Bullshit

I intended originally to present a more philosophical essay in today's post, a discussion of the nature of personality and how people assess and describe other people's characters and temperaments, but I decided that this could wait a little longer. Instead, I want to cover a slightly dis-jointed series of personal recollections, more or less in chronological order. In the previous post, I talked a little about conspiracy theories, saying that although most of them were bullshit, some might be true. The unifying idea behind today's post is the concept of bullshit.

Conspiracy theories are invented, endorsed and propagated by both members of the Left and the Right. One conspiracy theory of the Left that may be true or may be false is the story that the Russian government gathered kompromat on Donald Trump, secretly recording a liaison between Trump and Russian prostitutes in Moscow, a liaison during which the prostitutes either urinated on him or on each other, with the intention of blackmailing Trump should he became president. The reason I say this story might be false is because there is considerable uncertainty about the veracity of the dossier, compiled by a former M16 intelligence agent, in which the claim is made. It might still be true, though. I feel quite sure that the the theory that Russia interfered in the American election to help Trump get elected, through the promotion and dissemination of bogus blogs and fake news items on social media, is correct. Some Left-wing conspiracy theories, such as the idea that vaccinations cause autism, are probably false, but, on a whole, the Left has a much better handle on the truth than the Right. For example, most Republicans still insist that Climate Change isn't happening. Trump, during the campaign, even asserted that global warming was a hoax invented by the Chinese to hurt American business. This is just one example among many of the way the Right invents and spreads misinformation.

Liberals and Conservatives live in two separate worlds. Democrats get their news from the mainstream television networks, from newspapers, from reputable internet news sites like Mother Jones and from late night news satire programs like The Daily Show. Republicans get their news from Fox, from insane blogs and podcasts and from their equally delusional friends on Facebook and Twitter. The world of the Right is an echo chamber in which the craziest and most evil conjectures are spawned and amplified; it is a fun-house mirror in which Republicans' see reflected  their own madness, a madness born of their own stupidity, feelings of inferiority and self-hatred. There is no consensus reality; we live in a post-truth world. I like to imagine my readers are good secular liberals who live exclusively in the Left-leaning bubble and so you might not realise just how bad the situation has become. But I can tell some stories that illustrate this.

Recently I hung out with a friend of mine who immediately launched on first seeing me into a spiel about how the recent gas attack in Syria or the Trump administration's response, I forget which, was the result of machinations by a global banking conspiracy, a conspiracy including the Rothschilds. I laughed it off, saying "The Protocols of Zion, Amy!" but she was quite serious. When asked where she had picked up this information, she equivocated, saying she had got it from several reliable sources, but I suspect that she picked it up from a former flame, an American non-Trump supporting Republican, who had perhaps found it on some other idiot's blog. This girl, I should add, is a Labour supporter but seems to lack that filter that helps people distinguish between truth and bullshit.

As a patient of the Mental Health System, I have contact with two Mental Health professionals, my shrink who I see every couple of months, and my Key Worker who I currently see once a fortnight. (Of course, I also go in to the Clinic every four weeks to receive an injection.) When I see my Key Worker, an expatriate Indian South African who has been attached to me for about six months, we discuss politics. He also is a conspiracy theorist. A couple of months ago he said, "Do you want to know what the most Communist country in the world is? The answer may surprise you." I hazarded a guess that it was some Scandinavian country, although I added that a better word for these countries would be 'socialist'. He said, "No, it's the United States." This stopped me in my tracks; I had to tell him straightaway he was talking bullshit. Anyone who makes a claim that the United States is the most communist country in the world has no idea what the word 'communist' means. Last week I saw him again and he told me that the gas attack in Syria had been carried out not by the Assad regime, as the Pentagon and entire mainstream media has reported, but by ISIS who somehow had gained access to chemical weapons. In other words, his head is full of bullshit. It is a world-view born from a deep distrust of the 'mainstream media', from the idea that he most news is 'fake news'. In fact this chap gets his worldview from RT, the Russian Government owned news network; he has tried to encourage me also to patronise this news source. It makes me incredibly uneasy to have a Key Worker with such a flimsy grasp of reality – I half think he might be a Russian agent. But I don't get to choose my Key Worker..

It actually frightens me how susceptible people are to bullshit. And it affects me personally, because I have been the victim of bullshit.

I have in this blog discussed several times the period in my life when I was having weekly sessions with a psychologist attached to the clinic, in 2014. I shall assume readers have read and vaguely remember these posts. Around February of that year, before I started seeing Simon Judkins, I gave a long essay to my psychiatrist describing my entire life. It was twenty-five pages long (not fifteen as I have previously said in this blog). I thought this essay had been given to the psychologist and that he had read it but I feel now that he either didn't read it, didn't understand it or didn't believe it. Judkins obviously regards his role as helping homosexuals acknowledge and accept their hitherto denied sexual orientations, and was unnerved at my first appointment with him when I told him I was straight. During my sessions with Simon Judkins I discussed homosexuality, yes, much in the same way I have discussed it in this blog but also repeatedly came back to girls – prior girlfriends, girls I had been attracted to in the past and was attracted to at the time. I don't think any of the actual facts of my life, or the real causes of my illness, made it into his record.

In around 2004 or 2005, while competing my MA in English Literature, I wrote a research essay about the poet John Ashbery. I chose Ashbery more or less at random, mainly because he was a seminal figure in the early days of Post-Modern poetry, and set myself the task of interpreting his incredibly long and incredibly difficult poem Flow Chart. This poem is essentially concerned with Ashbery's life but is almost impenetrable. Having nearly given myself a cerebral haemorrhage trying to make sense of it, I decided that it was a massive 'coming out' poem. But if it was a statement of Ashbery's sexual identity it was a very strange one: he never used the word 'gay' or described sexual relationships with men. It was as though he was coming out as gay only to the two people in the entire world who could read his poem and understand it. This put me in an extraordinarily difficult position. When writing my essay about the poem, I tied myself up in knots trying to talk about the fact that it was a 'coming out' poem without ever explicitly outing him. It was an essay as impenetrable as the original poem.  I was in the process then of applying for a scholarship to an American university to do a PhD in English Literature and I sent this essay to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, MIT and Berkeley.

In more recent years I decided that I was wrong in thinking that in Flow Chart Ashbery was coming out as gay; I decided instead that he was trying to achieve the almost impossible feat of coming out as straight, and I told Judkins this. Between sessions, Judkins did some cursory research on Wikipedia and, at the next appointment, told me that he'd looked Ashbery up and that Ashbery was "definitely gay". I said, "Well, I didn't have Wikipedia when I wrote the essay." The evidence, by the way, that Ashbery is gay, is that he never married, had gay poet friends like Frank O'Hara and wrote a love poem to a male student when he was in high school. Now, I no longer believe any of this is proof sufficient that Ashbery was gay; perhaps the love poem was an expression of platonic rather than erotic love. I no longer can be sure.

In another session I discussed Lou Reed with Judkins. For those who don't know, Reed was treated for homosexuality in the late 'fifties, when he was a teenager, receiving Electro-Convulsive Therapy; in later life he only had relationships with women. When I told Judkins this, Judkins replied sarcastically, "Perhaps they cured him". Judkins missed my point. I believed then and think it still plausible today, that Reed was never gay in the first place, that he was treated for a condition that he didn't have. Reed scholars may dispute this. In other words, I was interested in people who are thought to be gay but aren't. In his attitude Judkin's attitude was inconsistent, hypocritical in fact. He had said to me in an early session that sexual identity was "fluid" but it was quite evident that he didn't believe this.

I think Judkins thought I was a closet homosexual, that I had a homosexual past that I refused to talk about, and was building a picture of me as someone who identified with people Judkins thought were gay. I probably talked about Kurt Cobain as well and this didn't help. In fact, I suspect, and I'm being totally honest now, that Judkins believes all his patients are either homosexual or muddled, perhaps because its the fashion in psychiatry and psychology to assume all schizophrenics are repressed homosexuals or perhaps as the result of massive projection.

In 2014, I saw for a time a new psychiatrist. The psychiatrist I had seen in 2013, Jen Murphy, was away on maternity leave. The first question this new psychiatrist, a woman called Sati, directed at me, with a hostile manner, was "Have you given up yet?" She was asking me, in fact, if I was ready to admit that I was gay. Having said that I was straight, directly and indirectly, since Easter of the previous year, having given the shrinks a long essay several months previously which proved it and having been seeing Judkins at that time for some months, I couldn't bear that they still seemed to think I was a closet homosexual; I chose to interpret her question as a reference to suicide, and replied, no, that basically I was a hopeful person. If she was indeed referring to suicide, it was an incredibly callous question to ask.

I continued seeing Judkins up until the end of 2014 or the beginning 2015. At the very beginning of 2015, I experienced some suicidal ideation. It was a direct result of a year of helpful therapy with this man. I felt like killing myself because there seemed no other way out. I was at this time seeing a different psychiatrist again, one Jeremy Whiting, and the idea of a reduction in my medication had been mooted; I think the cunts in charge of my life had decided that I had come to terms with my sexual orientation and that it was permissible to reduce my dosage. I had a judicial hearing at which it was determined my medication could be reduced from 300mgs every four weeks to 210mgs. At one of my appointments with Whiting, I think shortly before the hearing, I asked him if my diagnosis of schizophrenia would prevent me travelling overseas and mentioned a three month trip I'd taken to Europe in 2004. From his body language, I could just sense what he was thinking – that my trip to Europe had been an opportunity for multiple homosexual trysts. He didn't say anything, I simply intuited that he thought this. You might think I am reading a lot into very little. However, at all the Independent Reviews I have had since, at which the psychiatrists have argued that I am not fit to be released from the Mental Health Act, my shrinks have deemed it relevant to mention that I had an OE in Europe in 2004 and irrelevant to mention my previous girlfriends- although in the last review in the second half of last year, Jen decided to put in my report at the end, "He identifies as heterosexual and has had relationships with women in the past".

I wrote a little about my trip to Europe in the post "Stolen Kisses".

After the judicial hearing at which it was decided my mediation could be reduced to 210mgs, I saw Whiting again. My mental state around this time was profoundly depressed and distressed. A part of me knew that the cunts still thought I was gay; another part of me wanted to believe that the truth, having been put into writing a year before, and having been told to Judkins, was at last on my record. I told Whiting the story I wrote about in the post "Definitions of Sexuality", about the time when I was twenty-two when a man got in face. I described the situation I felt I had been in: "diagnosed homosexual and that's the only homosexual experience I ever had." Whiting grimaced. He old me I should start seeing Simon Judkins again. Perhaps he regretted his decision to let me reduce the drugs; he must have realized I still hadn't acknowledged my homosexuality. It suddenly became clear to me that Judkins must have been lying about me. That night or the next I sent Judkins an abusive email. I asked him, among other things, if he liked to spend time in gay saunas; I also told him that he was "in denial of his True Self and that if he didn't already fantasise about men when he masturbated, that he should start." Judkins lodged a complaint against me and immediately that after I ended up back in the psychiatrist's office - Whiting had gone to South America on honeymoon and so it was with Sati again. My dosage was increased back to 300mgs which is what I am still on. At the Review that I had in September of 2015, the reason given for why they increased the dosage was "weight loss" rather than the fact that I had sent my ex-psychologist an abusive email.

I'll tell one other story. In May 2015, my mother and I saw a screening of the Kurt Cobain biopic Montage of Heck. At my next appointment with Sati I mentioned that we had seen it. She said something like "is Kurt Cobain someone like you?". I don't remember her precise words unfortunately but her meaning was clear: she thought Cobain and I were alike in being closet homosexuals – although psychiatrists don't seem to use that term. So I said that I had liked Cobain since I was a teenager and explained that when I first got sick in 2007 I had believed that everyone in the world was gay except me and that Cobain was the first person I could think of who was also straight. She drew back in surprise, was taken aback, perhaps because what I said ran completely counter to the records about me, perhaps because I had actually used the word "gay". I recognised that this information about my first episode was new to her and told her that I told my psychiatrist Dharma this in 2013. So it should have been on my record. And of course I had written a fucking essay about it all very early the previous year.

In an earlier post, I mentioned that, back in 2014, on one occasion Judkins had asked me if I thought Jon Stewart was gay or straight. The other night I heard Jess in my head and she asked me, "Why did Simon Judkins ask you if Jon Stewart was gay or straight?". This might be a cue that this question is important and so I should hazard a guess. The Daily Show screened in New Zealand from 2008 until the end of 2009 and then went off the air here; it came back at the beginning of 2014 not long after I was put under the Act. I felt at the time, as I have said in previous posts, that I felt that my imaginary friend had come back when I needed him, when my life had reached rock bottom. I have written about my observations of Jon that year and the next in the chaotically written post "Me and Jon Stewart Part 3" but I feel I need to make something clear that I didn't make clear in that post. I sensed then, from watching his show, that rumours about his sexuality might be swirling around, that Jon knew or sensed this and that Jon found it painful. I remember an episode early in 2014 where he reported an audience member asking him if he enjoyed receiving blowjobs; his discomfort was palpable. Given the prevalence of bullshit in the US in recent years, I wouldn't be surprised if people on the Right hadn't launched a smear campaign against him. He knew about the rumours and I think it even made him ill. What I now suspect is that this rumour had reached the ears of my psychologist and that being the stupid shit that he is, someone who had never watched The Daily Show, he had believed it. The fact that I had been imaginary friends with Jon had been taken as further evidence that I was a closet homosexual.

This post is too long but I need to tell one more story. The older brother of a friend of mine is also diagnosed schizophrenic. He became ill at the same age as I did, saw the same psychiatrist as I saw did, Tony Fernando, was also put on Rispiridone first and then Olanzapine later. Unlike me, he was hospitalised repeatedly. He is now outside the system although I think he still takes lithium and I think Olanzpaine. He is still evidently unwell and is an alcoholic now. He told me once that he got out of the system by "telling the psychologist what the psychologist wanted to hear", something I am incapable of doing. You can easily imagine a little what he might have told the psychologist. He was quite evidently straight when he was younger but his sexual identity is now all fucked up. Although he hasn't come out to any of his family and friends, one can sense it. My friend, I should add, is completely unwilling to admit that his older brother's sexual identity is now all fucked up and that the reason it is fucked up is because of his treatment by the Mental Health System.

Unlike me, Yves never kept a blog telling his side of the story.

Being a patient of the Mental Health System in this country is like living in Putin's Russia. The whole system is built on bullshit, on incompetency and lies. I know I go on a bit about this but you have e