Cannabis and the Causes of Schizophrenia

In America, a number of states have legalised cannabis and the same move is being considered here in New Zealand by parliament. In fact, just a day or two ago, the Drug Foundation called for the decriminalisation of all illicit drugs so that addiction can be considered a health issue rather than a legal issue. If this proposal were to be accepted, New Zealand would be following in the footsteps of Portugal, a country that some years ago decriminalised the possession and use of all drugs, with beneficent results for Portuguese society and their justice system.

I suspect that the ordinary Joe Bloggs, who enjoys the occasional reefer with his beer after knocking off work at the construction site, wouldn't oppose this move (and most New Zealanders don't) but that it would be opposed by many doctors. In particular, there is an hypothesis, embraced by I think a lot of psychiatrists, that cannabis use is a major cause of psychosis, even schizophrenia, an hypothesis now supposedly supported by recent research. I have known several psychiatrists who at least pay lip-service to this received wisdom. Of course, I believe this hypothesis bullshit and the point of this post is to say why it is bullshit. I also want to state more categorically the reason I became 'ill' myself.

When I studied in Dunedin, I had an acquaintance, a marijuana user, who had a psychotic episode, during which he shaved off all his hair, including his eyebrows, because he believed his hair was acting as small antennas through which aliens were controlling him. Stories about cannabis-fuelled psychotic episodes, and even more stories about metamphetamine fuelled psychotic episodes, circulate widely through New Zealand society, in the same way that in Janet Frame's day, schizophrenics were all thought to be axe-welding maniacs. If there does seem to be evidence of a causal link between pot-use and psychosis, it is probably the fact that very many young people diagnosed with a mental illness have tried wacky-backy. Doctors, by contrast, tend to be people who have never tried pot and don't socialise with those who have. A significant cultural difference exists between the medical profession and those that they treat, and this culture difference is a part of the reason that there can be conflict between doctors and patients.

The problem with the hypothesis that cannabis-use causes psychosis is that it fails to take into account all the people who have tried pot, or use it regularly, who never become 'ill' at all. During the course of my life, all my friends, all my peers, had at least tried pot, and some smoked it every day; only a couple of them ever experienced a drug-induced psychosis. The stereotype of the stupid stoner dude who likes surfing and talks in a drawl, typified by Sean Penn in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, is only that, a stereotype; Bill Maher, a long time campaigner for marijuana law reform who, a little while ago, after cannabis was legalised in California, brazenly lit up a real joint live on his TV show, is far from stupid, and Barack Obama himself has admitted to smoking pot. Some months ago, TV1 news reported on a survey indicating that 85% of New Zealanders under the age of twenty-five had tried cannabis. If 85% of the patients who show up in psychiatric offices having experienced psychosis have tried pot, one might suspect a causal connection – but only if one discounts the rest of the population, the 85% of people who have tried pot without ever flipping out at all.

The simple equation "Cannabis use causes psychosis" requires fine-tuning. One might say, as many people do, that cannabis-use causes psychosis in the small minority who have a vulnerability to psychosis, a predisposition to schizophrenia that is either genetic or incurred as the result of childhood experiences. There is a problem even with this refinement, however, and, as evidence, I will draw upon my own life-experience. Yes, it is true that just prior to my first psychotic episode, at the Big Day Out in 2007, I smoked a lot of pot (while high on Ecstasy). It is also true that after becoming a patient of the Mental Health System, I vowed never to smoke pot again. But that concert I attended at the age of twenty-seven wasn't the first occasion I had smoked cannabis. I was never a heavy cannabis user but I did smoke it, a couple of times a year, from the age of about fifteen, with friends. The period in my life when I smoked the most was during seventh form, when I was seventeen. My best friend Shannon and I would get stoned, go to the video shop, and wander around lost looking for David Lynch films. If I had a vulnerability to psychosis that was triggered by cannabis use, my condition would have manifested when I was seventeen. Not twenty seven.

I have another reason for disliking the simple formula "Cannabis use causes psychosis". It is another way of blaming the victim. I have a friend, diagnosed bi-polar in his early twenties, who smoked pot prior to his diagnosis and still smokes pot today. I saw him recently and gently tried to gauge his opinion on the possibility that his illness might be in some way related to his drug use; he grew angry and defensive, I think rightfully so, because I was suggesting that his condition might be his fault. He knows his 'illness' better than I do, I think. The simply formula "Cannabis use can cause mental illness" can have other pernicious consequences. I know another patient, also diagnosed bi-polar, who once told his psychiatrist that his manic episodes were like taking drugs. They put down in his notes that he was a drug-user. He had never touched illegal drugs in his life.

Although it seems an simple (even dismissive) explanation for the cause of a person's 'illness', in my own case, the primary cause of my psychosis wasn't in fact the drugs. In the post, "My First Psychotic Episode", I summed it up. The causes of my illness has always been people thinking I'm gay when I'm not. The belief a person might entertain that others around him think him gay when he isn't sounds like a paranoid delusion but I have adduced evidence for it that this happened with me. In the post I just mentioned and the post "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM" I showed that there must have been a misperception of me at the radio station at which I worked; in "Concerning Dreams" I showed that something like a rumour about me must have even found its way into my flat. (In that post, by the way, I said that the party I talked of was held after I left bFM. I think now that it happened after the Big Day Out but before I left bFM.) For the longest time, I couldn't work out why people around me thought I was gay. Was it a rumour? Or was it something about my voice and body language, or even the brand of beer I chose to drink? I can turn off and on a gay voice almost at will, and in the early years of my 'illness' was paranoid mostly about how others perceived me. Recently, I discussed this problem with a good friend. During our conversation, he conceded that, in all likelihood, a rumour about me must have existed prior to my first episode. My friend, who is straight, also reassured me that I didn't give off a gay vibe, saying "I'm camper than you are."

I believe that something like a rumour did circulate about me and, if this did occur, it started as a result of a short film I wrote in 2001 at the age of twenty-one as part of a screenwriting paper, the gay spy film I have described in "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM." I believe that the English faculty at Auckland University decided I might be gay because of this film – and I want to adduce some evidence for this. I studied for my MA between 2001 and 2003. During a class on Joyce, I gave a presentation about "The Dead" in which I focussed on the idea of 'performance' as a theme in this story. When I named the theme, the lecturer flinched. I sensed that he thought my presentation was going to tackle this story from a gay perspective; I sensed this but didn't know why – I now realise that he thought I was going to relate "The Dead" to Judith Butler's theory of gender-performativity. When he realised that my presentation had nothing to do with queer theory at all he showed signs of visible relief. (In fact, I knew nothing about Judith Butler's theory of gender-performativity at all until just last year.) In another class, another lecturer, Alex Calder, who has a high voice, exhibited his anxiety about others' perceptions of him, an anxiety common among many academics in this country, by saying, "The reason I talk this way is because I had prostate cancer." Many lecturers in the Humanities have been made uncomfortable by the rise of queer theory and feminist theory. In 2004, I wrote an essay about the poet John Ashbery, having decided, after reading his incredibly long and difficult poem Flow Chart, after I had made the decision to write about him, that he was gay. My supervisor, Wystan Curnow, asked me what I liked about Ashbery and I was only able to say that we shared a similar world-view. That year I applied to do PhD at several American universities; Wystan sarcastically suggested I go to Berkeley.

Although I knew that the English department thought I might be gay, none of them was brave enough to ask directly, and so I was never able to set them right. For many years, this was also my experience of the Mental Health System (and then, when I finally was asked, in Easter 2013, I wasn't believed). Back then, though, it didn't cause me to go mad. Knowing that my lecturers thought I might be gay impacted corrosively on my self-esteem but I didn't go nuts until 2007, when it seemed that everyone in the world thought I was gay, including I think members of my own family.

I believe. now, that the cannabis I smoked at the Big Day Out exacerbated the psychotic episode I suffered about a month and a half later, but that it wasn't the cause. The cause we know. The only 'crime' I committed in my life, if you can call it a crime, is that I wasn't homophobic enough. Over the course of my life, I have known many gay men, both before and after they came out, and have several close friends who are lesbians. I had known gay men prior to writing the film in 2001. I remember, when I was seventeen, I went to the Hero parade with my girlfriend of the time. I wore an extremely tight t-shirt that belonged I think to a kid sister, because I thought it would be fun to pretend to be gay for a night. Unlike John Nash who, if reports about him are to be believed, behaved badly in many ways when he was young, the reason for my 'illness' was that I was too good, too left-wing.

I should bring this essay back to its original topic. A problem in psychiatry is that there is this thing, this condition, called 'schizophrenia' and it simply must have a cause, but no one knows what the cause is. Because schizophrenia is literally considered an illness,  it is assumed it must have a physical cause, and a leading candidate today for this cause is 'cannabis use' (even though, in Janet Frame's day, schizophrenics existed but cannabis-use didn't).  In reality, there is no such thing as 'schizophrenia'. People go mad for a time and then recover. The causes are different for every different person. But the reasons are seldom something simply physical. Often the madness has a spiritual dimension. And, in order to recover, the person needs to make sense of his experiences and talk about it with people. This is what I've learned, and what I am trying to share.

I might finish with a line from a song by the fantastic Kurt Cobain. "Just because you're paranoid, don't mean they're not after you." Perhaps not the best sentiment to end this post with but a wonderful line anyhow.

[Note: I have included my interpretation of "The Dead" in this blog, under the title "Exhuming James Joyce's The Dead.]

Mind Matters

In some ways I feel that this blog is finished, but there are still some stories I want to tell. I would love to write as well as Steve Braunias, with his sense of humour, but when I am not descanting about philosophy or physics, I am just trying to get the facts down 'on paper'. It's all been a bit workmanlike recently. The purpose of this post is to describe my time as a day patient at a Respite facility called Mind Matters in (I think) November and December 2007 and at last describe the kind of culture I was in. Just for the sake of completeness. For the sake of giving some clearer idea of what it is like to be a Mental Health patient here in this county.

In New Zealand (I don't know about the US), Respite facilities are places where Mental Health patients can stay when they are acutely unwell or when they are having difficulty looking after themselves. Respite facilities are not hospitals. Often they are simply anonymous houses in ordinary suburbs, or out in the sticks, with a number of bedrooms, and with an office staffed by some Mental Health worker containing his computer on which he takes notes. I don't know whether the caretakers of Respite facilities tend to be Social Workers, Occupational Therapists, or nurses, or whether they are just hired off the street. I have been in Respite twice in my life – the second time at a house in Point Chevalier in early 2014, just before I was put under the Act, a truly horrible institution which I believed at the time to be Purgatory. The caretaker's principal role, seemingly only role, was to cook meals, administer medication, and take notes on the patients. I had been coerced into going there and was only at this place two nights before running home to my mother. I have described a little of this Respite facility in the post "On Religion" and "Schizophrenia and the Double Bind Theory". But this is not the Respite Facility I want to talk about in this post. Rather I want to talk about a house that has since been disestablished, Mind Matters, out in Titirangi.

As far as I know, there are four official Respite facilities in Auckland, although there may be other unofficial ones. Of course, Respite facilities came into existence because the old insane asylums were abolished in the 'eighties and it was decided that something intermediate between hospitalisation and living in the community was required. Typically, patients only spend a week or so at one of these places but I have a little conspiracy theory that patients judged incurable may be shuffled between different facilities their whole lives. My experience of the second respite facility was truly terrible – the slum-like house felt indistinguishable from an insane asylum and I wonder today if the evil psychiatrist treating me had decided, against the evidence, that I was an incurable schizophrenic and accordingly sent me to a Respite facility for impossible cases. However, many respite facilities, I understand from other patients, may be quite pleasant, and often patients seek respite care voluntarily, although this may partly be because many of those who were diagnosed 'mentally ill' in their teenage years are in a sense institutionalised.

It is difficult for me to give precise dates but, I think, around early November 2007 my psychiatrist Tony Fernando thought it would be in my interests to become a day patient at the house out at a Titirangi. I had been more or less intensely psychotic since February or March of that year, since shorty after the Chilli Peppers concert; my mother was still working and I think a part of the reason I was sent there was because she felt like she couldn't look after me during the day. Every morning I was picked up by a Taylor Centre employee whose name I've now forgotten but who came from Melbourne, was a genuinely good person, and was taken to Mind Matters where I spent the day. I was picked up by my mother around four-thirty. From an outsider's perspective, Mind Matters seemed idyllic. It was a lovely house with multiple bedrooms, a beautiful view out over the Manukau heads, and was well-staffed principally by youngish women. It was intended for young people, teenagers and those in their early twenties, as a place where psychotics newish to the system could maybe make friends. From the beginning, I felt too old to be there – I was twenty-seven. But I was always an anomaly, a problem for the Mental Health Service, because I had never experienced a psychotic episode before that year. Schizophrenics tend to become 'ill' in their late teens or early twenties, rather than at twenty-seven. I was under the aegis of the Early Intervention Team but I didn't fit, have never fitted the profile of a 'typical' schizophrenic, if such a thing exists.

When I was sent to Mind Matters, I didn't then know anything about respite facilities, and didn't fully realise that I was delusional. In fact, I believed, that year, that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals; the name "Mind Matters" itself got tangled up in the delusion. I thought that it was a place to send geniuses, either those geniuses who had discovered the secret of the homosexual conspiracy, or those geniuses who were to be recruited to the homosexual ruling elite. Upon first arriving at the facility, I was primed to see my fellow inmates in a negative light. I was introduced to a teenage patient and, encouraged by a worker, we played table tennis. At the time, I believed that the Nazis were all closet homosexuals; I decided to thank the young man for some small gesture he had made by replying to him in his own language, "dankershern". He flinched in fear. This young man evidently had his own paranoid conspiracy theory; I picked up from some small signs that he believed in a Chinese plot; I speculate that he also had Fernando as his psychiatrist and had mistaken Fernando for Chinese (although Fernando is in fact from the Philippines). One of the workers at Mind Matters was Asian and he was convinced that she was part of the Chinese conspiracy, despite her continued protestations that she was actually Japanese. One of the other workers tried to get us to play Trivial Pursuit together– patients were supposed to be having fun and making friends, but this is obviously a quixotic hope when the two patients who are supposed to be making friends are both in the grips of extremely powerful paranoid delusions. The next day, we played Last Card with another patient, a Maori boy who had come to Mind Matters directly from hospital. The Maori boy and I started to blatantly cheat, abandoning any pretence of following the rules. The young man with the Chinese conspiracy theory panicked, abandoned us, phoned his father and asked to be taken home. I fell subject to a panic attack myself and asked if I could go wait on the street for my mother (it was close to the time when she picked me up). The Maori boy, the only one remaining of the three of us, went downstairs and began beating on the pipes, yelling, "I am the powerfullest!"

Before he left, the young man delivered a parting shot at me. I was sitting at a table in the front yard talking to a staff member when he emerged on the balcony and yelled out, "I'm still smarter than you are!". He never came back.

That first week at Mind Matters was the worst. I thought I was going to be the victim of human sacrifice. Despite its salubrious layout and environs, Mind Matters always felt to me like a kind of institution. A chimney flue ran from the lower floor up into the upper floor, transmitting sounds from the rooms below to the rooms above, exacerbating the feeling that one was under observation all the time, living in a panopticon. Although the situation improved after the first week, I was at some level sane enough to know that the other patients around me were crazy, that the house was more asylum than holiday camp. I felt a need to prove that I wasn't stupid – so I borrowed Fear and Trembling by Kierkegaard from the library and sat all day on the veranda pretending to read it. I remember spending time with a teenage girl who, for her part, sat all day reading Janet Frame's The Goose Bath. I told her I liked Douglas Adams and she instantly warmed to me, saying "My father likes Douglas Adams!" Later, during my stay, I borrowed Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, although I didn't get round to reading that either.

Many years ago the psychiatric profession apparently performed a fascinating experiment. A number of trainee doctors were told to pretend to be mad and were admitted to an asylum. The factotums who worked there couldn't tell the difference between the mad patients and the sane ones. But the patients themselves could always tell the difference. The situation was the same at Mind Matters. Although I didn't hear voices, I was profoundly 'unwell' – but the Social Workers and OT's who worked there had no idea how unwell I was, why I warmed to some people and kept others at arm's length. On one occasion I overheard one of the workers saying to another, "Remember the DSM? Borderline Personality Disorder..?" I piped up from the couch and said that I'd diagnosed myself a long time with Avoidant Personality Disorder.

The staff at Mind Matters was quite large – I would say about four women were there all the time and others, men and women, would come and go during the day. The staff had their own private space, an office in a separate building off-limits to the patients, which contained a number of computers. I imagine it was the place they went to discuss the kids trapped there, and take notes on them. Of course, the workers had access to my own notes from that year, although my notes were inaccurate and tended to extrapolate traits and dispositions wildly from stories I had told and from some cryptic and in reality inconsequential comments and and reactions I had made and performed. I suspect the workers there were trying to work out if I was gay or straight – when the obvious method to find out would have been simply to ask. On one occasion, I went for a walk with a woman who I think was a kind of untrained support worker. I was becoming slightly panicky about my situation and told her about the trip I took to Europe in 2004 and all the attractive young women I has seen there. She said sarcastically, "Did you like what they were wearing?" Evidently a story I had told earlier in the year had led them to believe wrongly that I was a transvestite. I said, "No, I liked the girls!" On another occasion, she took me to the waterfront and showed me an artwork. A rocky formation in one of the cliffs resembled male buttocks, and an artist had highlighted this resemblance by painting speedos on it. Now, I'm not so stupid that I can't tell the difference between a male arse and a female arse and I pointed out that I knew it was the posterior of a man. The worker said, sarcastically, "Very smart!"

What condition precisely had they diagnosed me with? I strongly suspect, now, and I've had years to think about this, that many psychiatrists (and even the psychologist I saw in 2014) think that everyone is bisexual, and that a cause of mental illness among some intelligent men and women is the realisation of this 'fact'. Some people who work in the system are aware of this theory but know its bullshit, struggle with the insane ideology that prevails– hence, the hostility of the woman I have described above. I too think its bullshit. I was totally heterosexual. In fact, as I have suggested indirectly in this blog, I think 'homosexuality' was invented by the psychiatric profession. This may seem a bizarre claim but, although he doesn't say this explicitly, it is Michel Foucault's position and the position adopted by David Halperin in his book One Hundred Years of Homosexuality.

Although the workers couldn't understand my condition, the other patients always understood it, understood me, and also intuitively knew just how ill I was. They always knew I was straight. I sincerely believe that psychotics and schizophrenics are all a little bit psychic. During the first week or two of my stay, I used to sit and listen to a young Maori girl endlessly and incomprehensibly, smilingly, tell stories about her family. On one occasion she said, "Do you want to have children?" Now, one of the first questions asked of Mental Health Patients is if there is any mental illness in the family, and so patients understand from the beginning, even if it is not made explicit, that mental illness is considered hereditary and that they are in a culture in which they will be tacitly discouraged from getting married and having kids. I understood her immediately, although I related it to my delusion that homosexuals were outbreeding heterosexuals, and told her, "I don't know. I have a lot of cousins though." On another occasion, another Maori boy, this one wearing a crucifix on a chain around his neck, appeared on the scene and came into the yard where we were sitting. I sensed immediately that he was sexually muddled. The Maori girl pointed to him and me and said, "I wish you and he could switch places!" Over the next couple of weeks, this boy formed an intense friendship with a Pakeha boy his own age and became inconsolable when his friend left.

The philosophy behind Mind Matters was to provide a space in which smart but mentally ill kids could have fun and make friends in a safe environment. It never worked for me. The workers there knew from my notes that I had lived in a flat with twenty other people and on one occasion compared Mind Matters with the Big House. I felt like saying, "This place is nothing whatsoever like the Big House."

I was a day patient at Mind Matters for a really long time, perhaps as long as two months. After the first week, things became easier – patients less acutely unwell and closer to my own age started staying over at the place. Men and women in their mid-twenties would appear, stay a couple of days or a week and then disappear again. However, I never became friends with any of these other patients, even going so far as to actively avoid them. I didn't like the house and would escape it every day by going for walks down to the shore or up to Titirangi shops for coffee. During the rest of the day, I would sit in a quiet corner where there was not chance of any interactions with other patients or with the workers, and spend the whole day laboriously completing the cryptic crossword. Basically, I spent eight hours a day waiting to be picked up by my mother and taken away from the place. Weekends were better – they were my respite from respite. I would lie on the couch at home all day watching the various Star Trek spin-offs, which I regarded as 'straight camp'. I was, of course, incredibly sedated by the drug I was being forced to take.

During the long period I was a patient at Mind Matters, I recovered from the psychotic episode that had begun perhaps at bFM, perhaps a little later after the Chilli Peppers Concert. The delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals went away and, although I experienced psychosis again in 2009 and 2013, this particular paranoid delusion never returned, although I still recognised that, as a patient of the Mental Health System, I was trapped in a perverse world that had entirely different rules to the real world. I stopped believing in the homosexual conspiracy over ten years ago – although this hasn't stopped my previous hateful psychiatrist, who I only got rid of recently, from implying at the Independent Reviews I've has since that I still believe in it.

I feel however that I need to explain this delusion a little. Yes, a delusion that the world is ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals is repugnant. This is why I couldn't talk about it for so long. What makes it even more repugnant is that I believed that homosexuals were procreating and that heterosexuals weren't. I knew immediately that I was subject to a discourse in which smart people were all considered bisexual and that I was being treated by a psychiatrist who I sensed from the first appointment was a closet homosexual. It sounds like a right-wing delusion to say that one believed in a homosexual conspiracy – but in fact my delusion was left-wing. I thought openly gay men and women were heroes. I thought Democrats were all either straight or openly gay; I thought Republicans were all closet homosexuals. At heart, I thought people on the Left followed their hearts and chose love and truth over fear and lies; I thought people on the Right chose fear and lies over love and truth. The psychosis I experienced in 2007 and 2009 wasn't principally concerned with sexuality but rather with politics. Tomorrow, America is to have its mid-term elections. I know, of course, that Trump is 'straight' – but he is the archetypal example of someone who has chosen lies and fear over truth and love.

So, this is my fairly workmanlike post about the time I spent in a Respite facility over eight years ago. Like many of the posts I have written, it found its subject as it went along. It seems evident to me, now, that what I intuited back then was the truth. The young man who seemed on the surface to believe in a Chinese conspiracy really believed in a homosexual conspiracy – and I have seen the same delusion again and again over the last ten years. It is a delusion that is natural response to psychiatric discourse itself. Foucault argued that discourses create the objects that they talk about. Another vile secret of psychiatry is that psychiatry created homosexuality and is still today turning straight people gay. Terrible, unbelievable. But true. The cause of homosexuality is the idea of homosexuality. If, dear reader, you are ever in a situation where a psychiatrist or psychologist tells you that there is some homosexuality in everyone, ask him if he gets sexually excited around men or fantasises about men when he jerks off.

I'll finish this post with two last comments about Mind Matters. The girl I call Jess had also been a patient there on several occasions before I met her and, unlike me, had enjoyed her time there. Unlike me, she'd been a patient of the Mental Health System since she was seventeen and its culture was the only culture she knew. Second, on my last day at Mind Matters, I was given a questionnaire sheet asking if I had made friends during my time there. I wrote, "No". And I did so with pleasure.

Concerning Dreams

In the film, David Brent, Life on Road, Brent, who suffers from serious depression, visits his unsympathetic psychiatrist and is asked, "Have you had the dream again?" He says "No". Then she spends about five minutes writing notes. After the consultation, upset, Brent tells the documentary crew his feelings, that he has no idea what his doctor thinks of him, worries that she might consider him a loser – or even a pervert. The scene is profound. It really shows Ricky Gervais's understanding of issues in the world that he probably has little contact with.

At least Brent's psychiatrist asks a question from time to time. Mine usually doesn't.

I have written about dreams a long time ago in this blog but I want to revisit this topic. I concede I will be covering material I have already gone over. I have suffered from nightmares since I was a small child and awake from dreams these days every morning. I can remember a dream I had when I was about four. It was edited in scenes like a television program and set at Sesame Street. The dream transitioned from shots of a chemist's laboratory, all bubbling pipettes, alembics, and test tubes, to shots of the street, a large puppet dog (one of the main characters then) and a human woman. The sky behind them was dark with thunderclouds. In the dream, I knew that the dog had rabies. I was the only one who knew though and was terribly afraid, felt that I needed to warn someone but didn't know who.

If I were to interpret this dream, I would note that one of my favourite books at that age was The Value of Believing in Yourself, about Louis Pasteur. I would also note that I watched Sesame Street every day. Aside from this, it is to long ago to establish what this dream meant or foreshadowed.

I wish to describe and interpret three dreams I have had since first becoming 'ill', all dreams I can remember vividly. The first happened in the middle of 2007. In the dream, I was sitting on a hill with my best friend from my days spent studying at Otago University in 1998 and 1999, Caleb Edwards A helicopter convoy arrived and took me to a house in the shadow of Mount Smart stadium, the air echoing with the bass beat of a rock concert. Inside the house, bedecked with Christmas decorations, I found myself in the presence of a number of ghouls and vampires, one of which even lacked a face. After I saw the faceless ghoul, I woke up.

Mount Smart stadium was the venue for the Big Day Out in January of that year. As I described in the posts "My First Psychotic Episode" and "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM" it was right after the Big Day Out that I had my meltdown at the radio station and maybe a month and a half later that I became psychotic. (The exact dates are in the post "Dates, Dosages, and Other Matters.") I want now to describe something that happened at the Big Day Out that is highly significant to the stories I've been telling but which I haven't told before. A bFM tent was set up on a grassy knoll in the stadium: I saw Jose Barbosa sitting there and approached him. I asked him if he wanted to go watch some bands with me. He leaned towards me and said, "I wish I could!" Something about his body language suggested he was attracted to me, that he meant something more than what he said. It was this moment that I knew for sure that he was gay but I immediately repressed this knowledge, clapping him on the shoulder in a matey heterosexual way. I suspect also that his inability to come watch the bands with me was because he was officially in the closet. Later that day I took Extasy and smoked a lot of pot with a mate from the Big House and, stoned nearly insensible, watched Tool play. People familiar with Maynard Keening's personal life (I wasn't then back in 2007) may rightly intuit that in my drugged state I may have picked up some slightly fucked up vibes. The reason for my meltdown the next Tuesday had something to do with aftereffects of the drugs but also the fact that the girl I liked, Caroline, had disappeared and I was stuck in a radio station with only Jose. A month later I saw the Chilli Peppers perform and was witness to Anthony Kiedis's indirect 'coming out' as queer – no wonder I decided that the world was full of closet homosexuals. It was all a perfect shit-storm.

Before I get back to the dream, I need to say something more about my first psychotic episode. I have said that a rumour went around my flat that I was gay but haven't offered any evidence. One of my flatmates was a girl called Kristy, a cool nice girl – I think for some reason I don't know she decided I was gay. Oddly enough I think she warmed to me more, was more friendly, when she had decided I was gay. I was walking with her once, after I started working at bFM, and she told me that there were places macho gay men could go to pick up people. I didn't know why she was telling me this and wondered if she was referring to the radio station. At a party in the interval between my leaving bFM and becoming psychotic, one of the enormous parties the Big House held,she introduced me to an obviously gay young man. He wanted a tour of the Big House and I took him around, even showing him the attic. When I showed him the attic, he said, in an innuendo rich tone, "I've heard of the attic." The only reason I was taking him for this tour was out of good-manners and friendliness but I felt uncomfortable and after this short perambulation got rid of him and found a straight male friend to talk to. When we parted company, the young gay man said, "Crazy."

To repeat myself, the reason I became 'sick' and remained 'sick' was because people around me had decided I was gay without ever asking.

I'll get back to the dream now. The reason the dream begins with an idyllic scene in which I am sitting on a hill with someone who had been my best friend for a long time when I was young, I think now, is because in the dream I was harking back to a time when my friends were straight, when male-male relationships were uncomplicated. The allusion to the Big Day Out marks my break with the past. And this is when it gets weird. The house full of ghouls and vampires I believe was a version of a Respite facility I spent at least a month as a day-patient in around December 2007 and January 2008. A house in Titirangi called "Mind Matters." During this period I spent a lot of time with other psychotics but much more time sitting doing nothing or leaving the facility for walks around Titirangi. I hated being there; in fact during the first week at the place I thought I was going to be the victim of human sacrifice. I can remember I was there just before Christmas when the staff hung fairy-lights along the balcony balustrade. My time at this Respite facility deserves a post for itself. The reason it's so weird that I dreamed about Mind Matters is because I had the dream some months before I became a day patient at the place. So the dream represented a kind of fore-knowledge or prescience.

Taken as a whole the dream describes a move from my former life, when I had been happy, to my hellish life as a patient of the Mental Health System.

Another dream I had in 2007 has stuck with me ever since. I dreamt I was in a subterranean grotto. Hellish firelight flickered over the walls. In the grotto with me was George W. Bush and the then New Zealand Prime Minister John Key. Bush said to me, "We try to keep our club quite exclusive." I was intimidated that the President was talking to me and I remember Key turning to Bush as if to say, "See how he is with us? That's how I feel with you." I left the cavern and outside, in a vestibule, stood with Tim Robbins, Nicolas Cage and a third slight figure I couldn't identify. Cage put something like a communion wafer in my mouth and immediately I was stuck in the mouth by a bolt of lightning. Cage said, "How do like that acid?"

Again this dream can be interpreted. I think now that Bush and Key were metaphors for my father and brother respectively but that they also represented themselves, the real leaders. The cave was Hell, a place of perdition, of guilty consciences. When I woke up I had no idea why Bush had said, "We try to keep our club quite exclusive." In 2007 I believed, stupidly of course, that Bush was gay and that there were more homosexuals than heterosexuals in the world. His statement made no sense. Years later I worked it out. Bush (obviously) is heterosexual but the heterosexual community is exclusive in the sense that if person comes out or is outed, even if wrongly, it is almost impossible to get back in again.

The communion wafer was I think code for Olanzapine, even though I didn't start to take this medication until late 2009. The fact that I was struck by lightning in the mouth represented the experiences I had in the months shortly after I started taking it, particularly in December 2009 and January 2010, when I thought I could telepathically communicate with Jon, Jess, Obama, and people from bFM among others. The third shadowy figure in the dream I think now was Jon Stewart. The reason I couldn't recognise him at the time was because I didn't start watching The Daily Show until the next year.

In Easter 2013, I approached the psychiatric profession again and, for the first time, identified and spoke about my parents' divorce when I was seven, the childhood trauma I believe made me vulnerable to psychosis later in life. Around this time I had another significant dream. I arrived at the Auckland University Human Sciences building and took an elevator to the top floor. I found myself in a dark space full of open-plan plywood cubicles, a little like many offices, except far more sinister. A malevolent clown patrolled the room. In the dream, I somehow leapt up, escaping the space and standing on top. Looking down into one of the cubicles, I saw my ex-girlfriend Maya, dead. In the cubicle was a chandelier. She had slit her wrists.

The reason this dream was set in the Human Sciences building was I believe because this is where the psychology department is located. Maya used to have an obsession with chandeliers and even did some art installations about them. I had always believed, if subconsciously, that her obsession wiht chandeliers was related to some kind of repressed trauma. When confronted with this trauma, in the dream, she had killed herself.

This is where it gets weird again. The layout of the dream-space greatly resembled the layout of a Market Research Company at which I worked performing telephone surveys in 2014 and 2015. I hated this job, partly because it was horrible work and partly because I was often physically and mentally very unwell during the period I worked there. It's weird because I had the dream at Easter 2013 and didn't start working at Infield until the end of 2014.

All three dreams I have described have elements that could only have come from the future. Some of my readers may think this is pretty cool, to have visionary dreams. I also used to think it was cool. Logically, if all the laws of physics are time-reversible, as they are, we should be able to remember the future as well as the past. Recently, though, I have found these dreams and other experiences I've had profoundly depressing and upsetting. It makes me wonder if my entire life, which has been mostly shit, was predetermined from the beginning. It was all fate.

Like I say, I dream most nights. I sometimes have dreams so horrible that they are comparable to the film The Human Caterpillar. One theory of dreaming has it that dreams are epiphenomena occurring when memories are shifted from short-term to long term storage. This hypothesis obviously can't apply to my dreams – my dreams, especially the memorable ones have meaning, they are messages. However in saying that dreams can be interpreted does not mean I am endorsing Freud – Freud's theory, that dreams are coded wish-fufillment fantasies, can't explain nightmares, especially the kind of nightmares I have.

I'll finish this discussion of dreams by describing a good dream. In 2013, I had a number of dreams about Jess. In one, she was a superhero capable of changing shape, and turned into a puddle of water. Obviously this dream does have a Freudian interpretation.

In this blog I often talk about my life and now I need to describe something significant that happened just yesterday. I saw my psychiatrist yesterday; she decided to double my dosage of Olanzapine. Now, she can invent any reason she likes for this change (ignoring the fact that I have been free of psychotic symptoms all year, ever since or before I wrote the post "Concerning Jess) but the real reason for her decision is that I lodged a complaint against her and Tony Fernando with the Health and Disabilities Commissioner. Psychiatrists have that much power. I know a young woman called Katrina who had a psychotic episode in her teens, was well and off the drugs for over ten years, and then had another one. She told me that the cause of this episode was that she became fascinated with the Illuminati. When she saw Fernando, he prescribed her fish-oil capsules. She was taking fifteen a day. Now, I don't believe in antipsychotic medication but to prescribe a dietary supplement for a psychotic episode is not the soundest of scientific practices. I told a friend this story and he opined that it might have had something to do with the pharmaceutical companies but I think the real reason that Fernando did this was because he could, on a whim. Psychiatric diagnoses are all arbitrary.

Probability and Schrodinger's Cat Part 2

I originally intended to write something about dreams today but have decided to postpone that post and instead elaborate in this post on the ideas I pitched a couple of days ago. Sometimes in this blog I come back to a problem repeatedly, revising my position, as in the series of essays I wrote about Neil Gaiman's comic book storyline A Game of You; although I could just leave my musings about quantum theory in the form I presented them in the previous post, I thought I would try to clarify my position and show that, although it looks flakey, this position is defensible. It is a strange position. I am arguing, in effect, that quantum physics allows for the possibility of supernatural causation, that Einstein and others (like Bohm) were correct in supposing that quantum physics requires a hidden-variable theory, but that they were wrong in believing science capable of discovering and elaborating such a theory. In today's post I want to talk about this in more depth. Bear with me.

The heart of my argument is the justifiable supposition that any estimate of probability is subjective rather than objective. An estimate of probability exists in the mind of a knower rather than being a fact about reality existing in the outside world. In the previous essay, I discussed the example of a shuffled pack of cards and I want to return to this example and look at it from a different perspective. Suppose we have a pack of cards and in the same room four people who have different degrees of knowledge about the sequence of cards in the pack. The question asked of them is "What is the probability of drawing the Queen of Hearts from the top of the pack?" Person A knows only that the pack is an ordinary pack minus jokers; he or she estimates the probability of drawing a Queen of Hearts as being 1/54. Person B knows more; he or she knows that the top twenty-six cards are all red. Consequently, Person B estimates the probability as being 1/26. Person C knows that the top thirteen cards are all hearts and consequently estimates the probability as being 1/13. Person D, with god-like omniscience, knows the precise order of cards in the pack and knows for sure that the top card is the Queen of Hearts. Consequently, he or she estimates the probability as being a certainty, 100%.

Which of the four is correct? It seems that the four individuals are increasingly more accurate, that the first is least accurate and the last most accurate. If we assume the Law of the Excluded Middle to be right (the axiom that propositions must either be true or false), it seems that Person D's estimate is true and that Person A's estimate must be false. More charitably, however, we could say that Person A's estimate is the best guess he or she can make given the information available to him or her. Although they are making increasingly accurate guesses, Persons A through C cannot be said to be making true statements. Only Person D is in a position to make a true statement regarding the card because he or she is omniscient– and of course it is worth noting that his or her estimate is no longer really an estimate of probability, but rather of certainty. If a person is omniscient, he or she knows for sure whether future events or outcomes will occur or not; it is no longer an issue of probability. From a traditional logical perspective, then, any proposition stating the probability of a future event, a probability given as something other than one or zero, is either false or meaningless. Is the future predetermined or not? Interestingly, David Foster Wallace grappled with the same problem when he was a student, the problem of Fate, although he approached it from a different angle. (Read Wallace's book Fate, Time, and Language for his thoughts.) Wallace weighed in in favour of free will and opposed the notion of Fate, but I have argued in the past the opposite, that Fate does in fact exist and that free will doesn't.

When quantum physics was first developed in the early decades of the twentieth century, when the wave-particle duality of light and matter was first proposed, no-one had any theory at first to make sense of this duality. In 1928, Max Born made a radical suggestion: that reality is indeterminate and that the equations of quantum physics can be construed as assigning probabilities to events and quantities. The probabilistic interpretation of quantum physics has ever since been central to most accepted views of quantum physics – although de Broglie, Einstein and later Bohm challenged it. The Schrodinger Equation and Dirac equation provide us with possibilities about the energies, momenta ,and positions of particles rather than certainties because reality itself is, in a sense, uncertain. It is precisely this position that I wish to critique. The fatal mistake I think quantum physicists made then and have continued to make ever since is that they have misunderstood the nature of probability. The physicists have treated uncertainty as being an objective fact about the universe – when in fact uncertainty is subjective, is a quality of a knowing mind when confronted with the universe. And yet, with only few exceptions, physicists have continued to cling to the idea that quantum physics presents an objective picture of reality, that uncertainty is objective rather than subjective.

In the previous post, I described the Schrodinger's Cat paradox and will do so again now as an aid in presenting my counter-theory. The paradox is beautiful, profound, and important. Schrodinger imagines the following situation. A cat is put in a sealed box with a piece of uranium that has a 50% chance of decaying over a certain period. If the uranium decays, a gun goes off, killing the cat. Schrodinger argues that, according to standard interpretations of quantum physics, the cat is described by a superposition of two states: the poor creature is both alive and dead at the same time. It is only when the scientist opens the box and observes the cat that one state is confirmed. This moment, this observation when the box is opened, brings about something known as 'wave function collapse'. Schrodinger's intention in posing this problem was to show the deficiencies of the standard probabilistic interpretations, to show what happens when the ideas of quantum physics, which are normally applied only to microscopic systems, are applied to macroscopic situations. He sought to show that the orthodox interpretation of quantum physics must be false if it yields such an absurd conclusion. However radical advancements in Chaos Theory have shown that microscopic events can have macroscopic effects, ("A butterfly flapping its wings in South America can cause a hurricane in Europe") and so the objection that quantum physics is inapplicable to macroscopic systems can be challenged.

I would like to develop the Schrodinger's Cat thought experiment in the following way. Suppose the experiment takes place under the guidance of three scientists – a chief scientist, an assistant, and an assistant to the assistant. Prior to opening the box we have not one but four universes – the universe of the cat, and three universes each of which belongs to one of the scientists. In the first universe, let us suppose that the cat is definitely alive. In the other three, the cat is both alive and dead at the same time. The assistant to the assistant opens the box and checks on the condition of the cat. Wave function collapse occurs – in his universe the cat is now definitely alive. We now have two universes in which the cat is definitely alive and two universes in which the cat is in a superposition of both states. The assistant to the assistant tells the assistant. Again wave function collapse occurs. We now have three universes in which the cat is definitely alive and one in which its vitality is still in doubt. The assistant tells the chief scientist and, again, wave function collapse occurs. In all four universes the cat is now definitely alive. Somehow all four universes, each of which represents a state of knowledge in the consciousness of a living being about the 'real' 'objective' world, have come into alignment.

In this thought experiment, I have asserted that the collapse of a particular wave function occurs not once but multiple times, once for every conscious individual observing or learning about the state of the particular system of interest. This runs completely counter to every established theory of quantum physics I know. According to most physicists, who are not only rational but possessed of 'sound common sense', wave function collapse only ever occurs once. The state of the cat passes once, permanently, from the unknown into the known. This common-sense tenet overlooks the fact that knowledge can only exist in the mind of a knower and that there is more than one knower in the world. Yet physicists continue to ignore this subjectivity. In the previous post, I briefly mentioned that the popular theory of wave function collapse today is 'decoherence' – decoherence is an attempt to ground wave function collapse in objective reality rather than in subjective perception. Decoherence theories propose that wave function collapse occurs when the microscopic system of interest interacts with its environment, interacts with macroscopic systems such as the apparatus used to measure the properties of the microscopic system. I lack the mathematical education to fully elucidate decoherence theories but the difference, in a nutshell, between my theory and decoherence is that decoherence theories propose that wave function collapse occurs when a system interacts with other physical systems, whereas I am proposing that wave function collapse occurs when a system interacts with a conscious mind. Although I lack the physics training to present a mathematical proof, I don't need one. If probability is of its nature subjective, it makes sense to suppose that wave function collapse is also subjective.

I want to draw attention to a curious feature of the examples I have given. With respect to the 'pack of cards' thought experiment, although three of the four observers are initially in doubt as to whether the Queen of Hearts is on top, when the card is flipped all four agree that it is. With respect to the Schrodinger's cat thought experiment, although three of the four sentient beings involved are initially in doubt about whether the cat is alive or dead, all eventually agree that the cat is alive. This is not intuitively obvious. If every person inhabits a different universe, I might believe Elvis is dead and you might believe he is alive, and we might both be right. If everything is subjective, then there is no such thing as objective truth. This line of thought leads to postmodernism, to the conclusion that all truth is relative. It could also lead to the idea that truth is a matter of consensus and that there is nothing outside 'consensus reality', what some philosophers have termed 'intersubjectivity'. The alternative to the idea that reality is in this radical sense fragmentary, subjective, is the idea that there are 'hidden variables' at work, an idea I discussed in the previous post. Einstein himself believed in a 'hidden variable' theory of quantum physics. In the previous post I suggested that such hidden variable theories may be eternally beyond the grasp of rational science; the hidden variables at play might be supernatural. Perhaps the only viable alternative to postmodernism is some form of mysticism.

The question I am really asking in this post is much older than quantum physics. Since the ancient Greeks people have posed the problem, "If a tree falls in the forest and no-one is around, does it make a sound?" The postmodern answer is simply, "No". Reality only exists in the minds of knowers. The hidden variable answer is, "Yes" – but only perhaps because a transcendental knower exists who knows everything. This is of course a mystical answer but sometimes seems to me the only answer.

I hope this post is clear enough; I fear that my writing style today is inadequate to the ideas that I am trying to express. If it is still unclear, read this post and the previous one again and maybe it will become clearer. I hope so, anyway,

Probability and Schrodinger's Cat

What is probability? At school we learn a little about chance – we learn for instance that the possibility of rolling a 2 on a fair die is one chance in six. What we don't learn is the deeper meaning of probability, that it is a judgement or estimate that emerges, rationally or semi-rationally, from a person's knowledge and ignorance of a situation or system, that it is subjective rather than objective. This perspective is generally known as Bayesian probability. In tonight's post, I want to talk a little about this view of probability, and then about quantum physics. I want then to venture into more flakey territory, to suggest a way the supernatural can interact with the natural world. Tonight's post follows on from another post I wrote a couple of years ago called "Free Will and Supernatural Causation".

Suppose you have on the table in front of you a shuffled deck of cards face down. You reach over and turn the top card over. The top card may or may not be the Queen of Hearts but you have no idea if it is or not until you flip the card. All you know before you flip it is that the Queen of Hearts occurs once and once only in the pack. Prior to turning it over you can make an estimate of the probability the card will the Queen of Hearts; assuming that there are no jokers in the pack, the probability is one chance in fifty-two. This is a reasonable estimate given your limited knowledge of the situation or system. Suppose however you know more, know that the top half of the pack is all red cards. In this case, you can revise the possibility – it is now one chance in twenty-six. Suppose you know that the top thirteen cards are all hearts. You can again revise the probability – it is now one chance in thirteen. Suppose you know that the top two cards are the Queen of Hearts and the Ace of Spades – now the most rational estimate of the chance of picking your wanted card immediately is just one in two. Suppose you know, for sure, that the Ace is on top. In this case the chance of picking the Queen of Hearts is simply zero. If you know however, for sure, that the Queen of Hearts is on top, the chance of flipping it is a certainty, unity, 100%. The more knowledge you have of the order of cards in the pack, the 'better' you can estimate the probability of turning over that one particular card.

We can consider the relationship of knowledge and ignorance, on the one hand, to probability on the other, by considering another hypothetical scenario. Suppose you buy a Lotto ticket every week, hoping to become an instant millionaire. A friend, condescendingly, seeks to dampen your enthusiasm by saying, "You know, you're more like to get killed in a car accident tomorrow than win Lotto first division." In a sense, your friend is telling the truth – statistically, some number of New Zealanders are killed on the roads every day but it is not every week that a New Zealander wins first division in Lotto. But it is only true in a limited sense. Your friend's estimate of the relative probabilities is grounded on the idea that New Zealanders are all the same, all indistinguishable, and does not take into account the specifics of your particular situation. Suppose that you bought a hundred lotto tickets a couple of days ago but have no intention of leaving your third floor apartment tomorrow, perhaps because you've suffered a broken leg. Given this additional information, your friends statement must be regarded as false; you do indeed have more chance of winning Lotto than being killed in a car accident. What this example shows among other things is that the fundamental philosophic axiom that statements must either be true or false runs into difficulties when the statements concern probabilities, because any estimate of probability is a conjecture based on limited information which can be revised as more information comes to light.

There is an old argument in philosophy, related to the arguments around the existence or non-existence of free will, that if the universe is deterministic and evolves according to deterministic laws, and if one possesses perfect knowledge of a particular system, one should be able to predict perfectly its future developments. Future events will all have a probability of either 1 or 0. In a deterministic universe, it only makes sense to make an estimate of probability if we only have limited knowledge, are partly ignorant. If we know everything about the present state of a system, we would know everything about its future. An evaluation of probability requires some ignorance; one must lack some information. It would be nice to say that the more knowledge we have of a situation or system, the closer our estimate of a future event's probability comes to either zero or one, but as the examples above demonstrate, the relationship between knowledge and certainty is not simple and very far from linear.

Of course, as I discussed in the other post, physicists today believe in fact that we do not live in a deterministic universe, that the universe is in key respects underdetermined. This has been for close to a hundred years the dominant position with respect to interpretations of quantum physics. The idea of probability is central to all quantum physics, the idea that we cannot know facts for sure when dealing with particles, but only possibilities. At this point, I want to bring up Schrodinger's cat, a thought experiment readers may be familiar with. It's interesting. Just in case, I'll recapitulate its basic ideas.

In 1935, Schrodinger presented the following thought experiment, an experiment in which a cat is put in a box with a piece of uranium that has a fifty-fifty chance of decaying during the period the cat is ensconced within the box. If it decays, a gun will go off, killing the cat. Schrondinger argued that, until the box is opened and the scientist looks inside, the two states "Cat-alive" and "Cat-dead" both exist simultaneously. The cat is alive and dead at the same time. However, when the scientist opens the box,  'wave-function collapse' occurs and one particular state wins out over the other. Schrodinger's purpose in posing this thought experiment was not to present a realistic picture of quantum physics but rather to show that the dominant interpretations of quantum physics current in his day must be wrong if they yielded such an absurd result as a consequence. However, physicists since have run with it – one interpretation of quantum physics that readers might have heard is the idea of a multiverse, that whenever a system can go in more than one direction multiple universes branch off, each of them enacting a different possibility. In this case, when the scientist opens the box, an even number of universes branch off, half of them expressing the 'cat-alive' possibility and the other half the 'cat-dead' possibility. These different universes don't subsequently interact. More recently, the popular theory among physicists to deal with the 'measurement problem', the problem of wave-function collapse, is known as decoherence, a theory I don't fully comprehend but which I understand to be only a partial solution to this problem.

Although I am not a professional physicist, I have thought about this problem for many years now, and have for a long time believed that there is simple route out of the mess. Many quantum physicists believe indeterminacy to be a feature of the universe. But perhaps it is simply a feature of what we can know about the universe. The Hesienberg uncertainty principle states that it is impossible to know simultaneously the precise position and momentum of a particle but this does not necessarily mean that the particle lacks a precise position and momentum. Rather it may be that it is impossible for any human being to know it. The Schrodinger and Dirac equations do not describe reality, they describe what can be known about reality, set limits on that knowledge. Let's return to the Schrodinger's cat thought experiment for a bit to illustrate this idea. Surely, even if the scientist doesn't know if the cat is dead or alive, the cat itself must know? It seems we have two universes, not in the multiverse sense, but in the sense that there is universe known to the cat, and a universe known to the scientist. In the first universe the cat is either alive or dead; it is only in the scientist's universe that the cat is both alive and dead at the same time. Suppose the scientist deputises an assistant to open the box; suppose that the assistant finds the cat alive. We now have three universes: the cat's universe, in which it is definitely alive, the assistant's universe, in which the cat is definitely alive, and the scientist's universe, in which the cat is dead and alive at the same time – until the assistant informs the chief scientists of its condition. There is a different universe for every observing consciousness; the equations only describe what can be known by any particular individual or group, rather than revealing the inner truth of reality.

In proposing this interpretation of quantum physics, that the equations describe what can be known rather than all of what is out there, I am simply bringing the notion of probability back to its roots. Any estimate is kind of semi-rational guess based on limited information, on knowledge and ignorance, is at heart subjective. Perhaps quantum physics sets limits not only on what we know, but what it is possible to know.

When Schrodinger posed his thought experiment, he did so in order to draw attention to the absurdities of contemporary interpretations of quantum. Schrodinger in fact believed that the universe was indeed deterministic and that the current theory was incomplete. At the time, he believed in what is called a hidden-variable theory. Albert Einstein himself also believed in a hidden-variable theory, saying in a letter once, "I am convinced that God does not play dice!" In 1932, the genius mathematician John von Neumann presented a proof that no hidden variable theory could account for quantum mechanics, that no hidden variable theory could be true. Today, however, largely because of the work of John Bell in the 'sixties, we know that hidden variable theories are indeed possible so long as they are non-local, so long as they allow information to be transmitted from one system to another faster than the speed of light (contrary to the Special Theory of Relativity). So Einstein gets his hidden-variable theory but at the price of finding it irreconcilable with his Special Theory of Relativity.

I myself believe in a hidden variable theory and would now like to set out my own opinion. The universe is deterministic. Therefore we simply must accept some kind of hidden-variable theory. This theory, as Bell showed, must be non-local – meaning that whether on not the cat survives its internment in the box may well depend on stuff transpiring on the other side of the planet or on the other side of the galaxy. Aside from this non-locality, it is impossible to know the details of these hidden variables. When such hidden-variable theories were first proposed by people like de Broglie back in the 'thirties, it was assumed that even if science lacked the capacity to explore and delineate such hidden variable theories at the time, in the future science would be capable of doing so. I am not so sure. Perhaps the Schrondinger and Dirac equations set fixed limits on what humans can know scientifically. Perhaps knowledge of this core aspect of reality is only available through revelation, through mystical experience.

It is possible, arguably, that the hidden variables in any hidden variable theory are the actions of a supernatural entity or entities, perhaps God (if we suppose only one such supernatural agent), perhaps an array of spirits and ghosts who interact with matter via the grey area of quantum indeterminacy. The old adage has it that "God moves in mysterious ways" and perhaps human lives and human civilisation is guided by higher beings. We cannot prove the existence of the supernatural – this is why Kierkegaard speaks of the "leap of faith". The knowledge of reality provided by science is inevitably circumscribed and perhaps we need to look outside science for answers. The supernatural lies outside the purview of reason. Perhaps, if Schrodinger's cat survives its captivity, it's because a guardian angel is looking our for it and ensuring the uranium doesn't decay. And if it gets killed... well, perhaps there is a reason for that too. If estimates of probability arise from ignorance and quantum physics draws a line beyond which science cannot go, perhaps we must look to sources of knowledge outside the scientific method. I know I sound flakey suggesting this but no-one can prove me wrong.

The Dopamine Hypothesis of Schizophrenia

Readers of my blog will know I'm a genius, a "very stable genius" in the immortal words of my hero Donald Trump. Readers of my blog will also know that when I call Trump "my hero," I'm making a joke in poor taste. I attend a weekly pub trivia contest at which I join forces with the rest of my team to answer questions like "Who was the eighteenth president of the United States?" and "What is the most common protein in the human body?" – questions to which I usually don't know the answer. Sadly, I lack a head for random facts. But in terms of critical thinking I think I can at least rival most people, once I've had enough time to process an issue. I have, I humbly submit, a profound need to get to the Truth even if it takes me a long time.

In tonight's post, I want to talk about the Dopamine Hypothesis of Schizophrenia and demonstrate that it is totally bullshit.

The Dopamine Hypothesis of Schizophrenia has been around a while. I believe it was the most popular explanation for schizophrenia eleven years ago, when I myself first became 'unwell', but has lost popularity in the decade since. My psychiatrist at the first or second appointment, back in 2007, explained my illness to me by telling me that I had suffered "a dopamine explosion" and put me on 2.5mgs of Risperidone. I didn't know what dopamine was, then, but did a little research in those first couple of months, finding, for instance, that dopamine was a neuro-transmitter, a chemical synthesised in the brain, and that it was involved in learning new behaviours. In the first three years of my treatment I often worried, sometimes to the point of having panic attacks, about what the drug might be doing to me, to my brain, to my hormones, to everything. I worry less about that now, although I still think it possible antipsychotics may gradually cause brain damage over the long term and still desperately want to get off them. Of course, the reason my psychiatrist told me I had suffered "a dopamine explosion" is because the Dopamine Hypothesis was then and is still now the justification for putting people on antipsychotics, even as it is being gradually discredited. Basically, this theory proposes that the cause of schizophrenia is an excess of dopamine (in the same way that depression is the result of a deficit in serotonin); consequently schizophrenics should be treated by drugs that reduce the amount of this chemical in the brain or, to be more accurate about what the drugs actually do, block the neuronal receptors that dopamine molecules attach to. The evidence for the hypothesis is the apparent success in reducing visible symptoms of so-called antipsychotics, which operate on the dopamine system, and, conversely, the way in which drugs like cocaine and metamphetamines, which have the opposite effect on the dopamine system, increasing dopamine levels, can cause psychosis.

So what is dopamine's function? The Wikipedia article on dopamine is full of arcane language (chemicals, organs and organelles in the brain, different types of brain cell) but, although dopamine's role is complex, its most important function seems to be related to motivation. It is involved in both 'wanting something' and 'enjoying that something when it's got'. Humans, like all animals, are goal-seeking machines. When we were hunter-gatherers, we would need to find food and consume food on a regular basis; dopamine appears to be involved in both a person's desire to get something and his or her pleasure in attaining his or her objective. Today it is relatively easy to obtain nutrients (we don't need to hunt mastodons anymore) but our goal seeking behaviour remains unchanged, expressing itself through other activities, such as sports and the playing of computer games. Every time we successfully navigate past the man-eating Venus Fly Traps in Super Mario Brothers or defeat the end-of-level boss, we experience that little dopamine rush. Nicotine breaks down into dopamine in the brain –which explains why people smoke and why when I don't have cigarettes I go out hunting for a person who will give me one. Dopamine encourages us to do stuff and to enjoy doing it when we do it.

Once we recognise that dopamine's main function is related to motivation and pleasure, the problem with the Dopamine Hypothesis of Schizophrenia becomes immediately apparent. I enjoy cigarettes – but I hated psychosis. There appears to be a contradiction. If the neurological basis of psychosis is an overproduction of dopamine, why is madness so unpleasant? Why do schizophrenics kill themselves? I can attest to the fact that psychosis is terrible and, as readers of my blog will know, my worst experiences of psychosis occurred while I was taking antipsychotic medication. Psychosis often expresses itself through catatonia and anhedonia; logically, then it simply cannot be the result of an excess of dopamine – assuming that dopamine is indeed related to goal-seeking behaviour.

And now we hit the crux of the matter.

How can a psychiatrist tell who is well and who isn't, which patient is dangerously psychotic and which is manageable? On the one hand she is presented with a patient who is voluble, excitable, and perhaps belligerent; on the other she is presented with a patient who is subdued, pliable, dull, who doesn't go on about crazy notions, and perhaps simply sits staring at the floor. The second is the one who is 'responding to treatment'. One dirty secret of the psychiatric profession is that psychiatrists are not interested in treating or curing patients; rather they are simply seeking to protect the commuinity from potentially violent or even criminal elements by sedating them, a kind of social hygiene, even, I think sometimes, a kind of eugenics. The other dirty secret is that, as I know from experience and from my observations of others, so-called antipsychotics do nothing to alleviate psychosis; they are, rather, simply tranquillisers that suppress behaviour without reducing psychotic symptoms such as voice-hearing and delusions at all. The supposed success of antipsychotics is of course adduced from the observed behaviour and reports of patients, and quiet patients seem better than noisy ones. I can remember when I was first put on Risperidone – I felt like a barrier had come down between me and the rest of the world. I could barely talk. If you, dear reader, submitted to a regimen involving high doses of Respiridone or Olanzapine, all you'd feel like doing is sitting in one place staring at a wall as well, until your brain adjusted or you liver learnt to efficiently remove the poison from your bloodstream. This, by the way, is the argument put forward by British psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff – that the term 'antipsychotic' is a misnomer and that such drugs should rather be called 'major tranquillisers' as they once were. (Moncrieff is misrepresented in the Wikipedia article about her incidentally.) 'Antipsychotics', to put it simply, do nothing to alleviate psychosis but they flatten out behaviour by reducing motivation, by reducing neuronal sensitivity to dopamine. Logically, the reason why schizophrenics display blunted affect and anhedonia, why they have difficulty finding work or forming relationships, is probably the drugs, not the condition.

The apparent success of antipsychotics is only that, apparent. The Dopamine Hypothesis was invented to account for the apparently improved behaviour of patients taking antipsychotics rather than any improvement in their actual condition. Psychiatrists do not have access to patients' minds or to their lives outside of the consultation room. The Dopamine Hypothesis, under scrutiny, falls apart, and the only possible conclusion is that psychiatrists prefer sick but sedated patients to ones who are well but who forcefully point out that the psychiatric profession is stupid and crooked.

I find myself differing with consensus wisdom on many issues. Thinking that the claim antipsychotics are effective is a lie told to patients, patients' families, and to the public is one example – although Moncrieff and others think so too. I want to mention another divergence. Several years ago I wrote a post "On Evolution" in which I put forward, tentatively, an objection to Darwinian accounts of evolution. I identified the problem but I couldn't think of a solution. The problem is this: Darwinian accounts of Evolution presume evolution occurs gradually in almost imperceptible increments. In fact, evolution must occur in discreet steps – for speciation to occur, an individual must be born with a significant mutation, this mutation must be beneficial rather than detrimental, and another individual must be born with the same significant, beneficial mutation at the same time in the same vicinity for the two to breed. Their children must then breed incestuously with each other. All of this is enormously improbable but is the only logical way to marry speciation with Darwinian evolution. At the beginning of this year a solution occurred to me – in fact, it came to me in the form of a voice. For speciation to occur, a large number of individuals in a population must all be born with the same mutation at the same time. This view, which is in a sense mystical, puts me directly at odds with evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins and his theory of "The Selfish Gene". It suggests evolution is guided by a higher intelligence or collective soul. I hope that mentioning this second divergence doesn't make me seem flakey.

I'll finish this post by making an observation. I sometimes think readers only stumble over my bad posts. Do people read my good posts as well? I would like people to read my stories: "69", "A Refusal to Mourn" and "The Great God Pan". I would also like them to read the two latter posts about Janet Frame, "On 'The Sellout' and 'An Angel at My Table'" and "Jon Stewart, Janet Frame, and Katy Perry." It may be hard to find the best posts but I worry that those in the great world outside my apartment only ever find the bad ones. I hope that you do read the good ones as well. And I hope that in this post I made the point I was trying to make.

Concerning Jess

In this blog, I have often mentioned a girl I knew once, a girl I have been referring to as Jess because I deemed it inappropriate to use her real name. Inquisitive readers will probably be able to discover the lass's real name from the clues I've dropped. In 2012, I went so far as to write a screenplay about her although I don't think I did her justice in it. In tonight's post I want to try to say something about the real girl.

I first met Jess I think in November 2009. I had been hearing voices since January and the fuckwits treating me had decided that it would be helpful if I went to a Hearing Voices group, a chance for voice hearers to get together and share their experiences of voice hearing with others who have acquaintance with the same 'symptom'. This Voice Hearing Group, which I attended in November and early December and then in February of the next year, was perhaps the most helpful treatment I ever received from the Mental Health System (medication of course being absolutely useless). Some research has suggested, by the way, that Voice Hearers tend on average to be more intelligent than 'normal' people – a finding that, if it was more widely known, might help reduce the stigma associated with mental 'illness'. Before the first session, I was sitting in the waiting room of the Taylor Centre with my mother and Key Worker, and noticed a young unusual looking girl also waiting for the first get-together, wearing a hat and a single glove, fidgeting restlessly with excitement – presumably, I think now, because this group was a novel opportunity to feed her curiosity about other people.

Sometimes you can tell that someone is extremely clever at a glance. The girl was fairly short, with an aquiline nose and, as I'd find out, the most extraordinarily penetrating pale blue eyes I've ever encountered. When subject to her gaze, as I was sometimes that year and in 2011, I found it both attractive and intensely discomforting. At the Hearing Voices Group, Jess, a few other psychotics, and I sat in a circle in one of the meeting rooms and shared our experiences. Jess said that she had an imaginary friend she called her 'comrade' who, when she was in shops, would point out where the surveillance cameras were. For my part, I told the group that sometimes I would hear voices so loud that I thought my head was going to split open – when I said this, she flinched. Years later, she would tell me that I was the first person she'd met through the Mental Health Service who didn't seem to be faking it. After the first session had finished, I approached her and complimented her on her shoes. She said, "They're just Doc Martins!" I said, "I like the colour."

I had fallen for her straight away of course. I was thirty and she was twenty-four or twenty-five – not an insurmountable age gap. We went out for coffee at one of the cafes near the Taylor centre. I asked her, "Why do you wear one glove? Do you think you're Michael Jackson?" I found out she was an avid reader of poetry – she quoted the first lines of Eliot's Prufrolk, "Let us go then, you and I, where the dawn meets the sky, like a patient etherised on a table." I didn't then and don't have now Jess's deep and comprehensive knowledge of poetry, but I do have Prufrolk more or less memorised and was able to quote another couple of lines: "I should have been a pair of claws, scuttling across floors of silent seas." My feelings towards her were from the beginning a strange mixture of desire and hostility, perhaps because she exhibited the same ambivalence towards me. We exchanged phone numbers and I spoke with her on the phone soon after. She asked me, "Do you like the Veils?" I told her that I was getting bad vibes down the phone and hung up on her. This is the one of the many small cruelties I perpetuated against her that have caused me sleepless nights since.

At the last session in November, she shared some issues with her family with the group and even got a little teary. She quoted the first stanza of Philip Larkin's "This be the Verse" and, by chance again, this happened to be a poem I knew, and I quoted the last stanza. She hated this. After this last session, she was whisked off to a respite facility (called Mind Matters) and on the way out told me sarcastically, "Good memory!" In December and January, I had the intense episode that I have described in other posts in which from the moment I woke until the moment I slept I spoke with Jon and Jess in my head.  After New Years I spoke to others, including, from around January 10, Barack Obama. I won't share the things I 'learnt' about her during this period, because much of it was wrong, but perhaps a story will give some idea. One night, in bed, I asked her (telepathically of course), "Why don't you like me? Give me ten good reasons why you don't like me." She quoted, from memory, the speech at the end of Ten Things I Hate About You. In February of 2010, I again attended the Hearing Voices group but, by then, the voices had almost ceased – I was only present in the off chance the real girl would come back but she didn't, and after a couple of weeks I 'graduated' from the group.

At the Independent Review I had most recently, my psychiatrist said that when I was put on Olanzapine I was first put on 12.5mgs, but that I couldn't tolerate the dosage, had 'side effects' and that the dosage was reduced to 10mgs in early 2010. Once again this is untrue – I don't know why the psychiatrist decided to put it it the official report she submitted to the Tribunal. I asked her at an appointment just before the review what 'side effects' I supposedly experienced but she wouldn't tell me. The truth, of course, is that the highest dosage I was ever on was 10mgs. Because this period, the end of 2009 and beginning of 2010, is important I will try to provide some dates. I believe the last Hearing Voices session probably finished if not in November than in early December. Shortly before Christmas, my mother and I travelled to Taupo bay to spend the festive season at a bach belonging to a family member of my sister-in-law. We came back to Auckland New Years Day because the day I had to be at work (I was then working at the TAB taking phone bets). Around perhaps January 5, my mother and I travelled to Dunedin by plane so she could attend a wedding. We then drove across Southland in a rented car to visit Fjordland. It was at a hostel in Milford Sound that it seemed to me that Obama started talking directly, if telepathically, with me. My best guess is that this happened around January 10. I returned from the South Island to go to The Big Day Out, then New Zealand's largest music festival, which was held January 15th. By February, as I said, the voices had largely faded away. I had an appointment with Fernando that month – no side effects were mentioned. What I remember is telling him that I had fallen in love. He said, "A boy or a girl?". I said, "A girl." Of course, there was never any chance of me falling in love with a boy. But at the time I just thought, "Hopefully this will go on my record as proof that I'm straight." It was the only time he directly enquired into my sexuality.

I suspect now that Fernando either didn't specify the gender in his notes or possibly wrote down "A boy". This seems unbelievable but the terrible truth is that the psychiatric community lies constantly.

My relationship with Jess could have ended there but it didn't. During the period when I was hearing voices over the summer of 2009 and 2010, I had asked them once, "When will I get to speak to the real girl?" They said that I had to wait a year. I said, "A year? That's too long!" During 2010 I recovered and I even participated in some personal growth groups sessions and training at Youthline in the second half of the year. In early 2011 I texted Jess, a year after the voices had told me to wait that long. We met at the Library Bar. Over the year I hung out with perhaps six to a dozen times, less than I wanted but enough to acquire some idea of who she was. She seemed reluctant to see me more than that. Although I didn't see her often I felt I gained quite a good understanding of her. In the film I wrote about her in 2012, I mixed up her life story with mine – for instance, I gave her an interest in quantum physics although in fact I knew a lot more about quantum physics than she did and I also suggested that the root cause of her illness was her parents' divorce but I believe this etiology applied more to me than to her. But I still think I captured quite accurately the way the real girl spoke.

From an outsider's perspective, Jess probably didn't seem particularly alluring. She lived in a little flat she called her 'hutch' with only an elderly cat called Tigger for company, just down the road from her mother's. I think she spent a lot of time at her mother's place and sometimes slept there. She was unemployed. Although I am sure many people liked her, she considered herself friendless. Despite all this, I thought she was incredibly cool. She had fantastic taste in clothes and music – she introduced me to Frank Zappa. She kept an enormous poster of Syd Barrett on her living room wall. Whereas my hobby outside writing is music (I play the guitar and the piano), her hobby outside writing was art. She would drawn pictures of semi-naked men with KFC buckets over their heads – she wasn't very good at depicting faces. At parties, her party trick was to recite Pi to a thousand places. The first evening I spent at her hutch, she showed me her poetry. I might have been one of the first people in the world to realise that she was that rare thing, a true poet, although the wider world knows this now.

We had some things in common, of course. Early in 2011, I told her that I had diagnosed myself with Avoidant Personality Disorder. She said, "I have that too!" Both of us had experienced delusions of being the Antichrist briefly. I was then taking 10mgs Olanzapine and she was taking Aripreprizole. She'd been on about half a dozen different types of antipsychotic at different times. I was well but she wasn't. On one occasion, I met her at a bookshop (Borders) and she told me, bleary eyed, "I heard you on the radio last night!" She thought she'd heard me on National Radio talking about etymology. She'd even woken up her mother to say, "Andrew's on the radio!"

Although in some ways we could understand each other better than others did, in other ways we were very different. A big difference between us, I think now, was our understandings of sexuality. I was always a bit homophobic in my music taste. I didn't like Queen or Elton John; I had liked George Michael when I was a child but went off him when I became a teenager. I didn't even like bands who gave off a gay vibe, like the Smashing Pumpkins and REM. I liked the Beatles; I had no time for David Bowie. I liked the Smiths but only because I had decided Morrissey was straight. I didn't like Nick Cave because I picked up the mistaken idea once that he wasn't. Jess, by contrast, I think now, liked androgynous men. To get some idea of what she looked liked the summer I first met her, google "Experience of Mental Illness as a Teenager" and "The New Zealand Herald" and a picture should pop up. Note that she's wearing a Ziggy Stardust t-shirt.

I am unsure how to end this post, or how much more to say. I very much wanted to see her more than I did. I gave her a ticket to Modest Mouse once (I had been unable to go because of another commitment) and hoped to see her afterwards, but she decided against it. In 2011 she apparently asked a psychologist if it was possible for schizophrenic girls to have boyfriends. In 2013 I saw her twice and again she seemed to entertain the possibility of taking me up as a boyfriend but, for some reason I've never understood, the relationship never eventuated. Of course, if we had settled into a relationship in either 2011 or 2013, I would never have written this blog. And it is possible that her success as a poet was somehow contingent on her remaining single.

Like I said, I am unsure what more to say about Jess. I think this is the last post in which I shall discuss or even mention her. Jess is significant because she is the proof that I'm straight. Of course, I had girlfriends before I became 'unwell' in 2007 but she was proof that I had remained straight through the terrible psychotic episodes I suffered in 2007 and 2009, periods in which I had believed for extended periods that there was a microphone in my glasses and that everything I said was being transmitted to third parties of some sort. The film I wrote about Jess in 2012 is also, in its way, proof. I had written love poems to both my previous girlfriends and the film was, in its way, a kind of long love poem. I made mistakes with respect to Jess but I still feel that, like King Lear, I am a man "more sinned against than sinning."