The Waste Land and Other Matters; An Endorsement

It is less than a week until the American election. The purpose of this blog has never been to interfere in American politics, something that I probably am not entitled to do as a New Zealander; however I feel given the stakes, and given that I have American readers, I should say something about who I would prefer to be the next US President. I will make my recommendation to my American readers towards the end of the essay. However I shall talk about other things first. I intend in this essay to say something initially about a matter related to sexuality and then talk a little about my own past, making as I have for a long time the rather egotistical assumption that people might be interested in the life of a 'poor little schizophrenic living in New Zealand'. (In using the word 'schizophrenic' to describe myself, remember that I find this term extremely problematic, especially the doctrine that it is a condition from which it is impossible to recover.) My relationship with the girl I call Jess has been a significant topic I have returned to repeatedly over the years and I want to talk about her again. I shall discuss the Big House again. I want then to talk a little about poetry and shall discuss perhaps the greatest poem of the twentieth century, The Waste Land by TS Eliot and relate it to schizophrenia. Finally I intend to make my endorsement. I caution the reader: in this essay I use the word 'gay' a lot.

Before I dive into my main topics I want to elaborate on something I mentioned in the previous essay, just to be as comprehensive about my own life as possible. In 2009, I saw a private psychologist for a period. This was organised by my step-mother I believe. I saw him weekly for perhaps a month or two late in the year starting around October or November. This private psychologist told me when I first met him that he had chosen not to refer to any notes written about me by workers in the Public Health System. Although I believe now that this psychologist may have been quite a good man, I was experiencing psychosis at the time and so wasn't able to take full advantage of his help – if I had seen him in 2008 or 2010 I might have been able to talk about the causes of the illness I suffered, such as what happened at bFM. I didn't use the words 'gay' or 'straight' with him at all although I can remember that, at the time, I thought that the Borders chain of book stores had been taken over by closet homosexuals and I alluded to this indirectly when talking to him. I think I said this because I had always loved the Borders bookshop on Queen Street and was unhappy with the direction it had taken at the time.

Much of this essay will be concerned with sexuality and sexual attraction, in particular, as you'll see, heterosexual sexual attraction. In talking about sexuality again, I once again need to remind readers at the onset that I am heterosexual – by heterosexual I mean that I only fall in love with women, only get sexually aroused around women, only want to have sex with women, and only fantasise about women when I masturbate. I know spelling this out may seem vulgar but hopefully this blog is read by adults – I would expect children to be more interested in TicToc than abstruse essays about the kinds of esoteric matters I usually discuss. When one realises that this is perhaps the best definition of the term 'heterosexual' one can arrive at, one immediately recognises that whether a person is heterosexual or not cannot necessarily be accurately established by observing a person from the outside. Generally we infer it from, say, whether the person has a partner or spouse of the opposite sex, or from other subtler clues. Generally we tend to look for signs of homosexuality rather than of heterosexuality. Insofar as there are external indicators we can associate with heterosexuality, these signs are not themselves coextensive with the meaning of the word 'heterosexual'; gender and sexuality are not, in my view, performative in the way Judith Butler, as I understand her, has argued, but are rather persistent aspects of private subjective experience. Now, I don't want to suggest that people who do not tick all four boxes above have to come out as gay or bisexual. In the end people are allowed some secrets. And for some people some kind of homosexuality may be a phase that they go through during adolescence. However in the last couple of months I have worried that some kind of false rumour might have somehow got out about me, for reasons I won't get into here, and so I wanted to state absolutely unambiguously that I am still heterosexual before plunging into the rest of the essay. The other reason I need to preface this essay with this statement concerning my own sexuality will become clear later.

The first matter I wish to discuss is the notion of 'coming out'. When when we think of homosexuality and, perhaps today, bisexuality, we often think of people 'coming out as gay'. Billie Eilish was outed by the magazine Variety earlier this year and then decided to come out publicly as gay by, among other things, releasing the song "Lunch". Her alternative to coming out would have been to fight the report by Variety by suing it for defamation – but maybe she realised that taking such a step would only damage her own reputation, the perceptions others had of her. Perhaps she had Tom Cruise as an example of how such a reaction could backfire; perhaps she sensed that having been outed there was no way back in. In the UK, TV presenter Philip Schofield, who is married with two daughters, came out publicly as gay in The Sun in 2020. The impression I gathered is that The Sun had incriminating evidence against Schofield and did a deal with him – either he give them an exclusive interview in which he would announce he was gay or they would out him whether he wanted it or not. Subsequently it was revealed that Schofield had been having an affair with a much younger man and that The Sun, as part of the deal, had agreed not to mention this in their front page article. After the affair was revealed by other media outlets, Schofield was forced to resign. A New Zealand columnist, perceptively, said about this whole scandal that it seemed Schofield was allowed to be gay but not allowed to do gay.

When celebrities come out as gay they do so with a splash. However in the ordinary world the process is much more incremental. A person may come out as gay to some friends or family members and then news of the coming out tends to spread among the person's other friends and acquaintances. This is an aspect of 'coming out' that people seldom appreciate – in the real world, a gay person always comes out to some other person. Coming out is not, in the workaday world, a singular event; a gay person may have to come out repeatedly to different people. Some gay people, say some teachers and academics, may be openly gay to their friends and their families but not openly gay to their students. Although we tend to think of gay people as being either in or out, of course if you apply some critical thinking to the issue, you realise the truth is far more complex; the gay person may be 'in' to some people and 'out' to others. How then do we decide if someone is openly gay or in the closet? Presumably the difference between the two is that we should consider someone to be in the closet if he or she tells the people he or she has come out to to keep it a secret; a person should be considered to be openly gay if there is a tacit understanding that the people he or she tells can tell other people. 

There is another significant issue here. Can you always be sure that someone else has come out as gay to you? Once again people understand this notion quite naively. People tend to suppose that when a gay person comes out they do so by clearly uttering the phrase, "I'm gay". But often it is not so clear cut – a young female friend of mine, for instance, 'came out' by starting to come to pub quiz with her girlfriend; she never used the word 'gay' around me at all. I often meet gay people who, in a sense, come out by implication, by for instance bringing up the novel Maurice by EM Foster. Sometimes, in fact, it is possible to think someone has come out when he or she hasn't, when the person may not be gay at all. People who have read this blog for years will recall that one of the main events that triggered my first psychotic episode is that I thought a couple of men at the radio station I was working at in 2007 had come out as gay to me and that I had to keep it a secret. I realised a very long time ago now that they did nothing of the sort.  Early on during my first psychotic episode I thought, wrongly, that Dr Phil had come out as gay on the Letterman Show. In 2013, I thought a family member had come out as gay for absolutely no reason at all. Twice I have thought men I've known had come out as gay to me because they used the word 'gay' in an odd contextless way. It has occurred to me recently that possibly I could have been wrong. One reason that the situation is so fraught is the enormous stigma the word 'gay' carries; sometimes it seems that only gay people and homophobes can use it, the latter employing  it as a derogatory epithet. Generally people avoid using the word 'gay' at all and, in fact, often gay people themselves avoid using it. Just saying this word out loud can arouse suspicion. In one of his first episodes back on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart used the word 'gay' and I could just sense then and the next week that merely using the word had burned him, as it had burned Kurt Cobain when he used it in the song "All Apologies." It is possible that someone I know thought I had come out to him early this year, not because of anything I said myself but because of something someone else present said when talking about another person entirely. (I don't really want to go into details about this here.) And of course, as readers will remember, one of the other significant mistakes I made much earlier in my life that led me to become ill later on is that in 2001, at the age of twenty-one, as part of a university course, I wrote a gay spy film, without reckoning with the enormous homophobia of the people who knew that I had written it. I had no inkling at the time, back in 2001, that writing this film would make people think I was gay myself although I began to sense this shortly after. It bothered me at the time but I didn't realise then that it would eventually ruin my whole life. All this can be taken as the explanation for why I opened this essay by saying, once again, that I am heterosexual – just so there is no possible confusion. Because I am not gay I have never come out as gay to anyone at all.

The second topic I want to talk about concerns Jess again. It also again involves sexuality. There is something about my relationship with her, something I had known subconsciously for a long time but which I found so painful that I couldn't face it directly and so have never talked about before in this blog.  I feel I should set it out at last. It is likely that when we were hanging out in 2011 she thought I was bisexual. I think I should explain why she might have thought this.

I met Jess in late 2009 at a Hearing Voices group, something I have talked about before. One occurrence at this group seems worth a digression because it is so relevant to other matters I have discussed in this blog. During some sessions there was a young guy present who, perhaps because he was being bombarded with voices, was almost catatonic. I asked him if he listened to the radio at all. He said, "I listen to Kim Hill!" Kim Hill was for a long time a very prominent radio personality here in New Zealand. The significance of his reply is this. Earlier that year, The Listener had put Kim Hill on its front cover with the caption, "Kim Hill is not a lesbian!" Sometimes in this blog I have to spell out the obvious – this young chap, like so many of the other patients I've met, was afraid that people thought he was gay. I believe this fear, a fear that I noted in many other patients and felt myself, justifiably, was probably justified in his case as well – I think psychiatrists tend to think all psychotics are either potentially or actually queer. But like almost every other patient I've met this young man was unable to use either the words 'gay' or 'straight'. In the real world and even in the Mental Health System straight men and women never say that they are straight unprompted. Often, also, patients often believe that many people around them, mental health workers and other patients, are secretly gay. It is a reaction to the culture of the Mental Health System. By saying that he listened to Kim Hill this young chap was trying to assert by implication the fact of his heterosexuality.

I myself was then also still incapable of using either the words 'gay' and 'straight' out loud. However, in late 2009, for some imbecilic reason, I thought that I had succeeded in the aim I had when I first became a patient, that I had 'come out as straight'. This was partly because my medication had been changed from Risperidone to Olanzapine. During one of the sessions, I talked about "Coming out the other side". It is quite possible that Jess thought I meant by this that I had come out as gay when I really meant that I thought I had comes out as straight. At the last session at which she was present, she talked about a family drama that had upset her and then quoted the first verse of Philip Larkin's "This Be The Verse". The first stanza runs as follows;

    They fuck you up, your mum and dad,

    They may not mean to but they do.    

    They give you all the faults they had

    And add some extra just for you.

Unable to help myself, maybe just because I wanted to demonstrate that I knew the poem, I quoted the last stanza.

    Man hands on inhumanity to man;

    It mounts up like a coastal shelf.

    Take my advice – get out while you can

    And don't have any kids yourself.

Jess hated this. At the end of the session she was swept away to Respite and on the way out said to me, tearfully and sarcastically, "Good memory!"

This, by the way, is not the only version of this poem but is the version I knew. Philip Larkin, one of the great poets of the twentieth century, is worth a digression. This poem may make people today think that Larkin was gay. Certainly Larkin I don't think ever had any serious relationships in his life. However his problem was not that he was gay but that he was very shy. He once wrote a poem, a poem that was never published in his lifetime, documenting his failed attempts to pick up a woman at a party. Larkin was very good friends with the novelist Kingsley Amis, father of Martin Amis, and it is interesting to note that in his highly fictionalised autobiography Martin Amis proposed that it was actually Philip Larkin rather than Kingsley Amis who had been his real biological father.

It may be that these references to "coming out" and "getting out" may have made Jess think I was gay. Another reason she may have thought this was, as I indicated in the previous essay, the urban myth that psychosis can be triggered by a homosexual experience, an urban myth that psychotics pick up on. To reiterate, my illness was not caused by a homosexual experience and nor was hers. However, certainly back then, all Mental Health Patients lived under a cloud of suspicion. I recall not long after we first met, Jess asked me if drugs were involved when I first became 'ill' and when I saw her in 2013 it seemed to me that she was fishing to see if my first psychotic episode was caused by a homosexual experience. There is a third possibility. It is possible that someone in the Mental Health Service told her I was gay. In 2011, she expressed a little interest in my Key Worker, Kate Whelan, who she had seen just before I first met her – at the time I wondered if she was interested in Kate because she thought Kate was a lesbian (for the record I briefly though Kate was a lesbian in 2007 but changed my mind permanently shortly after); I also wondered, although I now think this very unlikely, if Jess herself might have had a little bit of a lesbian interest in Kate. I now think this is very unlikely because I believe Jess was neither gay nor bisexual back then. It may be though that Kate had said something to her.  For whatever reason, when I first started hanging out with Jess in 2011, I truly suspect that she thought I was gay and then, when she received evidence that I wasn't, decided that I must be bisexual or had been somehow sexually confused. (I got hints of this sometimes.) When seeing her in 2011, I tried to indirectly indicate that I was completely straight many times, although not obnoxiously, and, in 2013, when I was again experiencing psychosis and was texting her with song suggestions every day, I thought that some of my song suggestions might prove to her that I was straight, although I didn't have a clear idea how to achieve this. The song that prompted her to get in contact with me that year was "Perfect Day" by Lou Read. It may be that a part of the illness Jess suffered in 2012 and 2013 was a result of cognitive dissonance concerning me. In an earlier essay I said that I believed that Jess was like me, preoccupied with matters to do with sexuality without being gay herself, and I am sure that there was an element of truth to this, but it is possible my views of her were warped by her views of me. As I said above, the idea that when we were hanging out Jess thought I might be bisexual or had been sexually muddled somehow is a possibility I find quite painful. 

I remember in 2013 there was a moment, not long after she had read the screenplay I had written about her, at a bar on the waterfront, when I sensed that she wanted me to kiss her but I couldn't do it. There is something very pitiful about the memory. I felt then and still today that both she and I were in the grips of some kind of malevolent fate.

I want now to turn to a different topic, although a related topic. I want to talk about the Big House again. I had hung out at the Big House for some years beforehand but didn't move in until early 2006. For much of that year I was completely preoccupied with Teachers Training College and the job I had every Saturday working for the TAB and wasn't really involved in the life of the flat. Sometimes, I think, Maya would come up from Katikati to visit but our 'relationship', if you can call it that, was something both she and I kept secret, she by design and me more or less unwittingly. My relationship with Maya was bad for both of us and both of us were responsible for this. As I've said, although the Big House had an openly gay resident in 2006 (he tried to get on New Zealand Idol) and although it is possible that the Frenchman who moved in in 2007 after I left bFM might have been gay, all of my other flatmates were straight. The Big House had twenty residents, half of which, by deliberate policy, were male and half female. However it may not have been obvious that all of us were straight. Men in the real world often engage in what Trump in 2016 called 'locker room talk' – a man might say to another man, for instance, "She's got a nice rack!" However my flatmates and I in the Big House didn't do this. Occasionally a male flatmate might mention that he'd kissed a female flatmate at a party or a female flatmate would confide that she'd slept with the drummer from the band Opshop the previous night; otherwise there was no obvious way to tell, except by picking up the vibes people gave off. Many of my flatmates were coupled up and one female flatmate, who was later diagnosed with Borderline personality disorder, went through a succession of boyfriends all drawn from the Big House pool. As often happens in the real world, the men would tend to hang out with the men and the women with the women but this says nothing about any of our sexual orientations. I was attracted to all my female flatmates although, and this is something that I also find painful, it is possible that because I almost never gave it away, my flatmates may not have been sure that I was heterosexual, and as I have described in other posts, it is possible that a rumour that I was gay when went around some of my flatmates in 2007, perhaps when I was working at bFM or perhaps after I'd left.

I'd like to relate a story here. For a period every week a couple of us male flatmates together with some other guys from outside the flat would gather in the dining space to play poker for small amounts of money. It is possible that some of these others playing each week might have been gay but I wasn't sure. This weekly poker game was advertised on a chalkboard in the kitchen. One evening, the evening of the weekly poker game, I was in the kitchen with a female flatmate, Em. Em was dressed up for a night on the town. I thought Em was just about one of the most gorgeous women I'd ever met. She said something; I looked her up and down, completely reflexively, and involuntarily called her beautiful. She became all flustered, ran to the chalkboard, and wrote down under the advertisement for the poker game, "More dicks wanted!" This memory is significant because it was about the only time I'd ever given myself away. I didn't know then and still don't know today whether Em had found me calling her beautiful flattering or offensive, whether I'd complimented her or mildly harassed her. In 2009, when I was experiencing psychosis, one of the peculiar things that happened to me that year was that everyone I saw on the streets had t-shirts with slogans emblazoned on them that seemed to relate to events in my life. One of the shirts I saw sticks out: I saw a chap wearing a t-shirt that read, "Poker? I hardly know her!"

Interestingly there is a song by the New Zealand band, the Tutts, called "K", which I am sure is inspired by parties at the Big House or rather the reputation these parties had. The song, which was released in 2008, makes reference to a bathtub in the back yard – the Big House had a bathtub in the back yard. You can listen to the song and watch the video for it on Youtube.

Earlier I talked a little Philip Larkin and, to make a change from stories about my own life, I might dabble in a little literary criticism. This might be of more interest to people who haven't followed my story for years because what I have to say here is self-contained. What I want to discuss nevertheless has great relevance to the general subject matter of this essay and my blog generally. I would like to talk about perhaps the greatest poet of the twentieth century, T.S Eliot. Early in his career, Eliot made his name with the poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrolk", a poem about an ageing bachelor who has missed his chance for love. I know great chunks of this poem off by heart and will quote a section from near the end;

I grow old, I grow old;

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare eat a peach?

I shall wear white cotton pants and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing each to each.

I do not think they will sing for me.

It was later in his career that Eliot created his masterpiece, The Waste Land. The Waste Land, published in 1922, emerged from a period of profound emotional and spiritual despair, despair that led Eliot to follow it up with the poem The Hollow Men, and then convert to High Anglicanism, probably as a reaction to this spiritual crisis, as a way to save himself; he went on to pen some important poems with religious themes, poems that are also very great but do not quite rise to the heights of The Waste Land. I studied Modernist poetry in 2002 and I can remember the lecture we had concerning The Waste Land. Ordinarily we would sit around and discuss the book or the poem; in this lecture, the then Head of Department, Ken Larsen, simply marched backwards and forwards and repeated over and over again that The Waste Land "was about nothing." We were being told that this was the official line and that we shouldn't attempt to deviate from it.

The Waste Land is in many ways a difficult poem – it begins with an epigraph in Sanskrit and contains quotations in German. It is full to the brim with allusions to the whole history of English poetry, from The Canterbury Tales onwards. It was originally published with an appendix to help readers track all the allusions back to their sources. At the same time it is often very easy to read. Consider the lines:

A rat crept softly through the vegetation

Dragging its slimy belly on the bank.

These lines are not themselves hard to understand. But it is not at all easy to work out why Eliot decided to include this reference to a rat in his poem at all. The poem is full of religious imagery but is also very much concerned with sex and love or rather the absences of love – sex without love, sexless relationships, frigid women. Eliot like many poets was very sensitive and The Waste Land is at once a poem inspired by his own life and a commentary on the world he lived in, on the deeper meaning of existence. Sometimes a person can suffer an emotional and spiritual crisis that has to do with sexuality; sometimes the upshot of such a crisis is that the person finds God. Something like this happened to Mike Patton, lead singer of the band Faith No More, as hinted at in the album King for a Day, Fool for a Lifetime (although I don't think he found God) and something like this happened to Kurt Cobain. In each individual case, the initial cause is probably different but the result is similar, a plunge into a sort of abyss, the ending of something, a type of death. In Eliot's case it probably had a lot to do with his then wife Vivienne. In doing a little superficial research for this essay, I found speculation by one critic that Eliot was uncomfortable with female sexuality; my feeling from reading and thinking about this poem is that what made Eliot uncomfortable was rather his sense that other people were having sex when he wasn't. I think what motivated Eliot to write The Waste Land was partly sexual frustration. This might seem reductive but Freud and evolutionary psychologists, despite their differences, agree that the fundamental meaning of life lies in love, sex, and reproduction; if this sexual drive is blocked or cannot be satisfied it will inevitably lead to psychological distress or depression. Especially if it goes unrecognised by others. Although John Ashbery, in a poem called "An Outing", may be mischievously suggesting that Eliot was gay and loved Ezra Pound, I think Eliot was straight. But it may be that a rumour that Eliot was gay had somehow circulated among his acquaintances, or that Eliot was worried that it had. Perhaps Eliot had sensed something like a rumour, and this rumour, if it did indeed circulate, brought about this crisis, this enormous anguish. In the second part of the poem there are the following lines:

Under the brown fog of a winter noon

Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant

Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants

C.i.f. London: documents at sight,

Asked me in demotic French

To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel

Followed by a weekend at the Metropole.

In this passage, Eliot seems to be describing being hit on by a homosexual. This is something that straight men don't like at all. For straight men there can even be a kind of horror associated with it. Imagine you're a straight man, a man only sexually attracted to women, but you're not getting any action, and then an unshaven male Smyrna merchant propositions you. It raises the spectre of a natural sex drive being diverted down an unnatural channel. Now, in suggesting that sexual frustration and sexual paranoia was a large part of what motivated Eliot when he wrote The Waste Land, I do not want to diminish the poem or detract from all the other meanings, religious, social, that people can find in it. But it might explain a lot.

In fact The Waste Land can provide great insight into the world of serious mental illnesses, the people here in New Zealand and around the world unfortunate enough to be diagnosed schizophrenic. I believe that at the root of much schizophrenia is an unsatisfied and possibly unsatisfiable craving for love and sex, for erotic love as opposed to platonic love (although there can be a desire for platonic love, for friendship, as well). I also believe, and this is very important, that most schizophrenics are heterosexual or start off heterosexual. Janet Frame, as I argued in the essays I wrote about her, was straight but worried that others thought she might be a lesbian; she might have even been, unknown to her, diagnosed a lesbian. In 2013 I read an autobiography called Blue Messiah by Peter Finlay, a New Zealander diagnosed schizophrenic. Finlay never had sex in his entire life but his book is full of references to the attractive women he sometimes met. On one occasion he told one of psychiatrists, "I have been on earth a hundred times and I have never had sex with a woman, and if I don't get to have sex with a woman in this life, I'm not coming back!" If sexual frustration and sexual paranoia lie behind much schizophrenia, this might seem to imply that we could cure schizophrenia by getting schizophrenics laid, but this would be a lunatic proposal. It is not actually the answer. All Mental Health workers have to do is simply recognise that most of their patients are heterosexual, recognise that they are humans beings with desires for love and sex. One reason patients often experience psychological distress is that, almost as soon as they become 'clients' of the Mental Health System, they acquire a fatalistic sense that love and sex and children, an ordinary life, is not something they will ever enjoy. Partly this results from the bullshit theory that schizophrenia is genetic, hereditable, a notion that patients pick up on almost immediately. In 2007, very shortly after I became a patient, when I was in Respite, I remember a female patient asking me, "Are you going to have children?" I understood exactly what she was getting at and replied, "Well, I have a lot of cousins." I was an evolutionary biologist back then and gave some credence to the notion of kin selection.

The perverse and evil truth though is that, even though most schizophrenics are heterosexual, I think there is a subcategory of schizophrenia that the psychiatrists associate with latent homosexuality. I do not know to what extent psychiatrists see schizophrenics as actually or potentially queer but it may vary between psychiatrists. Until relatively recently psychiatrists probably, like I used to do, simply divided the world into heterosexuals and homosexuals and didn't recognise all the other sexual varieties. Psychiatrists are far stupider than people realise. I also suspect that the psychiatrists don't have in their textbooks any adequate definitions for words like 'heterosexual', 'homosexual' or 'bisexual'. In the 1950s, psychiatrists apparently defined homosexuality as a sociopathic hatred of the opposite sex, a definition that must seem patently idiotic to most of us today, but it is unclear to me if psychiatrists today have any better definition. Homosexuality was once considered a type of mental illness but was removed from the DSM in 1973; the truth though, a truth that psychiatrists don't want to publicly admit, is that 'sexual confusion', deemed a kind of schizophrenia, is still treated with drugs; sometimes, in fact possibly quite often, this 'sexual confusion' may sometimes be diagnosed when it is in fact quite absent. It is probable that certain kinds of psychotic symptom are seen as evidence that the sufferer is a latent homosexual. Furthermore it is likely that psychiatrists think that if a patient is worried that others around him or her think him or her gay, that this should be taken as proof that the patient is indeed actually gay and is in denial. (Freud thought something like this.) If a patient says he or she is straight this is taken as evidence that he or she is gay. This seems insane but I think it partly explains why patients, once they've been in the system for a little while, start avoiding using the words 'gay' and 'straight' altogether. I have seen a lot of evidence for this over the years: psychiatrists and psychologists themselves, even when they're straight, seem unable to actually say that they are straight. I have heard that, often, gay men and women worry that others think that they are gay for a time before they come out, and so the psychiatrists probably decided that this worry was a symptom of latent homosexuality.  I get the impression that they believe this type of schizophrenia can be cured or at least alleviated by the sufferer coming out to a psychiatrist or a psychologist, although the real reason they believe this is just because it confirms their prejudices. However I believe that often the paranoia comes first, before the homosexuality. This paranoia affects all Mental Health patients as a result of talking with each other, of being in the system, and of talking with Mental Health workers who often see all their patients as potentially queer. The ability for patients to pick up on this 'theoretical' paradigm and culture verges on clairvoyance. Admittedly homosexuality is almost never discussed explicitly and this is why patients and workers somehow all independently arrive at the 'cat/dog' code, a code no one fully understands. If a patient is exposed to this attitude for long enough, an attitude that may sometimes even be adopted by members of the patient's own family, especially if the person's family have no understanding of schizophrenia at all, it can indeed sometimes result in 'sexual confusion'. Even when such 'sexual confusion' does not occur, being exposed to attitudes of this sort for many years can only exacerbate and prolong a person's mental distress. To think that a heterosexual man or woman might be sexually attracted to people of the same sex and/or not attracted to people of the opposite sex is a terrible thing to do to that person. And to coerce a person into 'coming out', effectively against his or her will, as I believe psychiatrists sometimes do, is certainly no way to cure him or her. 

Why then might the psychiatrists believe this, that sexual paranoia is an indicator of latent homosexuality? Partly it may be that this theory has taken hold and individual psychiatrists don't want to rock the boat by admitting that not only is it wrong but that it is pernicious, pathological. Or they believe it because it sometimes seems to be true and don't want to admit that a theory alone could be a cause of homosexuality. Rather than admit that that this theory might be actually harmful, that they might be missing something, they desperately look for confirming evidence. I doubt that there has ever been any robust research into whether this theory is true, and if sometimes true, why it would be true; I don't even know how such research could be carried out. Psychiatrists are all idiot sheep; none of them want to admit they have no idea what they're doing. The existence of this theory, and I admit I only have circumstantial evidence that it exists, might partly explain why so few schizophrenics recover. And terribly, as I've indicated, this theory can sometimes become a self fulfilling prophecy. I believe Kurt Cobain could have been diagnosed schizophrenic and, even though he was married to a woman he loved, a woman he was having sex with, he still killed himself because he thought others thought he was gay. 

In laying out my thoughts concerning schizophrenia and psychiatry I do not know whether I am making the situation better or worse. To suggest, as I have suggested, that a diagnosis of homosexuality, even when made clandestinely, can cause a person to become homosexual might seem a shocking and seemingly irrational conjecture. It is not altogether irrational nevertheless. I believe it possible Michel Foucault turned gay because a psychiatrist told him he was homosexual; this might partially explain his hatred of psychiatrists. Many years ago Jon Stewart said on his show, "Sunlight is the best disinfectant" and although he was talking about a different matter related to sexuality and although he may have since arrived at a different position, I have a sense that talking openly and honestly about all this, about matters to do with sexuality, although sometimes uncomfortable, is the best way forward. The sexual paranoia I have discussed partly springs from widespread homophobia. We need to live in a world in which we can ask people how they identify and believe them, and this requires a world that is far less bigoted.  I am not sure of the best way to achieve this amelioration. Psychiatrists have historically been terribly prejudiced, terribly homophobic, and many of them still are today; there is still a view that many patients might be secretly gay.  This needs to change. I think that if a patient either directly or indirectly says that he or she is straight in the world we live in now, that that person should be believed. One reason for my own recovery is that in this blog I have been directly dealing with matters to do with sexuality for a long time – unlike, say, TS Eliot or Mike Patton or most mental health patients generally, I decided to confront the issue head-on, if only in this blog. (I seldom talk about it with friends and family.) Another reason I think I was able to recover is the enormous progress the world has made with respect to issues to do with sexuality in the last ten years. I can only hope that by telling the truth as I see it that perhaps working together we can find some way to make the world a better place.

I arrive now at my endorsement. This blog has often been concerned with mental illness and sexuality and I have sometimes criticised the Left because I think it perpetuates a false view of both. Many people on the Left, and not only of the Left, put great faith in psychiatry, but I believe we need to completely rethink our understanding of mental illness. I sometimes sense that some people think I am anti-science but I am not anti-science, I am just anti-psychiatry; even though this may make it seem that I am aligned with RFK Jr, I simply do not believe in the medicalisation of mental illness and the total reliance of psychiatrists on medication as almost the sole form of therapy. With respect to sexuality I also have had misgivings. For a long time many on the Left pushed the doctrine that people were born either gay or straight, although this dogma has weakened in recent years. The reason for this was simple. If gay people cannot choose not to be gay, they cannot be held morally responsible for 'lifestyles' that the heterosexual majority finds distasteful. It was a way to battle homophobia. However in this blog I have argued that for some people sexuality can be fluid. Because I also want to say that most people, in particular most mental health patients, are simply heterosexual, I have argued that we should use the word 'bisexual' for people who have fluid sexualities, to distinguish them from heterosexual people, although even this may be too simplistic because it seems to imply that bisexual men and women are bisexual their whole lives and it may be more accurate to say that some people sometimes go through a bisexual phase. In arguing this way, I am aware that my view may make seem like a veiled criticism of openly gay men and women, people who identify strictly as gay. I am thinking of people like Jonathan Capehart, Pete Buttigieg, Grant Robertson, and comedians like Bowen Yang and Troy Iwata. But these men seem to me to be good people. It may be that the visibility and confidence of such openly gay men (and gay women like Chapell Roan who I like very much) is the best way to fight homophobia, and that people whose sexualities have been fluid but don't want to talk about it with others find such openly gay men and women comforting. It may also be that people who sometimes worry that others think them gay find the confidence of openly gay men and women reassuring.  I am not sure about this. I feel that an important function comedians perform in society generally is that by making jokes about things in their lives that they find embarrassing they make their audiences feel better about decisions and disasters in their own lives that they feel ashamed about. I would say to such openly gay men and women that they are performing a social service just by being candid, that they shouldn't feel ashamed, should be proud, should try not to internalise the homophobic attitudes of a prejudiced chunk of society. There is a paradox involved here but I am not sure how to get around it.

Issues to do with sexuality and mental illness are not obviously at the forefront of the current political battle but they may be bubbling away under the surface. On the surface the political debate concerns immigration and inflation and tariffs, and, for some people, climate change and the war in Gaza. Some of my readers may be considering voting for Trump but, perhaps because they have jobs and families, have not been paying close enough attention to what is actually going on to be fully informed. To me it seems like the election is a war between Good and Evil. Trump is a buffoon but something malign seems to be acting through him. Tucker Carlson, who appeared at a recent rally in support of Trump, in a private email called Trump "a demonic force, a destroyer". Battle lines have been drawn. Many stars support Harris and many billionaires, including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Peter Thiel, support Trump. It is not clear to me why these billionaires support Trump although they may see it as a way to augment their fortunes and influence. I sometimes think these billionaires hate ordinary people; I don't think they give a shit about the steel industry in Pennsylvania. Here in New Zealand, former Prime Minister John Key recently came out in support of Trump even though Trump had, among other things, done great damage to New Zealand by scuppering the Trans Pacific Partnership. This election is not obviously about mental illness and sexuality but I believe though that if there are issues to do with mental illness and sexuality that are in some covert way influencing the election and that require recalibration, conversations concerning them should occur within the Left, perhaps not in any obvious way, because it is the Left that is most likely to have the best answers; the Republicans have no answers at all apart from bigotry. This is why I support Kamala Harris and urge all of my American readers who have not yet voted to throw their support behind her. In a recent interview with Stephen Colbert, Kamala came across as authentic, as a real person who actually cares about real people. Trump pretends to care about the working class but all he really cares about is himself. Even if you disagree with the Biden-Harris policy with respect to the war in Gaza, this is no reason not to vote – Trump, who has always been cozy with Netanyahu as he is with all right-wing authoritarians, would be much worse. In endorsing Harris, I am aware that my opinion will only have weight to the extent that people actually like me. I may have taken too long to make my position explicit; voting is already underway; the opinion of a blogger in New Zealand may carry no sway at all; it may be that I am preaching to the choir. Nevertheless I felt it was important to make my recommendation known.

A Meandering Essay

It has been a long while since I've written a post. For the last year I have been dealing with some issues to do with physical health: I often feel quite fatigued and, despite being released from the Compulsory Treatment Order I was under for ten years, have also been suffering from a great deal of existential angst. I don't know what I'm going to do now, if I'm physically fit enough to get a job, or if at the age of forty-five my life is effectively over. Sometimes I feel that lots of people read this blog, I'm not sure why, but this blog in itself is not enough to make me feel that I am making a positive contribution to the world. What I want is for this physical ill health to go away, to get a real girlfriend, find some way to make a little money, and to generally feel that my life that was interrupted for sixteen years might resume.

In this essay I intend to cover a few disparate topics and in the later part of the essay I intend to discuss my life again. 

I might note that the people who read this blog sometimes go back to older posts and I'll make a confession: I can't always remember the content of every essay I've written. I cannot recollect at all posts like "Theories of Knowledge Part 2" or "Evolution, Entropy, and the Ontological Argument for the Existence of God" or "The Evolution of Cats and Dogs." I feel confident though that my thinking has a kind of consistency and has developed in an orderly fashion culminating in much more recent essays like "The Meaning of Meaning", "Determinism, Quantum Physics, and Free Will" and "Evolution, Ideas, and Hiveminds." The essays I've written concerning my own life I remember much better and it is one such essay I will briefly return to.

In the post "my soul is an irritant" I described how I had been told that a friend of mine, who I called Warren, had experimented with homosexuality when he was a student in Dunedin. If readers remember, which I suppose is unlikely, I visited another friend in Dunedin in 2000 or 2001 who told me, "There's something you need to know about Warren". Apparently he had seen Warren and another male acquaintance of ours take a young man they'd met into a bedroom with them. In the earlier post I didn't specify that this acquaintance was also male. After I learned this, I believed, literally for decades, that Warren was a closet homosexual. I never discussed this with Warren when I saw him or with anybody else. In the earlier post I wasn't clear that this was my view of him. He went on to have a string of girlfriends and eventually married and had a child. I could never understand what his girlfriends saw in him, why they would voluntarily choose to date a homosexual. One of his girlfriends had been to Yale and had known people who had been initiated into the Skull and Bones secret society, a society that had had George W. Bush among others as members, and years later, in 2007 when I was profoundly paranoid, I decided that the Skull and Bones must be a secret homosexual society. In 2013, I visited Warren. I gained the impression that he was finally coming out as gay to me and later that year I told a few people. A number of years ago I wrote to Warren, told him what my friend had told me way back in 2000 or 2001, told him that I had told people he was gay, and apologised. Warren wrote back saying, "I don't mind that you told people I'm gay. You and I both know that I'm not." He admitted that he had 'experimented' when he was young although he didn't use this word. Rather he said that what had happened between him and our male acquaintance was the result of too much testosterone and the fact that he was having difficulty sleeping with women at the time.

Another friend from Dunedin has also played a major part in my conception of the world, a women called Sarah. Sarah has all her life alternated between homosexuality and heterosexuality. When she has been a lesbian she has always been very open about her homosexuality, bringing it up even with strangers, I think because she feels it most ethical to be completely open and honest with everyone. I remember many years ago, after her marriage to a man had ended because she had fallen in love with her female riding instructor, I decided that she must simply be a lesbian and that when she had been married to a man, she had been in denial of her True Self. I realised a long time ago that I wrong. Nowadays she is sort of in a relationship with a man and has a young child and I now recognise that if any word should be applied to her at all, it is 'bisexual'. 

These two friends have greatly influenced my view of sexuality. When I was younger, a child of the 'nineties, even though I had heard that some people experimented with homosexuality, I had always tended to assume that people were born either gay or straight. I now realise that for some people (although not for me) sexuality can be fluid, that perhaps we should use the word 'bisexual' for such people. This is one reason why I have railed against the notion of a 'gay gene' in this blog and why sexual politics on the Left often bothers me so much. I don't support Gay Conversion Therapy but not because I think any longer that sexuality is fixed at birth; rather I oppose Gay Conversion Therapy because I believe people should be free to make their own sexual choices and not have such choices dictated by others. I also want to live in a world where such sexual decisions can be talked about openly and honestly; the obvious reason for my holding this view is that I have had people treating me who thought I had a secret life I was keeping hidden from them and this reactionary bigotry has been a major cause of the psychological distress I suffered for so long.

I have talked about sexuality many times and it may bore some readers. It might interest readers if I discuss some philosophical topics instead, topics I have thought about in the last couple of months. In an earlier post I mentioned the philosophical position known as mereological nihilism. Ordinarily people think that not only do cats and dogs and tables exist but so do their atomic constituents: protons, neutrons, and electrons. The property 'cat-ness' somehow supervenes on or is entailed by some arrangement of atomic building blocks. The mereological nihilist claims by contrast that cats and dogs and tables do not really exist, that they are false impressions; all that exist are arrangements of simple components that create false experiential perceptions of cats and dogs and tables in the minds of conscious beings. I want to point out an absurdity in this position. A philosopher who adheres to this doctrine, when denying that such sensible entities actually exist, is taking it on faith that the physicists and scientists who have told him or her that everything is made fundamentally of protons and neutrons and electrons are telling the truth. Does it make sense to reject one's own sense perceptions and yet accept unconditionally a physical theory about the fundamental nature of reality promulgated by scientists? Perhaps the physicists who have told us all about protons and neutrons and electrons are lying, are engaged in an enormous conspiracy, mass brainwashing. This might seem paranoid but this proposal can be taken as being like a kind of thought experiment: what if it were true? It does not seem to me rational to reject the apparent brute sensory fact of cats and dogs and tables existing yet at the same time place one's total faith in something one has read in a textbook. It does not seem rational to think one should choose between one perspective and the other. The best course is, of course, to suppose that cats and dogs and tables do indeed exist and also that they are made up of the particles that physicists study, rather than suppose we need to choose between one view and the other.

Another topic philosophers often discuss is our perceptions of colour, what philosophers call qualia. What annoys me often when I read or hear discussions of colour is that philosophers so seldom discuss the physiology of colour perception. In the retina of the human eye, there is a region called the fovea in which we find three types of photoreceptor cell designed to be sensitive to either blue, yellow-green, or blue light. All our perceptions of chromatic nuances, shades such as pink, purple, teal, and vermillion, are generated in the mind by contributions from or interplays between these three types of cone cell. Furthermore only a small portion of a person's visual field is coloured; most of the photoreceptor cells in the retina are only sensitive to intensities of light, effectively black and white and shades of grey. The impression one has that one's whole visual field is coloured is something like an illusion: it is created in one's mind. The notion of colour perception raises the following philosophical conundrum. Suppose a person is wearing a 'blue' shirt in a pitch dark room or is wearing a coat over the top of it. Is it still blue? In this case it seems we should say that the shirt is black. Or suppose that the room is only illuminated by a single wavelength of light, say red, in which case the shirt may seem black because it cannot scatter blue light as it would if it were illuminated by white light. What does it mean in this case to say that the shirt is 'blue'? I would like to suggest two answers to this question. First we could define the word 'blue' as meaning 'the colour people generally think that a 'blue' object has when seen by normal sighted people under ordinary light conditions'. Thus, even if I am wearing a coat over a blue shirt, it will still be blue if people generally agree that if I take off the coat and the shirt is illuminated by white light such as we get from the sun or normal light fixtures that it will seem blue to us. This way of defining a particular colour, as being the colour that normal sighted people would agree as being an object's colour under ordinary lighting conditions, may seem overly subjective. However science can help us out here. A blue object is an object the surface of which absorbs all colours in the visual spectrum except for one frequency, the blue frequency, which it scatters in a diffuse fashion, in all directions. There must therefore be something about the molecular composition of the surface of a blue object that compels us to call it 'blue'. This molecular composition would remain unchanged in a pitch dark room, if the object is covered with a coat, or if it is illuminated with monochromatic red light. Colour can be therefore be defined as being a feature or complex property associated with the molecular composition of the surfaces of objects. This way of defining blueness and redness and purpleness is perhaps about as close to objective as we can get.

In the previous post, I discussed quantum physics and almost as soon as I had published it, I realised that I might have made a mistake. I have been meaning to return to this topic for quite a while but partly because of my ill health it has taken me this long to get back to it. I'll start with what seems to be a major conceptual confusion at the heart of modern physics. Since at least the 'seventies, the dominant field within physics has been particle physics. The world is supposed to be made up of at least 61 different types of fundamental particle such as quarks and neutrinos and Higgs bosons. Importantly the four fundamental forces are supposed to be mediated by particles called gauge bosons: the electromagnetic force is mediated by photons, the strong force by gluons, and the weak force by  W+, W-, and Z bosons. It is proposed that gravity should be mediated by particles called gravitons but gravitons, even if they exist, may be impossible to experimentally detect. The first conceptual confusion is this: on the one hand, some physicists want to explain gravity as resulting from interactions between particles and gravitons but this contradicts the core premise of General Relativity, that gravity is not a real force but rather an effect of the curvature of space-time. Particle physics presumes that, fundamentally, everything can be explained as being the result of local interactions between particles but this seems to run counter to the picture we get from quantum physics which supposes wave-particle duality and non-locality. As I understand it, we are supposed to imagine that particles are excitations of underlying quantum fields. It is the issue of non-locality that I want to return to.

First, I want to say something about the 'randomness' or 'indeterminacy' of quantum mechanics. I like to picture it this way. Given some measurements of a system, we can formulate models of the wave functions associated with all of the particles involved in the system. These wave functions then enable us to make probabilistic estimates of the results of future measurements. However when these subsequent measurements are made, these measurements, say the locations at which electrons land on a screen, are known with certainty and we get 'wave function collapse'. It is with 'wave function collapse', something that occurs when we make a subsequent measurement, that randomness or indeterminacy arises; we cannot predict in advance exactly how a wave function collapse will manifest itself. Randomness is associated with measurements. Some physicists, such as Roger Penrose, believe in 'objective collapse' theories. That is, they suppose that quantum mechanics is incomplete and that wave-function collapse always occurs whether or not someone is watching, that it has nothing to do with measurements. Penrose in face believes that gravity must cause wave function collapse. However, although I cannot provide an ironclad argument in favour of my own interpretation, I believe that wave functions are in some sense subjective, models associated with sets of measurements that must in some sense exist in the minds of conscious observers, that 'wave function collapse' occurs when reality forces a person to change the model in his or her mind.

A little while ago I watched a very interesting discussion between Roger Penrose, Federico Faggin, and Bernado Kastrup on Youtube. Penrose presents the following compelling argument in favour of some kind of objective collapse theory. He imagines a planet in another star system without any conscious life on it, a planet with its own distinctive weather patterns; because of the butterfly effect, quantum considerations come into play and so we can suppose that the weather is actually a superposition of very many weather states. According to subjective interpretations of quantum mechanics, wave function collapse cannot occur because there are no conscious beings on the planet to observe the weather, perform measurements. A satellite takes pictures of the atmosphere of this planet and then sends these pictures to Earth; if we believe in conventional interpretations of quantum mechanics, such as the Copenhagen interpretation, it is only when people look at these pictures, perhaps years after the images were taken, that 'wave function collapse' occurs and one particular weather state is realised. Penrose argues that this little story is too absurd to be credible and so we must therefore assume some theory of objective collapse must be correct; the wave function collapse must surely have occurred before the snapshots were taken and so must be objective. However I think we should approach this thought experiment from a different angle. If scientists on earth know nothing about this exoplanet they can form no quantum model of its weather at all; given some measurements of it, say photos taken of it and transmitted to earth, they may be able to suppose it is in some kind of superposition; then given some further measurements, 'wave function collapse' occurs where 'wave function collapse' is a kind of epistemic phenomenon, a change in the models created to describe the exoplanet that exist, if anywhere, in the minds of the observers. This second interpretation is in fact the one endorsed by Faggin and Kastrup although I had come up with a similar theory myself independently simply by thinking through some logical implications of quantum mechanics.

The mistake that I might have made in the previous essay concerns conservation of momentum. It is tempting to think that energy and momentum are carried from one location to another by things; this is the mistake made by Veritassium in a video he made a long time ago, "The Big Misconception About Electricity." Certainly it seems reasonable to talk about photons carrying energy and momentum from one place to another and particle physics, with its conception of force mediating particles, does indeed seem to suggest that energy and momentum are carried by some kinds of particle between other types of particle, that changes in energy and momentum are the result of local interactions. However, from a Newtonian perspective, the perspective we learnt at high school, energy and momentum are not so much properties of things carried from one place to another but rather conserved quantities; they do not require local interactions and are not necessarily transported from one place to another. An object 1000 m above the surface of the earth has a certain amount of gravitational potential energy and, if released, accelerates downwards, resulting in a transformation of this gravitational potential energy into kinetic energy. Energy changes from one form to another but is not necessarily some kind of substance or property transported from one place to another place. Conservation of energy is something deduced from the mathematics, from the principle that we can explain physical phenomena by supposing that one type of energy, say some kind of potential energy, is turning into another kind of energy, say kinetic energy or heat or electromagnetic radiation. Energy is a mathematical construct that relates to motion and location. Let's consider the same example again, the object released 1000 m above the earth, but this time think about momentum instead of energy. As the object accelerates downward, the earth very slightly accelerates upwards – the gain in momentum of the dropped object is exactly equal and opposite in direction to the gain in momentum of the earth. But note that the exchange of momentum does not result from a local interaction – they are, to begin with, 1000 m apart. We are rather assuming a correlation in the change of momentum of an object in one place with the change in momentum of an object in another place. Perhaps particle physics, with its notion of mediating force particles, should replace this older Newtonian perspective; perhaps, in this example, changes in momentum do not happen until either the object or earth interacts with a graviton. But, if so, it may be that physicists really need to dig into the the philosophical  foundations of their subject to clear away conceptual confusions such as this.

In the previous essay, one of my key claims was that the apparent indeterminacy associated with quantum measurements might be incompatible with conservation of momentum and this might have been a mistake. There was a simple logical flaw in my argument. Suppose that a measurement is made that seems to indicate that the motion of a particle has randomly changed. There is no reason why we cannot suppose that when the measurement of this particle is made, a particle somewhere else in the system (or perhaps even somewhere outside the system) changes its motion in a synchronised fashion that preserves overall conservation of momentum. Furthermore, perhaps I am wrong in suggesting that quantum indeterminacy involves random changes in motion. Perhaps rather we should say that the exact momentum or position of a particle is not fully specified until a measurement is performed, a measurement that may not provide perfect information about the particle but will reduce the uncertainty surrounding it. I believe the confusion here is probably one of the most fundamental in modern physics. Is the universe deterministic or non-deterministic? On the one hand there is a notion in physics that information is absolutely conserved, a notion that depends on the presumption that the universe is deterministic. The way physicists put this is that the evolution of the wave function is 'unitary' - if we suppose that this is true and and also make some assumptions about general relativity, we arrive at the black hole information paradox discovered or invented by Stephen Hawking in the 1970s. Many physicists believe that the universe is deterministic because the wave-function evolves deterministically; as I mentioned in an earlier essay, this is the position of Lawrence Krauss. The basic problem here is that the wave function may evolve deterministically – but only until a measurement is made on the particular system being studied (or, if you believe, as Penrose does, in objective collapse theories, wave-function collapse occurs). The craziness of some physicists in attempting to reconcile quantum mechanics and determinism is exemplified by David Deutsch and those others who believe in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics.  These physicists believe the universe does indeed evolve deterministically but, in a sense, evolves into an infinite number of universes that all exist simultaneously. It is true both that you are reading this now and are out on the town drinking instead at the same time. Some believers in the many-worlds interpretation hold that measurements never actually occur while others think that whenever a measurement is made some number of universes branch off, each containing one of all the possible measurement results. On the other hand, the conventional interpretation of quantum mechanics, the Copenhagen interpretation, is explicitly non-deterministic, and Penrose for instance has based his argument that quantum effects are involved in consciousness on his core thesis that consciousness is non-deterministic, non-computable. There is thus enormous disagreement among physicists about probably the most fundamental characteristic of reality, whether or not the universe is deterministic.

As readers will have realised from the previous essay, I am not an expert in physics. I have discussed quantum physics a number of times in this blog but I arrived at my position more from philosophical considerations than any high-level study of mathematical physics. In the same way that Penrose's argument is motivated by his conviction that consciousness is non-computable, my argument is motivated by my belief that we cannot explain human-level behaviour in terms of simple reductive laws concerning the interactions of particles. I have thought for a long time that we might be able to explain how what I call the supernatural causally affects the natural world by supposing that quantum physics is involved. This is why in the previous essay I defined the terms 'random' and 'non-deterministic' as meaning 'not explainable in terms of simple reductive laws'. However my lack of expertise in high-level physics means that I am not the right person to make the most compelling argument in favour of this position. My view, that the wave function is in some sense a model, a view I have elaborated for a long time, now seems to be a valid new interpretation of quantum mechanics and is the one defended by Faggin and Kastrup although I cannot believe I had any hand in this. I think perhaps rather than returning to quantum mechanics over and over again in this blog, I should leave it to others who have studied it in more depth than I have been able to. Although when I look at the state of modern physics, I am not sure if even the supposed experts in physics have any better ideas than I do these days.

I feel I should talk about my life but I don't know what to say about it. For the last several months I have been thinking about it a lot and although what I have to say about it are things I have expressed more or less clearly elsewhere in this blog I might try to briefly clarify them here. I wish I could know what 'condition' I was diagnosed with when I first became a patient of the Mental Health Service– my difficulty in this respect is that I am not a psychiatrist and am not privy to the esoteric materials psychiatrists study at shrink school. Nor have I ever been given any kind of summary of what my supposed condition was by anyone in the Mental Health Service or ever been told what it was by any doctor. All I feel sure about is that whatever they diagnosed me with, they got it wrong – as I suspect they do with almost all patients. One possibility is that they thought I was a virgin. They might have thought that the cure for my condition was to have sex with a girl or something. This would explain why when I was in respite in 2007, one of the workers seemed to be trying to fix me up with a woman about my own age who was also a patient – I was far too unwell at the time to take advantage of this. Last year I read an essay about schizophrenia which mentioned an older apparent finding that one of the predictors of recovery from psychosis was 'recent sexual connexion', a claim that I suspect is dumb and has the additional demerit of making schizophrenics seem like animals. (Psychiatrists often seem to me to treat their patients as though they are subhuman.) If they did think I was a virgin, the thing which makes it so stupid is that in the interval immediately after I became a patient I actually did have sex a couple of times with my then sort of girlfriend. I guess, though, that no one working in the Mental Health Service had the courage to ask me if I'd ever had sex and somehow I couldn't tell anyone this unprompted, partly because in 2007 and later I didn't realise it was relevant and also because, for me, sex is sacred and was never something I wanted to share with strangers.

A second possibility is that they thought I'd had a 'homosexual experience' immediately before becoming unwell. Certainly I formed the belief that this was what they thought soon after I became a patient and I have intuited since that many patients think that the doctors and other workers within the system think that some kind of 'homosexual experience', an experience patients can't talk about, had caused their illnesses. A psychologist I saw in 2009 once asked me about sex at bFM, as though people in a radio station might be fucking each other at work, and the psychologist I saw in 2014 certainly gave me the impression that he thought schizophrenics were all either gay or bisexual. My question in relation to this supposed aetiology of schizophrenia would be this: how can a person accidentally have a homosexual experience? It seems to me that should a person actually have a homosexual experience, either that person must be gay or bisexual beforehand, or else he or she has been the victim of molestation or rape. If the person is confused about whether or not the experience was consensual, it seems to me possible that that person might then end up turning gay as a way of dealing with cognitive dissonance. However, as readers know, I haven't ever had a real homosexual experience and my intuition, an intuition I trust, is that none or almost none of the patients I've met over the years have had any kind of homosexual experience – apart from the one or two openly gay patients I've met. This idea, that psychosis can be triggered by a homosexual experience, is like an urban myth, an urban myth that people who experience psychosis pick up on in the same way that they also pick up on urban myths of alien abduction and brain-implanted microchips. It may also be that the idea that a homosexual experience can cause schizophrenia became fashionable among psychiatrists, that it is or was the newest fucking retarded theory that the fucking retarded psychiatric profession had decided might explain the cause of schizophrenia in the same way that a few decades ago they thought it was caused by a 'schizophrenegenic mother'. As though everyone diagnosed schizophrenic becomes ill for the same reason. Perhaps it was true of a few cases and then the psychiatric profession extrapolated this to the whole community of people diagnosed schizophrenic. 

In saying all this it might seem that I am touching on somewhat unpalatable ideas. Because this is a blog, I might turn to something else, say something about what I do every day. Every morning I get up and go to my mother's house and watch TV or Youtube or read. I do little else. I am currently reading The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guinn. Sometimes during the day, my mother and I go for drives to places like Piha. My mother is one of the few really good people I know but I suspect she is torn between me and my older brother, a brother I despise. I know it might sound sissy for a grown man to talk about how much time he spends with his mother but, lacking a job, she is and has been for a long time one of the mainstays of my life. In the evening I sometimes walk along Ponsonby Road although I am walking less at night than I used to. I walk just for the exercise; I have never felt unsafe. These days I often just go to bed early though. Every Tuesday I attend a Pub Quiz and, because we have a genius on the team, we usually win, something that I suspect may well demoralise some of the other teams. The other night, because he was not present, we finished in the middle of the pack. That's about it. I have sometimes felt a little physically ill over the last several months and sometimes have needed to take naps during the day. There is a possibility that I have developed type 2 diabetes (my GP thinks so) although, aside from the tiredness, I don't have any of the other symptoms, symptoms like excessive thirst and frequent urination. The tiredness may well be a result of depression or something else psychological rather than a genuinely somatic condition. This all I imagine sounds terribly depressing. Perhaps when this essay is published I will regain my mojo, will recover a little more zest for life, and will be able to start writing more about the topics that interest me in a more engaging fashion.

I considered writing a little about the woman I call Jess again. As you might recall, even though I wrote a film about her in 2012, I have never really known the specific cause of her particular illness. I haven't seen her for a ridiculously long time. Over the years, often wildly disparate hypotheses concerning her have leapt into my head and I have wondered if some are right. Sometimes I have suspected that she wrote a poem when she was a teenager which was misinterpreted and that this might have had a snowball effect. Psychiatrists often look for a big single cause for 'schizophrenia' – a schizophrenia gene or childhood sexual abuse or misuse of illegal drugs for instance. But it had may be that the initial cause of 'schizophrenia' is not only different for every single person but could start small. A rumour could get out about a person which then leads the person to feel she is the victim of a conspiracy and this could then result in psychosis. I wish I could talk to the real girl and ask her what she now believes to have been the cause of her illness – she said something to me a long time ago that I have never understood, something I haven't put in my blog but alluded to in my film, and although she indicated later that she was not sure why she said it, I feel she must know now. 

Perhaps I should say something about the treatment of the 'mentally ill'. There are innumerable problems with the Mental Health System and psychiatry generally and one of these serious problems is that, although copious notes are taken about patients, there appears to be a policy not to discuss the content of a patient's notes with the patient him- or herself. In New Zealand there is a law that patients can access their notes, something I took advantage of in 2015, but the impression I gathered then was that the enormous pile of paper I was given had no relation to the notes read by my various successive psychiatrists and Key Workers. As I have indicated in this blog over and over again, it seems that the psychiatrists got everything wrong, even ostensibly medical matters like my weight at various times and how much medication I was taking. Last year, for the first time in a long time, I got myself a good Key Worker. I brought along a copy of Jess's latest collection of poetry and talked about her and the girlfriends I'd had prior to becoming 'sick'. Although my new Key Worker didn't disclose the content of my notes to me, from the questions she asked I inferred that there were fairly significant errors in my notes concerning my sort-of girlfriend Maya; I also inferred that they thought I had said something about Jess that I hadn't. This is what led me to write the post "Concerning Clerical Errors" and, although I had to unpublish it and although it contained a couple of very small errors, it might have been this essay, which I gave to my Key Worker, that persuaded them to release me from the Act. A more general point can be made. The mental health of patients is extraordinarily dependent on the psychiatrists and Key Workers they have; when you consider that I have this blog through which to assert some control over my life and have some supportive family members and friends and that even I can be so deeply influenced by the workers within the mental heath system that I interact with, how much worse it must be for the majority of patients who are totally powerless, can be flung into hospital at the whim of a doctor or mental health worker and have no idea what is being written about them in their notes.

It is tempting to think that all psychiatrists are sadists and a cursory look at the history of psychiatry, from Kraepelin onwards, might seem to support this. This is not though wholly true; there are some well meaning psychiatrists around. But, generally speaking, every psychiatrist I've ever met has given me the impression that he or she is flailing around incompetently. If we can speak of a conspiracy related to psychiatry, it is this: psychiatrists and the establishment together collude in propagating an illusion of psychiatric competence, in fostering the misperception that psychiatrists are intelligent people who know what they are doing. People in the wider community have an erroneous notion of what goes on in a psychiatrist's office. They imagine that a patient sits down, talks about his or her family and the life events that have affected him or her and that the psychiatrist will murmur things like, "How does that make you feel?" However psychiatrists are not therapists; they are doctors, doctors supposedly looking for symptoms of various types of neurological diseases or disorders and then trying to work out which drug to prescribe and how much of it. When I have tried to talk about bFM and other life events with psychiatrists in the past, they seem to have thought it was irrelevant, have seemed to dismiss it, and do not even record it in their notes. Of course, psychiatrists are secretly psychologists and have secret psychological theories to explain the illnesses of their patients but they never behave like psychologists, never ask questions. If I write any more fiction, it might be worthwhile sketching a picture of what actually goes on in a psychiatrist's office.

I would like to improve the world by a suggesting, not a cure for all 'schizophrenia', but a cure for many types of 'schizophrenia'. The cure is to change the whole world. Of course, in saying this, I am betraying my lefty roots; I regard mental illnesses as social diseases that can be alleviated by changing society as a whole. Attempting to focus just on the few victims is not productive. The best way to help people is to change societal attitudes generally, such as reducing stigma around mental illness and jettisoning the idea that serious mental health conditions are diseases that people are born with and cannot recover from. In particular, the population as a whole needs a better and more consistent understanding of sexuality. People can become ill because there are aspects of sexuality generally that they don't understand and feel uncomfortable talking about; furthermore every single person understands issues to do with sexuality and gender differently to every single other person. I have realised that every person treating me has had a different notion in his or her head of what words like 'gay' and 'straight' mean. I have a small admission to make. Although I have read a little Foucault and read a little around Foucault, I have never read "The History of Sexuality". I didn't feel comfortable reading it or interested in reading it when I was young; I thought it was for gay people. Nor have I read "Gender Trouble" or any of the books by Judith Butler. What I suspect though is that the views of sexuality and gender articulated in Queer Theory today is probably not very helpful to most people; it is more about politics than truth. Young people today are indeed interested in matters relating to sexuality, as evidenced by the current popularity of Chapell Roan; it may be though that a song like "Good Luck, Babe!" probably goes over the head of most young listeners the same way "All Apologies" by Nirvana went over my head when I was a teenager. The problem for young people is that they gain some understanding of sexual differences from pop culture and peers but often fail to develop a more mature and accurate picture of the sexual differences between people until much later and this, together with a certain amount of shame related to sexuality, may be a significant factor in creating and exacerbating mental illnesses. I am not sure if this kind of ignorance and squeamishness was what led to my own mental illness but I do not feel inclined to rehash my life here again.

This essay will make most sense to people who have been following this blog for years; it will not make much sense to people who know nothing about my life. It has meandered as badly as a Trump rally. I'll conclude by saying one last thing. Some readers may think this blog is an indictment on the New Zealand Mental Health System. New Zealand society is certainly facing some serious problems at the moment (we are in recession). But to assume this would be to miss my most central claim. The fundamental problem with the treatment of the mentally ill lies in psychiatry itself. And psychiatric practice and 'science' is all produced in the US. Antony Fernando and my current psychiatrist were both trained in America. I strongly suspect that the situation for people diagnosed with serious mental health conditions in the US may well be vastly worse than the situation for people in New Zealand. All the science surrounding 'schizophrenia' is bullshit; I believe most of it is in the service of avaricious pharmaceutical companies who have a vested interest in pushing the idea that the only remedy for mental illness is the medication that they produce and sell and want people to take medication for their entire lives because it creates a captive market. It is bullshit propagated by psychiatrists who are either utterly unscrupulous or are afraid that if they step out of line with the orthodoxy or criticise their colleagues they will be forced out of their jobs. I get so tired of people talking endlessly in the popular media about neurotransmitters. It is not that I am not advocating a return to Freudian psychoanalysis but the medical model of mental illness that has taken hold, the model codified in the DSM, is not only wrong but profoundly harmful. It may be that we need a completely different theory concerning human psychology. Some such theory may be something I return to in later essays assuming I continue writing this blog in the future. I don't know if the new theory I have in mind will be an improvement – it may well be that, if it were adopted, it would have its own drawbacks and limitations that might create new problems for some patients in the future. But the current system helps no one.

Although this post has wandered from topic to topic I am glad to be have written something again. It might be that this physical or emotional upset will pass or is passing and that I may be able to start writing again more regularly. There is of course a possibility that this blog has jumped the shark. But perhaps there is still something worthwhile I can talk about with readers in the future.