the coin landed heads is 1/3. This is the value Beauty should rationally pick.
The halver position is, of course, different. According to this argument, Beauty (who has been informed of how the experiment will be conducted) knows beforehand that the chance of throwing a heads is 1/2 because everyone knows that. She thus concludes, upon being awakened and interviewed, that the chance of it landing heads was 1/2. She has no new information that would cause her to change her estimate. If it landed tails, it is either Monday or Tuesday. Because Beauty has no information that would incline her either way, the Principle of Indifference kicks in with respect to these two days. They must have equal probability and add up to 1/2. So she has to presume that the probability that it came up tails and it is Monday is 1/4, the probability that it it came up tails and is Tuesday is 1/4, and that probability that it came up heads and is Tuesday is 1/2. (In representing the halvers position this way, I am deviating from Wikipedia because I think Wikipedia gets it wrong.)
It seems from what I have read that the thirder position is most popular. It is the position Derek Muller opts for in the Veritasium video and is the position defended by Elgar in the essay in which he originally publicly presented the problem. However Derek is not always a perfectly rational thinker (I have criticised some of his videos in the past) and the crux of Elgar's argument is not particularly clear. In fact, from going through it several times, I think Elgar is performing some kind of sophistry or legerdemain. (I won't attempt to quote and critique Elgar's argument here because it will take us too far afield. Suffice it say that he is using sleight-of-hand to make the thirder position I described above seem more robust.) Naturally, as my readers might expect, I am going to pick the heterodox solution to the problem because intuitively it seems the right solution to me. I am going to defend the halver solution.
Consider, first, the thirder position from a common-sense perspective. Imagine Beauty just before the experiment being informed of the details of it. It does not matter when the coin is flipped except that it will be sometime in the future. If Beauty accepts the thirder argument, she will conclude that the chance of it coming up heads will be 1/3 even though folk physics dictates it must be 1/2. It seems that simply being informed of a future experiment has magically altered the probability of a coin toss. Thirders argue that she would in fact assess the probability as 1/2 at first and then change her estimate (her credence) upon one of her awakenings. But why would she do that? She has not been informed of the result of the coin toss. Nor has she found out that it was a loaded coin that comes up heads 60% of the time. She has no new information at all. In the absence of any new information, she has no rational reason to revise her estimate and, if initially she believed the probability to be 1/2, simply being awakened later gives her no reason to reassess her credence. (This is known as the Principle of Reflection which, like the Principal Principle, I find totally credible.)
There is a better and simpler argument for the halver position. Suppose we were to carry out the Sleeping Beauty experiment a thousand times with a thousand Sleeping Beauties. These experiments could be carried out on our Earth, or in this world and 999 possible worlds. It seems simple common-sense that, most likely, in around 500 of these experiments a head will be tossed and in 500 experiments a tail will be tossed. Of the 500 experiments in which a tail is tossed, the Beauties each are woken and put back to sleep twice while in the 500 experiments in which a head is tossed the Beauties each are woken and put back to sleep only once. There are thus 1000 awakenings for the tails scenario and 500 awakenings for the heads scenario and 1500 awakenings in total. The question a particular Sleeping Beauty should ask herself when awoken is this: "Should I base my credence on the ratio of heads awakenings to total awakenings or on the ratio of Sleeping Beauties involved in heads experiments to total Sleeping Beauties?" It seems obvious to me that Beauty should choose the second option. Half of the Beauties were involved in heads experiments and so she should assess the heads probability as being 1/2. Yes, there were twice as many tails awakenings but each tails awakening is only half as probable as a heads awakening. The issue, in a nutshell, is whether we apply the Principle of Indifference to awakenings or to Sleeping Beauties. We have two options. 1.) Each of the three awakening situations are equally probable and in only 333 of the thousand experiments were heads rolled. Or 2.) In around 500 experiments heads were rolled and the probability of a particular tails awakening is only half as much as a heads awakening. If, like me, you have a deep seated prejudice that we should expect a fair coin toss to come up heads half of the time, you will opt for the second option and (congratulations!) have joined the halvers faction. If you prefer the first option, you're a thirder like Adam Elgar and Derek Muller.
I have expatiated on the Sleeping Beauty problem because it sheds some light on the nature of probability, what probability is. Sleeping Beaty is making a subjective assessment of the probability of a coin landing heads up based on both what she knows and what she doesn't know. If she knew for sure that the coin came up heads, the question would be easy: she would assess the probability as 100%. But this information is withheld from her. So she must base her assessment on what she can rationally deduce from the information she has and her understanding of the laws of nature and principles of probability. If she finds thirders arguments sufficiently persuasive, she will estimate the probability as being 1/3. If she subscribes to the absurd conceit that coins tend to land heads up half the time, she will estimate the probability as 1/2. If, however, she possessed all the information and had perfect understanding of all the laws of nature, if she was omniscient, if she had God-like knowledge, she would assess the probability as being either 1 or 0, a certainty or an impossibility. This would be true even if a particular awakening in which she was asked to estimate the probability occurred before the coin toss. What I am claiming here is that the universe is deterministic, a claim I have made before in this blog. We make probabilistic estimates only because we are furnished with some but not all the information,; furthermore we are forced to make probabilistic estimates about the future because we do not possess a complete understanding of the all the relevant facts concerning the present. This has been known since at least 1692 when John Arbuthnot wrote: "It is impossible for a Die, with such determin'd force and direction, not to fall on such determin'd side, only I don't know the force and direction which makes it fall on such determin'd side, and therefore I call it Chance, which is nothing but the want of art...." This claim, that the future is as fixed as the past, is not something I can prove absolutely although I went some way towards doing so in the post "Chance and Necessity."
The idea that probability estimates are based on the information and knowledge one has can be illustrated with an interesting example, an example in some ways analogous to the deck of cards thought experiment presented earlier. From what I can gather from the Internet, every year 805,000 Americans have a heart attack. The population of the US is almost 332 million. Therefore, we might say that one out of every 412 US citizens will have a heart attack this year, or that the probability that you specifically will have a heart attack this year is about 0.24%. Immediately the reader will sense a problem. You might be a fit and healthy 18 year old; heart attacks disproportionately affect older people with high cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, cigarette addictions, or other confounding factors. This particular probability estimate does not apply to you, fit and healthy 18 year old. It seems then that we need to refine our analysis. What we could then do is take these formerly confounding factors into account. We could, say, divide the US population into different cohorts based on age, weight, physical activity, and other common characteristics, and assign to each different cohort a different probability. This initial fine tuning will not be perfect but we could go on fine tuning our cohort groupings, making smaller and smaller groups, until we are dealing with single people, and have assigned a different probability to every individual American citizen. As we go about the process, we will need to include more and more contributing factors. We might find for instance that a contributing factor to myocardial infarctions is messy divorces or breakups. However it is not practically possible for actual human beings to refine the analysis enough that we will be able to predict with absolute certainty that a particular American will have a heart attack this year. (The reason for this is partly Chaos Theory – it might be that a slight contributing factor to a particular American having a heart attack is a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil. Perhaps the butterfly flap leads to a storm over Ohio that gives someone a nasty cold that then increases that person's susceptibility to a heart attack, for instance.) However, I claim that a being with perfect knowledge, a being not limited in the ways actual human beings are, if such a being is possible, would be able not only to know everything that has happened in the past but also to predict with certainty everything that will happen in the future.
The way we go about estimating probabilities is by circumscribing a group of things or events, assuming that these things or events are mutually exclusive and mutually exhaustive, and then applying the Principle of Indifference. The mistake thirders make is that they do not realise that the fact of the coin toss is a confounding factor. This is like saying that the 0.24% heart attack probability is the best possible estimate and ignoring obesity as a confounding factor. It is an estimate that only makes sense if we possess very little information indeed.
If we decide that the universe is deterministic, it follows that we must abandon our belief in free will. This is a controversial stance to take. Most philosophers, including for instance Daniel Dennett, are 'compatibilists'. They believe that we can somehow reconcile free will with determinism. I do not believe this is possible and am in good company. Many public intellectuals and philosophisers, such as Sabine Hossenfelder, Sam Harris, and Alex O'Conner, have argued that we do not possess free will. I am not sure that these opinion makers realise the predicament this puts us in, those of us who are attracted to this creed. My unbelief in free will makes me quite unhappy sometimes. For instance, I want to condemn Vladamir Putin, to declare him evil, but often feel that even Putin is being compelled by forces (genetic, environmental, or supernatural) beyond his control. It is hard to justify an ethical system if you don't believe people are ultimately responsible for their actions. I don't think Harris, who both rejects free will and advocates for a form of scientific consequentialism, has reconciled these two projects. In a recent Youtube clip, O'Conner argues that the Grandfather Paradox can be taken as evidence that time travel is impossible. He does not seem to realise that his own determinism provides another solution. Alex may travel back in time with the intention of killing his grandfather – and then simply won't. It's not that some kind of supernatural force will prevent him carrying out the murder. Rather he will believe he is acting of his own free will. The Grandfather Paradox depends on free will; if we conclude that free will is an illusion, we can have time travel without any attendant temporal paradoxes. Thus it seems to me that many people who reject free will have not thought through this position to its final conclusion. I don't think I have myself.
The principal challenge to determinism, in my view, comes not from philosophers defending their strong intuitions that they possess free will, but from quantum physics. The wave function of a particle can be interpreted, indirectly, as a measure of the probability that the particle will be found in a particular region of space-time. This probabilistic interpretation of the wave function was first proposed by Max Born in 1928. I don't think that the physicists realised precisely the innovation this represented. Since at least 1692, as I indicated above, many thinkers understood probability as arising from subjective uncertainty. If we had perfect knowledge, uncertainty would disappear. Certainly in the early twentieth century determinism was the accepted philosophical paradigm of the physics community. However, when quantum physics was assimilated into accepted science, we effectively acquired a whole new concept: objective uncertainty. It is not just that people are uncertain and have difficulty predicting future events; future events are in principle unpredictable, the universe is itself uncertain. This gives rise to the idea of the multiverse as drolly represented in the film Everything Everywhere All At Once. Now, we could simply accept that the universe possesses this peculiar feature, objective uncertainty. But there is an alternative. We could maintain that all uncertainty is subjective. We could suppose that the universe is deterministic if we interpret the Schrodinger equation and Dirac equation as simply representing what it is possible for humans to know about a particle's position and momentum (given certain information) rather than as indicating a kind of real physical fuzziness in these qualities. This seems bizarre – we would effectively be arguing that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle does not describe reality but rather sets limits on what humans can know about it, that it says more about our own minds than about the universe. But this is no more peculiar than the multiverse theory. We could suppose that the universe is genuinely deterministic, that some hidden-variable theory is correct, but that not only do we not currently know what these hidden variables are, but also that it is impossible for us to know what they are. (I have argued for this conclusion more rigorously in the posts about Schrodinger's Cat.)
In order to argue that there are hidden variables at work in the universe, we must assume something called non-locality, quantum entanglement. Roughly, quantum entanglement is the idea that spatially separated systems can influence each other instantaneously, that there is what Einstein dismissed with the disparaging epithet "spooky action at a distance". Last year, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Alain Aspect, John Clauser, and Anton Zeilinger for experimentally proving that quantum entanglement is a real phenomenon. The Nobel Prize Committee issued a press release saying that these experiments had proved that all hidden variable theories must be incorrect. The Nobel Prize Committee got it wrong – the experiments only proved that local hidden variable theories must be incorrect. Non-local hidden variable theories, such as David Bohm's, are still possible. When John Stewart Bell first presented his argument, famously known as Bell's Inequality, the argument that lead to these experiments, he was very influenced by Bohm. It might seem brazen of me to suggest that the Nobel Prize Committee made a mistake but you don't need to take my word for it. I recommend the Youtube video "Tim Maudlin Corrects the 2022 Nobel Prize Committee" – Maudlin is a very credible commentator. Maudlin's criticism of quantum entanglement, the criticism he makes in the video, is not that it rules out hidden variable theories but that it leads to contradictions between quantum physics and relativity. Quantum entanglement involves simultaneity and Einstein's Special Relativity rules out the idea of absolute simultaneity. Maudlin suggests that this would lead us to conclude that, in some frames of reference, the effect can precede the cause. Maudlin, in effect, says that this must be a problem because it runs against our fundamental intuitions. We tend to assume that although the past is fixed, the future is in principle unpredictable, uncertain, an assumption or intuition closely related to the belief most people have that they possess free will. We assume that the direction of causation is from the past to the future. However, if we accept determinism, we could argue that our intuition that the past is fixed and the future undetermined, that there is a vast difference between the past and the future, is not a feature of the universe but a feature of human minds. Consider the following argument. Suppose if event A occurs, event B necessarily occurs; if event A does not occur, then event B necessarily does not occur. Suppose furthermore that event A precedes event B temporally. It seems that we are entitled to say that event A is the cause of event B. If there is a frame of reference in which B precedes A, however, we can, with respect to that frame of reference, say that B is the cause and A is the effect. To my mind, there is no problem here. In a deterministic universe, our judgements about which events are causes and which events are effects is arbitrary. I have argued that probability is a subjective assessment, a kind of heuristic or rule of thumb that human beings employ, and I have also suggested strongly that free will is an illusion. It might also be that our common sense understanding of causality is a feature of human minds we have acquired to help us navigate the world that has no basis in any kind of deeper reality.
Quantum physics might also help us solve the mind-body problem but this is not something I will delve into in this post.
Let us assume that human beings often have to make at least rough estimates of probability, estimates based on incomplete information. This brings me to another topic. Recently, against my better judgement, I watched some Jordan Peterson videos discussing climate change. Peterson's basic argument is this: there is no consensus about global warming and so governments and societies generally are not justified in taking action to address it. I would diagnose Peterson's mentality in the following way. Leftists think that sometimes there are collective problems that require collective solutions, collective solutions that can only be implemented through governmental policies and laws; right-wingers like Peterson find this tenet repugnant because they instinctively recoil away from notions of collectivism and 'governmental overreach'. In saying that there is no consensus, Peterson is employing motivated reasoning to support his fringe position that lefties are overreacting. As I perceive it, there is indeed a near total scientific consensus that global warming has occurred, is occurring, and is the result of humans increasing the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere – but let us assume for the moment that Peterson is right and that there is not a consensus. Is this then a reason not to take action? I would like to suggest that it is rational for governments and societies to take action to address a perceived risk even if we lack absolute confidence that the risk is certain. To put it simply, even if we cannot be sure about anthropogenic climate change, the consequences of runaway global warming would be catastrophic if it were happening, and so governments are indeed justified in taking action 'just in case'. To use an adage that has become an adage for a reason, it is better to be safe than sorry. A similar argument can be used with respect to the Covid response. Governments reacted for much of the pandemic by encouraging or requiring mask mandates, school closures, and, here in New Zealand, national lockdowns in 2020 and 2021. Pundits today often like to say that these measures were unnecessary: the science has shown that children are very unlikely to become seriously unwell, for instance, and the prophylactic effect of masks has come into serious question. Bill Maher often likes to blame severe Covid illness and death on obesity, implying that fit healthy people should have been much more sanguine about the dangers. But no one knew this three years ago. At the time, given the information we had, these measures seemed the most prudent. And, despite what influencers like Bret Weinstein maintain, the vaccines do seem to have worked. True, they don't prevent infection or transmission but they do seem to greatly reduce the incidence of serious illness. I have caught Covid twice now and both times it just felt like I had a bad cold for a couple of days. Partly my rapid recovery was because I was vaccinated and partly it was because the Covid variant circulating in New Zealand today is much less virulent than the original virus that came out of Wuhan at the beginning of 2020. People often assume that epidemiologists and other authorities know everything but they don't: they too were working with incomplete information. The misconception among some segments of society that people in authority know everything, an idea that is misconceived because people in authority are simply just trying to do the best they can with insufficient information, is why many people fell into paranoid conspiracy theories and why so many fools on the right started vilifying Jacinda Ardern.
Science is a tricksy business. In the previous post, I said that I wanted to discuss bad science as it pertains to schizophrenia. I said that according to psychiatric doctrine schizophrenics tend to lack verbal fluency, have problems with abstract thinking, possess fixed delusions, are sexually promiscuous, exhibit religiosity, and so on and so forth. This is the topic of the last part of this essay. In preparing to write this post, I reread the Wikipedia article on schizophrenia – I found that references to religiosity and promiscuity are no longer included although I am sure that they were in it in the past. My friend Jess, in a bio associated I think with her website, describes herself as a "promiscuous reader" – I think she had heard or read that schizophrenics are supposedly sexually promiscuous and, not being promiscuous at all herself, been bothered by it. Of course, Wikipedia is constantly being revised and updated. The article comes across as very assured, very authoritative, but I would like to try to poke some holes in it. Confidently reporting supposedly well established findings does not mean that the findings are really well established as Stuart Ritchie implicitly points out in Science Fictions. The specific aspect of it I wish to criticise is the view that schizophrenics are cognitively impaired compared to ordinary people, a claim that bundles together the two previous supposed findings that schizophrenics lack verbal fluency and that schizophrenics have difficulty with abstract thinking.
That schizophrenics supposedly lack verbal fluency and have problems with abstract thinking is not something I have just picked up from some disreputable site on the Internet. The psychiatrists genuinely believe it. At one of my first appointments with Antony Fernando in 2007, he said, "Well, you're certainly verbally fluent!" This did not stop him from leaning towards me at one of those early appointments and saying that his sister had schizophrenia, leading me to believe that he had diagnosed me schizophrenic. At another one of those early appointment, he told me that delusions are "fixed, by definition". He told me this even though he didn't know what my delusions were. Of course, this is ridiculous. The two major delusions that I had in 2007, that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals and that there was a listening device in my glasses, lasted about six months, were absent in 2008, reappeared very intermittently in 2009 and then went away for good at the very beginning of 2010. In early 2015, I saw a new psychiatrist, Jeremy Whiting. He had decided to reduce my dosage from 300mgs a month to 210mgs a month. I believe, as I've said before, that he had decided to reduce it because he thought that I had come to terms with my hitherto denied homosexuality or bisexuality as a result of my sessions with the clinical psychologist Simon Judkins; he was also, I found out later, influenced by my father who had suggested I have my dosage reduced. In order to justify or rationalise this decision, he surveyed me about my symptoms. He asked me to rate how paranoid I was on a scale of 1 to 5. In fact, I was somewhat 'ill' at the time, although it wasn't exactly paranoia. I think I said a 1 or 2 – I said this because I was desperate to get off the drugs and knew that I had to 'play the game'. A question concerning abstract thinking came up and I asked Whiting about it. He asked me, "What do a banana and an apple have in common?" I said, "They're both fruit although bananas generally don't have seeds. I've done harder quizzes." For whatever reason, my dosage was reduced although I only had one injection of the lower amount. These examples show that verbal paucity and problems with abstract thinking are indeed considered common features of schizophrenia.
The example above also shows, by the way, some of the absurdity of trying to apply the scientific method to real people in real situations. If psychiatrists are diagnosing people schizophrenic or testing the efficacy of drugs by asking patients to rate how paranoid they are on a scale of 1 to 5, the whole edifice of psychiatry is built on sand.
I know for a fact that I have exceptional verbal fluency and abstract thinking ability. This post, and others I have written, demonstrate this, but, at the risk of sounding like George Santos, I will adduce some more objective evidence. In 2004, I applied to some American universities with the intention of trying to get a scholarship and complete a Doctorate in English Literature overseas. I sat the GRE tests. In the verbal test, I scored in the top 1% and in the mathematics test I scored 100%. (In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that I only got 2 out of 5 for the essay. Perhaps I did the equivalent of arguing for a halver position and my marker was a thirder.) I also know for a fact that Jess has exceptional verbal fluency and abstract thinking ability. Her vocabulary is more extensive than mine and she is, now, an accomplished and award winning poet and short story writer. And the year before we hung out in 2011 she received an A+ for a paper in Formal Logic. John Nash certainly had no problems with abstract thinking and Janet Frame was, obviously, highly verbally fluent. Over the years I have met a number of other patients – first at the Respite facility I was a day patient at at the end of 2007, then through a coffee group I attended weekly in 2010 and 2011, and since 2014 through hanging out with other patients once a fortnight or month at the Taylor Centre after I have received my injection. The impression I have formed is that patients generally have basically the same average intelligence and same range of intelligence as ordinary people. (Admittedly, recently I have hung out with a patient who does seem cognitively impaired, but he might be the exception rather than the rule.)
A psychiatrist wishing to defend the view that people diagnosed schizophrenic tend to lack verbal fluency and have problems with abstract thinking might say, "Your impression of other patients is not scientific, not objective; furthermore, you and Jess are outliers. On average, schizophrenics are more cognitively impaired than non-schizophrenics." Presumably this supposed fact is founded on tests administered to people who have been diagnosed schizophrenic and those who haven't. We might suppose, as scientifically minded people do, that intelligence (assuming that intelligence can be quantified) lies on a normal distribution or bell curve for ordinary people, as does the intelligence of people diagnosed schizophrenic, but that the second bell curve is shifted to the left of the first by some margin. The problem then is this. People are either diagnosed schizophrenic or not (nobody considers the possibility that schizophrenia might come in degrees). So we need to say that someone either has a symptom or doesn't, lacks verbal fluency or possesses it. If there is considerable overlap between the two bell curves as seems likely however, the diagnostic criterion "lacks verbal fluency" becomes almost totally unhelpful. If someone has subnormal cognitive functioning, all we can say is that it is more probable that he or she is schizophrenic than if he or she doesn't, and because there are far fewer schizophrenics than non non-schizophrenics, it only increases the probability very slightly. A psychiatrist may say, "You are treating a lack of verbal fluency as if it were the sole diagnostic criterion. In reality, a diagnosis of schizophrenia is made for other reasons and the cognitive impairment has been noted as a common feature of those people who have, for other reasons, already been diagnosed schizophrenic." This raises the question of how schizophrenia is actually diagnosed, something I will come back to later.
We might also consider the methodology of the studies that have lent support to the supposed finding that schizophrenics lack verbal fluency and abstract thinking ability. We might ask how the psychiatrists quantify, measure, verbal fluency. What kind of test do they use? Is the assessment simply based on a subjective impression? Let us suppose that there is some 'objective' measure and that some representative sample of schizophrenics and a representative sample of non-schizophrenics (the control group) were persuaded to take some test and that the results of this study were the basis for the finding. Are the schizophrenics involved forced to take the test or is the group self-selecting? Is the control group forced to take the test or are they self-selecting? Who is in the control group? One of the many scandals affecting the social sciences is that there is concern that much psychological research is based on studies carried out on psychology students. We might conjecture that the control group in the verbal fluency study probably consisted of medical students, a group who are likely, of course, to have higher IQ scores on average than the average or median person. So the conclusion that schizophrenics have less verbal fluency than the average person might be skewed by the choice of subjects for either group. Perhaps this finding is genuinely the result of a properly randomised trial involving thousands of people diagnosed schizophrenic and non-schizophrenic – but I doubt it. As Stuart Richie points out in Science Fictions, a lot of what passes for science, particularly, I suspect, in psychiatry, is distorted by fraud, bias, and negligence. Psychiatrists are themselves subject to all the biases that affect ordinary people, such as confirmation bias, availability bias, and extension neglect. Perhaps the studies were small, perhaps bias in how the studies were carried out influenced the results, perhaps the researchers employed 'p-hacking'. For whatever reason, it not unreasonable to suspect that the conclusions were wrong and sprang from bad science. We might also employ a little common-sense humanity, some genuine compassion, in interpreting these findings. Suppose you are a person who is diagnosed schizophrenic, that you may likely have suffered childhood trauma, economic deprivation, repeated involuntary hospitalisations, and the serious stigma of being labelled 'schizophrenic' – and then you are put in a room and asked to complete an IQ test. Sensing, perhaps, that you are part of an experiment intended to prove that you are stupid. Of course, you might perform more badly than a medical student. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
There are other supposed symptoms of schizophrenia that I'll discuss briefly. One that is considered a core symptom is 'thought disorder'. The fact that this is listed as a core symptom really annoys me. I don't believe I have ever exhibited thought disorder, even when I was 'ill'. Of course, readers might imagine that I wasn't in a position to know if I was exhibiting thought disorder – but in the many years during which I have been well, I have never noticed thought disorder in anyone else I met diagnosed mentally 'ill'. The patient I mentioned earlier, the chap who to put it baldly seems a little dumb, sometimes digresses when he speaks, sometimes wanders off topic, but he is still intelligible. I suspect that psychiatrists sometimes diagnose thought disorder because they aren't socially competent enough to make the effort to understand the patient. Other negative symptoms associated with schizophrenia include anhedonia, an inability to take pleasure in activities one formerly enjoyed, and avolition, a lack of motivation. As is the case with verbal fluency and abstract reasoning, I wonder how the psychiatrists can measure these symptoms. Supposing, however, that these symptoms are indeed associated with those diagnosed schizophrenic, it seems very likely that these symptoms are side-effects of the medication rather than then of the 'condition'. Dopamine is involved in pleasure and motivation, and antipsychotics block dopamine receptors.
If lack of verbal fluency and deficits in abstract thinking are not core symptoms of schizophrenia, what are? Readers who know a little about schizophrenia may suppose that a core symptom is 'voice-hearing' – in the popular imagination, this is the defining symptom. It may even seem that this symptom is necessary for a diagnosis of schizophrenia. I wish now to discuss my own diagnosis of schizophrenia as it relates to my own life and to my interactions with the psychiatrists who have treated me. As I have described in the many posts about my first psychotic episode, I did not, in 2007, experience voice-hearing. At my first appointment with the psychiatrist Tony Fernando in the middle of 2007, an appointment I described in the post "Wokeness and What the Shrinks Knew", he asked me if I heard voices and looked surprised when I said "No". In January 2009, I did indeed begin to 'hear voices' – but these weren't auditory hallucinations. Rather I formed the delusion that I could communicate telepathically with people. I would have conversations in my head at first with George W. Bush, then later Jon Stewart, and then, towards the end of the year, the girl I call Jess, among others. However, although I didn't experience 'voice hearing' in 2007, I did experience a severe psychotic episode involving delusions. It is difficult for me to establish when this episode began. In this blog I have sometimes indicated that I first became psychotic when I formed the belief that bFM breakfast host Mikey Havoc and producer Jose Barbossa had come out as gay to me. This would have been at the end of January or beginning of February. However this could be described as a mistake rather than a delusion, Although I experienced some paranoia at bFM, after I left bFM, I would guess in March 2007, this paranoia mainly went away. I did not begin to experience psychosis at my flat, known in Auckland as the Big House, until after I saw the Red Hot Chilli Peppers perform with my nephew and younger sisters. According to the Internet, this concert was held April 21.The episode started small and became more intense. I would guess that I experienced psychosis for a month, certainly less than two months, before my flatmates called up my mother and said they were worried about me, the day after I had considered drowning myself. My brother removed me from the flat and the next day I made my initial incursion into the Taylor Centre and very soon after was put on 2.5mgs of Rispiridone. I remained psychotic, an episode that lasted until the end of the year, I guess in total about seven months. Different countries use different diagnostic criteria in assessing whether someone has schizophrenia. In Australia, a psychotic episode must last at least six months for a diagnosis of schizophrenia to be made; in the UK it is only one month. Either way, if one accepts these definitions, I would qualify as 'schizophrenic'. However, and this is the key point I have been trying to make for years, I would dispute the idea that a diagnosis of schizophrenia is a life-sentence, that it is impossible to recover.
In 2008, I was very close to totally well although I experienced side-effects from the medication that I didn't like. In January 2009, I became psychotic again and started hearing voices. This episode lasted eight months. In August 2009, after I had threatened to kill myself, I was allowed to go off the Rispiridone. I was well for approximately two or three months and then had a sudden relapse. I was put on 10mgs Olanzapine, a prescription I accepted quite willingly at the time. The psychosis I experienced, which mainly took the form of continuous telepathic communication with others, had faded away completely by about February 2010. I was totally well for the next three years. In January 2012, I asked Fernando if I could reduce my medication to 7.5mgs and be released from the service into my GP's care. He agreed. I felt so well that I reduced my medication myself to 5mgs. In January 2013, believing that I had fully recovered, I asked my GP if I could reduce my medication to 2.5mgs. She suggested I alternate between the two dosages. Shortly after this I became psychotic again. I approached the Taylor Centre again wanting to get it on the record that I am straight and always have been and wanting psychological rather than medical treatment, I didn't want to increase my medication. And then around February 2014 I was put under the Mental Health Act which I am still under today. In saying all this, I know I am repeating stuff I have said before in this blog many times but it is necessary to the argument I am making.
In describing my life this way, I make it seem as though my 'illness' was something separate from my environment, from my interactions with others, from the situation I was trapped in. This is the view psychiatrists want to believe and want people to believe. They want to regard schizophrenia as a congenital disease with an unknown aetiology and its own natural history that proceeds independently of any kind of social context; the role of the psychiatrist is to 'objectively' observe the patient with, in my experience, the sole purpose of working out which drug to prescribe and how much. In practice, this pose of dispassionate objective observer is impossible to maintain – I am very alert to subtleties of speech and body language and can infer some of what the psychiatrists believe about me from these. Of course, this is no easy process. Much of what I know of what the psychiatrists think of me comes from the written reports Sati and Jennifer Murphy wrote for the various Independent Reviews I've had, and it has taken me years to work out how to interpret them. For instance, perhaps a year ago, I worked out that much of the information the psychiatrists had about me must have come not from my own reports but the reports of some obviously unsympathetic tenant of the Big House. (This is not something I will go into any further in this essay but will talk about in a future post.) The psychiatrists don't ask questions. My current psychiatrist, now realising that I pay attention, has reacted to this by ceasing to ask questions almost altogether and by studiously avoiding giving anything away through body language. I feel like Joseph K in Kafka's The Trial. Of course, this is exactly the wrong approach for psychiatrists to take. They should ask, for instance, "What's your relationship like with your father?", "Have you ever used illegal drugs?", "Do you still hear voices?", "Have you ever had a homosexual experience?", "You said such and such two years ago – what did you mean?". They should be prepared to admit that their colleagues and other Mental Health Workers might have made mistakes. The cause of my illness was what others, particularly those working in the Mental Health System, thought of me. I have a kind of Foucauldian sense that the label 'schizophrenic' and the discourse surrounding it has an almost magical power over people. If it wasn't for this blog, in which I have tried to present my side of the story, my truth, I might be dead by now. In writing it, I have been trying to lift a curse. In this blog I have often said that I have recovered but I have not been clear about when I recovered – there is a reason for this. It was a gradual process. The cause of my illness was people thinking I'm gay when I'm not and I believe that, through this blog, I have finally convinced people that I am straight and always have been. And I strongly believe that the reason why I was diagnosed schizophrenic was because the people treating me thought I was lying when I said I was straight. In order to recover, I needed to prove both that they were wrong and that I have recovered. This near-mystical perspective has a corollary: if to recover from schizophrenia requires one to prove that one has recovered, it may well be that the major cause of schizophrenia is the diagnosis of schizophrenia itself. My more level headed readers might say, "Shouldn't you assess your recovery in terms of whether or not you still experience psychotic symptoms?" About eight or nine months ago, during mid-semester break, there was a night when, lying in bed, I participated in a long conversation with Jon and Jess in my head that lasted all night, similar to the conversations I'd had with them during the day over the summer of 2009 and 2010. It was a kind of closure. One of the things Jon said was "One of us is straight." This was the first time I had talked with them for a long while and the last time I have 'heard voices' at all.
In this essay, I have suggested that there are serious problems with the term "schizophrenic". I would like now to point out a problem with the term "psychosis". The easiest way to know if a patient is experiencing psychosis is for that patient to describe his or her symptoms, such as voice-hearing or a paranoid delusion such as being watched all the time. However patients don't always report symptoms and Mental Health workers and doctors, as I've said, usually don't ask. This means that people often judge whether someone is psychotic or not based on circumstantial evidence. And they often get it wrong. In a post I wrote a long time ago, "Corruption in the Mental Health Service", I described how at the first Independent Review I had in 2015, my then psychiatrist wrote in the report she gave to the panel that I had been psychotic in 2008 and well for the first eight months of 2009 – the exact opposite of the truth and something she should have known if my notes were accurate. In January 2012, when I was discharged from the Taylor Centre, my then key worker Kate Whelan said, "It's okay to hear voices!" I thought this was a strange thing for her to say because I hadn't heard voices at all for close to two years (it was easiest at the time not to correct her). In around May last year my mother and I visited my godmother in Whanganui and I overheard her expressing concern to my mother about me pacing. Yes, I was pacing – but this was because I had recently endured a horrible session with an Oral Hygienist, all my teeth hurt, and I was worried that they might all be pulled out. (I took antibiotics for a couple of weeks.) My godmother is no worse than a typical psychiatrist at determining whether someone is psychotic or not – psychiatric training consists of six years of learning about neurotransmitters and dubious medical theories about the causes of various psychiatric disorders and nothing about real people.
The fallibility of supposed experts in ascertaining whether someone is 'ill' or not has serious consequences for the diagnosis of schizophrenia, its treatment, and the critical question of whether someone diagnosed schizophrenic can recover and go off the medication. For instance, although Fernando led me to believe that I was diagnosed schizophrenic from the beginning, in all my official documentation from 2007 until 2012 such as that I took in to WINZ my diagnosis was 'psychosis not otherwise specified'. I was not officially diagnosed schizophrenic until 2013, by Jennifer Murphy. Did she base this diagnosis on symptoms I displayed at the time? When I re-entered the Taylor Centre in 2013, I did so with the primary purpose of getting it on the record that I am straight and always have been. At my first appointment with her (as I've said before) I told her that the first time I'd had sex was New Years Eve 1997 and the last time was a one-night stand in Wellington two years previously, Shortly after this, I gave her an essay describing the closest I'ver ever come to a homosexual experience (something I discussed in the post "A Description of a Couple of Experiences"). At one of these early appointments, I asked her what my diagnosis was and she said, "Schizophrenia", something I found upsetting at the time. I asked her, "Can someone recover from schizophrenia?" and she said something like, "Of course, a person can recover from schizophrenia." She was dissembling, paltering, and I sensed this because I already knew by 2013 that it is supposedly impossible to recover from schizophrenia. I believe Murphy diagnosed me schizophrenic because she thought I was lying. In this blog and elsewhere, I have always endeavoured to be as truthful and accurate as I am able but I can remember, after one of the Independent Reviews, Murphy sarcastically calling me "very honest". My current psychiatrist, who I see for an hour about once every six months, has requested I not talk about him in this blog but it is not defamatory to tell the truth and so I shall relate a couple of stories involving him. In I think late 2018 or early 2019, he asked me if I wanted to switch to Clozapine. Clozapine is an older antipsychotic than Olanzpine which is more brutal in its impact on the brain and has more serious side effects. I couldn't understand why he wanted to switch me to a stronger medication – presumably he thought, or thought I thought, that the Olanzapine 'wasn't working' even though I had never complained about any psychotic symptoms to him and given him no reason to think I was psychotic. I thought then as I think now that I have recovered and wanted to go off the medication entirely; I thought he could tell this. In reading the Wikipedia entry in preparation for this post, I found this detail. "Following two trials of different antipsychotics over six weeks, that also prove ineffective, they will be classed as having treatment resistant schizophrenia (TRS), and clozapine will be offered." I don't remember being given any other antipsychotic than Olanzapine in the time prior to being offered Clozapine. Certainly I wasn't experiencing any psychotic symptoms. It is quite possible that Jennifer Murphy had put it in my record that I have treatment resistant schizophrenia. (She had argued that I had treatment resistant schizophrenia at an Independent Review in late 2017.) Or perhaps Nick Hoeh thought I had treatment resistant schizophrenia simply because I claimed to have recovered and wanted to discontinue the medication. Wanting to discontinue medication, as I've said before, is considered a reason to force a person to take it – a Catch 22 that proves the insanity of the psychiatric profession. Back then I felt shit all the time but I believe this was the result of side effects rather than psychosis. These days I feel much better (I am still taking Olanzapine but on a much lower dosage) but I strongly suspect that I would be even happier and healthier if I wasn't on any medication at all. The second story relates to my last appointment with Hoeh a couple of months ago. I asked him, "What's your definition of schizophrenia?" He said it was a syndrome with a number of symptoms that are sometimes present and sometimes absent. He didn't say what those symptoms were.
Sometimes in this blog I have talked about Janet Frame. As my local readers will know, Frame is regarded as the greatest novelist New Zealand has ever produced. Frame is famous not only for her books and poems but because she was (mis)diagnosed schizophrenic and nearly had a lobotomy, a tragedy averted only when a book of her short stories won a major award just before the scheduled operation. As I've said before, there are major differences between her life story as she recounts it in An Angel at My Table and the Wikipedia entry about her: I don't know which is correct. The detail that is relevant to the present discussion is this. In An Angel at My Table, Frame says that there was some objective test that was used to determine whether someone has schizophrenia or not and complains bitterly that she was never administered this test. I doubt that in the 1950s the psychiatrists had any kind of adequate test to determine if someone has schizophrenia or not because they still don't have such a test today. Frame was almost certainly brighter than the doctors who treated her and she may have had difficulty accepting that her life had nearly been destroyed by supposed experts who were in reality deeply corrupt and stupid. Recently I read Owls Do Cry and one of the many interesting things about it is her depiction of the schizophrenic character Daphne. Daphne does not entertain significant paranoid delusions or hear voices. This suggests that schizophrenia in the 1950s was different to the schizophrenia we have today. Perhaps as the discourse surrounding schizophrenia changes so does the condition; perhaps 'schizophrenia' is a chimera conjured up by the discourse itself, as I suggested earlier. I know that this makes me sound suspiciously postmodern. But Frame herself, in her books, anticipated postmodernism.
In this essay I have digressed quite a lot but it is possible to relate the evaluation of symptoms such as paucity of speech and illogical thinking to the earlier discussion of probability. I have based my argument on anecdotal evidence and anecdotal evidence is often considered unscientific. But, I would argue, there is value in anecdotal evidence. I would strongly suggest trainee psychiatrists read the works of Janet Frame, the biography of John Nash (a biography considerably different than the film adaptation), The Eden Express by Mark Vonnegut, and perhaps this blog; I think this would be more useful than granting credence to all the bad science surrounding schizophrenia. However there is a paradox here – call it the Paradox of the Anecdotal. Suppose you have a friend who is given an experimental drug and the next day has a heart attack. You would be justified in suspecting that there is a causal connection. The pharmaceutical company might however argue that it is a coincidence, that there was 0.24% chance of your friend having a heart attack purely as the result of chance. They might say, "A thousand people were involved in this trial. We would expect as a matter of course that two people would have a heart attack that year." This type of argument is used by Steven Pinker. I can't remember his exact example but a representative argument of the type he presents can be given. Suppose the probability of having an apparently precognitive dream is one in a million: that means that most likely five people in New Zealand tonight will have an apparently precognitive dream even though the resemblance between the dream and future events is only a matter of coincidence. The Availability Bias makes these dreams seem more common than they actually are. Pinker uses such arguments to try to debunk the paranormal. But suppose you yourself, dear reader, have a dream tonight that seems premonitory. If you have not set the probability of precognitive dreams at zero, and you recognise that the probability of having this dream by coincidence was one in a million, I think you are justified in believing that the dream manifested a genuine premonition. This is the type of logic I employed in the post "The Weak Anthropic Principle". If something remarkable happens to you, one of your friends, or someone you know, you are justified in believing that it is more than just a random coincidence, that it is evidence of something, perhaps eve a deeper pattern. It seems likely to me, for instance, that my meeting Jess at a Hearing Voices group in late 2009 was more than just a coincidence. This is where Jung's notion of synchronicity seems appropriate. Like a subterranean river, there are forces below the surface that nudge us in particular directions at particular times (although this does not mean we should believe in Providence). Anecdotal evidence can guide us towards the truth. This is why, although scientific studies such as those by Kahneman and Tversky are useful, psychologists and psychiatrists should supplement their learning by reading quality literature.
There is a second way in which we can relate the discussion of schizophrenia to the discussion of probability. The more information a person has the more accurate his or her predictions. If a psychiatrist knows only that a person is diagnosed schizophrenic, he or she has no idea of the prognosis, and no idea how to treat that patient and help effect a cure. Without accurate information, he or she may overlook obvious causes and obvious remedial actions that could be taken. Because every person diagnosed schizophrenic is different from every other person diagnosed schizophrenic, as are the causes of any particular person's particular 'illness', psychiatrists need to ask questions, not only about the patient's day to day life, but about the reasons behind why he she became 'ill' in the first place. They need to recognise that conditions like 'schizophrenia' are not inexplicable diseases but are result from experiences, and they also need to admit that sometimes they and their colleagues can make mistakes. Simply labelling a person 'schizophrenic', testing out different drugs until one is found that 'works', and then telling the person that he or she needs to take drugs for the rest of his or her life – this is evil. It is especially evil to label a person with 'treatment resistant schizophrenia' because he or she simply wants to discontinue medication.
Some concluding remarks... In this essay, there is a tension between two different ways of looking at the world, a rational scientific view and a kind of Foucauldian postmodern view. Sometimes I have suggested that symptoms such as anhedonia and avolition are the result of neurological interventions, specifically the blocking of dopamine receptors by antipsychotics, and at other times I have suggested that these symptoms are the result of the diagnosis itself, a diagnosis that influences people in the similar manner to a self-fulfilling prophecy. It may be that these two views do not contradict each other but supplement each other. The takeaway from the last part of the essay, however, is that we should distrust the science around schizophrenia. I think we should defenestrate the term 'schizophrenia' completely. Every person who becomes mentally 'ill' does so for a different reason and the best form of treatment is for therapists to identify the specific causes of a person's distress and treat the cause rather than the symptom (although it is debatable, as I have argued in the past, whether antipsychotics actually do alleviate symptoms). If the people treating me had recognised that I was heterosexual from the beginning and if I had felt that I was in a culture or environment where I could openly and honestly talk about homosexuality, I would have recovered in a couple of months, although the silver lining of the last dreadful fifteen years is that I have come to an understanding of homosexuality that I have expressed in this blog, something I might not have done otherwise. I have a very vivid dream life and I'll finish by talking about a dream I had about a week ago. This dream contained a number of interesting details but I'll single out one. In the dream, I was sitting at a table with a group of patients; a female patient asked me, quite aggressively, "Do you have a girlfriend or a boyfriend?" I replied, "I don't have a girlfriend or a boyfriend but I'd prefer a girlfriend. Thanks very much for asking though."
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This post is very long but there is one last thing to talk about. I am a New Zealander and I have foreign readers. In the previous post I mentioned that Auckland, on Anniversary Day, experienced its worst ever weather event. It received more rain in a single day then it ever has before. Since then New Zealand was hit by Cyclone Gabrielle. This storm mainly missed Auckland (although it caused major slips in the far west) but it devastated Hawke's Bay and Gisborne. The scale of destruction is possibly, in some ways, worse than the 2011 Christchurch earthquake. It's terrible. Considering the magnitude of this disaster and everything else going on in the world, such as earthquake in Turkey and Syria and ongoing war in Ukraine, my story may seem trivial. I hope however that my story is a kind of synecdoche, that I am speaking for others as well as myself. There are over 18,000 people diagnosed schizophrenic in New Zealand alone, apparently, although this could be an underestimate because it does not include people who have experienced psychosis but are not officially diagnosed schizophrenic. I can only hope that my story will help others.
