It has been a long while since I've written a post. For the last year I have been dealing with some issues to do with physical health: I often feel quite fatigued and, despite being released from the Compulsory Treatment Order I was under for ten years, have also been suffering from a great deal of existential angst. I don't know what I'm going to do now, if I'm physically fit enough to get a job, or if at the age of forty-five my life is effectively over. Sometimes I feel that lots of people read this blog, I'm not sure why, but this blog in itself is not enough to make me feel that I am making a positive contribution to the world. What I want is for this physical ill health to go away, to get a real girlfriend, find some way to make a little money, and to generally feel that my life that was interrupted for sixteen years might resume.
In this essay I intend to cover a few disparate topics and in the later part of the essay I intend to discuss my life again.
I might note that the people who read this blog sometimes go back to older posts and I'll make a confession: I can't always remember the content of every essay I've written. I cannot recollect at all posts like "Theories of Knowledge Part 2" or "Evolution, Entropy, and the Ontological Argument for the Existence of God" or "The Evolution of Cats and Dogs." I feel confident though that my thinking has a kind of consistency and has developed in an orderly fashion culminating in much more recent essays like "The Meaning of Meaning", "Determinism, Quantum Physics, and Free Will" and "Evolution, Ideas, and Hiveminds." The essays I've written concerning my own life I remember much better and it is one such essay I will briefly return to.
In the post "my soul is an irritant" I described how I had been told that a friend of mine, who I called Warren, had experimented with homosexuality when he was a student in Dunedin. If readers remember, which I suppose is unlikely, I visited another friend in Dunedin in 2000 or 2001 who told me, "There's something you need to know about Warren". Apparently he had seen Warren and another male acquaintance of ours take a young man they'd met into a bedroom with them. In the earlier post I didn't specify that this acquaintance was also male. After I learned this, I believed, literally for decades, that Warren was a closet homosexual. I never discussed this with Warren when I saw him or with anybody else. In the earlier post I wasn't clear that this was my view of him. He went on to have a string of girlfriends and eventually married and had a child. I could never understand what his girlfriends saw in him, why they would voluntarily choose to date a homosexual. One of his girlfriends had been to Yale and had known people who had been initiated into the Skull and Bones secret society, a society that had had George W. Bush among others as members, and years later, in 2007 when I was profoundly paranoid, I decided that the Skull and Bones must be a secret homosexual society. In 2013, I visited Warren. I gained the impression that he was finally coming out as gay to me and later that year I told a few people. A number of years ago I wrote to Warren, told him what my friend had told me way back in 2000 or 2001, told him that I had told people he was gay, and apologised. Warren wrote back saying, "I don't mind that you told people I'm gay. You and I both know that I'm not." He admitted that he had 'experimented' when he was young although he didn't use this word. Rather he said that what had happened between him and our male acquaintance was the result of too much testosterone and the fact that he was having difficulty sleeping with women at the time.
Another friend from Dunedin has also played a major part in my conception of the world, a women called Sarah. Sarah has all her life alternated between homosexuality and heterosexuality. When she has been a lesbian she has always been very open about her homosexuality, bringing it up even with strangers, I think because she feels it most ethical to be completely open and honest with everyone. I remember many years ago, after her marriage to a man had ended because she had fallen in love with her female riding instructor, I decided that she must simply be a lesbian and that when she had been married to a man, she had been in denial of her True Self. I realised a long time ago that I wrong. Nowadays she is sort of in a relationship with a man and has a young child and I now recognise that if any word should be applied to her at all, it is 'bisexual'.
These two friends have greatly influenced my view of sexuality. When I was younger, a child of the 'nineties, even though I had heard that some people experimented with homosexuality, I had always tended to assume that people were born either gay or straight. I now realise that for some people (although not for me) sexuality can be fluid, that perhaps we should use the word 'bisexual' for such people. This is one reason why I have railed against the notion of a 'gay gene' in this blog and why sexual politics on the Left often bothers me so much. I don't support Gay Conversion Therapy but not because I think any longer that sexuality is fixed at birth; rather I oppose Gay Conversion Therapy because I believe people should be free to make their own sexual choices and not have such choices dictated by others. I also want to live in a world where such sexual decisions can be talked about openly and honestly; the obvious reason for my holding this view is that I have had people treating me who thought I had a secret life I was keeping hidden from them and this reactionary bigotry has been a major cause of the psychological distress I suffered for so long.
I have talked about sexuality many times and it may bore some readers. It might interest readers if I discuss some philosophical topics instead, topics I have thought about in the last couple of months. In an earlier post I mentioned the philosophical position known as mereological nihilism. Ordinarily people think that not only do cats and dogs and tables exist but so do their atomic constituents: protons, neutrons, and electrons. The property 'cat-ness' somehow supervenes on or is entailed by some arrangement of atomic building blocks. The mereological nihilist claims by contrast that cats and dogs and tables do not really exist, that they are false impressions; all that exist are arrangements of simple components that create false experiential perceptions of cats and dogs and tables in the minds of conscious beings. I want to point out an absurdity in this position. A philosopher who adheres to this doctrine, when denying that such sensible entities actually exist, is taking it on faith that the physicists and scientists who have told him or her that everything is made fundamentally of protons and neutrons and electrons are telling the truth. Does it make sense to reject one's own sense perceptions and yet accept unconditionally a physical theory about the fundamental nature of reality promulgated by scientists? Perhaps the physicists who have told us all about protons and neutrons and electrons are lying, are engaged in an enormous conspiracy, mass brainwashing. This might seem paranoid but this proposal can be taken as being like a kind of thought experiment: what if it were true? It does not seem to me rational to reject the apparent brute sensory fact of cats and dogs and tables existing yet at the same time place one's total faith in something one has read in a textbook. It does not seem rational to think one should choose between one perspective and the other. The best course is, of course, to suppose that cats and dogs and tables do indeed exist and also that they are made up of the particles that physicists study, rather than suppose we need to choose between one view and the other.
Another topic philosophers often discuss is our perceptions of colour, what philosophers call qualia. What annoys me often when I read or hear discussions of colour is that philosophers so seldom discuss the physiology of colour perception. In the retina of the human eye, there is a region called the fovea in which we find three types of photoreceptor cell designed to be sensitive to either blue, yellow-green, or blue light. All our perceptions of chromatic nuances, shades such as pink, purple, teal, and vermillion, are generated in the mind by contributions from or interplays between these three types of cone cell. Furthermore only a small portion of a person's visual field is coloured; most of the photoreceptor cells in the retina are only sensitive to intensities of light, effectively black and white and shades of grey. The impression one has that one's whole visual field is coloured is something like an illusion: it is created in one's mind. The notion of colour perception raises the following philosophical conundrum. Suppose a person is wearing a 'blue' shirt in a pitch dark room or is wearing a coat over the top of it. Is it still blue? In this case it seems we should say that the shirt is black. Or suppose that the room is only illuminated by a single wavelength of light, say red, in which case the shirt may seem black because it cannot scatter blue light as it would if it were illuminated by white light. What does it mean in this case to say that the shirt is 'blue'? I would like to suggest two answers to this question. First we could define the word 'blue' as meaning 'the colour people generally think that a 'blue' object has when seen by normal sighted people under ordinary light conditions'. Thus, even if I am wearing a coat over a blue shirt, it will still be blue if people generally agree that if I take off the coat and the shirt is illuminated by white light such as we get from the sun or normal light fixtures that it will seem blue to us. This way of defining a particular colour, as being the colour that normal sighted people would agree as being an object's colour under ordinary lighting conditions, may seem overly subjective. However science can help us out here. A blue object is an object the surface of which absorbs all colours in the visual spectrum except for one frequency, the blue frequency, which it scatters in a diffuse fashion, in all directions. There must therefore be something about the molecular composition of the surface of a blue object that compels us to call it 'blue'. This molecular composition would remain unchanged in a pitch dark room, if the object is covered with a coat, or if it is illuminated with monochromatic red light. Colour can be therefore be defined as being a feature or complex property associated with the molecular composition of the surfaces of objects. This way of defining blueness and redness and purpleness is perhaps about as close to objective as we can get.
In the previous post, I discussed quantum physics and almost as soon as I had published it, I realised that I might have made a mistake. I have been meaning to return to this topic for quite a while but partly because of my ill health it has taken me this long to get back to it. I'll start with what seems to be a major conceptual confusion at the heart of modern physics. Since at least the 'seventies, the dominant field within physics has been particle physics. The world is supposed to be made up of at least 61 different types of fundamental particle such as quarks and neutrinos and Higgs bosons. Importantly the four fundamental forces are supposed to be mediated by particles called gauge bosons: the electromagnetic force is mediated by photons, the strong force by gluons, and the weak force by W+, W-, and Z bosons. It is proposed that gravity should be mediated by particles called gravitons but gravitons, even if they exist, may be impossible to experimentally detect. The first conceptual confusion is this: on the one hand, some physicists want to explain gravity as resulting from interactions between particles and gravitons but this contradicts the core premise of General Relativity, that gravity is not a real force but rather an effect of the curvature of space-time. Particle physics presumes that, fundamentally, everything can be explained as being the result of local interactions between particles but this seems to run counter to the picture we get from quantum physics which supposes wave-particle duality and non-locality. As I understand it, we are supposed to imagine that particles are excitations of underlying quantum fields. It is the issue of non-locality that I want to return to.
First, I want to say something about the 'randomness' or 'indeterminacy' of quantum mechanics. I like to picture it this way. Given some measurements of a system, we can formulate models of the wave functions associated with all of the particles involved in the system. These wave functions then enable us to make probabilistic estimates of the results of future measurements. However when these subsequent measurements are made, these measurements, say the locations at which electrons land on a screen, are known with certainty and we get 'wave function collapse'. It is with 'wave function collapse', something that occurs when we make a subsequent measurement, that randomness or indeterminacy arises; we cannot predict in advance exactly how a wave function collapse will manifest itself. Randomness is associated with measurements. Some physicists, such as Roger Penrose, believe in 'objective collapse' theories. That is, they suppose that quantum mechanics is incomplete and that wave-function collapse always occurs whether or not someone is watching, that it has nothing to do with measurements. Penrose in face believes that gravity must cause wave function collapse. However, although I cannot provide an ironclad argument in favour of my own interpretation, I believe that wave functions are in some sense subjective, models associated with sets of measurements that must in some sense exist in the minds of conscious observers, that 'wave function collapse' occurs when reality forces a person to change the model in his or her mind.
A little while ago I watched a very interesting discussion between Roger Penrose, Federico Faggin, and Bernado Kastrup on Youtube. Penrose presents the following compelling argument in favour of some kind of objective collapse theory. He imagines a planet in another star system without any conscious life on it, a planet with its own distinctive weather patterns; because of the butterfly effect, quantum considerations come into play and so we can suppose that the weather is actually a superposition of very many weather states. According to subjective interpretations of quantum mechanics, wave function collapse cannot occur because there are no conscious beings on the planet to observe the weather, perform measurements. A satellite takes pictures of the atmosphere of this planet and then sends these pictures to Earth; if we believe in conventional interpretations of quantum mechanics, such as the Copenhagen interpretation, it is only when people look at these pictures, perhaps years after the images were taken, that 'wave function collapse' occurs and one particular weather state is realised. Penrose argues that this little story is too absurd to be credible and so we must therefore assume some theory of objective collapse must be correct; the wave function collapse must surely have occurred before the snapshots were taken and so must be objective. However I think we should approach this thought experiment from a different angle. If scientists on earth know nothing about this exoplanet they can form no quantum model of its weather at all; given some measurements of it, say photos taken of it and transmitted to earth, they may be able to suppose it is in some kind of superposition; then given some further measurements, 'wave function collapse' occurs where 'wave function collapse' is a kind of epistemic phenomenon, a change in the models created to describe the exoplanet that exist, if anywhere, in the minds of the observers. This second interpretation is in fact the one endorsed by Faggin and Kastrup although I had come up with a similar theory myself independently simply by thinking through some logical implications of quantum mechanics.
The mistake that I might have made in the previous essay concerns conservation of momentum. It is tempting to think that energy and momentum are carried from one location to another by things; this is the mistake made by Veritassium in a video he made a long time ago, "The Big Misconception About Electricity." Certainly it seems reasonable to talk about photons carrying energy and momentum from one place to another and particle physics, with its conception of force mediating particles, does indeed seem to suggest that energy and momentum are carried by some kinds of particle between other types of particle, that changes in energy and momentum are the result of local interactions. However, from a Newtonian perspective, the perspective we learnt at high school, energy and momentum are not so much properties of things carried from one place to another but rather conserved quantities; they do not require local interactions and are not necessarily transported from one place to another. An object 1000 m above the surface of the earth has a certain amount of gravitational potential energy and, if released, accelerates downwards, resulting in a transformation of this gravitational potential energy into kinetic energy. Energy changes from one form to another but is not necessarily some kind of substance or property transported from one place to another place. Conservation of energy is something deduced from the mathematics, from the principle that we can explain physical phenomena by supposing that one type of energy, say some kind of potential energy, is turning into another kind of energy, say kinetic energy or heat or electromagnetic radiation. Energy is a mathematical construct that relates to motion and location. Let's consider the same example again, the object released 1000 m above the earth, but this time think about momentum instead of energy. As the object accelerates downward, the earth very slightly accelerates upwards – the gain in momentum of the dropped object is exactly equal and opposite in direction to the gain in momentum of the earth. But note that the exchange of momentum does not result from a local interaction – they are, to begin with, 1000 m apart. We are rather assuming a correlation in the change of momentum of an object in one place with the change in momentum of an object in another place. Perhaps particle physics, with its notion of mediating force particles, should replace this older Newtonian perspective; perhaps, in this example, changes in momentum do not happen until either the object or earth interacts with a graviton. But, if so, it may be that physicists really need to dig into the the philosophical foundations of their subject to clear away conceptual confusions such as this.
In the previous essay, one of my key claims was that the apparent indeterminacy associated with quantum measurements might be incompatible with conservation of momentum and this might have been a mistake. There was a simple logical flaw in my argument. Suppose that a measurement is made that seems to indicate that the motion of a particle has randomly changed. There is no reason why we cannot suppose that when the measurement of this particle is made, a particle somewhere else in the system (or perhaps even somewhere outside the system) changes its motion in a synchronised fashion that preserves overall conservation of momentum. Furthermore, perhaps I am wrong in suggesting that quantum indeterminacy involves random changes in motion. Perhaps rather we should say that the exact momentum or position of a particle is not fully specified until a measurement is performed, a measurement that may not provide perfect information about the particle but will reduce the uncertainty surrounding it. I believe the confusion here is probably one of the most fundamental in modern physics. Is the universe deterministic or non-deterministic? On the one hand there is a notion in physics that information is absolutely conserved, a notion that depends on the presumption that the universe is deterministic. The way physicists put this is that the evolution of the wave function is 'unitary' - if we suppose that this is true and and also make some assumptions about general relativity, we arrive at the black hole information paradox discovered or invented by Stephen Hawking in the 1970s. Many physicists believe that the universe is deterministic because the wave-function evolves deterministically; as I mentioned in an earlier essay, this is the position of Lawrence Krauss. The basic problem here is that the wave function may evolve deterministically – but only until a measurement is made on the particular system being studied (or, if you believe, as Penrose does, in objective collapse theories, wave-function collapse occurs). The craziness of some physicists in attempting to reconcile quantum mechanics and determinism is exemplified by David Deutsch and those others who believe in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics. These physicists believe the universe does indeed evolve deterministically but, in a sense, evolves into an infinite number of universes that all exist simultaneously. It is true both that you are reading this now and are out on the town drinking instead at the same time. Some believers in the many-worlds interpretation hold that measurements never actually occur while others think that whenever a measurement is made some number of universes branch off, each containing one of all the possible measurement results. On the other hand, the conventional interpretation of quantum mechanics, the Copenhagen interpretation, is explicitly non-deterministic, and Penrose for instance has based his argument that quantum effects are involved in consciousness on his core thesis that consciousness is non-deterministic, non-computable. There is thus enormous disagreement among physicists about probably the most fundamental characteristic of reality, whether or not the universe is deterministic.
As readers will have realised from the previous essay, I am not an expert in physics. I have discussed quantum physics a number of times in this blog but I arrived at my position more from philosophical considerations than any high-level study of mathematical physics. In the same way that Penrose's argument is motivated by his conviction that consciousness is non-computable, my argument is motivated by my belief that we cannot explain human-level behaviour in terms of simple reductive laws concerning the interactions of particles. I have thought for a long time that we might be able to explain how what I call the supernatural causally affects the natural world by supposing that quantum physics is involved. This is why in the previous essay I defined the terms 'random' and 'non-deterministic' as meaning 'not explainable in terms of simple reductive laws'. However my lack of expertise in high-level physics means that I am not the right person to make the most compelling argument in favour of this position. My view, that the wave function is in some sense a model, a view I have elaborated for a long time, now seems to be a valid new interpretation of quantum mechanics and is the one defended by Faggin and Kastrup although I cannot believe I had any hand in this. I think perhaps rather than returning to quantum mechanics over and over again in this blog, I should leave it to others who have studied it in more depth than I have been able to. Although when I look at the state of modern physics, I am not sure if even the supposed experts in physics have any better ideas than I do these days.
I feel I should talk about my life but I don't know what to say about it. For the last several months I have been thinking about it a lot and although what I have to say about it are things I have expressed more or less clearly elsewhere in this blog I might try to briefly clarify them here. I wish I could know what 'condition' I was diagnosed with when I first became a patient of the Mental Health Service– my difficulty in this respect is that I am not a psychiatrist and am not privy to the esoteric materials psychiatrists study at shrink school. Nor have I ever been given any kind of summary of what my supposed condition was by anyone in the Mental Health Service or ever been told what it was by any doctor. All I feel sure about is that whatever they diagnosed me with, they got it wrong – as I suspect they do with almost all patients. One possibility is that they thought I was a virgin. They might have thought that the cure for my condition was to have sex with a girl or something. This would explain why when I was in respite in 2007, one of the workers seemed to be trying to fix me up with a woman about my own age who was also a patient – I was far too unwell at the time to take advantage of this. Last year I read an essay about schizophrenia which mentioned an older apparent finding that one of the predictors of recovery from psychosis was 'recent sexual connexion', a claim that I suspect is dumb and has the additional demerit of making schizophrenics seem like animals. (Psychiatrists often seem to me to treat their patients as though they are subhuman.) If they did think I was a virgin, the thing which makes it so stupid is that in the interval immediately after I became a patient I actually did have sex a couple of times with my then sort of girlfriend. I guess, though, that no one working in the Mental Health Service had the courage to ask me if I'd ever had sex and somehow I couldn't tell anyone this unprompted, partly because in 2007 and later I didn't realise it was relevant and also because, for me, sex is sacred and was never something I wanted to share with strangers.
A second possibility is that they thought I'd had a 'homosexual experience' immediately before becoming unwell. Certainly I formed the belief that this was what they thought soon after I became a patient and I have intuited since that many patients think that the doctors and other workers within the system think that some kind of 'homosexual experience', an experience patients can't talk about, had caused their illnesses. A psychologist I saw in 2009 once asked me about sex at bFM, as though people in a radio station might be fucking each other at work, and the psychologist I saw in 2014 certainly gave me the impression that he thought schizophrenics were all either gay or bisexual. My question in relation to this supposed aetiology of schizophrenia would be this: how can a person accidentally have a homosexual experience? It seems to me that should a person actually have a homosexual experience, either that person must be gay or bisexual beforehand, or else he or she has been the victim of molestation or rape. If the person is confused about whether or not the experience was consensual, it seems to me possible that that person might then end up turning gay as a way of dealing with cognitive dissonance. However, as readers know, I haven't ever had a real homosexual experience and my intuition, an intuition I trust, is that none or almost none of the patients I've met over the years have had any kind of homosexual experience – apart from the one or two openly gay patients I've met. This idea, that psychosis can be triggered by a homosexual experience, is like an urban myth, an urban myth that people who experience psychosis pick up on in the same way that they also pick up on urban myths of alien abduction and brain-implanted microchips. It may also be that the idea that a homosexual experience can cause schizophrenia became fashionable among psychiatrists, that it is or was the newest fucking retarded theory that the fucking retarded psychiatric profession had decided might explain the cause of schizophrenia in the same way that a few decades ago they thought it was caused by a 'schizophrenegenic mother'. As though everyone diagnosed schizophrenic becomes ill for the same reason. Perhaps it was true of a few cases and then the psychiatric profession extrapolated this to the whole community of people diagnosed schizophrenic.
In saying all this it might seem that I am touching on somewhat unpalatable ideas. Because this is a blog, I might turn to something else, say something about what I do every day. Every morning I get up and go to my mother's house and watch TV or Youtube or read. I do little else. I am currently reading The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guinn. Sometimes during the day, my mother and I go for drives to places like Piha. My mother is one of the few really good people I know but I suspect she is torn between me and my older brother, a brother I despise. I know it might sound sissy for a grown man to talk about how much time he spends with his mother but, lacking a job, she is and has been for a long time one of the mainstays of my life. In the evening I sometimes walk along Ponsonby Road although I am walking less at night than I used to. I walk just for the exercise; I have never felt unsafe. These days I often just go to bed early though. Every Tuesday I attend a Pub Quiz and, because we have a genius on the team, we usually win, something that I suspect may well demoralise some of the other teams. The other night, because he was not present, we finished in the middle of the pack. That's about it. I have sometimes felt a little physically ill over the last several months and sometimes have needed to take naps during the day. There is a possibility that I have developed type 2 diabetes (my GP thinks so) although, aside from the tiredness, I don't have any of the other symptoms, symptoms like excessive thirst and frequent urination. The tiredness may well be a result of depression or something else psychological rather than a genuinely somatic condition. This all I imagine sounds terribly depressing. Perhaps when this essay is published I will regain my mojo, will recover a little more zest for life, and will be able to start writing more about the topics that interest me in a more engaging fashion.
I considered writing a little about the woman I call Jess again. As you might recall, even though I wrote a film about her in 2012, I have never really known the specific cause of her particular illness. I haven't seen her for a ridiculously long time. Over the years, often wildly disparate hypotheses concerning her have leapt into my head and I have wondered if some are right. Sometimes I have suspected that she wrote a poem when she was a teenager which was misinterpreted and that this might have had a snowball effect. Psychiatrists often look for a big single cause for 'schizophrenia' – a schizophrenia gene or childhood sexual abuse or misuse of illegal drugs for instance. But it had may be that the initial cause of 'schizophrenia' is not only different for every single person but could start small. A rumour could get out about a person which then leads the person to feel she is the victim of a conspiracy and this could then result in psychosis. I wish I could talk to the real girl and ask her what she now believes to have been the cause of her illness – she said something to me a long time ago that I have never understood, something I haven't put in my blog but alluded to in my film, and although she indicated later that she was not sure why she said it, I feel she must know now.
Perhaps I should say something about the treatment of the 'mentally ill'. There are innumerable problems with the Mental Health System and psychiatry generally and one of these serious problems is that, although copious notes are taken about patients, there appears to be a policy not to discuss the content of a patient's notes with the patient him- or herself. In New Zealand there is a law that patients can access their notes, something I took advantage of in 2015, but the impression I gathered then was that the enormous pile of paper I was given had no relation to the notes read by my various successive psychiatrists and Key Workers. As I have indicated in this blog over and over again, it seems that the psychiatrists got everything wrong, even ostensibly medical matters like my weight at various times and how much medication I was taking. Last year, for the first time in a long time, I got myself a good Key Worker. I brought along a copy of Jess's latest collection of poetry and talked about her and the girlfriends I'd had prior to becoming 'sick'. Although my new Key Worker didn't disclose the content of my notes to me, from the questions she asked I inferred that there were fairly significant errors in my notes concerning my sort-of girlfriend Maya; I also inferred that they thought I had said something about Jess that I hadn't. This is what led me to write the post "Concerning Clerical Errors" and, although I had to unpublish it and although it contained a couple of very small errors, it might have been this essay, which I gave to my Key Worker, that persuaded them to release me from the Act. A more general point can be made. The mental health of patients is extraordinarily dependent on the psychiatrists and Key Workers they have; when you consider that I have this blog through which to assert some control over my life and have some supportive family members and friends and that even I can be so deeply influenced by the workers within the mental heath system that I interact with, how much worse it must be for the majority of patients who are totally powerless, can be flung into hospital at the whim of a doctor or mental health worker and have no idea what is being written about them in their notes.
It is tempting to think that all psychiatrists are sadists and a cursory look at the history of psychiatry, from Kraepelin onwards, might seem to support this. This is not though wholly true; there are some well meaning psychiatrists around. But, generally speaking, every psychiatrist I've ever met has given me the impression that he or she is flailing around incompetently. If we can speak of a conspiracy related to psychiatry, it is this: psychiatrists and the establishment together collude in propagating an illusion of psychiatric competence, in fostering the misperception that psychiatrists are intelligent people who know what they are doing. People in the wider community have an erroneous notion of what goes on in a psychiatrist's office. They imagine that a patient sits down, talks about his or her family and the life events that have affected him or her and that the psychiatrist will murmur things like, "How does that make you feel?" However psychiatrists are not therapists; they are doctors, doctors supposedly looking for symptoms of various types of neurological diseases or disorders and then trying to work out which drug to prescribe and how much of it. When I have tried to talk about bFM and other life events with psychiatrists in the past, they seem to have thought it was irrelevant, have seemed to dismiss it, and do not even record it in their notes. Of course, psychiatrists are secretly psychologists and have secret psychological theories to explain the illnesses of their patients but they never behave like psychologists, never ask questions. If I write any more fiction, it might be worthwhile sketching a picture of what actually goes on in a psychiatrist's office.
I would like to improve the world by a suggesting, not a cure for all 'schizophrenia', but a cure for many types of 'schizophrenia'. The cure is to change the whole world. Of course, in saying this, I am betraying my lefty roots; I regard mental illnesses as social diseases that can be alleviated by changing society as a whole. Attempting to focus just on the few victims is not productive. The best way to help people is to change societal attitudes generally, such as reducing stigma around mental illness and jettisoning the idea that serious mental health conditions are diseases that people are born with and cannot recover from. In particular, the population as a whole needs a better and more consistent understanding of sexuality. People can become ill because there are aspects of sexuality generally that they don't understand and feel uncomfortable talking about; furthermore every single person understands issues to do with sexuality and gender differently to every single other person. I have realised that every person treating me has had a different notion in his or her head of what words like 'gay' and 'straight' mean. I have a small admission to make. Although I have read a little Foucault and read a little around Foucault, I have never read "The History of Sexuality". I didn't feel comfortable reading it or interested in reading it when I was young; I thought it was for gay people. Nor have I read "Gender Trouble" or any of the books by Judith Butler. What I suspect though is that the views of sexuality and gender articulated in Queer Theory today is probably not very helpful to most people; it is more about politics than truth. Young people today are indeed interested in matters relating to sexuality, as evidenced by the current popularity of Chapell Roan; it may be though that a song like "Good Luck, Babe!" probably goes over the head of most young listeners the same way "All Apologies" by Nirvana went over my head when I was a teenager. The problem for young people is that they gain some understanding of sexual differences from pop culture and peers but often fail to develop a more mature and accurate picture of the sexual differences between people until much later and this, together with a certain amount of shame related to sexuality, may be a significant factor in creating and exacerbating mental illnesses. I am not sure if this kind of ignorance and squeamishness was what led to my own mental illness but I do not feel inclined to rehash my life here again.
This essay will make most sense to people who have been following this blog for years; it will not make much sense to people who know nothing about my life. It has meandered as badly as a Trump rally. I'll conclude by saying one last thing. Some readers may think this blog is an indictment on the New Zealand Mental Health System. New Zealand society is certainly facing some serious problems at the moment (we are in recession). But to assume this would be to miss my most central claim. The fundamental problem with the treatment of the mentally ill lies in psychiatry itself. And psychiatric practice and 'science' is all produced in the US. Antony Fernando and my current psychiatrist were both trained in America. I strongly suspect that the situation for people diagnosed with serious mental health conditions in the US may well be vastly worse than the situation for people in New Zealand. All the science surrounding 'schizophrenia' is bullshit; I believe most of it is in the service of avaricious pharmaceutical companies who have a vested interest in pushing the idea that the only remedy for mental illness is the medication that they produce and sell and want people to take medication for their entire lives because it creates a captive market. It is bullshit propagated by psychiatrists who are either utterly unscrupulous or are afraid that if they step out of line with the orthodoxy or criticise their colleagues they will be forced out of their jobs. I get so tired of people talking endlessly in the popular media about neurotransmitters. It is not that I am not advocating a return to Freudian psychoanalysis but the medical model of mental illness that has taken hold, the model codified in the DSM, is not only wrong but profoundly harmful. It may be that we need a completely different theory concerning human psychology. Some such theory may be something I return to in later essays assuming I continue writing this blog in the future. I don't know if the new theory I have in mind will be an improvement – it may well be that, if it were adopted, it would have its own drawbacks and limitations that might create new problems for some patients in the future. But the current system helps no one.
Although this post has wandered from topic to topic I am glad to be have written something again. It might be that this physical or emotional upset will pass or is passing and that I may be able to start writing again more regularly. There is of course a possibility that this blog has jumped the shark. But perhaps there is still something worthwhile I can talk about with readers in the future.
