Concerning Childhood Trauma and Bisexuality

In this week's post, I shall return to the topics that I have been centrally concerned with for a long time: mental illness (specifically 'schizophrenia') and sexuality. I know it is strange for a straight man to write about homosexuality and bisexuality so much, and I probably have readers who are turned off by it, but a great deal of mental illness could be alleviated by speaking about matters to do with sexuality openly and honestly. I used to have misconceptions about homosexuality and bisexuality that fed into the mental illness I suffered. I recall that in early 2010, when I was talking to people in my head a lot, I heard Michel Foucault (the only dead person I spoke with). He advised Jess and me to write a book called "A History of Sexuality: The Other Side". This is what I am trying to do – to write about homosexuality and bisexuality from a heterosexual perspective and for a heterosexual audience (although I may well have gay readers also).

Before I tackle the core topics I wish to address, I want to say something about the previous post in which I talked about Maori-Pakeha relations and Three Waters. I didn't realise, when I wrote that post, that the Three Waters legislation was about to be passed. For a week or two after the post and the enactment of this legislation by Parliament, the Herald was full of articles about co-governance and Maori-Pakeha relations. I became aware that I made a number of factual errors. I said that Abel Tasman set foot on New Zealand soil in 1642 but apparently he didn't; the first was James Cook in 1769. There may be a number of other small errors in the essay (such as calling Three Waters 3 Waters). I believe that my description of the Treaty of Waitangi was accuarate – I had good history teachers at school. I also believe my description of the Wanganui/Whanganui farrago and the debate about matauranga Maori that played out in the Listener and elsewhere was accurate. The gist of the essay I stand by. The previous post was problematic for me more because the argument I made could be used to support the Act party rather than because of the small errors it contained – David Seymour has called for a referendum on the Treaty of Waitangi and I believe has made this a non-negotiable policy plank in future negotiations with the National Party, assuming that the Right wins a majority. Temperamentally, in terms of tribal allegiance, I have tended to side with the Greens. Perhaps the problem here is that political affiliation obscures rather than illuminates the actual issues – many people support Three Waters because Labour and the Greens do rather than because they have rationally analysed the problem. It is a kind of 'short cut'. But it is possible for the right party to be on the wrong side. In his final Daily Show appearance (in the between the scenes Youtube clip), Trevor Noah pointed out that even Donald Trump could sometimes do the right thing, such as his implementation of criminal justice reform. What is really going on with Three Waters? I have wondered over the last couple of weeks if Parliament as a whole is involved in some kind of skulduggery, that there are hidden plots at work, but I won't pursue this line of thinking because it will make me sound conspiratorial.

The most important topic I wish to address in this post is the role my parents' divorce when I was seven played in the psychotic episode I suffered when I was twenty-seven and the episodes I experienced subsequently. I have suggested, perhaps most clearly in the post "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM", that this divorce created a vulnerability to psychosis and that the stress of what happened at bFM and the Big House resulted in a complete psychotic break. The issue I am stressing here is that psychosis has psychological causes – it is not a neurological disease caused by a 'schizophrenia gene' or a virus or a difficult childbirth or any of the candidate hypotheses proposed by idiot psychiatrists. The causes of 'schizophrenia' are different for every single person diagnosed with the condition. To prove this, I need to talk about the divorce, and to talk about the divorce, I need to talk about my family. I don't believe anything I have to say will be particularly scandalous.

My father comes from Kaiwaka and boarded at Mt Albert Grammar in the 'sixties. While there, he was taught by my mother's oldest brother, Tom Newman. I have talked about Tom before, in 2016, but I suspect that that post was quite badly written. Tom was an amazing person. He had been a radio DJ when he was younger and then gone on to teach English at Mt Albert Grammar, becoming Head of Department, and then later worked for the teachers training college. He was diminutive, smoked like a train and, during his younger years, drank a bottle of whiskey a night and popped pills to stay awake. He was possibly a little 'fey' – he loved astrology and believed in ghosts and other supernatural phenomena. He was a playwright, penning a play called "The Crucifixion" in which he presented Jesus as a left-wing political revolutionary. Importantly, he was almost certainly gay. My mother is a lot older than me and Tom was a lot older than her – because homosexuality didn't become legal in New Zealand until 1986, Tom never came out, but everyone in the family, including me as a child and later teenager, sensed that he was gay. (Just before my first psychotic episode in 2007, I asked my mum, for this first time, if Tom was gay and she confirmed it.) When I was very young Tom was diagnosed with severe emphysema and retired. We would see him every Sunday for a roast dinner and he would lie on the couch and talk about history and poetry and politics. Tom died in 1997, coincidentally the morning after the night when I first kissed my first girlfriend, Danielle.

My father thought very highly indeed of Tom and it was at a party hosted by Tom, possibly a Labour Party event, that my father met my mother. He courted her through letters and they married in 1969. (My elder brother was born in 1970.) Mum and Dad, like Tom, were both very involved in the Labour Party and sometimes hosted the Mt Hobson Branch of the Labour Party, among the members of which were Helen Clark and Jim Anderton. (I hope that this is right.) My foreign readers need to know a peculiar fact about New Zealand political history. From 1984 until 1990, New Zealand was governed by the Labour Party, mostly under David Lange. Under the stewardship of finance minister Roger Douglas, New Zealand lurched towards the libertarian right, reducing income and corporate taxes, corporatising and sometimes privatising state owned assets, floating the dollar, and so forth. Americans had Reaganomics and the Brits had Thatcherism – in New Zealand, we had Rogernomics. The bizarre thing was that these significant Friedmanite policies were carried out in New Zealand by a political party that had its roots in Socialism. It eventually tore the Labour Party apart. I have often viewed my parents' divorce in 1986 as being a reflection or microcosm of the split in the Labour Party. Tom and my mother remained true to the traditional version of the Labour Party while my father went with Roger Douglas, Michael Bassett, and Richard Prebble, and today is an ardent supporter of the Act Party and is close to David Seymour. (If you tell kids today that the Act Party has its roots in the Labour Party, they are frequently astounded.)

And now I come to the divorce. My readers may imagine it was preceded by fighting or acrimony. What in fact happened is that one day my father was there and the next day he wasn't. My mum said recently that they had planned to hold a party for the law firm he worked at and, the day before they were due to hold it, dad just left. What had happened was that my father had fallen for a young and ambitious family court lawyer, Jan Doogue, a woman much younger than my mother. But when I was seven I didn't understand this. It is not uncommon for children of divorces to blame themselves – and this is exactly what I did. I thought that I was responsible. I briefly saw a child psychologist. (I have a hazy memory of unhappily playing with toys in his office.) In 2015, my mother dug up the report he had written. I had apparently told him that I was afraid that if my father had left, my mother might as well. My mother often tells a story that at this time, while she, my brother, and I were walking upstairs to bed, I apparently said something like, "Now there are three where once there were four." My mother also said recently that the child psychologist had told her, "They've lost one parent, they can't afford to lose both." For me, when I was seven, the divorce was something completely inexplicable and this is why I blamed myself.

After that I was for many years deeply troubled and unhappy. I had behavioural issues. I used to chew my shirt. I had no friends. Life was a constant source of anxiety – I hated school and lived for TV and books. Of course, I was still a highly intelligent and creative child. I read adult literature and, for my favourite teacher, started a novel. My writing was indecipherable but this teacher, Mr Hurchibese, would have me read the story I was writing to him and then write it down more legibly. The first chapter, typed out, was hung in the teachers' staff room and this teacher even started a creative writing class, I think because of me. Nevertheless my childhood, particularly Form 1, were passed in a haze of anxiety and misery. I spent every second weekend with my father and Jan and we went on occasional holidays to places like Bali and Noosa (in Australia). I cannot fault my father for not making the effort to do the right thing by me – but he should have realised that the divorce had traumatised me and sat down with me to talk about it. In many ways the father lacks some social skills. Things started to improve for me in Form 2, something I will come back to in a moment.

I turn now to the most important thing. I believe that when I was seven I decided that my father had left because he thought I was gay. Children are more precocious than we give them credit for and I was a particularly precocious child. I have a hazy memory that supports the idea that I formed this belief and the whole course of my life supports it. Recall that the year of my parents' divorce was the same year that homosexuality was legalised in New Zealand so there would have been conversations about it on the news and in my social environment. However, I didn't even know what the word 'gay' meant. A couple of weeks ago, I saw the documentary "Why Am I Gay?" – in it, the documentary maker, Angelo Tedoldi, says that he knew that he was gay when he was seven. It seems cruel for me to suggest Tedoldi is deceiving himself but he must be. Homosexuality is defined as a sexual attraction towards members of the same sex and seven year olds, despite what Freud said, do not experience sexual attractions. Children can't be gay or straight (or bisexual). Nevertheless I strongly suspect that, prior to or after the divorce I formed the belief that my father had left because he thought I was gay. This seems incredible but I still think it is true.

I hit puberty in Form 2 when I was eleven. In this blog, I often discuss sexuality and so I have to be a little crude here. I didn't have wet dreams – rather I started masturbating and from the beginning fantasised. My fantasies came partly from the books I read and resembled anime movies. As I've said before I only fantasised about women and didn't even realise there was an alternative. I didn't then, still, know what the word 'gay' meant. Gay men often ask, "Why am I gay?" I'm in the strange position of asking myself, "Why am I straight?" I suspect that a part of the reason I am straight is that I hit puberty before I understood what homosexuality was. By the time, I was fourteen and had gay people in my peer group, my sexuality was established. I never considered the possibility that I might be gay. I knew I was straight although I was probably still quite fuzzy about what the word 'gay' meant. Although Auckland Grammar was then and probably still is a rubbish reactionary institution, even though I never did my homework and was constantly in trouble with the teachers, my life followed an upwards trajectory – in seventh form I had one of my better friends, Shannon Singh, and through him met my first girlfriend, Danielle. Funnily enough, although my memories of Auckland Grammar are mostly negative, some of my peers may well have respected me and recognised that, although I was deeply lazy, I hung on by virtue of my intellect. I was teased, in a good humoured way, because I would start so many conversations by saying, "I have a theory". I apparently asked the physics teacher a question that stumped him. I had a chemistry teacher who would say, "Judd, you are a schlacker!" something my peers remember. I usually hated myself at high school but, perhaps towards the end, my fellow students didn't hate me.

The other important thing that happened, and I cannot be certain if it happened with puberty or before then, was that I changed the story I had invented to make sense of the divorce. I decided that my father had left my mother because he had fallen in love with Jan. However, the subconscious belief I had formed when I was seven didn't altogether go away. In the post "Wokeism and What the Shrinks Knew" I described how in my first year studying in Dunedin, in 1998, I had bought a Cleo magazine because it was Danielle's favourite magazine (we were then in a long distance relationship). My best friend had teased me about it and I told him that I was secure enough in my sexuality that I could buy a woman's magazine without it bothering me. He said, "By that logic, you can prove beyond doubt that you're straight by dressing in women's clothes." I took up the challenge, put on a dress, wig and high heels and was photographed by our lesbian friend who lived down the hall. Obviously, I have always been trying to prove that I'm straight. After two years at Otago, I transferred back to Auckland so that I could live in the same city as my girlfriend. At the beginning of 2001, after I had spent a month in the UK, I came home and Danielle broke up with me, something I found very painful. That year I did a screenwriting paper through the English Department at the University of Auckland and wrote a gay spy film and a film about a comedian who befriends the devil and sells his soul for love. By this stage in my life, I had known many gay men and women. The second film (a film I wrote about in the post "Bruce Sells Out") was really my way of mourning Danielle. At one point in the film, the comedian's girlfriend suggests he see a psychologist. He says, "What is he going to tell me? My mother dropped me down a well when I was seven – thus my obsession with buckets!" The Freudian innuendo was intentional.

As my readers know from previous posts, I suspect that as a result of the short gay spy film, a rumour got out that I was gay. I sensed that some of my lecturers thought I was gay and somehow this rumour followed me to teachers' training college in 2006. There was nothing I could do about it because my relationship with Maya was not, in some ways, a real relationship – it wasn't a love relationship. And in the real world people never usually need to say, "I'm straight." This misperception followed me to bFM, perhaps because of the gay spy film, perhaps because of something I'd said, perhaps even because of the clothes I was wearing when I first rocked up to bFM. I volunteered at bFM a couple of mornings a week writing news stories. As I've said a number of times, at first I endured the worry that the people at bFM thought I was gay when I wasn't and then later, perhaps a fortnight after the Big Day Out, formed the delusion that bFM was full of closet homosexual and after perhaps a fortnight or month of forming this delusion, abruptly left. I formed the delusion that the world was full of closet homosexuals – and then partly as a result of thinking about the Lacanian notion that the name of the father is the centre of the system, decided that my father was gay as well. I have gone into all this in more detail in other posts. What is important here is that when I decided my father was gay, the comforting belief that my father had left my mother because he had fallen in love with Jan was stripped away. Partly this 'disillusionment' resulted from my knowledge that their marriage was unhappy. The deeply buried belief that my father had left because he thought I was gay came back. I decided, when I reached crisis point, that bFM had outed me or that I had outed myself accidentally simply by going to work there; I considered drowning myself but thought that this would only bring more shame on my family. Two days later I was in the Taylor Centre telling people "My father's gay, he divorced my mother when I was seven because he didn't want me to be gay and I want to come out as straight!" My belief then was that that the world was full of secretly gay men marrying secretly gay women and raising secretly gay children – I thought that homosexuality arose in some way from family dynamics, from the family situation. This might explain why I thought that my father had left to 'save' me. It is important to note here that although I thought my father was gay I still loved him. In fact there were times later in the year when I thought he was a double agent – I thought that he might be a straight man who had infiltrated the conspiracy of closet homosexuals who ruled the world by pretending to be a closet homosexual. (In reality, my father is about the least camp man imaginable.)

The episode that began at the Big House lasted until the end of the year. It was, as my readers know now, an acute psychotic episode not helped by the vile antipsychotic I was put on. (I was briefly on 2.75mgs Rispridone before I complained of akathisia and it was reduced to 2.5mgs.) In 2008, I was close to well. The belief that my father was gay had gone away but I still believed that my father had divorced my mother because he thought I was gay. I didn't tell anyone this partly because I simply couldn't say the words 'gay' and 'straight'. In 2008, I had 'therapy' with a Scottish nurse called Avril. She told me that she had young children and I can remember asking her old they were. I didn't say this out loud to her but I can remember thinking that it is impossible to tell if a seven year old is gay or straight – so the belief must still have been there. In 2009, I became psychotic again. It is difficult to summarise the psychotic episode I suffered that year but it was partly a result of the belief that I had been outed as gay in my notes even though I had never said I was gay and partly a result of my fear that the drug I was on might somehow turn me gay. I won't go into all the details here because I have done so elsewhere. In 2010, 2011 and 2012 I was quite well. In 2012 I wrote the film script about my friend Jess which, as the reader will recall, ends with her father saying, "You know you weren't responsible for the divorce? You do know that don't you?" Jess replies, "Of course I know that. I'm not stupid." I was perhaps being too clever or too ironic for my own good. Unlike Jess, I have always known that the cause of my illness was the divorce.

In 2013, I became psychotic again. I worried that somehow rumours about me had gone through the media again, partly as a result of a letter I had written to the Herald, a letter the Herald published, about lead exposure, and partly as a result of the screenplay I had written. It also partly resulted from my discovery that Jess had spent eight months in hospital in a psychiatric ward in 2012 and through into 2013; I became very afraid for her. The delusion that my father was gay came back. A lot of buried resentment against him also surfaced. Just before Easter I approached the psychiatrists again, asking to see any psychiatrist other than Antony Fernando. I told the new psychiatrist, "My father's gay and he divorced my mother when I was seven because he thought I was gay as well." My new key worker, Josh Brasil, asked me, "How do you identify?" the first time anyone at the Taylor Centre had asked me that question. I said, "Straight". He said, "When did you know you were straight?" I replied, "Since puberty." I experienced very unpleasant psychotic symptoms over the next couple of months and I can remember saying to Jess, who I saw in the middle of the year, that I thought it might be unhealthy for me to hate my father. After perhaps six months I stopped believing that my father was gay – in an essay I gave to my then psychiatrist Jennifer Murphy describing the closest I've ever come to a homosexual experience, I told her this. The delusion that my father was gay has never returned. However, the idea that my father might have thought I was gay when I was seven or that I had mistakenly decided this at the age of seven is something that has stuck with me, even though I have only mentioned it once before in this blog.

My relations with my father are fairly good now. These days I see him as a man with both positive and negative qualities. I see his flaws (for instance, he was for a long while and perhaps still is a climate change denier) but love him anyway. I worry though that because of certain limitations in his emotional intelligence, he doesn't understand me.

The point I am making is that my life quite clearly shows that mental illness often, perhaps always, has psychological causes, such as childhood trauma and environmental stressors. The current paradigm in psychiatry, that mental illness is, say, the result of a neurotransmitter imbalance, is both evil and fucking stupid – it is because the psychiatrists can't see what's right in from of them that patients never recover.

I'll turn now to a different but related issue. Earlier in this post, I mentioned the documentary "Why Am I Gay?" In this documentary, a supposed expert says that while women can be bisexual, men are almost always either gay or straight. This is also just profoundly fucking stupid. I am not bisexual myself but I have known many bisexual men. What I want to do now is list some examples.

The first gay man my own age I ever knew was a chap called Jonathan. I had known him since Primary School. We sat next to each other in Physics when I was about fourteen or fifteen and he used to rabbit on about his sexual adventures while away touring with the school orchestra. I didn't know then that he was gay, probably because I wasn't paying attention. One day he said, "With all this sex I've been having, I hope I don't get AIDS!" I said, trying to be reassuring, "I wouldn't worry about that Jonathan. It's only gay people who get AIDS." He said to me, like I was an idiot (which I was), "Andrew, I'm gay." It surprised me. I can vaguely remember walking home that afternoon feeling somewhat unsettled or perturbed and reflecting on Tom and the divorce. What is relevant to the present discussion is that my friend Shannon (a straight man) stayed at Jonathan's house in Seventh Form and told me, "For a gay man, he sleeps with a lot of women!" I should, therefore, have realised that men who identify as gay sometimes sleep with women as well but for some reason this insight didn't sink in. Interestingly, the last time I saw Jonathan was on TV1 News in 2019. I believe he was interviewed in relation to AIDS medication and awareness. He had AIDS.

In late 2017 or early 2018, I bumped into a friend of a friend in Ponsonby Road, a straight man called Seth who worked in a bar there. Because it was late on a weeknight, we ended up at the Eagle in K Road, a gay bar, to continue drinking and talking, the Eagle being the only bar still open. (This is the only time I've been to the Eagle although I occasionally walk past it.) After the area out the front was closed, Seth and I went out the back to continue drinking and talking. A tall muscular gay man approached us and said, "Are you gay and he's your straight friend or are you gay and he's your straight friend?" Both Seth and I had trouble saying we were both straight, but eventually the gay man cottoned on and said, in astonishment, "So you're two straight men at a gay bar?" I like telling this story because I think it is amusing. My friend and I had an interesting, frank, and informative conversation with the gay man. He said, among other things, that it is impossible to tell the difference between a gay man and a straight man. He also said, and this is the relevant remark, "I sleep with women as well – but I love cock!" This further corroborates the idea that many men who we think of as gay and who may identify as gay should really be described as bisexual. Another example is Peter Ellis, a man we think of as gay but, as Steven Braunias pointed out in an article a little while ago, had romantic or sexual relationships with women as well as men. If Bohemian Rhapsody can be trusted, the love of Freddy Mercury's life was a woman, a women he'd had a sexual relationship with. And Oscar Wilde had two sons.

There are many other examples. A friend of my nephew came out as gay in 2012 or 2013. He'd had a girlfriend before then and I asked my nephew, back in early 2013, "Did he and the girlfriend have sex?". Apparently they had. In 2011, I tutored a fourteen or fifteen kid in maths whose father had left his mother for another man. This kid said one day, out of the blue, "My mother's not a lesbian, you know." When ordinary heterosexuals hear stories like this, about men who have had romantic or sexual relationships with women before coming out as gay, they tend to assume that these men were in denial. But there are problems with this story that people like to spin. In 2013, I'm pretty sure that a regular at a bar I go to for a weekly pub quiz came out as gay to me– he is now married to a woman and living in Hamilton. In the post "my soul is an irritant" I described a friend of mine who had experimented with homosexuality while studying at Otago University, then had a string of girlfriends and eventually married and had a child. A couple of years ago I learned that Richard Pryor had slept with Marlon Brando and, more recently, that David Bowie had slept with Mick Jagger; these stories were confirmed, respectively, by Pryor's wife and Bowie's wife. Clive Davis, the man who managed Whitney Houston, famously came out as bisexual. In 2013, he said in an interview that bisexuality was 'maligned and misunderstood'. (An article about this can be found on the Guardian Online.) 

Despite overwhelming evidence that men can be bisexual, most ordinary heterosexuals find this hard to believe – I found it hard to believe myself. Furthermore, many in the gay community push the idea that men are one way or the other, perhaps to counter more conservative narratives that sexuality is the result of nurture not nature and to fight practices like gay conversion therapy. It is not just the documentary I mentioned above: it is films like Rocketman and Dating Amber. There is a concept called 'bearding' that has got into the collective imagination through Glee, Rocketman and Dating Amber, among other books and films, the idea that gay men and women enter into fake relationships with members of the opposite sex to hide their genuine sexual orientations from the world. Perhaps sometimes this happens but, from what I have observed in the world I live in, I don't think it is particularly common. Rather I think there are many bisexual men who either, if they come out as gay, allow people to think their relationships with women were fake or, if they don't, hide their relationships with men.

The reason I am talking about this is that the idea that men can't be bisexual is pernicious. For one thing it is just obviously factually wrong. For another thing, if people believe that men can only be gay or straight, it means that men who have had homosexual experiences have to choose between coming out as gay or keeping them secret. I would like a world in which men can, like Clive Davis, come out as bisexual. It would alleviate a lot of mental illness if bisexual men could come out as bisexual and if heterosexuals who are privy to the secrets of bisexual men and women could feel free to tell others. And it would mean that heterosexuals who are falsely thought to have had homosexual experiences, people like me, would be believed, would not be suspected of keeping secrets that would no longer be necessary to keep. I am aware that in arguing that bisexuality is perhaps more common than homosexuality, I am swimming against the tide, that people may simply refuse to accept it. But we all do need to accept it.

I'll finish this post by saying something about my 'condition' and my current treatment. I feel totally well these days, believe that I have fully recovered, that I recovered many years ago, but I am fighting against a medical establishment that thinks it impossible to recover from schizophrenia. Apparently, in I think the 'seventies, a couple of good progressive psychiatrists devised the Stress-Vulnerability Model of Schizophrenia. In the article they wrote (an article given to me by Simon Judkins, the only good thing he ever did), they described a study. People diagnosed schizophrenic were divided into three groups: label deniers, label acceptors, and label rejectors. Label rejectors, people who accepted the label 'schizophrenic' for a time and then later rejected it, were found to have the highest rate of recovery. In 2015, I told my then psychiatrist, Sati, about this study – she reacted in astonishment as though she had never heard about it. Psychiatrists today don't believe people can recover from schizophrenia and I don't know why attitudes have regressed since the 'seventies. Perhaps it is because the quality of people who become psychiatrists is lower – most psychiatrists I've met seem to be pretty stupid people, lazy and dishonest. Two or three years ago I requested a second opinion and saw a retarded psychiatrist called Andrew Russell. He said that it is impossible to recover from schizophrenia "by definition". In saying this he was unknowingly echoing what I had a psychiatrist say in the film I wrote in 2012.

About three weeks ago I had an appointment with my current psychiatrist Nick Hoeh and, partly at my mother's suggestion, he agreed to a reduction in my medication from 405mgs of Olanzapine a month to 300mgs of Olanzapine a month, the dosage I'd been on from when I was put under the Act in early 2014 until early 2018. About a fortnight ago, I had my first injection at the lower dose. I'll say something about the side-effects I have suffered since then. Immediately after the injection, I had a feeling that there was cotton wool in my skull, a feeling that lasted just over a week, although it was mercifully absent on Christmas Day. (That night, though, I couldn't sleep until dawn.) I worried for a while that despite saying that they had lowered my dosage, they had actually increased it or given me another drug without telling me. What I suspect now is that nurse who gave me the injection (a Filipino called Manny) might not have properly prepared the drug, that a lot of Olanzapine had got into my system all at once rather than incrementally as it is supposed to. I had to deal with some anxiety during this period. After that I felt better although I experienced nausea and a headache, symptoms that I have read on the Internet are consistent with Olanzapine withdrawal. Right now, and for the last number of days, I have felt quite well. I have not experienced any psychotic symptoms, any 'rebound psychosis'. For the last week, I have not only been sleeping well but sleeping more than I did prior to the reduction.

I'll finish this post by telling a story I have told before, a story that I am telling again because I find it so rankling or aggravating. In 2015 or 2016, I had an Independent Review at which I said to the psychiatrist on the panel, "What do you think the cause of schizophrenia is?" He said something about it being caused by illegal drugs. The reason I asked him this question is that I knew what was making me sick – being treated by people who thought that I was secretly gay when I'm not. This wasn't something I could say explicitly at the review. This psychiatrist wrote in the decision about me, "He said somewhat poignantly that if he knew the cause of his illness, he would ague his case better." I never said this. This illustrates a general point about the psychiatric profession: it is full of arseholes. The problem is that there is supposedly this thing "schizophrenia" and supposedly it is a unitary thing with a single cause but no-one knows what that cause is. Supposedly we are all waiting for some genius to come along and explain the cause of schizophrenia. It doesn't take a genius to work out what the real problem is. Every person diagnosed schizophrenic is different from every other person diagnosed schizophrenic and the causes are different for every person. This is why the search for the 'cause of schizophrenia' is doomed in advance. And the psychiatrists would have worked this out decades ago if they weren't all such fucking cretins..

Concerning Co-Governance

In tonight's post I wish to steer away from my usual concerns and discuss an issue very prominent in the New Zealand news at the moment, a controversy that has been brewing since not longer after we relaxed Covid restrictions – co-governance between Maori and Pakeha. I suspect that many of my readers are not New Zealanders but I will attempt to describe this very significant and interesting development in New Zealand's race relations in a way that should be clear even to people in the United States or Germany (to pick two countries at random). Even if you know very little about New Zealand, you might, through some kind of analogical thinking, be able to relate it to race relations in your own country and to 'political correctness', 'identity politics' and 'wokeism' in general. It also has consequences for 'democracy'. I won't set out my conclusions immediately but rather simply present my personal perspective on this potentially extraordinary seismic shift in the cultural and political landscape. Consider me a field journalist reporting on the culture wars here in Aotearoa. 

According to the last census in 2018 (I am here citing Wikipedia), New Zealand's population comprises four main ethnic groups: 70.2% European, 16.5% Maori, 15.1% Asian and 8.1% Pacific Islander. The reason these percentages add up to more than 100% is because it is possible for New Zealand citizens to identify with more than one ethnic group. In the introduction I used the word 'Pakeha'. This word is ambiguous. 'Pakeha' is a Maori word which simply means non-Maori but is often used to describe ethnically European New Zealanders. (Of course, when the word 'Pakeha' was first coined, the only non-Maori in New Zealand were the European colonisers.) Maori are, of course, the indigenous inhabitants of New Zealand, the 'tangata whenua' (people of the land). I shall attempt, perhaps imprecisely, to say something about the Maori. Maori society was and still is tribal – for instance, the largest tribe (or 'iwi') in New Zealand is Ngapuhi.  My foreign readers may jump to the conclusion that Maori are somehow 'uncivilised', that they live in flax huts and spend their time fishing, gathering shellfish, and growing sweet potatoes (kumara). In fact, they enjoy the benefits of Western 'civilisation' (I hope I am not using this word injudiciously) while still keeping alive many of the cultural traditions that predated Abel Tasman first setting foot on New Zealand soil in 1642, traditions that have experienced a renaissance over the last thirty or forty years after essentially being squashed for over a century by government policies that favoured assimilation. Central to Maori culture is the 'marae' a meeting house that serves as focal point for Maori communities. I have been on maraes a number of times in my life. For example, when I undertook my abortive experiment in teacher training in 2006, my teachers, fellow students, and I all spent the night sleeping in a marae as a kind of bonding or spiritual experience – it is not uncommon for many organisations or professions in New Zealand to recommend or even require this rite of passage for prospective initiates. Perhaps spending the night on a marae at least once in one's life is seen as a way of confirming one's status as a New Zealander. More recently I attended the funeral service, more properly called the 'tangi', of the mother of my sister-in-law, Colleen Urlich, a celebrated Maori artist who had specialised in pottery, at her marae near Dargaville. 

Most marae tend to be in rural parts of New Zealand but most Maori, like most New Zealanders, live in the cities. Although I said above that Maori enjoy the benefits of European civilisation, Maori are far more likely to be poor and disproportionately make up the prison population. Some people on the right use this as an excuse for racism – Michael Laws, the former mayor of Whanganui, used to talk darkly of a 'feral underclass'. Many people on the Left blame colonisation for the deep seated inequities in New Zealand society. In 1994, a very well received and reasonably successful film was made about sexual and physical abuse in a Maori family living in South Auckland, Once Were Warriors. This film, based on a book by a Maori author, Alan Duff, and directed by a Maori director, Lee Tamahori, essentially argued that the cause of Maori social ills was the circumstance that many modern Maori are disconnected from their cultural roots. (Once Were Warriors provided the springboard for the Hollywood careers of actors Temuera Morrison and Cliff Curtis.) This film may still be taught in high schools but I suspect that it probably couldn't be made today in 2022 given our current political environment.

We arrive now at one of the central things complicating race relations in Aotearoa New Zealand. Although I have been talking about Pakeha/Maori relations as though it is an us and them situation, in fact there has been so much intermarriage between Pakeha and Maori over the last two centuries that it is almost impossible to draw a line between the two groups. For instance, David Seymour, the leader of the right libertarian Act Party, who has called for abolishing two agencies expressly designed to further Maori interests (the Ministry of Māori Development and the Office of Māori Crown Relations), is part Maori himself (his iwi is Ngapuhi). This led the Maori minister for the former agency, Willie Jackson, to say, "He's just a useless Maori that's all [...] (He’s) absolutely Māori, but just maybe the most useless advocate for Māori we’ve ever seen.” Closer to home, my sister-in-law has Maori, Dalmatian and I think English heritage as I've intimated above and, obviously of course, so do my nephew and niece. In fact, my lovely and almost preternaturally good niece won an award a year or two ago for top Maori law scholar at Victoria University. By way of contrast, I'll mention another relation (although not one I am related to by blood), an Irish immigrant now in his eighties, who likes to bang on about the Maoris and says, whenever the subject comes up, "There's no such thing as a full blooded Maori!" (a common plaint among Pakeha of his generation). This relation is a staunch Labour supporter and a socialist. It is even possible that I have a little Maori blood in me – I had a great grandmother who was dusky and used to say that she had Spanish blood. All this gives some indication of how complicated it is, a complication compounded by the fact that at least some Maori put their tribal affiliation ahead of their membership in the wider Maori population, something I shall come back to later. Maori are not a homogenous group. Legally, according to the Maori Affairs Amendment Act 1974, a Māori is defined as "a person of the Māori race of New Zealand; and includes any descendant of such a person". Thus David Seymour and my niece, although they are perhaps only an eighth or less genetically Maori, can claim to be Maori. I heard from a right-wing source that the Government is considering changing the definition so that any person can claim to be Maori if he or she chooses to identify as such but, although I spent a little time poring through the Internet last night, I was unable to find anything to confirm this potentially scurrilous rumour. It could be just more bullshit cooked up by the Right.

The media, government, schools, judiciary, and other agencies are constantly seeking to promote Maori culture and language ('te reo') and I shall give a couple of case studies that illustrate this phenomenon, the first relating to place names, the second relating to the teaching of Maori knowledge in science classes, and the third relating to common law. As my readers will have picked up, some place names in New Zealand are of British origin, such as the major cities Auckland, Hamilton, Wellington, Christchurch, and Dunedin. Others are Maori such as Kaitaia, Waikato, Oamaru, and Timaru. We have a Mount Cook and and Mount Ruapehu. This is not to say that things cannot change – on the nightly news Auckland is often referred to as Tamaki Makaurau and people often refer to New Zealand, as I have done above, as Aotearoa. Importantly, in te reo, the 'wh' transcription is (usually) pronounced closer to a 'f' sound than a 'w' sound. In the early days of settlement, or colonisation, many Maori place names were, effectively, mistranscribed and for some decades government agencies, such as the New Zealand Geographic Board, have been putting the letter 'h' back in place names. Towards the end of the first decade of this century, iwi groups in what was then Wanganui applied to the New Zealand Geographic Board for the spelling of the small city's name to be changed to 'Whanganui'. In 2006 and 2009, two referenda were held on whether the city should have its name changed. Then mayor Michael Laws, who I mentioned above, campaigned strongly against the change. Both times the Wanganui citizens voted, by a slim majority, to retain the status quo. Despite these referenda, the New Zealand Geographic Board recommended that the name be changed and in all official Crown documents 'Whanganui' was chosen as the preferred spelling. Wanganui, effectively, officially, became Whanganui in 2015. Personally, I was against the change – but I had a good reason. In the local Maori dialect in the region, the name Whanganui is pronounced with a hard 'w' sound rather than an 'f' sound and I worried that people would start pronouncing the name of the city and region in a way quite different to the way the original iwi who lived there had pronounced it. More generally, this example illustrates the problem I shall come back to later, a tension in this country between the interests of Maori and democracy. (Before my New Zealand readers leap to the conclusion that I am a right wing hack, remember that the name change occurred under a National government.)

I wish to digress for a moment to mention my friend Jess (a girl I haven't seen since 2015). Jess, I suspect, has no Maori blood in her but she is fascinated by Maori mythology and once wrote a poem about the Maori goddess of Death, Hine-nui-te-po. In 2009, she cut out a whole lot of 'h's from newspapers and magazines, put them in an envelope, and mailed them to Michael Laws.

A more recent controversy surrounds the teaching of Maori knowledge, known as matauranga Maori, in universities and schools. Halfway through last year a group of prominent academics from the University of Auckland wrote an open letter to The Listener, New Zealand's most popular and widely read magazine, saying that matauranga Maori was "not science" and protesting being forced to teach it. The letter provoked a backlash from Maori and Maori-sympathetic academics and even from the University's Vice-Chancellor. Subsequently Richard Dawkins weighed in on the controversy from his base in Oxford, penning a very well written open letter to The Listener supporting the original protest. Recently I saw Richard Dawkins interviewed on New Zealand TV by Patrick Gower – he dismissed matauranga Maori as 'mythology'. The issue, as I see it, is this. If, as the original letter suggested, matauranga Maori is being promoted as an alternative to Western science, if Western science is viewed as a Eurocentric tool of colonisation and oppression, this is clearly nonsense. It resembles the claim that was apparently made (perhaps only once by a very silly Feminist) that the equation E=mc squared is sexist. Science is both a method of generating knowledge and the knowledge itself and at least seeks to be objective. Perhaps more importantly it is subject to revision. Einstein overturned Newton, the theory that schizophrenia is genetic has been debunked as has the dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia, the theory that Alzheimers is caused by plaques in the brain has been shown to be based on fraudulent research, and so on. In my view even the idea that evolution is caused by natural selection acting on random mutations may one day be rejected. If science is ultimately subjective, we would never be able to falsify or disprove a theory – the fact that science seems to progress is what makes it different from knowledge systems based on tradition. It is an historical accident that what we generally call science arose in Europe (algebra, apparently, originated with the ancient Babylonians) and so can be regarded as something universal. If, however, we view matauranga Maori as contributing to science, there is no longer a problem. Some Maori knowledge may not be science but some is – to dismiss all matauranga Maori as 'mythology', as Dawkins did, is to overlook the possibility that some Maori ideas may advance science. I cannot be certain which of these two views is the predominant one among Maori academics and the New Zealand academy as a whole. There are also moves to teach matauranga Maori in high schools – I am worried about this. When I was in high school, way back in the 'nineties, we studied New Zealand history. We learned about the Treaty of Waitangi and the land wars of the nineteenth century. In English, back then and today, students study Maori authors such as Witi Ihimaera, Patricia Grace, and Keri Hulme. When I was on placement at a school in 2006, I voluntarily taught the poet Hone Tuwhare. But I am very skeptical about the idea that matauranga Maori should be taught in chemistry and physics classes.

A third way in which Maori culture and concepts are creeping into the mainstream is through the courts. In    October this year the Supreme Court in New Zealand posthumously quashed the convictions of Peter Ellis, a former creche worker who had been found of guilty of a number of sexual offences against children in 1993 and had served seven years in prison. I won't go into the details of this bizarre and terrible case in this post but I recommend readers have a look at the Wikipedia article about it. I will only say about it that, in my opinion, Ellis was the victim of a kind of mass hysteria reminiscent of the insane paranoid suspicion currently held by some Republicans in the US that the Democrat party is deliberately trying to sexualise and groom children. What is relevant here is that the Supreme Court, when posthumously overturning Elis's convictions, relied on the Maori concept of tikanga Maori, a concept that, now that it has been introduced into New Zealand common law, enables the 'mana' (a word which loosely means reputation or prestige) of a defendant to be restored through the courts even if the defendant has died. What do I think about this? In this particular case, I think it is a good thing – I believe, as many people do (including a number of political party leaders and former Prime Ministers such as Don Brash, David Lange, and Mike Moore) that Ellis was the victim of a major miscarriage of justice. However there remains the serious issue of whether such a significant change to New Zealand jurisprudence should have been effected by the courts rather than by Parliament. In America, the Right used to talk ominously about 'activist judges' (until they had their own activist judges in power). It seems that we can justifiably use the same term about many judges here.

I have given three examples of the promotion of Maori culture in New Zealand and now I will adduce perhaps the most obvious, striking exemplar. On the nightly news these days, a lot of te reo is used. Not only is Auckland often referred to as Tamaki Makaurau but Maori phrases are often used (such as, for instance, 'ka kite ano' which loosely means 'see you tomorrow). If I was an American tourist visiting New Zealand who happened to watch the news, I might assume that all New Zealanders speak Maori. This is not the case. Most Pakeha and even some Maori do not speak te reo, at least not as their first language. I myself do not speak Maori although, like most New Zealanders, I know a smattering of Maori words. Even though Maori tend to constitute a kind of underclass in New Zealand (except in Parliament where they are perhaps overrepresented), there is a way in which Maori culture and language is being introduced from the top down. What do I feel about this? I suspect that I am becoming more conservative as I get older but I can't really see a downside to the increased use of the Maori language. I would, for instance, support changing New Zealand's name officially to Aotearoa. The Maori culture and language is something that makes New Zealand unique and the use of Maori words provides a way for immigrants, including those whose ancestors immigrated here over two hundred years ago, to declare their membership in the New Zealand community. For instance, earlier this year, I was at the birthday party of a (female) friend, an immigrant from Ireland. Her girlfriend, an Indian immigrant, used the word 'whanau', a Maori word which means family, during the celebratory speech in honour of my friend.

New Zealand identity, for some time, has been going through a momentous change. In the mid-twentieth century many Pakeha would refer to Britain as 'home'. In 1941, Allen Curnow, perhaps one of the two greatest New Zealand poets (the other being James K Baxter), wrote a poem called "House and Land" which gives some sense of how New Zealand identity has shifted since then. I have been unable to find a full transcription of this poem on the Internet but it contains the lines "The spirit of exile, wrote the historian, /Is strong in the people still" and ends by talking about "Awareness of what great gloom / Stands in a land of settlers / With never a soul at home". (This poem, of course, conveniently forgets Maori.) Curnow was instrumental in guiding New Zealand poets towards a poetry rooted in New Zealand rather than a poetry that simply echoed English verse. As the twentieth century progressed, Pakeha New Zealanders found other tropes through which to express their group identity, such as comic book character Wal Footrot, the black t-shirted sheep farmer who lives in a provincial town and loves rugby, or Fred Dagg, memorably played by John Clarke. Pakeha did not seek to incorporate Maori culture into their identities and Pakeha and Maori identities remained distinct. Over the last several decades, however, as I've already suggested in this essay, Pakeha and Maori identities have begun to overlap or coalesce. I am unsure when this process began.

The point of this post is to discuss co-governance and I am getting there gradually but first I need to say a little about Maori-Pakeha relations from a political perspective. The founding document of New Zealand is the Treaty of Waitangi, signed in 1840, a document as important to New Zealand as the Declaration of Independence is to Americans.  I will not describe fully the Treaty of Waitangi here but point readers to the Wikipedia article on it if they are interested. What is important here is that the Treaty was an agreement between the (British) Crown and Maori iwi in which the Maori gained the privileges of British citizens and were guaranteed rights over their land, villages, and other treasures ('taonga'). The Maori version of the Treaty, signed by around 530 chiefs (including thirteen women), was imperfectly translated from English – in the English version, the Maori ceded 'sovereignty' to the Crown while in the Maori version the word used was 'kawanatanga' (governance) while 'rangatiratanga' (chiefly rule) was also guaranteed. Not long after the signing, the British colonisers, and it is important to remember that they made up a much smaller proportion of the population in those days, pretty much ignored it, resulting in wars between the Brits and the Maori between 1845 and 1862. Starting in the 1970s, however, the importance of the Treaty was recognised by the government, and more gradually by the general population. Compensation began to awarded to iwi for the loss of lands and other taonga and, in 1974, Waitangi Day was made a public holiday. What is essential to note here is that the Treaty and the spirit of the Treaty assumes two separate groups, the English and the Maori, and, as it is generally interpreted today, treats the governance of New Zealand as a kind of partnership between the English and the Maori. (In fact, many Maori oppose making New Zealand a republic because to do so might effectively nullify the Treaty.)

Finally, before turning to co-governance, I wish to say something about the Maori seats. The New Zealand Parliament has 120 seats of which seven of the sixty electorate seats are Maori seats. New Zealanders who identify as Maori can choose to be either on the Maori roll or the general roll. The Maori seats were set up to ensure Maori representation in Parliament but, as I've suggested, quite a number of Members of Parliament today are Maori although I cannot be certain how many.

All these issues have come to a head recently. Along with an upsurge in crime and serious inflation (inflation that is, however, lower than in the US and UK), the major issue that may cost the Labour-led government the next election is the 3 Waters project. My foreign readers may find this part of the essay somewhat dull but for New Zealanders this strikes at the heart of two basic concerns – what it means to be a New Zealander and what our form of government should be. The proposed scheme provokes very strong emotional reactions from both supporters and opponents and can even make some quite upset. In a nutshell, the 3 Waters reform is this. Currently, stormwater, wastewater, and drinking water are administered by 67 regional councils. It is proposed to amalgamate the water services of these councils into four publicly owned entities. These entities will have boards selected, as one site I read says, "based on competence". In fact, what will happen is some kind of governing body, 50% made of council representatives (with each council getting one vote per 50,000 ratepayers) and 50% made of up representatives of iwi that fall under the jurisdiction of a particular entity, will choose the board members. The entities will "have highly skilled, competency-based boards to govern the entities professionally and independently. This will include a collective requirement for the board to have competence in the delivery of infrastructure and have an understanding of the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi, mātauranga Māori, tikanga Māori, and te ao Māori." Furthermore they will "have joint, and equal, local government and mana whenua strategic influence and oversight of the entities and their operation." The need for reform is clear – the water infrastructure in New Zealand is substandard and set to get worse without significant investment. I believe even the opposition National Party recognises the need for reform. What people disagree about is the co-governance of these entities by councils and iwi.

Democracy is generally considered a Good Thing. I recall that when George W. Bush thought he'd won the war in Iraq he said (in 2005) "It is true that the seeds of freedom have only recently been planted in Iraq -- but democracy, when it grows, is not a fragile flower; it is a healthy, sturdy tree." Policy wonks in Washington like to say that no two democracies have gone to war against each other. The recent American midterms were pitched by Democrats as a referendum on democracy itself – they warned that democracy itself was in peril. My foreign readers probably assume that New Zealand is a democracy (and they would be mostly right) – but the co-governance envisaged by the 3 Waters project is, basically by definition, antidemocratic. For one thing, Maori will have 50% influence and oversight even though Maori make up less than 17% of the population. Second, discrimination based on race is built into the structure of these entities. Third, it treats Maori as monolithic. Most importantly, we might ask the question, "Who chooses the Maori representatives?" I admit that the internal workings of iwi are murky to me. Iwi were once ruled by rangatira, chiefs, a hereditary office, but this is no longer the case. Today tribes are effectively led by 'kaumatua' (respected elders), a person becoming a kaumatua through seniority and the respect of his or her peers. I believe kaumatua assemble on marae and, through a process of discussion, deliberation, and consensus arrive at decisions for their iwi or hapu (a process known as a 'hui'). The question then is – is the internal power structure of an iwi democratic and non-democratic? If we accept the Western idea of democracy, that it consists of elections in which each constituent has one vote, iwi are not democratic. If we also then accept that democracy is a Good Thing, than co-governance must be considered a Bad Thing. If we regard the Maori way of administering their own communities as simply a different kind of democracy, the issue is not so clear cut.

Of course, this assumes that democracy is a Good Thing. Some political philosophers don't agree. Last semester, for a Philosophy paper on politics, I studied the book Against Democracy by Jason Brennan. In this disquisition, or polemic, Brennan, an American, argues that most American citizens are so stupid they shouldn't be allowed to vote and suggests that people should only be grated suffrage if they can pass an exam on civics and basic economic theory. If we accept Brennan's argument, we could possibly argue that Maori society is better governed than Western democracies.

There is another aspect of the 3 Waters debate that is seldom covered by the media here. Not only is Maori society tribal, it used to be very bellicose. Iwi often fought vicious wars against other iwi and victors sometime enslaved and sometimes even ate their vanquished foes. In the early 19th century, the Musket Wars were fought during which tribes took advantage of newly acquired guns to dramatically alter tribal borders and decimate other tribes, a conflict led at first by Ngapuhi chief Hongi Hika. Although iwi no longer fight wars against each other, there is still a great deal of intertribal rivalry. It has been suggested to me that a part of the politics of 3 Waters stems from this intertribal rivalry. The Minister of Local Government, Nanaia Mahuta, a strong proponent of 3 Waters, although, according to the Internet, tracing her heritage to three iwi, is mostly closely aligned with Tainui; it is possible that disagreement about 3 Waters may partly be result from animosity between different tribes. In the Herald today (it has taken me about a week to write this post) Shane Jones, a former MP for New Zealand First, suggests that 3 Waters could lead to litigation between different iwi and cites as an example "current infighting between Hauraki iwi and Ngati Whatua in Auckland." Jones, like the New Zealand First leader, Winston Peters, court conservative 'mainstream' New Zealand – Peters, for instance, strongly opposes changing New Zealand's name to Aoteaoroa. However, both, by the definition advanced above, are Maori. According to what I can find, Jones is of Te Aupouri and Ngati Takota descent and Peters is of Ngati Wai descent (his Scottish clan being MacInnes). It is not impossible that disagreement about 3 Waters partly reflects hostility between Northland tribes and Tainui, an iwi based in the Waikato – Jones has criticised Tainui in the past. (I might note here that is not easy to find accurate facts about tribal affiliation of individuals on the Internet.)

This essay shows just how complex Maori-Pakeha relations are here in New Zealand. In a recent post, "A Reaction to Netflix's Adaptation of The Sandman", I discussed how, in America and the UK, there is a tension today between two different conceptions of racial identity. On the one hand, there is a desire to believe that race no longer matters, that western civilisation has moved beyond race. On the other hand, there is the desire to cleave to one's own racial or ethnic group, a disposition encompassed by the term "Identity Politics". This tension is manifest in New Zealand today. On the one hand, New Zealanders, regardless of their genealogy (their 'whakapapa'), embrace Maori culture and language and associate national identity with Maori tradition. This first attitude is inclusive of all New Zealanders. On the other hand, there is a move to divide New Zealanders, separate them into two groups, Pakeha and Maori, and grant disproportionate power to the minority. The first conception is something with which I am very sympathetic but the second conception is something with which I am uncomfortable. Some opponents of co-governance even use the word 'apartheid'. Fundamentally, the problem in New Zealand is that there is a basic contradiction between the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi and the principles of democracy. Because the Treaty is New Zealand's founding document, this is no easy problem to fix. It is also worth noting that, in a sense, the Treaty predated democracy – in 1840 (and only as a result of the 1832 Reform Bill) only 18% of the total adult male population in England and Wales could vote. Presumably British colonists in New Zealand in 1840 had no say over the government at all. Although democratic theorists like to trace the history of democracy back to ancient Athens, in a sense modern democracy, the doctrine that every citizen of voting age has an equal right to participate in elections, is a recent invention – it did not come into existence until the early twentieth century. Moreover, a part of Identity Politics is the idea that one's own identity depends on the history of the group to which one belongs – this is what drives talk in the US about awarding reparations to the descendants of slaves. The precept that societies should correct historical injustices against minority groups is what partly motivates the proponents of co-governance. I would like to say, as Stephen Daedalus does in Ulysses, "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." 

It might seem that I have been arguing against co-governance but there are always arguments to be made on both sides. Much of the criticism of co-governance comes from the Right, from people who support laissez-faire capitalism. I would like to say here that if these critics oppose co-governance on the grounds that it is undemocratic, they should also, for the sake of consistency, support the nationalisation of New Zealand's two supermarket chains. Capitalism, like co-governance, is also antidemocratic.

This post, as the reader may have noticed, exhibits a certain amount of ambivalence. Even within my own family, there is sharp and sometimes passionate disagreement about co-governance. My father, a King's Counsel, is currently with a group of concerned citizens planning to take the government to court over co-governance. I believe this is public knowledge – he wrote a piece for the National Business Review earlier this year attacking the 3 Waters scheme. In this post, I have tried, as objectively as a I can, to get to the philosophic roots of the problem.

My American readers, who may be familiar with New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern only through her appearances on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, may be surprised to learn how much hostility there is towards her here in New Zealand, particularly among the Right. Some think that because she has identified as a Socialist, she is aligning herself with Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao. I think this is quite wrong. I wrote a post about Jacinda a couple of years ago, when she enjoyed more popular support, in which I argued that she could be described as both a democrat and a technocrat. I would like to say here that I truly believe she is a good person trying to do the right thing. It might be that she is being bullied by the sizeable Maori contingent in the Labour caucus; it might be that she truly believes co-governance is the best way to honour the spirit of the Treaty. If I could, I would suggest she consider the position taken by Helen Clark in 2004 when the then Labour government passed the Foreshore and Seabed Act that prevented iwi from seeking customary title of the coastline. If the current government does not back down, it will probably lose the next election. And a National government will certainly repeal 3 Waters or at least that part of the legislation that grants iwi 50% control. It isn't a battle worth fighting.

At the risk of repeating myself, I'll summarise the arguments I have made. In New Zealand at the moment, there is a push to change the national identity by promoting Maori culture and concepts from the top down. This unofficial policy involves, for instance, changing place names, making much more use of te reo in the media, and introducing concepts like matauranga Maori to education and tikanga Maori to common law. This can be considered a type of 'political correctness' or 'wokeism', a form of social engineering analogous to practices in the US known as 'affirmative action' or 'reverse discrimination'. I will reserve judgment about whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. Alongside this, paradoxically, there is a political move to separate New Zealanders into two distinct groups, Maori and Pakeha, and award disproportionate power to the former group – this is occurring even though Maori and Pakeha identities, culturally and in terms of heritage or ancestry, are becoming increasingly blurred. This tension, operating both to bring New Zealand together and to pull it apart, has part of its roots in the Treaty of Waitangi, New Zealand's founding document, a document that predated modern democracy.

I'll finish this post by describing a couple of experiences I've had that bear on the topics I have discussed. In early 2014, immediately after I was put under the Act, my mother and I visited the coastal town of Kawhia – I felt like some kind of spirit or presence associated with the place didn't want me to be there and was trying to push me out. Kawhia was the birthplace of a particularly blood-thirsty Maori chief, Te Rauparaha, who fought during the Musket Wars. I learned just now that for a period during the nineteenth century Kawhia was closed to Europeans. More recently, I think in 2016, when I was still hearing voices sometimes, I was lying in bed and heard a voice chanting in te reo in the back of my mind. As I've said, I don't speak Maori, but I had the sense somehow of a 'karakia' being performed. A karakia is a ritual chant or incantation used to invoke spiritual guidance or protection. In this blog, I have very often indeed discussed mental illness, and mental illness, like crime and poverty, disproportionately affects Maori. Perhaps, by discussing my own mental illness publicly, I have helped the Maori community a little. This sounds grandiose but that doesn't make me wrong.

Wokeism and What The Shrinks Knew

Do people read blogs? I have to confess that I don't myself. Instead I watch Youtube a lot and read the Guardian and other news sites online. For a long time I've felt, with little evidence, that maybe, despite my awareness that people don't read blogs, this one was making a difference, that perhaps, among other things, I was presenting the human face of 'mental illness' or 'schizophrenia' (whatever that word means), that I might somehow de-stigmatise this condition. I thought this blog would improve people's understanding of it and bring about some changes not only in public perceptions but in psychiatric discourse. This activist motivation entered into the reasons I wrote the screenplay The Hounds of Heaven in 2012, a film I have talked about in other posts. One problem, as I've become aware, is that every person diagnosed 'schizophrenic' is different from every other person diagnosed 'schizophrenic'; my life story might only to a limited degree be generalisable. Furthermore popular prejudices and stereotypes associated with mental illness are very hard to shift, even among commentators I like, such as Jon Stewart. Yet another problem is that I believe I have recovered, that I recovered many years ago, and so it is strange to at once say that this is condition I understand because I have it and say that I no longer do. The general public and psychiatric profession does not believe recovery is possible. This year I have been studying postgraduate Philosophy part time – this is why I have not posted for a long while. (Later this week I will publish an essay I wrote concerning fictions for a Philosophy of Language paper.) But I still want to keep this blog going. There is still more I can say about my life, even though perhaps I have said all I need to. In this post I want to discuss some problems with Woke ideology, as it pertains to fiction and to my other concerns, and then talk a little more about the Mental Health System. I have described a great deal of my life in this blog – in this post I wish to talk about what the shrinks and other mental health workers knew about it and when they knew it.

As I've said, I spend a lot of time watching clips from smart people on Youtube, sites such as Munecat, Mathologer, Veritassium, Cosmic Skeptic, and Lawrence Krauss's site The Origins Podcast. Sometimes I watch Unbelievable? or talks by Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins. I like Rupert Sheldrake. I also like Sam Harris. I used to watch Bret Weinstein before he went down the anti-vaxxer rabbit hole. I religiously view clips from American late night talk shows like The Late Show, The Daily Show and Late Night with Seth Meyers. I always watch Bill Maher, enjoy The Majority Report, John Oliver, and Jon Stewart. As this reading list suggests, I have Catholic tastes. The algorithm can't work out if I'm gay or straight, a moderate or progressive left-winger, or if I'm a Christian or an atheist. I admit that I was drawn to the anti-Woke left but in recent months have returned to the Progressive wing of the Democrat party. But this does not mean that I can't criticise Woke ideology when it goes wrong.

I have discussed the inspirations of authors before in this blog. I have argued that authors sometimes draw from their own life experience, sometimes draw on what they surmise about other people (any good author is a kind of amateur psychologist), and sometime make stuff up. The problem with Woke ideology, as it pertains to fiction (and to other forms of story telling such as documentary making), is that the current dogma has it that one should only write about one's own experience and the experiences of the group to which one belongs– or else simply invent stuff with no relation to reality at all. For instance, the novel American Dirt, a novel about illegal immigration from Mexico to the US by Jeannine Cummins, became the subject of sometimes vitriolic controversy because Cummins is white. She was accused of putting on 'brown face'. More recently the documentary Jihad Rehab was pulled from Sundance because a number of Muslim documentary makers, most of whom hadn't seen it, mounted a ferocious campaign against it partly because it was made by a white non-Muslim American woman. The only documentary film festivals in the world that have screened it were here in New Zealand and in Zurich. I recommend readers watch Harris's interview with the documentary maker Meg Smaker (on Youtube) although, for balance, you should also read the Guardian article about the controversy. There is another problem with this political orthodoxy. Suppose we say that only Maori authors can tell stories about Maori – are we then supposed to believe that a particular Maori author speaks for all Maori? If we say 'no', it would follow from this way of thinking that the only permissible form of story telling is autobiography. If this idea, that authors should only write about their own experience or invent fantasies, becomes the new orthodoxy, all stories will either be memoirs or chimeras such as are found in the Marvel cinematic universe or in the fantasy section of the bookshop. (No one can accuse Tolkien of appropriating the cultures of elves and dwarves because elves and dwarves can't mount Twitter campaigns for more representation and social justice.) It would destroy literature. I am not saying that misrepresentation can't be a problem. I have a published a couple of (badly-written) posts about how terribly the film A Beautiful Mind represents the life of John Nash and schizophrenia generally. But I don't think Ron Howard should be cancelled. Edward St Aubyn, in Double Blind, and Salman Rushdie, in East West, depict schizophrenic characters that I think are completely inaccurate but I don't think either book should be burnt because of that. It is important that writers be able to write about whatever interests them. A reader might disagree with a particular representation but he or she shouldn't go on Twitter calling for the author to be cancelled because the author has hurt his or her feelings.

There are some other problems with Woke ideology. These problems pertains to my own life – these are the problems that probably led me to embrace the anti-Woke left. Perhaps most importantly, I get the impression that for a man or woman to say he or she is straight is considered somehow homophobic. This is part of the reason Tom Cruise received such opprobrium starting in the 'nineties. Because he had sued a British newspaper that had said he was gay for defamation, a civil suit he won, it split much of the public evenly between those who thought he was a closet homosexual and those who thought he was a homophobe. I think this public perception was partly why he has appeared on Graham Norton's show several times. This Woke dogma might also be why George Clooney, after a gay magazine in the UK called him "gay, gay, gay", released a statement saying, "I don't want to offend the gay community by saying I'm not gay but the third 'gay' seems a little excessive. I may be gay, gay, but I'm definitely not gay, gay, gay.' (To state the obvious, Clooney is straight.) I might be wrong about this impression. On his show, Seth Meyers sometimes runs a segment called "Jokes Seth can't tell" in which a lesbian writer and a black writer tell jokes that a straight white man couldn't tell – in fact, Seth usually introduces this segment by saying that these are jokes that he as a straight white man can't tell. It seems that a man or woman with impeccable leftist credentials can get away with saying he or she is straight but that some of us can't.

This double-bind, a double-bind that affects those of us who may perhaps be the subject of mostly unfounded rumours, is part of the reason I was 'ill' for so long. A couple of years ago a dear female friend, a friend I hadn't seen for many years, sent me an email. She had read this blog. She said, "Why do you mind if people think you're gay?" She added, "Of course, I'm not under the Mental Health Act." To put it bluntly, one reason I don't like people thinking I'm gay is because gay men have sex with each other, a practice that simply repels me. Another reason is that because many people think gay men and women are born gay, this would mean that people might come to the conclusion that my love for the three women in my life that I've fallen for (one of whom was the friend who had sent me the email) was somehow fake. It is possible for a man to accept homosexuality in others while still finding the idea of sodomising other men himself abhorrent. I know this makes me sound homophobic. In 2014, the clinical psychologist I saw that year said something like, "There is so much hate in you." As I've suggested in other posts, he was putting me in the double bind I have just described, putting me in a position where my only possible options were homophobia or homosexuality. This is why I nearly hanged myself at the very beginning of 2015.

The generally accepted definition of 'homosexuality' is "sexual attraction towards members of the same sex". 'Heterosexuality' is defined as "sexual attraction towards members of the opposite sex". Presumably 'bisexuality' should be defined as "sexual attraction towards members of both sexes." It seems to me that most people, including most psychiatrists, don't understand these definitions because they don't understand what the term 'sexual attraction' means. I'm different. Even back in 2007, when I first became 'unwell', I had a fairly good understanding of sexuality. In particular, I knew that I was heterosexual because I knew that I was only sexually attracted to women. Starting in 2013, however, after I first started to consistently say that I'm straight, I've had to deal with psychiatrists and other mental health workers who either think I'm dishonest or stupid. Immediately before being put under the Act in early 2014, I saw a psychiatrist who took the risk of defining the word 'homosexual' for me as though I didn't know the definition. I felt as though something evil had looked at me from behind her eyes. She was treating me as though I was retarded. At my first appointment with the clinical psychologist I saw in 2014, I said I was straight but this didn't stop him from asking me, after some eight months of seeing him, "Aren't you attracted to men?" Two or three years ago, I saw a different psychiatrist once for a second opinion. I told him that the people at bFM had thought I was gay. He expressed surprise, saying that he thought bFM would be quite a progressive place. I said, "They weren't homophobic – they just thought I was gay." A little later, my regular psychiatrist asked me, "Why do you mind people thinking you're gay?" I replied, simply, "Because it's not true." The point I'm getting at here is that the people who think it homophobic for someone to say he or she is straight obviously don't understand the definition of homosexuality.

In this blog, perhaps not consistently, I have not only been claiming that I am straight but also trying to prove it by talking about my sexual attraction to women. (I am setting aside that terrible part of my life from 2013 until the end of 2015.) Once again this causes me to run afoul of Woke ideology. We live in an age where many strident Feminists see all men as potential rapists. I am not going to excuse someone like Harvey Weinstein but I have heard stories about university professors who have been disciplined for looking at female students the wrong way. For a discussion of this issue, from a female perspective, I recommend the Lawrence Krauss podcast in which he interviews Janice Flamengo. I am aware that in discussing my sexual attraction to women some women on the fringe left may regard me as something like a male chauvinist. I have played around with the term InCel because, although I have been celibate since 2011, this does not mean that I have become a Buddhist Monk who has sworn of sex. I still want to be in a relationship with a woman but because I am no longer particularly handsome, am unemployed, and am diagnosed schizophrenic, I am not particularly attractive to women. I don't blame women for my celibacy, I blame myself and my situation. I have considered writing a blogpost describing my relationships with women in the past to show that I have mainly had perfectly respectful attitudes to women. I was in a serious relationship from the age of 17 until the age of 21 (with a girl called Danielle) and was sort of in a relationship from the age of 23 or 24 until the age of 29 (this particular relationship was, admittedly, complicated). I never slept with the girl I call Jess although I wanted to and I believe she knew that I did. I made an advance on her early on in 2011 but, from hanging out with her in 2013, I get the feeling that she either didn't mind or had forgiven me. (Our relationship was complicated by the Christchurch earthquake.) Very occasionally in my life, the last time being in 2012, I have made an advance on a woman but never, I believe, in a crude or coercive way. For instance, when I was much younger I made an advance on a girl called Sara, one of the three women I've loved in my life, after we had seen a movie together and while we were watching the video Lost Highway. She rebuffed me but we remained friends. In fact, it was Sara who sent me the email I described earlier in this post.

The main point of this post is to describe not my life, which I've talked about at length, but what the people in the Mental Health Service knew about it. I have realised that some of my readers may not understand how the Mental Health System in New Zealand works and so I shall give a brief description. A patient sees his or her psychiatrist for an hour perhaps once a month or perhaps more infrequently. (The last time I saw my present psychiatrist was over six months ago.) A patient also has a Key Worker, a nurse or occupational therapist or social worker, who he or she sees more often. In my early days, in 2007 until 2009, I saw my Key Worker, a woman called Kate Whelan, at least once a week. We would usually go out for coffee to a cafe. At the beginning of 2010, Kate organised a weekly coffee group for youngish patients to meet and socialise which I attended. Since Kate, I've had five Key Workers; currently I don't seem to have a Key Worker at all. My only contact with the Taylor Centre is my monthly injection. After the injection I have to remain at the Taylor Centre for two hours, just in case I suffer post-injection syndrome, during which I talk to other patients or to the workers observing me. Apart from a very nice woman called Teri, I don't always remember the names of the workers because new ones appear fairly regularly. After every interaction between a patient and a worker or workers, they write up notes about the interaction. In my case this means that I now have a dossier of notes bigger than the Bible. As I've said in a recent post, I don't believe that when I get a new psychiatrist, they pore through my notes. At my last injection, I asked a worker about this, about how the psychiatrists come to an appointment with some understanding of the patient, and she said that after an appointment with the doctor, the doctor makes a short summary of the last several months. This might not be a sufficient explanation. Perhaps the doctors do write up some kind of short summation, a summation which, as I argued in that recent post, might in my case be full of serious inaccuracies.

A legal right I have as someone under the Mental Heath Act is that I can ask to see my notes. As I said in that recent post, in 2015 I requested a copy of my notes and, after some time, was given an enormous sheaf of papers. Supposedly notes about every interaction I'd ever had were in it. I only read the very beginning of it because it was so dispiriting. What I noticed, however, was that there seemed to be some omissions. The record didn't include any notes about my first appointment with my first psychiatrist, Antony Fernando; nor was there any mention of what I had said when I had first made landfall at the Taylor Centre. I didn't kick up a fuss about this at the time because, back then, I had a kind of fatalistic sense that I had no options or recourse, that there was nothing I could do. If they did carry out redactions on my notes, the Taylor Centre may have broken the law. In the rest of this post, I shall, therefore, rely on my memory. I know memory is fallible. However everything I shall say I feel confident about.

I have talked about my first psychotic episode in a number of posts, "My First Psychotic Episode", "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM" and "Theory of Mind and the Big House" and elsewhere. It occurred in 2007 when I was twenty-seven. Although this may be an oversimplification, it seems justifiable to say that the cause of this first episode was that a rumour went around some of my acquaintances that I was gay. Of course, there had been rumours about me (among some people) starting in 2001 because of the short film script I had written that year, the gay spy film that I described in the post "My First Psychotic Episode and bFM". The episode I suffered, which really kicked into gear perhaps a fortnight after I left bFM, was acute. I decided that there were listening devices in the fire alarms, started dividing my flatmates, of which I had twenty, into angels and demons, heterosexuals and closet homosexuals, and formed the paranoid conspiracy theory that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals. I decided that Jesus was straight and all the disciples were gay and considered the possibility that I might be Jesus. The episode reached its climax when I considered drowning myself, decided against it, returned to the flat, and told some of my flatmates, "My father's gay but I'm straight!" What is important to note here is that, after I said this, much of my psychosis went away. I recall telling some of my flatmates the next night, immediately before my brother arrived to remove me from the Big House, that I either had schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder. I still thought that my father was gay and that bFM was full of closet homosexuals but the more bizarre delusions, such as the delusion that I was under surveillance, had evaporated (although I was still agitated and emotionally distressed).

The next day my father drove me to the Taylor Centre. It is hard to remember this exactly but both my father and mother were there. I went into an office and spoke with a psychiatrist called Trish van der Krellen and Kate Whelan without either parent present. I thought I had made some kind of important breakthrough. I had always tried to be friendly with gay people, had supported gay rights, and, even though I am straight, been interested in homosexuality. I thought that my father being gay might explain this. I thought that my father's homosexuality might account for why I had got myself into such a terrible mess. I recall that I was quite voluble, saying among other things that I had been friends with gay students at High School. I said, and this is exactly what I said, "My father's gay, he divorced my mother when I was seven because he didn't want me to be gay, and I want to come out as straight!" What I meant by this was that I had always been straight and wanted people to know it. I can remember Kate Whelan sitting there smiling; I immediately got a bad vibe off her. My parents were invited into the office – I recall my father was very red in the face. I wasn't sure at the time if they knew what I told Kate Whelan and Trish van der Krellen. My lovely mother said something like, "He was hit on the head by a night cracker when he was a kid. Perhaps that's the cause." (This is slightly inaccurate but close enough.)

Shortly after this first contact, I had my first real appointment with the psychiatrist who would be the one to treat me until the beginning of 2012, Antony Fernando. At the time I believed that the Mental Health Service would offer psychological treatment. I thought that I would lie on a couch, talk about my family, come to terms with my father's homosexuality, and then be let go. What I didn't realise then is that psychiatrists are doctors who consider psychological distress a symptom of a neurological disease, a neurotransmitter imbalance. I didn't realise then that basically the only form of treatment they offer is medication. I remember the moment I walked into the Fernando's office deciding, from the way he looked at me, that he was yet another closet homosexual. My parents were both present at the consultation– I couldn't tell Fernando that my father was gay with my father in the room and I couldn't say this to a man who I had immediately concluded was homosexual. Furthermore, I sensed immediately that this was a medical consultation and decided to treat it as such. I described my symptoms without mentioning anything to do with homosexuality at all. For instance, I told him that I had formed the delusion that there were listening devices in the fire alarms of the flat in which I lived and that the horoscope had been talking to me. Fernando asked me if I heard voices and looked surprised when I said "No". I very much wanted him to ask me if I was gay or straight but he didn't and never did. I recall telling him that I lived in a vegetarian flat. He asked me, "Are you a vegetarian?" I said, "No, I'm a carnivore." I was talking in code. I was trying to tell him that not only was I straight, I had a sex drive. When I said this, he smirked.

I believe it was at that first consultation that Fernando told me to "Stop avoiding". He also sarcastically referred to my "breakthrough". I immediately concluded that he had decided to diagnose me as a latent or closet homosexual. It was terrible. There was no way I could tell him he was wrong. I should say something about those early days. Because I had suffered an acute psychotic episode and because I was new to the Mental Health Service, I was put under the Early Intervention Team. I saw Kate Whelan or other workers every day. I can remember, in particular, going for drives or walks sometimes with a chap called Jurgen and sometimes a chap called Maurice. Although this didn't begin immediately, I would sometimes divide the people treating me into angels and demons, as I had my flatmates at the Big House. Sometimes I thought they might be, in a way, witches and vampires. I can remember immediately forming a bad impression of Maurice, sensing a kind of darkness around him, although I worked out later that he was a very good man. Not only was I still dealing with psychosis, suddenly becoming a patient of the Mental Health Service made me feel that my life had ended, that the world had ended. I sensed that I had become a patient permanently. Later in the year, there were times when I literally believed the Apocalypse had occurred, that we were living in the End Days. I sensed all this immediately. I had been uprooted from my previous life and put in new one, one in which I was subject to an institution. I recall, just a couple of weeks after becoming a patient, I attended an art group at an establishment called Toi Ora, a charity that caters to mental health patients by providing creative workshops. I drew a picture of whole lot of bric-a-brac and people being blown away by a terrible wind.

The point I am trying to make here is that the people treating me should have realised that my illness was a temporary reaction to stressful circumstances rather than something I was born with and would suffer from for the rest of my life. A couple of months ago a worker asked me about my 'illness', saying, "When was it picked up?" I replied, "It wasn't 'picked up'. I had a very sudden and severe psychotic episode." The worker's question is more evidence of the idiocy of the Mental Health System generally.

The other important point I wish to make, something I think about a lot, is that there was a window in those early days when everything could have turned out differently. I did very occasionally use the words 'gay' and 'straight' for the first couple of weeks although I didn't say I was straight again, or talk about bFM or the Big House. I told the people treating me about the gay spy film I had written when I was twenty-one – I know this because a worker asked me how long ago I had written it. I replied, "Ten years" although of course it was only six. (I hadn't then started making sense of my life.) During one of the first times I went out for coffee with Kate Whelan, in Remuera, I told her a story that I have also told in this blog before, in the post "An Anecdote; and A Description of a Condition". In 1998, when I was living at Knox College in Dunedin, I had bought a Cleo magazine because my girlfriend living in Auckland liked Cleo. My best friend at the time had teased me about it. I told him that I was confident enough in my sexuality that I could buy a woman's magazine without it worrying me. Being a philosophy student, he said, "By that logic, you could prove beyond doubt that you're straight by dressing in women's clothes." Viewing this as challenge, I borrowed a dress, wig and high-heels from our lesbian friend down the corridor and dressed in drag for an evening – our lesbian friend took photos. It was a fun night. The reason I told Kate this story was because I sensed that Fernando had decided to diagnose me a closet or latent homosexual and this was my way of saying that I was totally straight, that his diagnosis was absurd. I suspect that Kate simply put something like 'has transvestite tendencies' in my notes. I know this from circumstantial evidence. When you get down to brass tacks, the cause of my illness was simple. The people treating me should have worked out that I was straight and that I had become unwell as a result of false gossip. And they could have worked this out if they'd asked me some fucking questions.

The window passed quickly. I remember the feeling that I was under surveillance came back. I was walking with my mother and she asked me how they could be monitoring me. I decided that there must be a microphone in my glasses. The delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals, that there were more homosexuals than heterosexuals in the world, came back. I stopped using the words 'gay' and 'straight' entirely. These delusions went away at the end of 2007 but I still avoided using either word. I didn't say the word 'gay' to Kate again until 2013. When I became a patient of the Taylor Centre again that year, just before Easter, I had a consultation with a different psychiatrist and was assigned a new key worker, Josh Brasil. Josh was the first and only Mental Health worker to ask me how I identified. (I replied "Straight" of course.) A little later we went out for coffee. We discussed Charles Bukowski. Now, Bukowski is an author that straight bookish men like to talk about to prove that they are straight, the same way straight music fans like to talk about Jim Morrison and steer clear of Morrissey in conversation. I didn't like this conversation; it felt fake. I was also under a great deal of stress at the time. I saw Kate briefly and burst out to her that I didn't like "being flirted with by a gay man". Her reaction is hard to describe – the way I would put it is perhaps that she became incredibly uncomfortable. My saying this caused her considerable cognitive dissonance. Shortly after this, I changed my mind about Josh and decided that he actually was straight but I never corrected the error that I had made, although perhaps a year and half later, just before he moved to a different DHB and ceased being my Key Worker, I apologised for the bad start we'd had, saying that I had been under a great deal of stress at the time. Yet it probably had gone on my record as another black mark against me.

This post is a little clumsily written. I am probably repeating things readers already know. I can't go through all of the last fifteen years describing when people knew what, but there are two items in the list that are perhaps significant, that I'll mention. At my first Independent Review in 2015, a review I'd requested, my then psychiatrist put in the report that I was ill in 2008 and well for the first eight months of 2009 prior to going off the Rispiridone. The opposite is true. As I've pointed out a number of times, I was close to well in 2008 and didn't start hearing voices until January 2009, after I'd been on antipsychotics for over a year and half. I have described what triggered this episode most clearly in the post "The Illusion of Authorship and Other Matters." The important point here is that when I started hearing voices I told people. Very shortly after I started hearing voices, I was lying in bed and heard a voice say very loudly, "I love you." I thought it was God. I told the Scottish nurse Avril I had been seeing for 'therapy' about this.  So they must have known that the 'treatment' I was receiving had made me worse. The only conclusion I can draw is that the people treating me are either incompetent or dishonest. The second item concerns a long essay that I wrote about my life and my treatment shortly after I was put under the Act in early 2014. I had a copy of it put in my psychiatrist's pigeon hole and gave another to my lawyer. I know my lawyer read it; I can remember, for instance, in late 2017 just before my last Independent Review, he said to me, "It's been four years. Perhaps that's long enough." (What he meant by this is that I'd been consistently saying I was straight since early 2013.) However I don't think the psychiatrist I was seeing, Jennifer Murphy, ever read it although I told her repeatedly that she should. I don't believe the Key Worker I had at the time, Josh, ever read it. I suspect that the Clinical Psychologist I saw in 2014, Simon Judkins, read it but because he's a fucking imbecile he didn't understand it. If they'd read it and realised I was telling the truth, the truth that my sociopathic former psychiatrist Antony Fernando must have lied about me, they would have been forced to let me go years ago.

Not only does the psychiatric profession not understand what the terms "heterosexual" and "homosexual" mean, I have come to the conclusion that they don't understand what the term "schizophrenia" means. In 2013, having been discharged from the Taylor Centre for a year, only being on 5mgs of Olanzapine for that period, and having been totally well since early 2010, I became somewhat psychotic again. I thought, rightly or wrongly, that there was still uncertainty in the Fourth Estate about my sexuality; I though that if I reengaged with the Taylor Centre and got it on my record that I'm straight and always have been that this fact would somehow disseminate into the public domain. I told the first psychiatrist I saw that year about the three women I'd loved in life. Just before I saw Jennifer Murphy for the first time, I heard a voice in my head saying, "Don't talk about love, talk about sex" and so, at my first appointment with her, I told her, truthfully, that the first time I'd had sex was New Years Eve 1997 and the last time was a one night stand in Wellington in 2011. It was almost immediately after that that she told me that I was schizophrenic. (Prior to 2013, my official diagnosis had been Psychosis Not Otherwise Specified.) She diagnosed me schizophrenic because she thought I was lying. Now, if you look up the definition of schizophrenia on Wikipedia for instance, you'll find that officially the positive symptoms are delusion and hallucinations. Dishonesty is not supposedly a symptom. Nevertheless, I believe this is why she diagnosed me schizophrenic. If dishonesty is considered the criterion by which we diagnose schizophrenia we would also have to consider Donald Trump and Hershel Walker schizophrenic. She diagnosed me schizophrenic, I have to assume, because she thought I was a virgin and was lying about having had sex with women. Presumably this lie originated with Antony Fernando. I wish to say something briefly about the psychiatric profession. The public tends to assume that psychiatrists are very clever people. They aren't. They spend some ten years learning about neurotransmitters and parts of the brain and nothing about real people. And of course most psychiatric discourse about schizophrenia is just fucking wrong. Jennifer Murphy is evidence for the claim that most psychiatrists are fucking corrupt and stupid.

When I write a post about my life, it is tempting to put everything in but I can't. I have to assume readers have read the other posts I've written. I will say one last thing however. In other posts, I have claimed that Antony Fernando is a closet homosexual. Having thought about this some more, I would like to refine this diagnosis. I believe that, at my first appointment with him, he experienced a Same Sex Attraction and then projected his own homosexuality onto me. This is why I decided he was a member of the Homosexual Conspiracy. If I'd been treated by a heterosexual psychiatrist, I would have recovered in a couple of months. Furthermore I believe Fernando has misdiagnosed patients before – I refer the reader to another post I've written concerning a patient called Yves who was also treated by Antony Fernando and was also, I believe, raped by the Mental Health System. Patients deserve better than a psychiatrist who gets sexually excited whenever he has a male patient in his consultation room.