This post follows on from a previous post "My First Psychotic Episode" and I suggest the reader have a look at that one first. I hope it was well written enough and that this one will be well-written enough. I didn't quite say all I could say in that post and I won't be able to say everything I could say in this one, about what happened to me over the couple of months in 2006 and 2007, that provoked the psychotic episode I suffered for all of 2007. Mostly this compression is for reasons of brevity. I can, though, say a little more.
First, I need to say something about my parents' divorce when I was seven. I have intimated elsewhere in this blog that I believe this divorce, the trauma of it, engendered a psychological vulnerability and that this vulnerability was what made me susceptible to psychosis later in life. The reader may rightfully wonder – what connection could there be between a child's experience of divorce and a psychotic episode experienced by a twenty-seven year old, revolving around the idea of a conspiracy of closet homosexuals? In 1986, the year of my parents' divorce, homosexuality was decriminalised in New Zealand, and there was I imagine much talk of it in the media and in the air. I believe I probably picked up on the fact that there were these people called 'gays' in the world and that my father, elder brother and his friends didn't like them much. Not that my dad and brother were vehemently homophobic but rather that they possessed the kind of vague prejudice shared by almost all ordinary heterosexuals. When my father left my mother, I decided, as is not uncommon among young children of broken families, that I was responsible for the divorce. I was in fact emotionally wounded for many years. I even saw a child psychologist briefly which I think made me feel even more to blame. I believe, and have a shred of a memory to support this, that I decided at seven that the reason my father had left was because he thought I was gay. Even then I knew I wasn't – although of course a seven-year old has no understanding of what homosexuality actually is, but I must assume that I did in fact believe this or something like it. This false belief nestled in my subconscious mind like an undetonated hand grenade until I was twenty-seven when events in my life caused it to explode.
As I grew up, this deeply buried trauma manifested itself in the following way. Like most ordinary heterosexual men, I didn't much like associating with gay men but, politically, and in principle, I strongly supported gay rights and opposed homophobia. In this I resembled Kurt Cobain. In 2001, at the age of twenty-one I wrote a short film, a gay spy film, for a paper I was enrolled in. In this film an American spy and a Russian spy play a kind of cat-and-mouse game but, at the end of the film, they kiss, and we realise that they are really two gay men playacting spies, play a sex-game. I wrote this film because I was fascinated by John Le Carre spy novels, with the idea that both sides of the Cold War were mirror images of each other. The twist in the film is that the two men, who seem to be enemies, are really lovers, reflections of each other, narcissists. I didn't think at the time that this film would haunt me for years to come but I think it did. People made assessments of who I was because of it. Of course this is stupid. Was Nabokov a pedophile because he wrote Lolita? Is Bret Easton Ellis a serial killer because he wrote American Psycho? Was David Foster Wallace a drug addict because he wrote Infinite Jest? I was straight but, at the time, other students in my orbit knew only I think that I had written a gay spy film and didn't know that I had broken up at the beginning of the year with a girl I'd been dating since I was seventeen. I had fouled my own reputation.
In 2006, I decided to volunteer for the radio station bFM, a station I had listened to and loved since I was a teenager, as I have described in the other post. I should say something about this station. bFM is a student radio station that then had a tremendous cachet among the cool, young crowd. Unlike other radio stations, the DJs would pick obscure current songs apparently of their own choice and apparently based on their wide and deep knowledge of many musical genres. At the time I went to work for bFM the Breakfast Host was Mikey Havoc. My New Zealand readers will know something about Mikey but for my international readers I should say something about him. Havoc was and is a very big man with an imposing presence and forceful personality; he was then and still is a divisive and controversial figure. He had made his fame working at bFM in the late 'nineties and had returned to it in 2005 or 2006 after his TV career had faltered. He was then married to Claire Chitham. The station suited him. It was then and ostensibly still is a student radio station but, at the time I worked there, some staff at bFM were paid and the rest were volunteers; the young volunteers, who wanted to be cool, were willing to work for free to be part of the elite that was the bFM community. They were essentially being exploited by the paid staff for their free labour. I was unaware of this until I stated working there. That this dynamic existed at bFM, this cultish exploitation, only gradually occurred to me over the course of several months as a volunteer. It also became apparent to me that bFM was really a commercial radio station masquerading as a community service station, that all the music was selected by the Music Programmer Jason Rockpig. In 2007, at the station sometimes, I began to hear "Strawberry Fields Forever", with its refrain, "Strawberry Fields, nothing is real" playing on repeat in my mind; bFM was marketing itself to its devoted audience as something it wasn't. The station and its core staff were engaged in a kind of conspiracy, a kind of lie.
During my time at bFM, from I think around October 2006 until I think late February or March 2007, I worked in the side room finding and writing news stories, a couple of mornings a week. I was never on air or, I think, only ever on air once briefly. It is possible though that I garnered some fame or notoriety among the media for the stories I was writing – I can't be sure about this. My reasons for wanting to work there in the first place were threefold: to resuscitate an old friendship with bFM producer and Wire presenter Jose Barbosa, to feel part of some kind of community and, to a degree, maybe to work my way up into a paid media job. I never sought to become a newsreader or DJ however, because, having started working there, I totally lost confidence in myself. bFM's audience was bigger than I thought; bFM was bigger than I thought. Sometimes I would hear myself on tape when taking soundbites of interviews and I hated the sound of my own voice – I can't hear myself when I talk ordinarily. How could I go on air when I hated the sound of my own voice? I was offered an on-air role in 2007 but I declined it.The bFM staff may have been unsure why I was there in the first place.
It is worth noting that when I first rocked up to bFM I was given a job immediately, without interview or CV or even any conversation about what I wanted from the job. I think I was given it simply because of Jose's endorsement.
I need say something now about Jose Barbosa. Jose was, is, a short plump bearded man from Tauranga who pronounces his name with a hard 'J'. I had known him a little from my MA in English literature and I can remember, during that time, having a drink with him and him telling me of an important heart-to-heart he'd had with his grandfather in a fishing boat off the coast of Spain, without specifying any details of the conversation; I thought Jose might be gay but wasn't sure. Perhaps the conversation he mentioned was him 'coming out' to his grandfather. In the previous post "My First Psychotic Episode" I said that in the years since working in bFM I have wracked my brain looking for evidence one way or the other to determine Jose's sexuality; I am going to go out a limb now and say that I think Jose homosexual, although he never came out to me. I suspect Jose just tended to assume that other people could tell, even though he wasn't camp at all. In the same way that I was uncertain about him I think he was uncertain about me. I now think it possible that Jose was one of those gay men who falls for straight men but keeps quiet about his own sexuality when around them, and that this was the essence of his friendship, his relationship, at bFM with Mikey Havoc. (Jose was the producer of Mikey's show.)
Jose's sexuality is important to the story I'm telling and I do have some evidence that Jose was gay, particularly in terms of his body language and attitude towards me on the few occasions I met him outside bFM. He may have had a crush on me, as well as on Mikey. He must have known that Mikey wasn't gay even though I think he thought I was. I remember once at bFM when he was going in to check on Mikey, him referring to Mikey when speaking to me as his "blind man", and then changing his body language, mincing a little as he danced into the studio proper. During my MA my best friend was a blind man called Rene, I think Jose knew this, so the analogy was "Rene is to Andrew as Mikey is to Jose" – i.e. he was suggesting that in the same way that he was a gay man friends with a straight man, I was a gay man who had been friends with a straight man. Furthermore his reference to Mikey as a "blind man" suggests that Mikey himself didn't know that Jose was gay. I actually do think this the case, that Mikey didn't know, although I do think Mikey had suspicions.
So Jose was gay man working in a radio station, in a high profile position, who was not public about his sexuality and in fact hadn't even explicitly told all of his co-workers. I was working there because I was his friend. He may conceivably have told people I was gay, or it could be construed that I was gay because I was there because of him. I sort of knew this and sort of didn't know this, at the same time. The situation was from the beginning, and increasingly so as time passed, incredibly stressful for me. I knew stuff and didn't know stuff at the same time. I believe that Mikey too thought I was gay – for instance, he asked me once if I enjoyed the rave culture, not really in a friendly, interested way but rather in an attempt to put me in a box, because he thought I must conform to a particular stereotype. Some bad fashion choices and a willingness to run stories about gay marriage may have contributed to this misperception among the people at bFM.
As I said in the post "My First Psychotic Episode" by early 2007 I began to vacillate between thinking everyone in the station thought I was gay and thinking everyone else in the station was gay. You see, I knew what I knew and didn't know it at the same time, didn't want to know it. It was after I brought in the German girl, Caroline, a girl I was hitting on, a couple of times in early January that everything went to hell. (Jose, by the way, was completely oblivious to how cute she was although Mike certainly wasn't.) On the Tuesday after the Big Day Out (on January 17 2007) I had a complete meltdown in the news room– but it was that day that I think they decided to briefly put me on the air. Despite my meltdown I kept coming back. If the people running the station had been sensible they would have had a chat with me and said I wasn't a good fit for bFM but I think by that time I had accrued something like a fanbase and they couldn't get rid of me. I can't be sure about this.
A week or a fortnight later Mikey had his "in/out" rant on-air and I found the Hard News news item that the station manager wouldn't let me run with.
I was starting to unravel. It was that morning, the morning of the 'in/out rant' that the triggering event occurred which caused me to truly became delusional. I went into the studio proper after the morning show had finished. Mikey and Jose were sitting watching themselves on webcams; I can't remember precisely what they said to me, unfortunately. I looked at Jason Rockpig and he said, "I just play guitar." The station manager, who was there as well, sarcastically quoted the Hard News item – "If you let in a flamboyant homosexual, you might as well let in a Catholic!" I was in a situation I couldn't understand. I asked to have a word with Jose and he said, "When I've finished messing around with these dicks!" I couldn't comprehend what they were trying to tell me but I could sense that they were trying to show that Jose and Mikey were in the same camp, so to speak. I felt fairly sure by then that Jose was gay– so I could only assume that Mikey was as well. I thought they were both coming out as gay to me. In fact, I decided that they were having an affair.
On the way out of bFM I tripped on the stairs. I remember Jason saying to another core staff member, "Do you think he's alright?"
Briefly I thought I had been admitted to an exclusive club. But this wasn't a secret I could keep for long. I told my best friend, in confidence, in the Big House; I told my mother. I told my brother that there was "a conspiracy at bFM". I continued to work there for perhaps another fortnight but at last had to leave, doing so in the explosive fashion I described in the earlier post. The situation had become truly horrible. I thought that bFM had outed me publicly as gay even though I wasn't. Or that I had accidentally outed myself simply by going to work there.
After I stopped working at bFM I experienced some severe depression. I was prodromal. I thought that I had escaped the situation I had been in by leaving – but I hadn't. A scandal, and it was a scandal, follows a person. The psychotic episode didn't seize me fully however until after the Red Hot Chilli Peppers's concert (which I dated in the post "Dates, Dosages and Other Matters.") The episode, as it developed, was truly apocalyptic. I started to believe that the flat was bugged, that everything I said was being broadcast to a vast gay fanbase, that my flatmates were divided into angels and demons (which was code for straights and gays), that the media was made up entirely of closet homosexuals. I never spoke explicitly about sexuality at all (contrary to what my psychiatrists have said about me) but my behaviour must still have caused consternation among my flatmates. I started sleeping during the day and walking at night. I overheard one female flatmate one day saying to another, "Maybe he doesn't know!" and I have never been sure since precisely what she meant, what exactly I didn't know. Perhaps I had indeed been outed by bFM and this was what she was referring to. I have never been able to uncover what my flatmates knew but I didn't.
Eventually, after perhaps a fortnight, things reached a crisis point. A vicious circle was at work; the stranger I became, the stranger my flatmates became around me. Eventually I reached an absolute nadir: I decided that everyone in the world was gay except me – including my father. I went for a walk. All the anguish of my parents' divorce came back – because at another level I knew something closer to the truth. I had decided when I was seven that my parents had divorced because my father thought I was gay and now it seemed that everyone in the world thought I was gay. I truly believed I had been outed and the knowledge of this rejection caused me, that night, to realise that I was reliving the trauma I had experienced as a child. It was the end of the world. I considered suicide, walking into the sea up to my shins, and then changed my mind, deciding that suicide would only bring more shame on my family, came home to the Big House and said, "My father's gay but I'm straight!" I was wrong about my father (I need to say this) but the important thing was that I had finally said that I was straight. I had needed to say this, if indirectly, publicly, since the first day I rocked up to bFM.
Briefly I was well – and then I ended up a patient of the Mental Heath System. I still then possessed the delusion that my father was gay although I never talked about it. I didn't even talk about bFM at all and the Mental Health Service didn't know for years that I had worked there. Yes, I was sick – but if it had been put on my record that I 'identified' as heterosexual, if I hadn't been stuck with a gay psychiatrist, if I hadn't been put on the vile major tranquilliser Rispiridone and if the people treating me had put any effort into finding out why I had become ill in the first place and given me competent therapy, I might have got better in six months or a year, instead of the ten years it has taken me to fully recover. To say again something I have repeatedly said before, I didn't start hearing voices until January 2009, after I had been on 2.5mgs of Rispiridone for over a year and a half, and this was the result of my treatment. It has taken me ten years to talk about this, to "come out as straight".
I might finish by saying a little more about Mikey Havoc and Jose Barbosa. Mikey stayed on at bFM for the rest of the year and during this time his wife split from him. For years after, he was unemployed and living at home with his mother – I think he'd had something similar to a total breakdown. He had truly loved Clare Chitham. He worked at Radio Hauraki for a while and is now back at bFM. I don't know what Jose does now but in 2010 or 2011 I bumped into him. I was going to the Auckland Film Society for a screening (I was a member) and found him sitting on a wall as though he was waiting for me, as though he knew I was coming. He hopped up and made overtures. He may still have then thought I was gay. I brushed him away angrily, saying that I'd had a terrible time the last three years. I blamed him for it of course. He took the hint and disappeared, and I have never seen him since.
[Note: Since writing this post I have thought a little more about the moment where I formed the delusion that Mikey and Jose were having an affaire. It is possible that the people at bFM were simply, or at least partly, trying to tell me that they had "faces for radio" as the saying goes, but that I didn't have the voice for it. They might have 'tactfully' trying to get rid of me. If they were, there were probably better, more truly tactful, ways of doing it.]
Friday, 24 November 2017
Friday, 27 October 2017
Some Additions and Clarifications
In today's post, I want to clarify some aspects of my life, things I have alluded to in previous posts and which I want to elaborate on.
First I want to talk a little more about a chap I know, Yves, someone I have discussed a little in other posts. I am friends with Yves's younger brother Rene and have met Yves several times through Rene. As I have said in previous posts, Yves became unwell some years before I did at the same age as I did, was also treated by the same psychiatrist as I was, one Tony Fernando, was also diagnosed schizophrenic and was also put on Risperidone first and then Olanzapine later. I first met Yves a couple of years before I became 'ill' myself, at a party at Rene's house. I remember Yves, then a tall bulky guy with a paranoid mien, staring at me and blinking repeatedly as though he was trying and failing to work me out. At one point during the party he menacingly approached my girlfriend Maya as though he wanted to kiss her. I have since forgiven him for this invasion of my girlfriend's space. Yves is, I should say, heterosexual. In 2014 I hung out with Yves and Rene again and I remember him saying to Rene, "Well, you've had a woman more recently then I have!" In 2015 I asked him if he'd studied at University and he said that he did for a time because he was chasing a girl whose "pants he wanted to get into". I've actually met one of his ex-girlfriends, a woman who told me that Yves was very good looking when he was younger. Yves must now be around 42 or 43.
In 2014, just before New Year's Eve, I stayed with Rene, Yves and their father at their father's holiday home up north. While I was there, I told Yves about the satirical piece I had sent journalist Steve Braunias in which I strongly suggested that Tony Fernando was a homosexual sociopath who serially misdiagnoses his patients and falsifies patient records; when I told Yves this he seemed to fall into a state of profound confusion, as though he couldn't quite understand what I was telling him. Later that evening he stepped towards me as though he wanted to kiss me. I don't think this was a homosexual advance but rather a psychotic impulse he couldn't quite control. It was later that night that he asked me, in a paranoid sarcastic way, "Do you go to bars?" As I have said in an earlier post, I believe that Yves had told people in the Mental Health System that he sometimes went to bars and that they had decided he was going there to pick up gay men.
During this stay, at dinner once, Yves raised a toast to me, saying, "Here's to Andrew – let's hope they can understand him." I believe, to put it bluntly, Yves had been misdiagnosed homosexual by Tony, that this was the reason for his continuing illness. As I have said in earlier posts, Yves had told me that he got out of the system by "telling the psychologist what the psychologist wanted to hear". I believe he had lied to the psychologist he had seen, saying that he was gay even though he wasn't (or words to that effect), because this was the only way he could get out of the system. Unlike me, Yves had been hospitalised repeatedly.
I now want to turn to dates and events. In earlier posts, I have said that I started hearing voices in January 2009, after I had been on Risperidone for over a year and a half. In the post "What Happened in 2007 and 2009" I backtracked, and said that it might have been February. To be clear, the psychotic episode I experienced for all of 2009, except for a month in September, began the night of the Seven Worlds Collide concert at the Powerstation on January 7th. It was in full force on January 20th, the day of Barack Obama's inauguration, although I was then still to hear voices. It was between a week and a fortnight later I believe that I first heard a voice – specifically George W. Bush.
I haven't really heard voices for several months now but, a couple of weeks ago, while lying in bed, I briefly spoke with Stephen Colbert (telepathically of course). He asked me, "How did you know they had diagnosed you homosexual?" When I first made landfall at the Taylor Centre in 2007, I had told the first shrink I saw, a woman called Trish Van der Krallen, and the woman who was to become my key worker, Kate Whelan, "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!" I was wrong about my father but the important part of the statement I made that day was the wanting to 'come out as straight' – a reaction principally to my terrible time at bFM and at the Big House, as I have described in the post "My First Psychotic Episode", but something I had needed to do for many years, ever since I was twenty-one and had written a gay spy film and ever since I had written an academic essay about the poet John Ashbery at the age of 23. I simply wanted it known publicly that I was straight; I wanted to be recognised by those around me as heterosexual. At my first appointment with Fernando, he told me that I had "suffered a dopamine explosion" and advised me to "stop avoiding". Of course, I knew at a glance Fernando was gay and could only conclude from what he had said that I had been diagnosed as a latent or closet homosexual – although of course he didn't tell me this explicitly. I would often think in later years that the term "dopamine explosion" might be a euphemism for "homosexual experience" – something I'd never had. I could only surmise that he thought I was gay because I'd said my father was gay, that the gay gene must be carried on the Y chromosome. Shortly after my first appointment with Fernando, I returned briefly to the Big House and told some of this to my best friend there. He said, "Do you want to know about my homosexual experiences?" When he asked me this, the darkness of the Homosexual Conspiracy descended all around me. I believed then that the only people who could have homosexual experiences were homosexuals, and the fact that my best friend could say that he'd had homosexual experiences without actually coming out as gay made him one of Them, yet another closet homosexual.
In the post "What Happened in 2007 and 2009" I recounted two experiences that occurred at the beginning of 2009 – the first being the moment when the nurse Avril I was seeing for 'therapy' falsely put in my record that I had issues with my mother and the second being when she and Fernando decided to put me on antidepressants even though I wasn't depressed. In that post, I put these two events in that order but I think now it was the other way around.
In that same post, I said that I had gone back to AUT to study IT in February 2009 and that I received an A in programming. I was then on 2.5mgs of Respiridone. After I was allowed to discontinue this horrible drug, I dropped out. This could be taken as evidence that I was well when I was on Respiridone and became ill when I discontinued it – but the reverse is true. When I was studying the programming paper, I had no contact with other people and was able to function despite my psychosis. Sometimes I thought others' thoughts were being projected into my mind. I remember one time in a computer lab imagining that the asian girl sitting across from me had telepathically broadcast the threat, "You will fail!" into my mind. My decision to drop out in the second semester, after I had gone off the Respiridone was because, having recovered some measure of sanity, I asked myself why I was studying IT when I didn't have the slightest interest in it. I made the decision to drop out because the decision to take this course in the first place had been a mad decision.
During my appointments with Tony Fernando in 2009 I was so sick as to be virtually catatonic. I was sometimes bombarded by voices on all sides. During 2010 and 2011 I was well, as I have said in other posts, but, because I disliked Tony so much, at my appointments with him I would stick with superficialities and get out of the room as quickly as possible. I didn't like being in his presence; he just struck me as someone false and mendacious. I only saw Tony once every few months and always with my mother and sometimes my father in attendance.
In the post, "What Happened in 2007 and 2009", I suggested that Fernando, colluding with Avril, had falsely put in my record that I had come out as gay and that this happened in January of 2009. If this was the case, as I believe it was, it illuminates something that happened later that year, before I went off the Risperidone. Fernando never asked me if I was gay or straight but at one appointment he asked me, with my parents in the room, in a deliberately off-hand manner, "Do you stand up for yourself or are you a people pleaser?". I had no idea what he was talking about but opted for "people pleaser" – I was afraid of him, you see. The cunt smirked. I now realise that he was asking me if prefer to give or receive blowjobs from men. Can you imagine the sadism and brutality of a psychiatrist, a psychiatrist who had put me on 2.5mgs of Rispiridone, who had said to me on one occasion, "You know, I can put you in hospital if I want," asking me, a straight man, if I preferred to give or receive blowjobs? He was deliberately putting me in a false position, a double-bind. Is it any wonder I think all psychiatrists are going to burn forever in hell when they die?
To sense that one has been diagnosed as a latent or closet homosexual is a terrible thing because it is impossible to tell the doctor that he is wrong. It is also a terrible thing when the psychiatrist refuses to change his mind.
There are other additions and clarifications I would like to include in this blog but I can't include everything. I will try to mention one or two things though. One thing for instance that bothers me is that in 2013, when my current psychiatrist Jen Murphy diagnosed me schizophrenic (I can only assume because I had said that I was straight), I came very close to forming a relationship with the girl I call Jess. My shrink knew about it and about her. The relationship never came into existence and I have never worked out what happened to sabotage it. Towards the end of the year I met another girl, a girl called Heidi Brickle, a painter who I had discovered through a Poetry Open Mike night. I told my shrink about her as well. In fact I told the shrink, "I have good luck with ELAM girls". (Maya had also been an ELAM student.) There was simply no justification for Jen Murphy to continue to maintain the lie that was my misdiagnosis, a misdiagnosis I had lived with ever since my very first appointment with Tony. Since I have been under the Act I have had no luck with women whatsoever. I have always felt that I wanted it finally and definitively on my record that I'm straight before I get myself a real girlfriend.
I'll finish this post by talking a little about one last thing. Towards the end of January or the beginning of February 2014 I was bullied into going to stay at a truly horrible respite facility near Pt Chevalier, three days that paved the way for my being officially sectioned a week or two later. I have talked a little about this period in the posts "On Religion" and "The Double Bind Theory of Schizophrenia". This period was terrible for two reasons. First, I sensed that I was going to be put under the Mental Health Act regardless of anything I said or I did. Second, a memory of a delusion or hallucination that I had experienced in very early 2010 had returned, an experience I have referred to indirectly in the post "The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name"; I had talked about it in an email I had sent to Jess. The world was ending around me. My time at this Respite Centre was not characteristic of my health generally, was not characteristic of the previous year. In fact, I thought I was in hell (I was being forced every night to take three different types of drug). It was said about me at my first legal hearing, when I was officially put under the Act, that while I was at this respite facility I would go for walks and not return until 4 in the morning. This never happened. Every night I was in bed by 8:30. One night I woke up at 4AM and went out into the yard for a cigarette. It was then that I saw God. When I went back to bed, another patient followed me to my room and I think was dissuaded from coming in by the man in charge of the respite facility. The next night I ran home, partly by bus and partly by train. I was scared to death. I was returned to the Respite facility by my mother but ran away again, this time calling Heidi on my cell-phone, in a panic, knowing I needed somewhere else to stay and only thinking of her to call. I knew I couldn't remain another night there in that hellhole. I think this call frightened Heidi off and I have never spoken to her again since. I ran home again to my mother instead and this time was allowed to stay there.
I don't know how much longer I will need to keep writing this blog. Obviously I can't share every detail of my life and at some point I will have to get back to writing fiction. Perhaps this is the last post I will need to write.
First I want to talk a little more about a chap I know, Yves, someone I have discussed a little in other posts. I am friends with Yves's younger brother Rene and have met Yves several times through Rene. As I have said in previous posts, Yves became unwell some years before I did at the same age as I did, was also treated by the same psychiatrist as I was, one Tony Fernando, was also diagnosed schizophrenic and was also put on Risperidone first and then Olanzapine later. I first met Yves a couple of years before I became 'ill' myself, at a party at Rene's house. I remember Yves, then a tall bulky guy with a paranoid mien, staring at me and blinking repeatedly as though he was trying and failing to work me out. At one point during the party he menacingly approached my girlfriend Maya as though he wanted to kiss her. I have since forgiven him for this invasion of my girlfriend's space. Yves is, I should say, heterosexual. In 2014 I hung out with Yves and Rene again and I remember him saying to Rene, "Well, you've had a woman more recently then I have!" In 2015 I asked him if he'd studied at University and he said that he did for a time because he was chasing a girl whose "pants he wanted to get into". I've actually met one of his ex-girlfriends, a woman who told me that Yves was very good looking when he was younger. Yves must now be around 42 or 43.
In 2014, just before New Year's Eve, I stayed with Rene, Yves and their father at their father's holiday home up north. While I was there, I told Yves about the satirical piece I had sent journalist Steve Braunias in which I strongly suggested that Tony Fernando was a homosexual sociopath who serially misdiagnoses his patients and falsifies patient records; when I told Yves this he seemed to fall into a state of profound confusion, as though he couldn't quite understand what I was telling him. Later that evening he stepped towards me as though he wanted to kiss me. I don't think this was a homosexual advance but rather a psychotic impulse he couldn't quite control. It was later that night that he asked me, in a paranoid sarcastic way, "Do you go to bars?" As I have said in an earlier post, I believe that Yves had told people in the Mental Health System that he sometimes went to bars and that they had decided he was going there to pick up gay men.
During this stay, at dinner once, Yves raised a toast to me, saying, "Here's to Andrew – let's hope they can understand him." I believe, to put it bluntly, Yves had been misdiagnosed homosexual by Tony, that this was the reason for his continuing illness. As I have said in earlier posts, Yves had told me that he got out of the system by "telling the psychologist what the psychologist wanted to hear". I believe he had lied to the psychologist he had seen, saying that he was gay even though he wasn't (or words to that effect), because this was the only way he could get out of the system. Unlike me, Yves had been hospitalised repeatedly.
I now want to turn to dates and events. In earlier posts, I have said that I started hearing voices in January 2009, after I had been on Risperidone for over a year and a half. In the post "What Happened in 2007 and 2009" I backtracked, and said that it might have been February. To be clear, the psychotic episode I experienced for all of 2009, except for a month in September, began the night of the Seven Worlds Collide concert at the Powerstation on January 7th. It was in full force on January 20th, the day of Barack Obama's inauguration, although I was then still to hear voices. It was between a week and a fortnight later I believe that I first heard a voice – specifically George W. Bush.
I haven't really heard voices for several months now but, a couple of weeks ago, while lying in bed, I briefly spoke with Stephen Colbert (telepathically of course). He asked me, "How did you know they had diagnosed you homosexual?" When I first made landfall at the Taylor Centre in 2007, I had told the first shrink I saw, a woman called Trish Van der Krallen, and the woman who was to become my key worker, Kate Whelan, "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!" I was wrong about my father but the important part of the statement I made that day was the wanting to 'come out as straight' – a reaction principally to my terrible time at bFM and at the Big House, as I have described in the post "My First Psychotic Episode", but something I had needed to do for many years, ever since I was twenty-one and had written a gay spy film and ever since I had written an academic essay about the poet John Ashbery at the age of 23. I simply wanted it known publicly that I was straight; I wanted to be recognised by those around me as heterosexual. At my first appointment with Fernando, he told me that I had "suffered a dopamine explosion" and advised me to "stop avoiding". Of course, I knew at a glance Fernando was gay and could only conclude from what he had said that I had been diagnosed as a latent or closet homosexual – although of course he didn't tell me this explicitly. I would often think in later years that the term "dopamine explosion" might be a euphemism for "homosexual experience" – something I'd never had. I could only surmise that he thought I was gay because I'd said my father was gay, that the gay gene must be carried on the Y chromosome. Shortly after my first appointment with Fernando, I returned briefly to the Big House and told some of this to my best friend there. He said, "Do you want to know about my homosexual experiences?" When he asked me this, the darkness of the Homosexual Conspiracy descended all around me. I believed then that the only people who could have homosexual experiences were homosexuals, and the fact that my best friend could say that he'd had homosexual experiences without actually coming out as gay made him one of Them, yet another closet homosexual.
In the post "What Happened in 2007 and 2009" I recounted two experiences that occurred at the beginning of 2009 – the first being the moment when the nurse Avril I was seeing for 'therapy' falsely put in my record that I had issues with my mother and the second being when she and Fernando decided to put me on antidepressants even though I wasn't depressed. In that post, I put these two events in that order but I think now it was the other way around.
In that same post, I said that I had gone back to AUT to study IT in February 2009 and that I received an A in programming. I was then on 2.5mgs of Respiridone. After I was allowed to discontinue this horrible drug, I dropped out. This could be taken as evidence that I was well when I was on Respiridone and became ill when I discontinued it – but the reverse is true. When I was studying the programming paper, I had no contact with other people and was able to function despite my psychosis. Sometimes I thought others' thoughts were being projected into my mind. I remember one time in a computer lab imagining that the asian girl sitting across from me had telepathically broadcast the threat, "You will fail!" into my mind. My decision to drop out in the second semester, after I had gone off the Respiridone was because, having recovered some measure of sanity, I asked myself why I was studying IT when I didn't have the slightest interest in it. I made the decision to drop out because the decision to take this course in the first place had been a mad decision.
During my appointments with Tony Fernando in 2009 I was so sick as to be virtually catatonic. I was sometimes bombarded by voices on all sides. During 2010 and 2011 I was well, as I have said in other posts, but, because I disliked Tony so much, at my appointments with him I would stick with superficialities and get out of the room as quickly as possible. I didn't like being in his presence; he just struck me as someone false and mendacious. I only saw Tony once every few months and always with my mother and sometimes my father in attendance.
In the post, "What Happened in 2007 and 2009", I suggested that Fernando, colluding with Avril, had falsely put in my record that I had come out as gay and that this happened in January of 2009. If this was the case, as I believe it was, it illuminates something that happened later that year, before I went off the Risperidone. Fernando never asked me if I was gay or straight but at one appointment he asked me, with my parents in the room, in a deliberately off-hand manner, "Do you stand up for yourself or are you a people pleaser?". I had no idea what he was talking about but opted for "people pleaser" – I was afraid of him, you see. The cunt smirked. I now realise that he was asking me if prefer to give or receive blowjobs from men. Can you imagine the sadism and brutality of a psychiatrist, a psychiatrist who had put me on 2.5mgs of Rispiridone, who had said to me on one occasion, "You know, I can put you in hospital if I want," asking me, a straight man, if I preferred to give or receive blowjobs? He was deliberately putting me in a false position, a double-bind. Is it any wonder I think all psychiatrists are going to burn forever in hell when they die?
To sense that one has been diagnosed as a latent or closet homosexual is a terrible thing because it is impossible to tell the doctor that he is wrong. It is also a terrible thing when the psychiatrist refuses to change his mind.
There are other additions and clarifications I would like to include in this blog but I can't include everything. I will try to mention one or two things though. One thing for instance that bothers me is that in 2013, when my current psychiatrist Jen Murphy diagnosed me schizophrenic (I can only assume because I had said that I was straight), I came very close to forming a relationship with the girl I call Jess. My shrink knew about it and about her. The relationship never came into existence and I have never worked out what happened to sabotage it. Towards the end of the year I met another girl, a girl called Heidi Brickle, a painter who I had discovered through a Poetry Open Mike night. I told my shrink about her as well. In fact I told the shrink, "I have good luck with ELAM girls". (Maya had also been an ELAM student.) There was simply no justification for Jen Murphy to continue to maintain the lie that was my misdiagnosis, a misdiagnosis I had lived with ever since my very first appointment with Tony. Since I have been under the Act I have had no luck with women whatsoever. I have always felt that I wanted it finally and definitively on my record that I'm straight before I get myself a real girlfriend.
I'll finish this post by talking a little about one last thing. Towards the end of January or the beginning of February 2014 I was bullied into going to stay at a truly horrible respite facility near Pt Chevalier, three days that paved the way for my being officially sectioned a week or two later. I have talked a little about this period in the posts "On Religion" and "The Double Bind Theory of Schizophrenia". This period was terrible for two reasons. First, I sensed that I was going to be put under the Mental Health Act regardless of anything I said or I did. Second, a memory of a delusion or hallucination that I had experienced in very early 2010 had returned, an experience I have referred to indirectly in the post "The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name"; I had talked about it in an email I had sent to Jess. The world was ending around me. My time at this Respite Centre was not characteristic of my health generally, was not characteristic of the previous year. In fact, I thought I was in hell (I was being forced every night to take three different types of drug). It was said about me at my first legal hearing, when I was officially put under the Act, that while I was at this respite facility I would go for walks and not return until 4 in the morning. This never happened. Every night I was in bed by 8:30. One night I woke up at 4AM and went out into the yard for a cigarette. It was then that I saw God. When I went back to bed, another patient followed me to my room and I think was dissuaded from coming in by the man in charge of the respite facility. The next night I ran home, partly by bus and partly by train. I was scared to death. I was returned to the Respite facility by my mother but ran away again, this time calling Heidi on my cell-phone, in a panic, knowing I needed somewhere else to stay and only thinking of her to call. I knew I couldn't remain another night there in that hellhole. I think this call frightened Heidi off and I have never spoken to her again since. I ran home again to my mother instead and this time was allowed to stay there.
I don't know how much longer I will need to keep writing this blog. Obviously I can't share every detail of my life and at some point I will have to get back to writing fiction. Perhaps this is the last post I will need to write.
Wednesday, 11 October 2017
Noam Chomsky's "Propaganda Model" in 2017
I am publishing another essay I recently wrote for the course I am doing. It is not a great essay – it is not as academic as it should be, is mostly concerned with my observations of the Media. But I suspect readers might find it interesting anyway.
•••
Andrew Judd
Political Economy of the Media
Assignment 1
Question 3: Does the ‘propaganda model’ of Manufacturing Consent still have validity in the diverse mute-platform environment of today?
In 1988, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky was published, a radically Leftist, almost Marxist, critique of the media. In this work the authors argued that the mass media was engaged in a concerted if unconscious effort to shape the opinions of the masses to serve the interests of governmental and corporate elites, elites that owned or influenced, and thus indirectly determined, the content of newspapers, television news shows, magazines, and other major media. The question is, does this model, if it ever had validity, still have validity today? This essay will first describe Chomsky’s and Herman’s Propaganda Model in more detail before pointing out a major flaw in it – the flaw being that it overlooks the fact that media organisations are commercial enterprises that tailor their content to suit the interests of their perceived consumers in order to maximise audience share. The second part of the essay will provide some observations of the media landscape as it is today to show how diverse viewpoints and voices have proliferated, how any semblance of consensus has disappeared and how the media that might have seemed largely monolithic in 1988 now in 2017 has fractured into multiple competing splinter groups.
The basic argument Chomsky and Herman present is simple. The media tend to be owned by members of an elite, a ruling class that dominates the business, academic and governmental sectors. This elite is cohesive and unified, sharing the same interests and aims, particularly with respect to protecting its own power and privilege. Journalists and editors tend to be recruited who are “right-minded”, who “align themselves with the interest of dominant elites” (Klaehn, 2002, p 151). Those who disagree even a little soon learn that in order to remain and advance within the profession they must conform with the opinions and viewpoints of their bosses. They must “internalise beliefs and attitudes which in turn influences media performance”. (p. 151) The model presumes that the media serve and protect elite interests by promoting some issues and suppressing others, by framing debates in certain ways, by endorsing some opinions and dismissing contrary ones. This is not, Chomsky and Herman insist, a deliberate conspiracy but rather an inevitable result of a system in which control and power lie in the hands of a relatively small ruling class. It is “self-censorship without significant coercion” in which newsmakers convince themselves that they are making their decisions based on professional news values and common sense.
Herman and Chomsky argue that before news reaches the masses it passes through five filters. The first filter is that the media is owned by a small number of wealthy, profit-orientated individuals. The second is that commercial media rely financially on advertising paid for by businesses that are themselves owned by members of the profit-orientated ruling class. The third is the media’s reliance on information and ‘experts’ emerging from governmental and corporate elites. The fourth is ‘flak’ (a way dominant institutions can pressure media into selling the message they want sold). The fifth is anti-communism. Since the end of the Cold War, this last filter has been rendered obsolete, but proponents of the Propaganda model have argued that anti-communism has today been replaced by anti-Islamism.
The argument in Manufacturing Consent is based on an analysis of news content reported by the mass media. For instance, Herman and Chomsky argue that the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s was vastly more widely reported than a comparable genocide that occurred in East Timor around the same time, because of a pro-American bias in the media. The Cambodian genocide was carried out by a Communist regime whereas the US was complicit in the East Timorese genocide. A flaw in the theory is that it is based on content and does not investigate in any depth the internal workings of the media. A second flaw is that although it assumes that the media act to stifle democracy by effectively brain-washing the general populace, it does not investigate the effects of media on the masses with any rigour. The authors seem simply to assume that ordinary people are all alike blank slates, passively absorbing and being shaped by the reportage and opinions the media disseminate.
We now come to what can be regarded as the basic flaw in the Propaganda model. In my own view, publics are heterogenous. Consumers are active participants in the world who think for themselves, pick and choose their news sources and are influenced by many factors outside mainstream media, such as family, friends, work-colleagues and innate temperament. Although Herman and Chomsky regard media operations as a top-down process, media organisations are commercial entities that seek to maximise their audience by appealing to particular groups and demographics, to individuals who have pre-existing views. A media organisation seeks to reflect the views of its audience, rather than shape those views– content is to a large extent driven from the bottom up. If Fox News is anti-Islamist, this is not because Rupert Murdoch wishes to push an anti-Muslim agenda, but rather because the audience for Fox News is already prejudiced against Muslims and wants their prejudice presented as legitimate by their preferred television channel. The pandering of media organisations to their audiences has become much more evident today than it was in 1988, now that media in all its forms has so greatly proliferated and splintered and the media environment has become so much more competitive. For instance, we can even imagine, today, that if a strong demand for Marxist readings of current events existed, some TV show, e-zine or website would immediately spring up to satisfy this demand. The willingness of news outlets to present even radical left-wing views is a paradoxical consequence of neo-liberalism, of the application of free-market principles to the media.
Since 1988, there have been a number of developments in the media which make the situation today different than when Manufacturing Consent was written. In 1996 Fox News was launched. Fox News presented itself as an alternative to the ‘mainstream media’ which it said had ‘a liberal bias’. From its launch until 2016, its slogan was “fair and balanced”. Arguably, Fox News is a cheerleader for the Republican Party but it was not launched to propagandise for the Republican Party but rather to cater to a largely untapped socially conservative public, often rural rather than urban, that pre-existed Fox News and who were already unhappy with other mainstream media. Also in 1996 The Daily Show was launched on the cable and television channel Comedy Central. The Daily Show soon became an important voice for the American Left, often criticising and satirising Fox News. Its long time host Jon Stewart was notable for opposing the Iraq war when the America media almost universally supported it. In recent years, the number of satiric Leftwing news shows has enormously multiplied and now includes Real Time with Bill Maher, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee and Late Night with Seth Meyers among others. Media organisations in the US now wear their politics on their sleeves when once they would present themselves as detached and objective. There is a Democrat media and a Republican media; news shows of both the serious and satiric variety in the US have become increasingly partisan. The party divide in the American media, on TV, radio and in print, reflects the partisan divide among the American public; it is possible to speak of two Americas living side by side in separate bubbles, each receiving its own views reflected back at it by its chosen chorus masters, each being courted by advertisers whose aims are not to promulgate ideology but to make money. It is hard to speak of manufacturing consent when there is no media consensus.
Proponents of the Propaganda Model might argue that this apparent schism in the American media is simply cosmetic, conceals an underlying set of shared core assumptions. However, if the mainstream media is a cohesive block representing the views of the ruling capitalist class, some shows can certainly counterfeit anti-capitalist dissent quite convincingly. The satirical news show Last Week Tonight, produced by HBO, has won multiple Emmys since 2015 and so must be considered ‘mainstream’. In late September this year, the show ran a piece on corporate consolidation that is a pointed lesson in Political Economy; in it the host John Oliver attacks oligarchies, reports examples of the many industries dominated by only a few companies, and cites the striking fact that the manufacture and distribution of contact lenses is entirely controlled by a single business. During the show Oliver says, “"Full disclosure here, even our own parent company, Time Warner, is currently trying to merge with AT&T, which makes this story a little dangerous for us to do. That is, presuming that AT&T executives manage to get their shitty service working long enough to see it” (https://www.salon.com/2017/09/25/john-oliver-explains-why-corporate-consolidation-is-a-big-big-problem/). Oliver’s piece ends with him exhorting the US government to revamp its antitrust laws. The fact that Oliver was permitted to run an extended item criticising the way modern capitalism tends towards quasi-monopolistic practices when his ultimate employer is Time Warner supports my argument: HBO knows that Last Week Tonight appeals to young, educated, left-leaning viewers and presumably must consider the maintaining of high ratings more important than the propagandising of a pro-capitalist message or the promotion of its own parent company.
A less dramatic example of the media’s openness to dissenting opinion is the reverential interviews given to Noam Chomsky on the show Democracy Now!, an example less dramatic because Democracy Now! is syndicated around the world mainly on public-access TV channels rather than commercial channels. (https://www.democracynow.org/2017/4/4/full_interview_noam_chomsky_on_democracy) A second-order prediction of the Propaganda Model is that media and academia will want to ignore or suppress the theory, and Chomsky’s appearance on this show, many academic speaking engagements in recent years and participation in interviews published on the Internet and Youtube, ironically weakens his argument, that the proof of his theory is the unwillingness of the media and academy to discuss it or him.
Although this essay has so far focussed on how the number of television channels and shows has proliferated since 1988, the most important technological innovation in the period since Manufacturing Consent was written has been the invention and growth of the Internet. The Internet has provided an extraordinary means for citizen journalists, for bloggers, pod-casters and amateur film-makers, to reach potentially enormous audiences. Much of the work uploaded to the Internet is unremunerated so Herman’s and Chomsky’s argument cannot apply – such contributors often do not belong to the dominant elite. Some sites are supported by advertising but it is infrequent for advertisers to influence content. Rather businesses simply seek to attach themselves to sites that receive a lot of hits. Through platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, ‘prosumers’ can distribute their own content to their circle of ‘friends’ or recommend Internet based news sites and articles. Social Media, as the term ‘Social Media’ suggests, breaks significantly with traditional media – where once there was a clear distinction between those in the media and those outside it, now potentially anyone can be a ‘journalist’ or a ‘publisher’. The development of Internet journalism and of Social Media makes the Propaganda Model far less tenable in the modern age – such prosumers are no longer employed by the capitalist elite and no longer have any reason to internalise or propagate the ruling ideology. If we accept the basic assumption of the Propaganda Model that the reason the media did so was because the media were “fully integrated into the institutional framework of society and act in unison with other ideological sectors, i.e. the academy, to establish, enforce, reinforce and police corporate hegemony” (Klaehn, p. 147) we must presume that such user-generated content is by definition not propagandistic.
The effect of the Internet has been to allow voices and viewpoints far outside the mainstream to reach large audiences. Much of the success of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign can be attributed to Alt-Right sites such as Breitbart News. Andrew Breitbart has said he founded it with "the aim of starting a site that would be unapologetically pro-freedom and pro-Israel. We were sick of the anti-Israel bias of the mainstream media and J-Street.” Breibart News has often been accused of promulgating misleading or false stories. Another site that indicates how far outside the mainstream a popular Internet site can be is Infowars, hosted by Alex Jones, a site which according to https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/infowars.com received on average around 297,000 unique visitors every day for the week ending 2 October. On this site Jones has argued that the US government was involved in the September 11 terrorist attacks and that the American government is putting chemicals in the water that turn frogs gay; he has been called a far-right conspiracy theorist. Although it is hard to know how many visitors to his site take Jones seriously, this indicates how far removed from the cautious and unified if potentially biased core media that existed in 1988 some sectors of the modern media have become. The Internet also provides access to popular left-wing sites such as The Huffington Post and Mother Jones. In the ‘diverse multi-platform environment of today’, consumers do not passively receive news but actively seek out media that reinforces their established world-views.
A significant issue with respect to the Internet is that although anyone can publish a piece or opinion online, it may be possible for large Internet providers and search engines to influence public opinion by promoting or making available some sites more than others. This is an issue Herman and Chomsky could never have anticipated in 1988.
If the mainstream media in the United States is now polarised into Republican and Democrat camps and the Internet contains viewpoints that range so far outside the mainstream as to seem delusional, there is also the absolute opposition between the Trump Administration and the mainstream media to be considered. The mainstream media in America has been attacking Trump daily since long before his election. The New York Times has gone so far as to write an article calling Trump a liar, headlined “Trump’s lies” (http://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/ej-montini/2017/06/27/why-isnt-trump-suing-new-york-times/430127001/), a major step for a respected newspaper to take.Trump, for his part, often calls the media “fake news” and consistently bypasses the mainstream media entirely by using Twitter, dispatching Tweets that reach his supporters directly. In Manufacturing Consent, Herman and Chomsky argue that the ruling class is essentially cohesive and unified and that any difference of opinion within it is simply a disagreement with respect to tactics; it is difficult to view what looks like open war between the mainstream media and the Trump administration as a squabble over tactics within the dominant elite. This raises a problem for the supporter of the Propaganda Model. If the mainstream media is an instrument of the ruling class, does that make Trump a representative of the common man? Or is the mainstream media not so sinister after all?
Manufacturing Consent is no longer valid today because the theory it presented had three serious defects. First, it assumed that the dominant elite is coherent and unified and that the media are simply an instrument of this elite; today the dominant elite at least in the US is deeply split and much of the media is independent of the ruling elite. Second, the theory assumed that consumers were homogenous and passive; today it has become evident that publics are heterogenous in their views and active in seeking out which news sources to patronise. Third, the model assumed that a principal function of the media was to distribute propaganda when in reality most media outlets are principally seeking to maximise audience numbers.
This essay has so far only considered the US media. The situation in New Zealand is quite different. A typical Aucklander will get his or her news mainly from the TV1 or TV3 news, from the radio and from the New Zealand Herald, and perhaps partly from Internet sites such as stuff.co.nz and the thespinooff.co.nz. The impression one gathers of the New Zealand media is that, unlike the US media, they largely do present a unified world view. In order to see whether the Propaganda Model applies to the New Zealand media it would be necessary to compare the content of a newspaper like the New Zealand Herald with what has actually happened in the real world and make value judgements about what should rightfully be considered important and newsworthy. This way of approaching the question of whether news agencies are properly fulfilling their function is the methodology Herman and Chomsky employ in Manufacturing Consent but such an analysis is beyond the scope of this essay. Nevertheless New Zealand media outlets such as the New Zealand Herald certainly do suggest an impression of propagandising, of promoting a unified, cohesive and often conservative world view, a consensus that excludes, disparages or ridicules dissenting opinion. It is rare, for instance, for a New Zealand journalist to praise or support Winston Peters. I suspect however that this impression of a consensus among journalists about political, commercial, scientific and ethical issues does not arise from journalists internalising the beliefs and attitudes of media owners but rather from their sense of who their audience is, from their identification with that audience and from their intention to speak to that audience, often called ‘middle New Zealand’. I have described the New Zealand media as ‘conservative’, but in fact the dominant ideology today is what is often described as ‘Political Correctness’ – that is, the New Zealand media today strive as much as possible to avoid any appearance of racism, sexism, homophobia or any other kind of discriminatory attitude. If we accept the assumptions of the Propaganda Model, we are forced to conclude that Political Correctness and Identity Politics, prominent in the US and New Zealand media today, must somehow serve the interests of the ruling elites, perhaps by diverting attention away from more important issues.
The current situation in the US and New Zealand is very different than when Manufacturing Consent was published in 1988. In 1988 a consensus existed about reality even if, as Herman and Chomsky argue, this consensus was biased in favour of dominant elites. Today there is no longer any consensus about what reality is. The internet has empowered ordinary people but this empowerment of individuals does more harm than good when people are uninformed or misinformed. Technology and media proliferation have permitted perspectives and opinions far removed from verifiable truth to be disseminated and there is a continual hubbub of conflicting viewpoints. Anyone with access to a computer can throw in his or her two cents. Occasionally a real voice can be heard through all the noise but this is rare indee
•••
Andrew Judd
Political Economy of the Media
Assignment 1
Question 3: Does the ‘propaganda model’ of Manufacturing Consent still have validity in the diverse mute-platform environment of today?
In 1988, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky was published, a radically Leftist, almost Marxist, critique of the media. In this work the authors argued that the mass media was engaged in a concerted if unconscious effort to shape the opinions of the masses to serve the interests of governmental and corporate elites, elites that owned or influenced, and thus indirectly determined, the content of newspapers, television news shows, magazines, and other major media. The question is, does this model, if it ever had validity, still have validity today? This essay will first describe Chomsky’s and Herman’s Propaganda Model in more detail before pointing out a major flaw in it – the flaw being that it overlooks the fact that media organisations are commercial enterprises that tailor their content to suit the interests of their perceived consumers in order to maximise audience share. The second part of the essay will provide some observations of the media landscape as it is today to show how diverse viewpoints and voices have proliferated, how any semblance of consensus has disappeared and how the media that might have seemed largely monolithic in 1988 now in 2017 has fractured into multiple competing splinter groups.
The basic argument Chomsky and Herman present is simple. The media tend to be owned by members of an elite, a ruling class that dominates the business, academic and governmental sectors. This elite is cohesive and unified, sharing the same interests and aims, particularly with respect to protecting its own power and privilege. Journalists and editors tend to be recruited who are “right-minded”, who “align themselves with the interest of dominant elites” (Klaehn, 2002, p 151). Those who disagree even a little soon learn that in order to remain and advance within the profession they must conform with the opinions and viewpoints of their bosses. They must “internalise beliefs and attitudes which in turn influences media performance”. (p. 151) The model presumes that the media serve and protect elite interests by promoting some issues and suppressing others, by framing debates in certain ways, by endorsing some opinions and dismissing contrary ones. This is not, Chomsky and Herman insist, a deliberate conspiracy but rather an inevitable result of a system in which control and power lie in the hands of a relatively small ruling class. It is “self-censorship without significant coercion” in which newsmakers convince themselves that they are making their decisions based on professional news values and common sense.
Herman and Chomsky argue that before news reaches the masses it passes through five filters. The first filter is that the media is owned by a small number of wealthy, profit-orientated individuals. The second is that commercial media rely financially on advertising paid for by businesses that are themselves owned by members of the profit-orientated ruling class. The third is the media’s reliance on information and ‘experts’ emerging from governmental and corporate elites. The fourth is ‘flak’ (a way dominant institutions can pressure media into selling the message they want sold). The fifth is anti-communism. Since the end of the Cold War, this last filter has been rendered obsolete, but proponents of the Propaganda model have argued that anti-communism has today been replaced by anti-Islamism.
The argument in Manufacturing Consent is based on an analysis of news content reported by the mass media. For instance, Herman and Chomsky argue that the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s was vastly more widely reported than a comparable genocide that occurred in East Timor around the same time, because of a pro-American bias in the media. The Cambodian genocide was carried out by a Communist regime whereas the US was complicit in the East Timorese genocide. A flaw in the theory is that it is based on content and does not investigate in any depth the internal workings of the media. A second flaw is that although it assumes that the media act to stifle democracy by effectively brain-washing the general populace, it does not investigate the effects of media on the masses with any rigour. The authors seem simply to assume that ordinary people are all alike blank slates, passively absorbing and being shaped by the reportage and opinions the media disseminate.
We now come to what can be regarded as the basic flaw in the Propaganda model. In my own view, publics are heterogenous. Consumers are active participants in the world who think for themselves, pick and choose their news sources and are influenced by many factors outside mainstream media, such as family, friends, work-colleagues and innate temperament. Although Herman and Chomsky regard media operations as a top-down process, media organisations are commercial entities that seek to maximise their audience by appealing to particular groups and demographics, to individuals who have pre-existing views. A media organisation seeks to reflect the views of its audience, rather than shape those views– content is to a large extent driven from the bottom up. If Fox News is anti-Islamist, this is not because Rupert Murdoch wishes to push an anti-Muslim agenda, but rather because the audience for Fox News is already prejudiced against Muslims and wants their prejudice presented as legitimate by their preferred television channel. The pandering of media organisations to their audiences has become much more evident today than it was in 1988, now that media in all its forms has so greatly proliferated and splintered and the media environment has become so much more competitive. For instance, we can even imagine, today, that if a strong demand for Marxist readings of current events existed, some TV show, e-zine or website would immediately spring up to satisfy this demand. The willingness of news outlets to present even radical left-wing views is a paradoxical consequence of neo-liberalism, of the application of free-market principles to the media.
Since 1988, there have been a number of developments in the media which make the situation today different than when Manufacturing Consent was written. In 1996 Fox News was launched. Fox News presented itself as an alternative to the ‘mainstream media’ which it said had ‘a liberal bias’. From its launch until 2016, its slogan was “fair and balanced”. Arguably, Fox News is a cheerleader for the Republican Party but it was not launched to propagandise for the Republican Party but rather to cater to a largely untapped socially conservative public, often rural rather than urban, that pre-existed Fox News and who were already unhappy with other mainstream media. Also in 1996 The Daily Show was launched on the cable and television channel Comedy Central. The Daily Show soon became an important voice for the American Left, often criticising and satirising Fox News. Its long time host Jon Stewart was notable for opposing the Iraq war when the America media almost universally supported it. In recent years, the number of satiric Leftwing news shows has enormously multiplied and now includes Real Time with Bill Maher, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee and Late Night with Seth Meyers among others. Media organisations in the US now wear their politics on their sleeves when once they would present themselves as detached and objective. There is a Democrat media and a Republican media; news shows of both the serious and satiric variety in the US have become increasingly partisan. The party divide in the American media, on TV, radio and in print, reflects the partisan divide among the American public; it is possible to speak of two Americas living side by side in separate bubbles, each receiving its own views reflected back at it by its chosen chorus masters, each being courted by advertisers whose aims are not to promulgate ideology but to make money. It is hard to speak of manufacturing consent when there is no media consensus.
Proponents of the Propaganda Model might argue that this apparent schism in the American media is simply cosmetic, conceals an underlying set of shared core assumptions. However, if the mainstream media is a cohesive block representing the views of the ruling capitalist class, some shows can certainly counterfeit anti-capitalist dissent quite convincingly. The satirical news show Last Week Tonight, produced by HBO, has won multiple Emmys since 2015 and so must be considered ‘mainstream’. In late September this year, the show ran a piece on corporate consolidation that is a pointed lesson in Political Economy; in it the host John Oliver attacks oligarchies, reports examples of the many industries dominated by only a few companies, and cites the striking fact that the manufacture and distribution of contact lenses is entirely controlled by a single business. During the show Oliver says, “"Full disclosure here, even our own parent company, Time Warner, is currently trying to merge with AT&T, which makes this story a little dangerous for us to do. That is, presuming that AT&T executives manage to get their shitty service working long enough to see it” (https://www.salon.com/2017/09/25/john-oliver-explains-why-corporate-consolidation-is-a-big-big-problem/). Oliver’s piece ends with him exhorting the US government to revamp its antitrust laws. The fact that Oliver was permitted to run an extended item criticising the way modern capitalism tends towards quasi-monopolistic practices when his ultimate employer is Time Warner supports my argument: HBO knows that Last Week Tonight appeals to young, educated, left-leaning viewers and presumably must consider the maintaining of high ratings more important than the propagandising of a pro-capitalist message or the promotion of its own parent company.
A less dramatic example of the media’s openness to dissenting opinion is the reverential interviews given to Noam Chomsky on the show Democracy Now!, an example less dramatic because Democracy Now! is syndicated around the world mainly on public-access TV channels rather than commercial channels. (https://www.democracynow.org/2017/4/4/full_interview_noam_chomsky_on_democracy) A second-order prediction of the Propaganda Model is that media and academia will want to ignore or suppress the theory, and Chomsky’s appearance on this show, many academic speaking engagements in recent years and participation in interviews published on the Internet and Youtube, ironically weakens his argument, that the proof of his theory is the unwillingness of the media and academy to discuss it or him.
Although this essay has so far focussed on how the number of television channels and shows has proliferated since 1988, the most important technological innovation in the period since Manufacturing Consent was written has been the invention and growth of the Internet. The Internet has provided an extraordinary means for citizen journalists, for bloggers, pod-casters and amateur film-makers, to reach potentially enormous audiences. Much of the work uploaded to the Internet is unremunerated so Herman’s and Chomsky’s argument cannot apply – such contributors often do not belong to the dominant elite. Some sites are supported by advertising but it is infrequent for advertisers to influence content. Rather businesses simply seek to attach themselves to sites that receive a lot of hits. Through platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, ‘prosumers’ can distribute their own content to their circle of ‘friends’ or recommend Internet based news sites and articles. Social Media, as the term ‘Social Media’ suggests, breaks significantly with traditional media – where once there was a clear distinction between those in the media and those outside it, now potentially anyone can be a ‘journalist’ or a ‘publisher’. The development of Internet journalism and of Social Media makes the Propaganda Model far less tenable in the modern age – such prosumers are no longer employed by the capitalist elite and no longer have any reason to internalise or propagate the ruling ideology. If we accept the basic assumption of the Propaganda Model that the reason the media did so was because the media were “fully integrated into the institutional framework of society and act in unison with other ideological sectors, i.e. the academy, to establish, enforce, reinforce and police corporate hegemony” (Klaehn, p. 147) we must presume that such user-generated content is by definition not propagandistic.
The effect of the Internet has been to allow voices and viewpoints far outside the mainstream to reach large audiences. Much of the success of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign can be attributed to Alt-Right sites such as Breitbart News. Andrew Breitbart has said he founded it with "the aim of starting a site that would be unapologetically pro-freedom and pro-Israel. We were sick of the anti-Israel bias of the mainstream media and J-Street.” Breibart News has often been accused of promulgating misleading or false stories. Another site that indicates how far outside the mainstream a popular Internet site can be is Infowars, hosted by Alex Jones, a site which according to https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/infowars.com received on average around 297,000 unique visitors every day for the week ending 2 October. On this site Jones has argued that the US government was involved in the September 11 terrorist attacks and that the American government is putting chemicals in the water that turn frogs gay; he has been called a far-right conspiracy theorist. Although it is hard to know how many visitors to his site take Jones seriously, this indicates how far removed from the cautious and unified if potentially biased core media that existed in 1988 some sectors of the modern media have become. The Internet also provides access to popular left-wing sites such as The Huffington Post and Mother Jones. In the ‘diverse multi-platform environment of today’, consumers do not passively receive news but actively seek out media that reinforces their established world-views.
A significant issue with respect to the Internet is that although anyone can publish a piece or opinion online, it may be possible for large Internet providers and search engines to influence public opinion by promoting or making available some sites more than others. This is an issue Herman and Chomsky could never have anticipated in 1988.
If the mainstream media in the United States is now polarised into Republican and Democrat camps and the Internet contains viewpoints that range so far outside the mainstream as to seem delusional, there is also the absolute opposition between the Trump Administration and the mainstream media to be considered. The mainstream media in America has been attacking Trump daily since long before his election. The New York Times has gone so far as to write an article calling Trump a liar, headlined “Trump’s lies” (http://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/ej-montini/2017/06/27/why-isnt-trump-suing-new-york-times/430127001/), a major step for a respected newspaper to take.Trump, for his part, often calls the media “fake news” and consistently bypasses the mainstream media entirely by using Twitter, dispatching Tweets that reach his supporters directly. In Manufacturing Consent, Herman and Chomsky argue that the ruling class is essentially cohesive and unified and that any difference of opinion within it is simply a disagreement with respect to tactics; it is difficult to view what looks like open war between the mainstream media and the Trump administration as a squabble over tactics within the dominant elite. This raises a problem for the supporter of the Propaganda Model. If the mainstream media is an instrument of the ruling class, does that make Trump a representative of the common man? Or is the mainstream media not so sinister after all?
Manufacturing Consent is no longer valid today because the theory it presented had three serious defects. First, it assumed that the dominant elite is coherent and unified and that the media are simply an instrument of this elite; today the dominant elite at least in the US is deeply split and much of the media is independent of the ruling elite. Second, the theory assumed that consumers were homogenous and passive; today it has become evident that publics are heterogenous in their views and active in seeking out which news sources to patronise. Third, the model assumed that a principal function of the media was to distribute propaganda when in reality most media outlets are principally seeking to maximise audience numbers.
This essay has so far only considered the US media. The situation in New Zealand is quite different. A typical Aucklander will get his or her news mainly from the TV1 or TV3 news, from the radio and from the New Zealand Herald, and perhaps partly from Internet sites such as stuff.co.nz and the thespinooff.co.nz. The impression one gathers of the New Zealand media is that, unlike the US media, they largely do present a unified world view. In order to see whether the Propaganda Model applies to the New Zealand media it would be necessary to compare the content of a newspaper like the New Zealand Herald with what has actually happened in the real world and make value judgements about what should rightfully be considered important and newsworthy. This way of approaching the question of whether news agencies are properly fulfilling their function is the methodology Herman and Chomsky employ in Manufacturing Consent but such an analysis is beyond the scope of this essay. Nevertheless New Zealand media outlets such as the New Zealand Herald certainly do suggest an impression of propagandising, of promoting a unified, cohesive and often conservative world view, a consensus that excludes, disparages or ridicules dissenting opinion. It is rare, for instance, for a New Zealand journalist to praise or support Winston Peters. I suspect however that this impression of a consensus among journalists about political, commercial, scientific and ethical issues does not arise from journalists internalising the beliefs and attitudes of media owners but rather from their sense of who their audience is, from their identification with that audience and from their intention to speak to that audience, often called ‘middle New Zealand’. I have described the New Zealand media as ‘conservative’, but in fact the dominant ideology today is what is often described as ‘Political Correctness’ – that is, the New Zealand media today strive as much as possible to avoid any appearance of racism, sexism, homophobia or any other kind of discriminatory attitude. If we accept the assumptions of the Propaganda Model, we are forced to conclude that Political Correctness and Identity Politics, prominent in the US and New Zealand media today, must somehow serve the interests of the ruling elites, perhaps by diverting attention away from more important issues.
The current situation in the US and New Zealand is very different than when Manufacturing Consent was published in 1988. In 1988 a consensus existed about reality even if, as Herman and Chomsky argue, this consensus was biased in favour of dominant elites. Today there is no longer any consensus about what reality is. The internet has empowered ordinary people but this empowerment of individuals does more harm than good when people are uninformed or misinformed. Technology and media proliferation have permitted perspectives and opinions far removed from verifiable truth to be disseminated and there is a continual hubbub of conflicting viewpoints. Anyone with access to a computer can throw in his or her two cents. Occasionally a real voice can be heard through all the noise but this is rare indee
Thursday, 21 September 2017
What happened in 2007 and 2009
In this post I want to talk a little more about my first psychotic episode, an episode that continued from when I left the Big House until the very beginning of 2008. I also want to describe something that happened in early 2009 which may be significant to those interested in my situation.
I have described my first experience of madness in the post "My First Psychotic Episode" although there are some details I have omitted because they are difficult to express. It felt very much like a religious experience at the time, albeit a negative one: I felt the victim of a conspiracy although there were moments, bizarrely, when I thought it was a benevolent conspiracy. After my crisis at the Big House my psychotic symptoms went away away briefly. Upon first encountering Tony Fernando, I decided I wanted no part in the Service, but when my psychotic symptoms returned a week or two later (I had then moved home to live with my mother), I felt I needed help and the Mental Health Service was the only place I could turn to. I saw him again and was put on 2.5mgs of Rispiridone. I would continue to live at home with my mother until the beginning of last year.
The most important aspect of the episode I suffered in 2007 was that I had formed the delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals. I believed briefly, in fact, that everyone in the world was gay except me – Kurt Cobain was the first person I could think of who was also straight. The episode that year was often intense but I never heard voices. I can't do justice to all I experienced that year but one story may give some idea. I had formed the belief that heterosexuals had to keep secret their attraction to women, to conceal the fact of their heterosexuality from the all the closet homosexuals, and that some, such as James Joyce, would even feign blindness in order to hide the fact that they were looking at females. On the morning that New Zealand played France in the Rugby World Cup, an early intervention team member took me for a excursion to Cornwall Park. While there I hallucinated that a old friend of mine, who is blind, was sitting on a bench (this friend was then in reality completing a doctorate in the States); the woman sitting next to him said, "He saw someone in his room." I thought I had miraculously restored Rene's sight. Sometime later I would decide that such miracles were more harmful than beneficial and that I should revoke my gift. In the car on the way back from Cornwall Park, we heard on the radio that the All Blacks had lost. I decided I was personally responsible for their defeat because I hadn't watched the game.
The delusions that a psychotic can suffer are often an exaggeration of common delusions that many people share – psychosis is a kind of reductio ad absurdum. In 2007, I believed in a gay gene, as many people do. Consider the consequences of this hypothesis. If there is such a thing as a gay gene, it would mean that for hundreds of thousands of years gay men were marrying gay women and having gay children. I believed in 2007 in fact that homosexuals outnumbered heterosexuals. The heterosexual minority, the few who actually loved the opposite sex, were in the main unaware that the majority of people in the world were closet homosexuals; they had been brainwashed, were as it were repressing their knowledge of this homosexual conspiracy. Only a few could pierce through the veil to the truth. I believed furthermore that over time a slow genocide was being carried out. The closet homosexuals, indistinguishable in my mind from sociopaths, hated the heterosexuals and were systematically weeding out heterosexuality from the gene pool. I would believe, for instance, that the Jews were all straight and that the Nazis were all closet homosexuals; I thought the Holocaust evidence of this genocidal intent. My attitude to the Mental Health Service varied but often I thought that it was an instrument of this conspiracy. I didn't like being a patient of the Mental Health Service but felt I had no choice in the matter.
When I first became ill, in the Big House, I had formed the belief that I was secretly under surveillance. After my crisis there, this feeling went away for a period, but the feeling that I was under surveillance returned soon after my first appointment with Tony Fernando. I decided that there was a listening device in my glasses. It is impossible to stress how persistent and horrible this delusion was: I believed the Media were monitoring everything I said. This delusion lasted all of 2007. I believed that if I said I was straight or if I exposed the homosexual conspiracy, I would be killed. For all of 2008 this delusion sort of went away: I thought that if I said nothing controversial, people wouldn't be listening. But it came back in early 2009 and didn't vanish for good until the beginning of 2010.
Over the summer of 2007 and 2008 I spent some time, I think at least a whole month, as a day patient of a Respite Facility called Mind Matters. My psychosis abated. I had told no one of my delusions. I was almost totally well for all of 2008. I stopped believing in the homosexual conspiracy, although I continued to believe, correctly, that I had been misdiagnosed by my psychiatrist at the first appointment. I went back to university and studied some philosophy papers. Perhaps around September of that year my mother went to Britain for a holiday and organised for my sort of girlfriend Maya to come stay with me. We got into a fight and conclusively broke up. Shortly after, a old friend of mine called up; he had recently returned from the Czech Republic and needed some place to stay, so came to stay with me. Later during the rest of the year I would visit him occasionally at his house in Piha. I didn't like this chap particularly much, to be honest, but he was the only friend I had.
I should say something about my state of mind that year, 2008. I was still taking 2.5 mgs of Rispiridone which made me feel rotten all the time. Because of my terrible experiences the previous year and my residual delusion that I had a microphone in my glasses, I never used the words 'gay' or 'straight' – although I would occasionally try to find indirect ways, when speaking to Tony for instance, to say that I was heterosexual. That year I saw a middle-aged Scottish nurse called Averil for 'therapy' although no therapy ever happened. The only thing I felt able to talk about with her at the time was the David Letterman show and the American election. I remember my first appointment with her: she said, "I should be an attractive young woman!" At the time I did really know why she had said this. I needed counselling; her looks shouldn't have been relevant. The issue which I wanted to talk about was my parents' divorce when I was seven but she never raised it. I believed then and now that mental illness has a psychological cause and wanted psychological treatment. I talked about my friend with Averil.
At the very beginning of 2009, I decided that I should at least try to talk about my family and mentioned my dislike of my stepmother. At the next appointment with Averil she said, "You were telling me about your dislike of your mother." I said, "No, it's my stepmother I have problems with." All of a sudden I felt a kind of terrible darkness, that had been there since I had started taking Rispirdone, rising up all around me. A false statement that I disliked my mother had been put on my record. Almost immediately after this, I attended the Seven Worlds Collide concert with my friend and that night my psychosis returned. My belief in a homosexual conspiracy came back and I decided that I had to sever my ties with him. I have only seen him occasionally since.
I should say that I now know this friend was straight although that night I decided that he might be gay; in fact the night of the concert I met for the first time his new girlfriend. What I think now, and have thought for a long time now but have had difficulty expressing, is that the people who were treating me thought this friendship was a homosexual relationship. This because they had diagnosed me homosexual at the first appointment without ever actually finding out if I was gay or not. It seems the mental health service assumes that all relationships, including same-sex ones, involve fucking.
It is difficult for me now to get the events in the early part of 2009 in the right order. I became very ill indeed – it was shortly after this that I first began hearing voices. I have said the voices began in January but it might have been February. The first voice I heard, in fact, belonged to George W. Bush. (When I spoke with him I asked him if he was straight and he replied, "I think so.") At my mother's suggestion, I went back to university to study IT. It seems incredible that I was studying because I was in fact so extremely ill, but I seem able to function well even when ill. I even got an A in programming that semester. There is one particular event that has always seemed very important me – it occurred in the first month or two of 2009 just before I started attending AUT. Almost all of the appointments I had with Tony Fernando were in the company of my mother and often my father. Around this time I had an appointment with just me, Tony and Averil. They had decided to put me on anti-depressants as well as Rispiridone. At this appointment, I gained the strange impression that Tony and Averil were in a clandestine sexual relationship – a bizarre feeling to have because I was fairly confident that Tony was homosexual. What I think now was that this was an intuition that were, in fact, colluding. I asked why they wanted to put me on antidepressants when I wasn't depressed; I suggested that I could take St John's Wort instead. Tony turned to Averil with a smirk and said, "I hear they prescribe St. John's Wort – in Germany!" That appointment was the time I felt most strongly just how evil and sadistic Tony is. It is significant that my Key Worker Kate Whelan was not present at this appointment.
Shortly after, I started going to AUT – I remember Kate taking me, sick as I was, to the Disabilities Support Service. I had sensed from my first appointment with Tony, in 2007, that I had been misdiagnosed homosexual and I had been mortally afraid of being 'outed' ever since; I felt strongly then that this had actually happened. I think Tony had written in whatever secret record that psychiatrists keep about their patients that I had come out as gay; I think moreover that either Tony or Averil had told Kate that I had come out as gay and that she subsequently told other people. I only took antidepressants for a short time – after a couple of weeks I somehow convinced those treating me to let me go off them.
I had become very ill indeed. Every night I heard voices. It was just a couple of months later that I adopted Jon Stewart as an imaginary friend, a moment I have described in the post "Jon Stewart, Janet Frame and Katy Perry." I'll tell one story that gives some idea of just how sick I was before I went off the Rispiridone, a story I've told before but is worth telling again. One night I went into the back garden of my house – I thought that the garden was Gethsemane and that the tree in the garden was one of the tree of suicides from Dante's Inferno. I thought I was Jesus and that I was being called upon to save young mental health patients from suicide. I said to the voices, "Choose someone else!" They said, "Okay". When I went back inside the house I asked the voices, "Am I Jesus or am I in hell?" The voices replied, "What's the difference?"
I believe that what I was being called to do was save young people from being driven to either suicide or homosexuality by psychiatric misdiagnoses.
Rispirdone is a vile drug. I don't believe it helps at all in mitigating psychotic symptoms– all it does is make people feel sick and afraid all the time which psychiatrists probably like because it makes patients more pliable. On August 6, my mother's birthday, having been very unwell for some eight months, I contemplated suicide – I thought I was going to be on Rispiridone forever. When Tony found out the next day that I had written a suicide note, he panicked and permitted me to go off it, 0.5mgs a week over the course of about a month and a half. For a period I saw the Crisis Team daily. Around this time I became concerned about my testosterone levels – I thought the Rispiridone might somehow turn me gay by fucking with my hormones. Going off the Rispiridone was hard but fortunately I had Jon and Lily Allen as guardian angels. For about a month after I was totally off the Rispiridone, I was actually well – being allowed to get off this horrible drug had cured my psychosis. I went to Sydney with my mother for a wedding and there hit on a girl in a boat. Shortly after I got back, the psychosis suddenly returned, triggered, bizarrely enough, by seeing Iggy Pop on TV. I believe the reason I became psychotic again was a reaction to years of terrible stress. I ended up back in Tony's consultation room and was put on Olanzapine, my dosage gradually being increased to 10mgs. I continue to experience psychosis for the next few months, a psychosis perhaps slightly more intense but far less terrible than the psychosis I had experienced while taking Rispiridone. Around this time, I walked up Mt Hobson and asked the voices how I could escape my madness. I heard a voice say, "Accept consensus reality". I decided this was my only way out. On the way down the hill I saw a vagrant and heard two voices, one saying "The saved" and the other "The damned". I didn't know which of us was which.
Around November, I started attending a Hearing Voices group at which I met Jess. Over the summer of 2009 and 2010 I experienced the psychotic episode that I have described in other posts, the episode during which from the moment I woke to the moment I slept I spent talking with Jess, Jon and other people, including, from around January 5, Barack Obama.
Psychosis seems to me an escape from an unendurable reality. a way of coping. I remember in late 2009, before I met Jess, Jon speaking to me. He said, "You're long sighted!" I said, "No, I'm short sighted." He said, "You're long sighted!" I said, "No, I'm short sighted – I see well at short distances!" He laughed and said, "There's no hope for you." I told this story to Kate. She had no idea what I was talking about, but of course I was talking about what it was like to live with a misdiagnosis.
My psychosis ebbed away after a couple of months. I remained on 10mgs until the beginning of 2012. During this time I believe Kate thought of me as gay man who didn't want to come out. In 2011, I hung out with the real Jess on a number of occasions. In 2012, as I've said before, I was discharged from the Service and reduced my dosage to 5mgs. That year I completed an MA in Creative Writing through AUT, writing a film script about Jess. In early 2013, for whatever reason, reasons I can only surmise, but mainly I think because I had found out that Jess had spent eight months in hospital in 2012, I became ill again. I re-entered the service voluntarily in order to finally get it on my record that I was straight. And then, of course, as I described in the previous post, I was put under the Mental Health Act in early 2014 for doing so.
Readers may wonder, did you perhaps say you were gay at some time and this was put on your record? How else could the psychiatrists justify their misdiagnosis? All I can say is that it is impossible for me ever to have said it. It just never happened. I am very close to my mother and see her almost every day – I have never 'come out' to her. I have a good friend Sarah McConie who is bisexual, who has gone backwards and forwards between men and women her whole life, was in a Civil Union with a woman for some years and is now in a relationship with a man. I have never 'come out' to her. Why would I tell anyone in the Mental Health Service that I was muddled sexually and never tell my friend Sarah? They had diagnosed me either sexually muddled or homosexual without ever actually asking me, something I think psychiatrists do with many if not all of their patients.
This type of misdiagnosis occurs all the time. In previous posts I have talked about a man I know called Yves – Yves was also treated by Tony, was also put on Rispiridone first and Olanzapine later and, in his own words, got out of the Mental Health System by "telling the psychologist what the psychologist wanted to hear". He is still sick, still takes Olanzapine and now Lithium. I remember around New Years Eve 2015 I spent time with Yves and his family because I am friends with his younger brother Rene. Yves asked me, in a strange paranoid way, "Do you go to bars?" Evidently at some point in his treatment he had told people that he went to bars sometimes and they had decided he was going to bars to pick up gay men.
I watched the Daily Show every night during 2008 and 2009 – it went off New Zealand TV for several years and came back in 2014, just after I had been put under the Act. As I've said in a previous post, I felt my imaginary friend had returned at the moment when I most needed him, when I was being made to see the psychologist Simon Judkins. I want to say a little about Jon, not the Jon I spoke to my head but the real one. I remember in 2014, after having delivered an impassioned conflicted defence of marriage equality, a speech he obviously found difficult, him turning to the camera and saying, "We live in trying times, my friends – but we are blessed." This meant a lot to me because Jess's real name is Elizabeth which means "blessed by god"; I thought Jon was addressing all the other schizophrenics in the world. In 2015, during his last show, his final diatribe was about how official records are all bullshit. This may seem unbelievable but it actually happened and this moment is probably viewable on Youtube somewhere.
It seems to me that the current fashion in psychiatry is to assume that all schizophrenia is a form of repressed homosexuality. This is evil and stupid. The clever patients sense the psychiatrists think this and it drives them mad, drives them to either suicide or homosexuality. When a psychotic first presents what the psychiatrists should actually try to do is find out the reasons for his or her first episode, reasons that probably differ from patient to patient.
I'll finish this post by saying one last thing. The nurse Averil left the Taylor Centre in either 2010 or 2011. When she left she gave me a hug goodbye, something no other worker at the Taylor Centre ever did. I have wondered since if this hug was an indication of a guilty conscience.
I have described my first experience of madness in the post "My First Psychotic Episode" although there are some details I have omitted because they are difficult to express. It felt very much like a religious experience at the time, albeit a negative one: I felt the victim of a conspiracy although there were moments, bizarrely, when I thought it was a benevolent conspiracy. After my crisis at the Big House my psychotic symptoms went away away briefly. Upon first encountering Tony Fernando, I decided I wanted no part in the Service, but when my psychotic symptoms returned a week or two later (I had then moved home to live with my mother), I felt I needed help and the Mental Health Service was the only place I could turn to. I saw him again and was put on 2.5mgs of Rispiridone. I would continue to live at home with my mother until the beginning of last year.
The most important aspect of the episode I suffered in 2007 was that I had formed the delusion that the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals. I believed briefly, in fact, that everyone in the world was gay except me – Kurt Cobain was the first person I could think of who was also straight. The episode that year was often intense but I never heard voices. I can't do justice to all I experienced that year but one story may give some idea. I had formed the belief that heterosexuals had to keep secret their attraction to women, to conceal the fact of their heterosexuality from the all the closet homosexuals, and that some, such as James Joyce, would even feign blindness in order to hide the fact that they were looking at females. On the morning that New Zealand played France in the Rugby World Cup, an early intervention team member took me for a excursion to Cornwall Park. While there I hallucinated that a old friend of mine, who is blind, was sitting on a bench (this friend was then in reality completing a doctorate in the States); the woman sitting next to him said, "He saw someone in his room." I thought I had miraculously restored Rene's sight. Sometime later I would decide that such miracles were more harmful than beneficial and that I should revoke my gift. In the car on the way back from Cornwall Park, we heard on the radio that the All Blacks had lost. I decided I was personally responsible for their defeat because I hadn't watched the game.
The delusions that a psychotic can suffer are often an exaggeration of common delusions that many people share – psychosis is a kind of reductio ad absurdum. In 2007, I believed in a gay gene, as many people do. Consider the consequences of this hypothesis. If there is such a thing as a gay gene, it would mean that for hundreds of thousands of years gay men were marrying gay women and having gay children. I believed in 2007 in fact that homosexuals outnumbered heterosexuals. The heterosexual minority, the few who actually loved the opposite sex, were in the main unaware that the majority of people in the world were closet homosexuals; they had been brainwashed, were as it were repressing their knowledge of this homosexual conspiracy. Only a few could pierce through the veil to the truth. I believed furthermore that over time a slow genocide was being carried out. The closet homosexuals, indistinguishable in my mind from sociopaths, hated the heterosexuals and were systematically weeding out heterosexuality from the gene pool. I would believe, for instance, that the Jews were all straight and that the Nazis were all closet homosexuals; I thought the Holocaust evidence of this genocidal intent. My attitude to the Mental Health Service varied but often I thought that it was an instrument of this conspiracy. I didn't like being a patient of the Mental Health Service but felt I had no choice in the matter.
When I first became ill, in the Big House, I had formed the belief that I was secretly under surveillance. After my crisis there, this feeling went away for a period, but the feeling that I was under surveillance returned soon after my first appointment with Tony Fernando. I decided that there was a listening device in my glasses. It is impossible to stress how persistent and horrible this delusion was: I believed the Media were monitoring everything I said. This delusion lasted all of 2007. I believed that if I said I was straight or if I exposed the homosexual conspiracy, I would be killed. For all of 2008 this delusion sort of went away: I thought that if I said nothing controversial, people wouldn't be listening. But it came back in early 2009 and didn't vanish for good until the beginning of 2010.
Over the summer of 2007 and 2008 I spent some time, I think at least a whole month, as a day patient of a Respite Facility called Mind Matters. My psychosis abated. I had told no one of my delusions. I was almost totally well for all of 2008. I stopped believing in the homosexual conspiracy, although I continued to believe, correctly, that I had been misdiagnosed by my psychiatrist at the first appointment. I went back to university and studied some philosophy papers. Perhaps around September of that year my mother went to Britain for a holiday and organised for my sort of girlfriend Maya to come stay with me. We got into a fight and conclusively broke up. Shortly after, a old friend of mine called up; he had recently returned from the Czech Republic and needed some place to stay, so came to stay with me. Later during the rest of the year I would visit him occasionally at his house in Piha. I didn't like this chap particularly much, to be honest, but he was the only friend I had.
I should say something about my state of mind that year, 2008. I was still taking 2.5 mgs of Rispiridone which made me feel rotten all the time. Because of my terrible experiences the previous year and my residual delusion that I had a microphone in my glasses, I never used the words 'gay' or 'straight' – although I would occasionally try to find indirect ways, when speaking to Tony for instance, to say that I was heterosexual. That year I saw a middle-aged Scottish nurse called Averil for 'therapy' although no therapy ever happened. The only thing I felt able to talk about with her at the time was the David Letterman show and the American election. I remember my first appointment with her: she said, "I should be an attractive young woman!" At the time I did really know why she had said this. I needed counselling; her looks shouldn't have been relevant. The issue which I wanted to talk about was my parents' divorce when I was seven but she never raised it. I believed then and now that mental illness has a psychological cause and wanted psychological treatment. I talked about my friend with Averil.
At the very beginning of 2009, I decided that I should at least try to talk about my family and mentioned my dislike of my stepmother. At the next appointment with Averil she said, "You were telling me about your dislike of your mother." I said, "No, it's my stepmother I have problems with." All of a sudden I felt a kind of terrible darkness, that had been there since I had started taking Rispirdone, rising up all around me. A false statement that I disliked my mother had been put on my record. Almost immediately after this, I attended the Seven Worlds Collide concert with my friend and that night my psychosis returned. My belief in a homosexual conspiracy came back and I decided that I had to sever my ties with him. I have only seen him occasionally since.
I should say that I now know this friend was straight although that night I decided that he might be gay; in fact the night of the concert I met for the first time his new girlfriend. What I think now, and have thought for a long time now but have had difficulty expressing, is that the people who were treating me thought this friendship was a homosexual relationship. This because they had diagnosed me homosexual at the first appointment without ever actually finding out if I was gay or not. It seems the mental health service assumes that all relationships, including same-sex ones, involve fucking.
It is difficult for me now to get the events in the early part of 2009 in the right order. I became very ill indeed – it was shortly after this that I first began hearing voices. I have said the voices began in January but it might have been February. The first voice I heard, in fact, belonged to George W. Bush. (When I spoke with him I asked him if he was straight and he replied, "I think so.") At my mother's suggestion, I went back to university to study IT. It seems incredible that I was studying because I was in fact so extremely ill, but I seem able to function well even when ill. I even got an A in programming that semester. There is one particular event that has always seemed very important me – it occurred in the first month or two of 2009 just before I started attending AUT. Almost all of the appointments I had with Tony Fernando were in the company of my mother and often my father. Around this time I had an appointment with just me, Tony and Averil. They had decided to put me on anti-depressants as well as Rispiridone. At this appointment, I gained the strange impression that Tony and Averil were in a clandestine sexual relationship – a bizarre feeling to have because I was fairly confident that Tony was homosexual. What I think now was that this was an intuition that were, in fact, colluding. I asked why they wanted to put me on antidepressants when I wasn't depressed; I suggested that I could take St John's Wort instead. Tony turned to Averil with a smirk and said, "I hear they prescribe St. John's Wort – in Germany!" That appointment was the time I felt most strongly just how evil and sadistic Tony is. It is significant that my Key Worker Kate Whelan was not present at this appointment.
Shortly after, I started going to AUT – I remember Kate taking me, sick as I was, to the Disabilities Support Service. I had sensed from my first appointment with Tony, in 2007, that I had been misdiagnosed homosexual and I had been mortally afraid of being 'outed' ever since; I felt strongly then that this had actually happened. I think Tony had written in whatever secret record that psychiatrists keep about their patients that I had come out as gay; I think moreover that either Tony or Averil had told Kate that I had come out as gay and that she subsequently told other people. I only took antidepressants for a short time – after a couple of weeks I somehow convinced those treating me to let me go off them.
I had become very ill indeed. Every night I heard voices. It was just a couple of months later that I adopted Jon Stewart as an imaginary friend, a moment I have described in the post "Jon Stewart, Janet Frame and Katy Perry." I'll tell one story that gives some idea of just how sick I was before I went off the Rispiridone, a story I've told before but is worth telling again. One night I went into the back garden of my house – I thought that the garden was Gethsemane and that the tree in the garden was one of the tree of suicides from Dante's Inferno. I thought I was Jesus and that I was being called upon to save young mental health patients from suicide. I said to the voices, "Choose someone else!" They said, "Okay". When I went back inside the house I asked the voices, "Am I Jesus or am I in hell?" The voices replied, "What's the difference?"
I believe that what I was being called to do was save young people from being driven to either suicide or homosexuality by psychiatric misdiagnoses.
Rispirdone is a vile drug. I don't believe it helps at all in mitigating psychotic symptoms– all it does is make people feel sick and afraid all the time which psychiatrists probably like because it makes patients more pliable. On August 6, my mother's birthday, having been very unwell for some eight months, I contemplated suicide – I thought I was going to be on Rispiridone forever. When Tony found out the next day that I had written a suicide note, he panicked and permitted me to go off it, 0.5mgs a week over the course of about a month and a half. For a period I saw the Crisis Team daily. Around this time I became concerned about my testosterone levels – I thought the Rispiridone might somehow turn me gay by fucking with my hormones. Going off the Rispiridone was hard but fortunately I had Jon and Lily Allen as guardian angels. For about a month after I was totally off the Rispiridone, I was actually well – being allowed to get off this horrible drug had cured my psychosis. I went to Sydney with my mother for a wedding and there hit on a girl in a boat. Shortly after I got back, the psychosis suddenly returned, triggered, bizarrely enough, by seeing Iggy Pop on TV. I believe the reason I became psychotic again was a reaction to years of terrible stress. I ended up back in Tony's consultation room and was put on Olanzapine, my dosage gradually being increased to 10mgs. I continue to experience psychosis for the next few months, a psychosis perhaps slightly more intense but far less terrible than the psychosis I had experienced while taking Rispiridone. Around this time, I walked up Mt Hobson and asked the voices how I could escape my madness. I heard a voice say, "Accept consensus reality". I decided this was my only way out. On the way down the hill I saw a vagrant and heard two voices, one saying "The saved" and the other "The damned". I didn't know which of us was which.
Around November, I started attending a Hearing Voices group at which I met Jess. Over the summer of 2009 and 2010 I experienced the psychotic episode that I have described in other posts, the episode during which from the moment I woke to the moment I slept I spent talking with Jess, Jon and other people, including, from around January 5, Barack Obama.
Psychosis seems to me an escape from an unendurable reality. a way of coping. I remember in late 2009, before I met Jess, Jon speaking to me. He said, "You're long sighted!" I said, "No, I'm short sighted." He said, "You're long sighted!" I said, "No, I'm short sighted – I see well at short distances!" He laughed and said, "There's no hope for you." I told this story to Kate. She had no idea what I was talking about, but of course I was talking about what it was like to live with a misdiagnosis.
My psychosis ebbed away after a couple of months. I remained on 10mgs until the beginning of 2012. During this time I believe Kate thought of me as gay man who didn't want to come out. In 2011, I hung out with the real Jess on a number of occasions. In 2012, as I've said before, I was discharged from the Service and reduced my dosage to 5mgs. That year I completed an MA in Creative Writing through AUT, writing a film script about Jess. In early 2013, for whatever reason, reasons I can only surmise, but mainly I think because I had found out that Jess had spent eight months in hospital in 2012, I became ill again. I re-entered the service voluntarily in order to finally get it on my record that I was straight. And then, of course, as I described in the previous post, I was put under the Mental Health Act in early 2014 for doing so.
Readers may wonder, did you perhaps say you were gay at some time and this was put on your record? How else could the psychiatrists justify their misdiagnosis? All I can say is that it is impossible for me ever to have said it. It just never happened. I am very close to my mother and see her almost every day – I have never 'come out' to her. I have a good friend Sarah McConie who is bisexual, who has gone backwards and forwards between men and women her whole life, was in a Civil Union with a woman for some years and is now in a relationship with a man. I have never 'come out' to her. Why would I tell anyone in the Mental Health Service that I was muddled sexually and never tell my friend Sarah? They had diagnosed me either sexually muddled or homosexual without ever actually asking me, something I think psychiatrists do with many if not all of their patients.
This type of misdiagnosis occurs all the time. In previous posts I have talked about a man I know called Yves – Yves was also treated by Tony, was also put on Rispiridone first and Olanzapine later and, in his own words, got out of the Mental Health System by "telling the psychologist what the psychologist wanted to hear". He is still sick, still takes Olanzapine and now Lithium. I remember around New Years Eve 2015 I spent time with Yves and his family because I am friends with his younger brother Rene. Yves asked me, in a strange paranoid way, "Do you go to bars?" Evidently at some point in his treatment he had told people that he went to bars sometimes and they had decided he was going to bars to pick up gay men.
I watched the Daily Show every night during 2008 and 2009 – it went off New Zealand TV for several years and came back in 2014, just after I had been put under the Act. As I've said in a previous post, I felt my imaginary friend had returned at the moment when I most needed him, when I was being made to see the psychologist Simon Judkins. I want to say a little about Jon, not the Jon I spoke to my head but the real one. I remember in 2014, after having delivered an impassioned conflicted defence of marriage equality, a speech he obviously found difficult, him turning to the camera and saying, "We live in trying times, my friends – but we are blessed." This meant a lot to me because Jess's real name is Elizabeth which means "blessed by god"; I thought Jon was addressing all the other schizophrenics in the world. In 2015, during his last show, his final diatribe was about how official records are all bullshit. This may seem unbelievable but it actually happened and this moment is probably viewable on Youtube somewhere.
It seems to me that the current fashion in psychiatry is to assume that all schizophrenia is a form of repressed homosexuality. This is evil and stupid. The clever patients sense the psychiatrists think this and it drives them mad, drives them to either suicide or homosexuality. When a psychotic first presents what the psychiatrists should actually try to do is find out the reasons for his or her first episode, reasons that probably differ from patient to patient.
I'll finish this post by saying one last thing. The nurse Averil left the Taylor Centre in either 2010 or 2011. When she left she gave me a hug goodbye, something no other worker at the Taylor Centre ever did. I have wondered since if this hug was an indication of a guilty conscience.
Wednesday, 13 September 2017
Why I Was Put Under the Mental Health Act
In today's post I want to talk about the circumstances surrounding when I was put under the Mental Health Act in early 2014. I have covered this period in a previous post "What Happened in 2013" but there are some details I left out. In today's post I want to try to say a little more about what happened in 2013 and 2014. This is a less well written post than some others and is possibly only of interest to the people interested in my case, but I wish to get it on the record.
I was a patient of the Mental Health Service from 2007 until early 2012, was discharged from the Service for a year and then re-entered it voluntarily just before Easter 2013. The reason I re-admitted myself was because I wanted to get it onto the record why I had become ill in the first place; I also wanted it finally on the record that I was straight. I had become 'ill' again about a month or two before. It may seem strange that I felt but driven to do this at the time, felt forced to, but I felt then and have felt since that something occurred at the beginning of the year which necessitated me getting the truth on the record. It may seem absurd that I could have been a patient of the Mental Health Service since 2007 and for the psychiatrists not to know that I was heterosexual but incredibly I believe this the case. Evidently many psychiatrists believe that all psychotics are sexually confused. I had said that I was straight in 2007 at my first engagement with the service but I believe it was thought that this was a delusion and the issue of my sexuality came directly only once, in early 2010, when I told my psychiatrist Tony Fernando that I had fallen in love. Fernando asked me, "A boy or a girl?" I said, "A girl." The girl was of course the one I call Jess.
From 2007 until early 2012 my psychiatrist was one Tony Fernando, a chap with a high profile in the media at the time; I knew at a glance, from my first appointment with him, that he was gay – although he never came out to me. When I first became 'ill' in 2007, I believed the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals, so having a psychiatrist who was one only exacerbated my condition. I was very ill indeed in 2007 and all of 2009. I knew also that I had been misdiagnosed from the first appointment with Tony, I intuited it, but simply never knew how to tell him he was wrong.
In 2013 when I re-entered the Service, I asked to see any psychiatrist other than Tony. I saw a locum called Dharma, an appointment that I have described in the post "Faith No More vs. Bruce Springsteen". When I saw him I said that I was straight and told him of the three women I had loved in my life. After two appointments with Dharma I saw Tony once (not at my request) and then began to see a psychiatrist called Jen Murphy. I was still trying to get it on the record unequivocally that I was straight and just before my first appointment with her I heard a voice saying, "Don't talk about love, talk about sex". So at that appointment I told her truthfully that the first time I had sex was New Years Eve 1997 and that the last time was a one night stand in Wellington in 2011. In fact, I've had two long term relationships in my life. From the age of 17 until the age of 21 I was in a relationship with a girl called Danielle Lander. From around the age of 23 until I was 28 I was sort of in a relationship with a girl called Maya Gilmour. I didn't completely break with Maya until 2008 – a year after I had become a patient of the Mental Health Service. Evidently neither relationship was in my record. (I should say that although the girl I call Jess is very dear to me, we were never in a relationship.)
When I told Jen this, I think she thought I was lying. It contradicted the diagnosis Tony had made of me, what was in my record, what she had been told about me. I think moreover that it was because she thought I was lying that she decided to diagnose me schizophrenic – up until then I had been diagnosed 'psychosis not otherwise specified'. I remember at one appointment her asking me sarcastically if I had a problem with 'phonies' – I thought of the The Catcher in the Rye and told her 'yes'. I knew at the time though that she was referring to me. I think in the intervening years they have been forced to realise that I wasn't lying and have confabulated other reasons for diagnosing me schizophrenic, I don't know what.
When it became apparent to me that, even though I had said I was straight, the shrinks didn't believe it, I decided that Tony must have lied about me. In fact, I thought this lie might have been made public. I tried to deal with this in the only way I could think of, by sending something like a short article to the journalist Steve Braunias effectively accusing Tony of being a homosexual sociopath who serially misdiagnoses his patients.
After this, having told Jen of the letter, I was coerced, under threat of being put under the Mental Health Act, into increasing my dosage of Olanzapine from 5mgs to 12.5 daily. I had never been on such a high dosage before. At this time, I was working as a Reader-Writer for AUT and, after my dosage was increased, I lost this job. I felt that I was the victim of a cover-up to protect Tony Fernando from charges of gross incompetence and the stress this caused me was the reason I lost this job. I no longer believed in the efficacy of medication and, although my mother in good faith ensured I took my dosage every night, I began to start vommiting it up. At an appointment with Jen I told her I was doing this; my mother said she couldn't be "a nurse and a mother at the same time" and Jen permitted me to go off the medication. I went from 12.5 to nothing – I would guess around November of 2013.
I admit I was ill in 2013. The psychosis started around January or February of that year, as I have recorded in earlier posts. As I have also said in earlier posts, my psychosis of that year entirely revolved around my concern for my friend Jess. After I was allowed to go completely off the drugs, as I said I think around November, I was almost well for several months. On January 17 2014, I attended the Big Day Out with my brother, sister-in-law, niece and some friends of hers. This was the last time for a number of years that I was happy – as I would say to my brother some time later, I liked seeing attractive young women in all directions. (At the time he replied, bizarrely and defensively, "Well, we all feel that way".) My mother was visiting Wanganui and so I slept that night at my brother's house. When I woke the next morning, lying in bed, I felt an incredibly unpleasant sensation – I felt as though there was a patina of gayness completely covering my skin. I got up and had a strange conversation with my brother in the kitchen – he had emerged from his bedroom wearing only boxers. I feel that he hadn't really enjoyed the festival the previous day, that it was a scene he didn't really understand. Later that day I travelled by bus to Wanganui, and felt some re-emergence of psychotic symptoms. I had written a story called "Misery" which I have not included in this blog but which I showed my god-mother. In the next week or two, my 'illness'' returned – I think the reason for this was that I sensed what was going to happen, that there was no escape, that whether I liked it or not I was going to be dragged back into the system. I had moments of discomfort around my mother and would go for walks into town to get away. Somehow I ended up back at the Taylor Centre, taken there by my mother – I can't remember precisely what immediately preceded this. I was dragooned into signing something, I don't know what, by Jen and about nine other people – it was either sign this form or run away, and the latter wasn't an option. This 'intervention' happened when my Key Worker was away on holiday. I was taken to a truly horrible respite facility at which I was forced to take Olanzapine, Lorazapam and Zopiclone. During this period women who I'd never seen before and would never see again would show up during the day to observe me and take note of my condition. I thought I was in hell – I only stayed at the respite facility for two nights. After this, after I had come home, for a period nurses would show up every night to force me to take my drugs and a week or two later I had a cursory judicial hearing and was officially put under the Mental Health Act.
I had committed no crime other sending a potentially libellous letter about Tony Fernando to a journalist and not wanting to take my medication, something permitted by my psychiatrist.
The unpleasant sensation I experienced the morning after the Big Day Out would continue to last for some time. Every morning, for years, I would awake with almost unbearable thoughts of homosexuality in my head, a 'symptom' that didn't stop entirely until the beginning of last year. These unpleasant hypnopompic thoughts and images began at my brother's house. I suspect, and this is the first time I've felt able to say this, that it is my brother who is ultimately responsible for the misdiagnosis I have lived with for the last ten years. My brother is fucked in the head.
I should say something more general about what it means to be a patient of the Mental Health Service. A patient has two main contacts with the service – his psychiatrist and his Key Worker. The Key Worker can be an Occupational Therapist, a nurse or a social worker. From 2007 until 2012 my Key Worker was an OT called Kate Whelan, a nice enough woman in some ways but I think with some serious psychological issues related to sexuality, a tendency to view all her patients as sexually muddled. When I re-entered the service in Easter 2013, I was given a new Key Worker, a social worker called Josh Brazil. My relationship with Josh began a little roughly but improved after some months. Josh, as I said, was away on holiday when I was put under the Act. I remember when I was seeing my insane psychologist Simon Judkins in 2014 Judkins saying to me, "Whether a person is gay or not is between him and God!" – I reported this exchange to Josh and Josh said, "Simon said that – to you, did he?". In mid 2015, I think, Josh left the Taylor Centre to go work at another DHB. My new key worker was a nurse called Terry. Once again my relationship with her began somewhat badly and improved when she got to know me. Terry performed the best service by me that any Key Worker I've had has ever performed. At an Independent Review in 2015 that I'd requested she told the Tribunal, "He hates people thinking he's gay because he's not." In 2016 Terry retired. It feels like since 2013 my Key Workers keep finding reasons to disappear. Since then I've had a new Key Worker, one like all the others I see infrequently, another social worker, this one called Daniel Moodley. Once again, the relationship started off tensely and has improved. At my last appointment with Jen he had to leave the room, as though he didn't want to be involved, didn't want to know what was said because that would make him complicit or culpable. My own feeling is that the ground level staff in the Mental Health System today are generally good, well-meaning people and that it is the psychiatrists (and psychologists) who are corrupt, who are more interested in protecting each other than treating their patients.
I'll make note of something else, something that may seem trivial but seems important. At the various reviews I've had, a supposed indication of my illness and my need to take medication is the fact that I would go for walks at night. Supposedly this was a sign that I was sick. Even though I am receiving monthly injections of Olanzapine, I still, even today, go for walks, sometimes at night. I live in Eden Terrace – often I'll walk along K Road, down Ponsonby Road and then back up Queen Street. I have been walking around town, sometimes at night, all my life. Jen Murphy has argued that these walks expose me to danger – but in all my years going for walks I have never been involved in a fight or even ever witnessed one. I have never been in danger. I know many of the homeless well enough to exchange greetings with them even though I don't know them by name. I fail to understand why walking is considered evidence of schizophrenia. Perhaps Jen wants to insinuate I am cruising for male prostitutes. I have never encountered a male prostitute once and of course wouldn't do anything even if I met one.
I'll conclude the post by saying something more general, something about the double bind all mental patients are in. When a diagnosis of schizophrenia is made, the patient must take drugs for the rest of his life; if he dares suggest that antipsychotics don't actually do anything he is considered to be showing lack of 'insight' and this is considered evidence that he should be forced to take them. It's a Catch-22. The fucked up thing is that antipsychotic medication doesn't work. The whole of psychiatry is based on a lie; this is the reason the psychiatric profession attracts stupid and dishonest people. My psychiatrist Jen Murphy, for instance, is an utter bigot and a liar. Psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical companies together have for decades been committing a crime against their patients, perhaps the greatest crime of the twenty-first century. I know from my own experience and from my observations of other patients that antipsychotics don't work; I suspect that they may even make people worse. John Nash believed that antipsychotics impede the process of recovery and I think he may be right. What better way to make someone ill and keep them ill then force that person to live a lie – to tell him repeatedly that the drugs he is taking help him when they don't at all and may even be making him sicker? As I have said before, I didn't start hearing voices until January 2009 after I had been on Rispiridone for a year and half; I was well in 2012 when I was only taking 5mgs; I was very ill just before I was put under the Act I admit but this was because I knew I was to be put under the Act; I was very ill again at the beginning of 2015, even a little suicidal, after I had been under the Act for a year. It's only in the last month or two that I've felt as well as I did in 2012. Jess would sometimes quote the Verve to me: "The drugs don't work, they just make things worse" and I know from my observations of her this to be true, that the drugs never worked for her. I think, incidentally, that just as I had been misdiagnosed homosexual, she had been misdiagnosed 'promiscuous' – the opposite of the truth. Yes, I admit I have been 'ill' sometimes but the my 'illness' has always been a result of others telling untruths about me, and of being trapped in a situation I can't escape.
Psychiatrists and psychologists didn't just invent homosexuality. They invented schizophrenia. If we go back over a hundred years, back to the time of Kraepelin, schizophrenics didn't hear voices. Instead they were more likely to hold delusions that they were people like Napoleon. In my ten years as a patient I have never met anyone who believes he was someone famous, someone he isn't. Schizophrenia has changed as the description has changed – psychiatrists create the condition they purport to describe. It's no science at all. The whole of psychiatry is just quackery.
Although my first psychotic episode wasn't caused by the Mental Health System, every subsequent episode was. And a big part of that was being stuck with a pervert psychiatrist who gets sexually excited whenever he has a male patient in his consultation room.
I was a patient of the Mental Health Service from 2007 until early 2012, was discharged from the Service for a year and then re-entered it voluntarily just before Easter 2013. The reason I re-admitted myself was because I wanted to get it onto the record why I had become ill in the first place; I also wanted it finally on the record that I was straight. I had become 'ill' again about a month or two before. It may seem strange that I felt but driven to do this at the time, felt forced to, but I felt then and have felt since that something occurred at the beginning of the year which necessitated me getting the truth on the record. It may seem absurd that I could have been a patient of the Mental Health Service since 2007 and for the psychiatrists not to know that I was heterosexual but incredibly I believe this the case. Evidently many psychiatrists believe that all psychotics are sexually confused. I had said that I was straight in 2007 at my first engagement with the service but I believe it was thought that this was a delusion and the issue of my sexuality came directly only once, in early 2010, when I told my psychiatrist Tony Fernando that I had fallen in love. Fernando asked me, "A boy or a girl?" I said, "A girl." The girl was of course the one I call Jess.
From 2007 until early 2012 my psychiatrist was one Tony Fernando, a chap with a high profile in the media at the time; I knew at a glance, from my first appointment with him, that he was gay – although he never came out to me. When I first became 'ill' in 2007, I believed the world was ruled by a conspiracy of closet homosexuals, so having a psychiatrist who was one only exacerbated my condition. I was very ill indeed in 2007 and all of 2009. I knew also that I had been misdiagnosed from the first appointment with Tony, I intuited it, but simply never knew how to tell him he was wrong.
In 2013 when I re-entered the Service, I asked to see any psychiatrist other than Tony. I saw a locum called Dharma, an appointment that I have described in the post "Faith No More vs. Bruce Springsteen". When I saw him I said that I was straight and told him of the three women I had loved in my life. After two appointments with Dharma I saw Tony once (not at my request) and then began to see a psychiatrist called Jen Murphy. I was still trying to get it on the record unequivocally that I was straight and just before my first appointment with her I heard a voice saying, "Don't talk about love, talk about sex". So at that appointment I told her truthfully that the first time I had sex was New Years Eve 1997 and that the last time was a one night stand in Wellington in 2011. In fact, I've had two long term relationships in my life. From the age of 17 until the age of 21 I was in a relationship with a girl called Danielle Lander. From around the age of 23 until I was 28 I was sort of in a relationship with a girl called Maya Gilmour. I didn't completely break with Maya until 2008 – a year after I had become a patient of the Mental Health Service. Evidently neither relationship was in my record. (I should say that although the girl I call Jess is very dear to me, we were never in a relationship.)
When I told Jen this, I think she thought I was lying. It contradicted the diagnosis Tony had made of me, what was in my record, what she had been told about me. I think moreover that it was because she thought I was lying that she decided to diagnose me schizophrenic – up until then I had been diagnosed 'psychosis not otherwise specified'. I remember at one appointment her asking me sarcastically if I had a problem with 'phonies' – I thought of the The Catcher in the Rye and told her 'yes'. I knew at the time though that she was referring to me. I think in the intervening years they have been forced to realise that I wasn't lying and have confabulated other reasons for diagnosing me schizophrenic, I don't know what.
When it became apparent to me that, even though I had said I was straight, the shrinks didn't believe it, I decided that Tony must have lied about me. In fact, I thought this lie might have been made public. I tried to deal with this in the only way I could think of, by sending something like a short article to the journalist Steve Braunias effectively accusing Tony of being a homosexual sociopath who serially misdiagnoses his patients.
After this, having told Jen of the letter, I was coerced, under threat of being put under the Mental Health Act, into increasing my dosage of Olanzapine from 5mgs to 12.5 daily. I had never been on such a high dosage before. At this time, I was working as a Reader-Writer for AUT and, after my dosage was increased, I lost this job. I felt that I was the victim of a cover-up to protect Tony Fernando from charges of gross incompetence and the stress this caused me was the reason I lost this job. I no longer believed in the efficacy of medication and, although my mother in good faith ensured I took my dosage every night, I began to start vommiting it up. At an appointment with Jen I told her I was doing this; my mother said she couldn't be "a nurse and a mother at the same time" and Jen permitted me to go off the medication. I went from 12.5 to nothing – I would guess around November of 2013.
I admit I was ill in 2013. The psychosis started around January or February of that year, as I have recorded in earlier posts. As I have also said in earlier posts, my psychosis of that year entirely revolved around my concern for my friend Jess. After I was allowed to go completely off the drugs, as I said I think around November, I was almost well for several months. On January 17 2014, I attended the Big Day Out with my brother, sister-in-law, niece and some friends of hers. This was the last time for a number of years that I was happy – as I would say to my brother some time later, I liked seeing attractive young women in all directions. (At the time he replied, bizarrely and defensively, "Well, we all feel that way".) My mother was visiting Wanganui and so I slept that night at my brother's house. When I woke the next morning, lying in bed, I felt an incredibly unpleasant sensation – I felt as though there was a patina of gayness completely covering my skin. I got up and had a strange conversation with my brother in the kitchen – he had emerged from his bedroom wearing only boxers. I feel that he hadn't really enjoyed the festival the previous day, that it was a scene he didn't really understand. Later that day I travelled by bus to Wanganui, and felt some re-emergence of psychotic symptoms. I had written a story called "Misery" which I have not included in this blog but which I showed my god-mother. In the next week or two, my 'illness'' returned – I think the reason for this was that I sensed what was going to happen, that there was no escape, that whether I liked it or not I was going to be dragged back into the system. I had moments of discomfort around my mother and would go for walks into town to get away. Somehow I ended up back at the Taylor Centre, taken there by my mother – I can't remember precisely what immediately preceded this. I was dragooned into signing something, I don't know what, by Jen and about nine other people – it was either sign this form or run away, and the latter wasn't an option. This 'intervention' happened when my Key Worker was away on holiday. I was taken to a truly horrible respite facility at which I was forced to take Olanzapine, Lorazapam and Zopiclone. During this period women who I'd never seen before and would never see again would show up during the day to observe me and take note of my condition. I thought I was in hell – I only stayed at the respite facility for two nights. After this, after I had come home, for a period nurses would show up every night to force me to take my drugs and a week or two later I had a cursory judicial hearing and was officially put under the Mental Health Act.
I had committed no crime other sending a potentially libellous letter about Tony Fernando to a journalist and not wanting to take my medication, something permitted by my psychiatrist.
The unpleasant sensation I experienced the morning after the Big Day Out would continue to last for some time. Every morning, for years, I would awake with almost unbearable thoughts of homosexuality in my head, a 'symptom' that didn't stop entirely until the beginning of last year. These unpleasant hypnopompic thoughts and images began at my brother's house. I suspect, and this is the first time I've felt able to say this, that it is my brother who is ultimately responsible for the misdiagnosis I have lived with for the last ten years. My brother is fucked in the head.
I should say something more general about what it means to be a patient of the Mental Health Service. A patient has two main contacts with the service – his psychiatrist and his Key Worker. The Key Worker can be an Occupational Therapist, a nurse or a social worker. From 2007 until 2012 my Key Worker was an OT called Kate Whelan, a nice enough woman in some ways but I think with some serious psychological issues related to sexuality, a tendency to view all her patients as sexually muddled. When I re-entered the service in Easter 2013, I was given a new Key Worker, a social worker called Josh Brazil. My relationship with Josh began a little roughly but improved after some months. Josh, as I said, was away on holiday when I was put under the Act. I remember when I was seeing my insane psychologist Simon Judkins in 2014 Judkins saying to me, "Whether a person is gay or not is between him and God!" – I reported this exchange to Josh and Josh said, "Simon said that – to you, did he?". In mid 2015, I think, Josh left the Taylor Centre to go work at another DHB. My new key worker was a nurse called Terry. Once again my relationship with her began somewhat badly and improved when she got to know me. Terry performed the best service by me that any Key Worker I've had has ever performed. At an Independent Review in 2015 that I'd requested she told the Tribunal, "He hates people thinking he's gay because he's not." In 2016 Terry retired. It feels like since 2013 my Key Workers keep finding reasons to disappear. Since then I've had a new Key Worker, one like all the others I see infrequently, another social worker, this one called Daniel Moodley. Once again, the relationship started off tensely and has improved. At my last appointment with Jen he had to leave the room, as though he didn't want to be involved, didn't want to know what was said because that would make him complicit or culpable. My own feeling is that the ground level staff in the Mental Health System today are generally good, well-meaning people and that it is the psychiatrists (and psychologists) who are corrupt, who are more interested in protecting each other than treating their patients.
I'll make note of something else, something that may seem trivial but seems important. At the various reviews I've had, a supposed indication of my illness and my need to take medication is the fact that I would go for walks at night. Supposedly this was a sign that I was sick. Even though I am receiving monthly injections of Olanzapine, I still, even today, go for walks, sometimes at night. I live in Eden Terrace – often I'll walk along K Road, down Ponsonby Road and then back up Queen Street. I have been walking around town, sometimes at night, all my life. Jen Murphy has argued that these walks expose me to danger – but in all my years going for walks I have never been involved in a fight or even ever witnessed one. I have never been in danger. I know many of the homeless well enough to exchange greetings with them even though I don't know them by name. I fail to understand why walking is considered evidence of schizophrenia. Perhaps Jen wants to insinuate I am cruising for male prostitutes. I have never encountered a male prostitute once and of course wouldn't do anything even if I met one.
I'll conclude the post by saying something more general, something about the double bind all mental patients are in. When a diagnosis of schizophrenia is made, the patient must take drugs for the rest of his life; if he dares suggest that antipsychotics don't actually do anything he is considered to be showing lack of 'insight' and this is considered evidence that he should be forced to take them. It's a Catch-22. The fucked up thing is that antipsychotic medication doesn't work. The whole of psychiatry is based on a lie; this is the reason the psychiatric profession attracts stupid and dishonest people. My psychiatrist Jen Murphy, for instance, is an utter bigot and a liar. Psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical companies together have for decades been committing a crime against their patients, perhaps the greatest crime of the twenty-first century. I know from my own experience and from my observations of other patients that antipsychotics don't work; I suspect that they may even make people worse. John Nash believed that antipsychotics impede the process of recovery and I think he may be right. What better way to make someone ill and keep them ill then force that person to live a lie – to tell him repeatedly that the drugs he is taking help him when they don't at all and may even be making him sicker? As I have said before, I didn't start hearing voices until January 2009 after I had been on Rispiridone for a year and half; I was well in 2012 when I was only taking 5mgs; I was very ill just before I was put under the Act I admit but this was because I knew I was to be put under the Act; I was very ill again at the beginning of 2015, even a little suicidal, after I had been under the Act for a year. It's only in the last month or two that I've felt as well as I did in 2012. Jess would sometimes quote the Verve to me: "The drugs don't work, they just make things worse" and I know from my observations of her this to be true, that the drugs never worked for her. I think, incidentally, that just as I had been misdiagnosed homosexual, she had been misdiagnosed 'promiscuous' – the opposite of the truth. Yes, I admit I have been 'ill' sometimes but the my 'illness' has always been a result of others telling untruths about me, and of being trapped in a situation I can't escape.
Psychiatrists and psychologists didn't just invent homosexuality. They invented schizophrenia. If we go back over a hundred years, back to the time of Kraepelin, schizophrenics didn't hear voices. Instead they were more likely to hold delusions that they were people like Napoleon. In my ten years as a patient I have never met anyone who believes he was someone famous, someone he isn't. Schizophrenia has changed as the description has changed – psychiatrists create the condition they purport to describe. It's no science at all. The whole of psychiatry is just quackery.
Although my first psychotic episode wasn't caused by the Mental Health System, every subsequent episode was. And a big part of that was being stuck with a pervert psychiatrist who gets sexually excited whenever he has a male patient in his consultation room.
Sunday, 3 September 2017
Jon Stewart, Janet Frame and Katy Perry
Something that may have caused some misunderstandings in some of my posts, and in my interactions with friends and with people in the Mental Health Service, is my claim that I was 'imaginary friends' with Jon Stewart, that I used to talk with him in my head (and still occasionally do). 'Surely', people must wonder, 'wasn't this just a voice in your head that you decided to call 'Jon Stewart'?'. In fact, I feel almost as though I do know him and in today's post I want to try to explain why I feel this way. I also want to discuss Janet Frame again and talk a little about Katy Perry.
I started watching the Daily Show in 2008. (Contrary to my medical records, I was well that year.) The Daily Show screened four nights a week and those familiar with the show will remember that Jon didn't just talk about politics and Fox News but would also talk a lot about himself. So I picked up a lot of information about him. I knew early on, for instance, that Jon was Jewish, married to a Catholic woman and had a couple of kids. I remember an interview he conducted in 2008 with Tony Blair. Blair had converted to Catholicism, perhaps because of guilt about his involvement the invasion of Iraq, perhaps as a reaction to the public opprobrium he had endured since. Jon told Blair that his wife was Catholic. Blair was surprised and brought up the subject of Jon's children. He said, "How's that working out?" Jon replied, "We're raising them to be sad."
When I became ill again in 2009, the facts I had learned about Jon Stewart informed the presence I mentally invoked. If I'm to pretend to be rational about it. This is why I felt like I was genuinely speaking to him, particularly over the summer of 2009 and 2010. Some facts, such as his marriage, were obvious (although I didn't know Tracy's name at the time). Other facts I somehow intuited. In very late 2009 or early 2010, he told me, for instance, in my head, that he was uncomfortable around Wyatt Synach, that he didn't like the way Wyatt looked at him. Just today, I found out from a friend that Jon and Wyatt in reality did indeed have a difficult relationship and that Wyatt has opened up about this publicly afterwards.
A long time ago in this blog I described the evening Jon first spoke to me and though I have told this story before it is worth telling again. I had been hearing voices, typically when I was in bed, since around late January 2009 (although my records state that I was well during this period). Usually the people I heard, such as Helen Clark, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton among others, seemed already to know who I was. One night, however, sometime in 2009 before I went off the Rispiridone, I heard Jon in my head. He said, "Who the hell are you anyway?" I said, "Just a poor little schizophrenic living in New Zealand." He said, "Are you straight?" I said that I was, or at least I thought I was. He said, "What's the time difference?" I said, "About eight hours." We chatted for a bit. The next night, on his show, in his opening remarks, he referred to the conversation we'd had the previous night and then said, "Meanwhile, back here in America." It was extraordinary, unbelievable. Jon was the only person who ever spoke back to me in real life. It was after this and partly because of this that I adopted him as an imaginary friend.
At this point I need to go deeper than known facts. I believe that Jon was then secretly, or perhaps not too secretly, homophobic. I believe in fact that Jon even suffered a little from a paranoia that many of those around him were covertly gay. I know this sounds like projection but I believe something like it to be true. The Daily Show went off the air in New Zealand at the very end of 2009 and came back in early 2014 – and that year I saw Jon change, or try to. All that year he was presenting the case for gay marriage to the straight community; arguably Jon's advocacy in 2014 was instrumental in getting Marriage Equality passed into law in the States a few years ago. Perhaps the stress this advocacy caused him personally, this cognitive dissonance, was why he retired in 2015 to go live in 'a cabin in the woods' (as they say). It seems fucking obvious when you think about it. Not only did he have to battle to overcome his own homophobia, I believe there may have been rumours circulating about him which only made it worse. He had to make the case for gay marriage to the straight community, deal with this rumour and try not to seem a hypocrite while doing so; his choice that year was to argue that people are born one way or the other which is what the straight community believes. In fact, as I have said in an earlier post, his show helped me get through another awful year. It felt as though he had made the decision to argue that people are born one way or the other to help me personally. It was as though he had returned to New Zealand TV to save me.
I consider myself fairly intuitive. I suspect I intuited things about Jon and I suspect I also intuit things about others. I want now to talk about Janet Frame again and discuss my intuitions with respect to her. Frame couldn't be more different from Jon in some ways, for reasons I will discuss later. In other ways they are similar. I have discussed Frame in previous posts but I need to clarify what I have only intimated in those other posts, what my alert readers may have guessed. The first, and most obvious thing to say about Janet was how wonderful a person she was. She was sweet, innocent, sensitive, intensely shy, perhaps naive and for much of her life painfully lonely. She spent I think eight years in and out of lunatics' asylums even though she was never mad – I know there is differences of opinion about Frame on many matters such as the exact nature of her condition but I have decided to believe what she herself wrote in her autobiography rather than what others have said about her. Her treatment in hospital was awful. She received ECT over a hundred times; in those days, inmates were often given ECT as a punishment for misbehaviour. No psychiatrist at any time ever sat down and had a real conversation with her. She wrote a letter to her sister June in which she described the gorse as having a "peanut-buttery smell" – all letters dispatched from the asylums in those days were vetted and the doctors who read it decided her use of this metaphor was further evidence of her insanity. She was quoting Virginia Woolf.
What I believe or intuit is that the psychiatrists had, probably as the result of the sessions she'd attended with the arsehole psychologist John Money in 1945, diagnosed her as a lesbian – and declared her schizophrenic for this reason. I know this sounds unbelievable but I think it true. I think they had diagnosed her as a lesbian but she had no idea they had – and what makes this conjecture even more horrible is that Frame evidently didn't even know what lesbianism was herself. She only found out that homosexuality existed at all in the first few few years after she was formally released from the asylums, in the mid 'fifties, and living in a hut out the back of Frank Sargeson's house in Takapuna. She learnt Sargeson was gay then and met gay men and lesbian women for the first time in her life through him. She says about this period, "My life with Frank Sargeson was for me a celibate life, a priestly life devoted to writing, in which I flourished, but because my make-up is not entirely priestly I felt the sadness of having moved from hospital where it has been thought necessary to alter the make-up of my mind, to another asylum where the desire was that my body should be of another gender. The price I paid for my stay in the army hut was the realisation of the nothingness of my body. Frank talked kindly of men and of lesbian women, and I was neither male nor lesbian. He preferred me to wear slacks rather than dresses. I, who looked on Frank Sargeson as a saviour, was forced to recognise, through the yearning sense of gloom, of fateful completeness, that the Gods had spoken, there was nothing to be done."
When I wrote my previous post about Frame, I hadn't, unfortunately, quite finished An Angel at My Table. There is a chapter towards the end which is significant and which I'll talk about now. A friend of Frank, a woman who calls herself Paul, appears on the scene. Frank tells Frame, "She's a lesbian, you know." Frame goes to stay with Paul at Mt Maunganui. Prior to going, Frank explains to Frame what lesbianism actually is (she would then be about thirty or thirty one.) At Mt Maunganui, Paul makes the point of telling Frame, "I'm a Lesbian" (spelt with a capital L). They discuss poetry and Paul's life. Paul lends Frame The Well of Loneliness, the first book ever written about lesbianism, published in the Victorian Era and the cause of a considerable stir at the time, perhaps one of the books that invented lesbianism. Paul talks of past loves. Frame says of this brief stay the following: "I decided that I liked Paul, that she was just another of the misunderstood misfits of the world. I was repelled by the idea of both male and female homosexuality yet I was learning slowly to accept the sacred differences in people although I was then ignorant of biological and hormonal facts. I knew then only that such sexual differences threatened and hurt those who loved the opposite sex."
The passage requires some comment. First Frame's use of the word "repelled" sounds horribly un-PC to modern ears but, still, it is true that most heterosexuals have an aversion to homosexuality although people don't like to say this out loud today. Second, although Frame talks of "biological and hormonal facts", when she wrote An Angel at my Table doctors then didn't know the cause of homosexuality – and they still don't today. The medical profession is stupid. What I think is that someone provided Frame with a serviceable theory which she clung to to reassure herself that she wasn't a lesbian. Third, when I read this, it also struck me as profoundly sad: Frame clearly loved the opposite sex but apart from one short-lived fling, news of which emerged only after her death (and which I know little about), I don't believe she ever had any relationships with men at all.
The difference between Jon Stewart and Janet Frame is that Jon 'knew' what homosexuality was from childhood whereas Jean didn't find out until she was thirty.
The last person I want to talk about is Katy Perry. Katy has had a horrible year this year I think. In 2007 she became famous for the record "I Kissed A Girl" and I can remember in 2008 or 2009 Perry coming to Auckland and being asked by a reporter if that song was based on a real-life experience. Perry denied it. In the years since she has had a number of high profile relationships with men, including a two-year marriage to Russell Brand. In March of this year, Perry, during an acceptance speech at an LGBT awards ceremony, 'confessed' for the first time that the song was in fact based on a real life lesbian encounter, a relationship which she said had gone further than a kiss. In the months since, she has cut her hair short and dyed it peroxide blonde; she has talked of suffering terrible mental anguish. Perhaps she can't talk explicitly about has happened to her. It seems 'coming out' has caused her dreadful pain.
Queer theorists may at the moment be trying to convince the world that sexuality is 'fluid' but the heterosexual community simply doesn't seem to want to believe it.
I have said that my illness was a choice between Katy Perry and Lady Gaga. Katy actually featured briefly in my imaginings back in 2009 and I have for a long time liked Katy Perry more than Lady Gaga. In the end I decided to choose Perry over Gaga. Lady Gaga was wrong and Katy Perry was right – but it is Perry who has been punished. It seems, and this is the point of this post, that the world we live in routinely does terrible things to good people.
I started watching the Daily Show in 2008. (Contrary to my medical records, I was well that year.) The Daily Show screened four nights a week and those familiar with the show will remember that Jon didn't just talk about politics and Fox News but would also talk a lot about himself. So I picked up a lot of information about him. I knew early on, for instance, that Jon was Jewish, married to a Catholic woman and had a couple of kids. I remember an interview he conducted in 2008 with Tony Blair. Blair had converted to Catholicism, perhaps because of guilt about his involvement the invasion of Iraq, perhaps as a reaction to the public opprobrium he had endured since. Jon told Blair that his wife was Catholic. Blair was surprised and brought up the subject of Jon's children. He said, "How's that working out?" Jon replied, "We're raising them to be sad."
When I became ill again in 2009, the facts I had learned about Jon Stewart informed the presence I mentally invoked. If I'm to pretend to be rational about it. This is why I felt like I was genuinely speaking to him, particularly over the summer of 2009 and 2010. Some facts, such as his marriage, were obvious (although I didn't know Tracy's name at the time). Other facts I somehow intuited. In very late 2009 or early 2010, he told me, for instance, in my head, that he was uncomfortable around Wyatt Synach, that he didn't like the way Wyatt looked at him. Just today, I found out from a friend that Jon and Wyatt in reality did indeed have a difficult relationship and that Wyatt has opened up about this publicly afterwards.
A long time ago in this blog I described the evening Jon first spoke to me and though I have told this story before it is worth telling again. I had been hearing voices, typically when I was in bed, since around late January 2009 (although my records state that I was well during this period). Usually the people I heard, such as Helen Clark, Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton among others, seemed already to know who I was. One night, however, sometime in 2009 before I went off the Rispiridone, I heard Jon in my head. He said, "Who the hell are you anyway?" I said, "Just a poor little schizophrenic living in New Zealand." He said, "Are you straight?" I said that I was, or at least I thought I was. He said, "What's the time difference?" I said, "About eight hours." We chatted for a bit. The next night, on his show, in his opening remarks, he referred to the conversation we'd had the previous night and then said, "Meanwhile, back here in America." It was extraordinary, unbelievable. Jon was the only person who ever spoke back to me in real life. It was after this and partly because of this that I adopted him as an imaginary friend.
At this point I need to go deeper than known facts. I believe that Jon was then secretly, or perhaps not too secretly, homophobic. I believe in fact that Jon even suffered a little from a paranoia that many of those around him were covertly gay. I know this sounds like projection but I believe something like it to be true. The Daily Show went off the air in New Zealand at the very end of 2009 and came back in early 2014 – and that year I saw Jon change, or try to. All that year he was presenting the case for gay marriage to the straight community; arguably Jon's advocacy in 2014 was instrumental in getting Marriage Equality passed into law in the States a few years ago. Perhaps the stress this advocacy caused him personally, this cognitive dissonance, was why he retired in 2015 to go live in 'a cabin in the woods' (as they say). It seems fucking obvious when you think about it. Not only did he have to battle to overcome his own homophobia, I believe there may have been rumours circulating about him which only made it worse. He had to make the case for gay marriage to the straight community, deal with this rumour and try not to seem a hypocrite while doing so; his choice that year was to argue that people are born one way or the other which is what the straight community believes. In fact, as I have said in an earlier post, his show helped me get through another awful year. It felt as though he had made the decision to argue that people are born one way or the other to help me personally. It was as though he had returned to New Zealand TV to save me.
I consider myself fairly intuitive. I suspect I intuited things about Jon and I suspect I also intuit things about others. I want now to talk about Janet Frame again and discuss my intuitions with respect to her. Frame couldn't be more different from Jon in some ways, for reasons I will discuss later. In other ways they are similar. I have discussed Frame in previous posts but I need to clarify what I have only intimated in those other posts, what my alert readers may have guessed. The first, and most obvious thing to say about Janet was how wonderful a person she was. She was sweet, innocent, sensitive, intensely shy, perhaps naive and for much of her life painfully lonely. She spent I think eight years in and out of lunatics' asylums even though she was never mad – I know there is differences of opinion about Frame on many matters such as the exact nature of her condition but I have decided to believe what she herself wrote in her autobiography rather than what others have said about her. Her treatment in hospital was awful. She received ECT over a hundred times; in those days, inmates were often given ECT as a punishment for misbehaviour. No psychiatrist at any time ever sat down and had a real conversation with her. She wrote a letter to her sister June in which she described the gorse as having a "peanut-buttery smell" – all letters dispatched from the asylums in those days were vetted and the doctors who read it decided her use of this metaphor was further evidence of her insanity. She was quoting Virginia Woolf.
What I believe or intuit is that the psychiatrists had, probably as the result of the sessions she'd attended with the arsehole psychologist John Money in 1945, diagnosed her as a lesbian – and declared her schizophrenic for this reason. I know this sounds unbelievable but I think it true. I think they had diagnosed her as a lesbian but she had no idea they had – and what makes this conjecture even more horrible is that Frame evidently didn't even know what lesbianism was herself. She only found out that homosexuality existed at all in the first few few years after she was formally released from the asylums, in the mid 'fifties, and living in a hut out the back of Frank Sargeson's house in Takapuna. She learnt Sargeson was gay then and met gay men and lesbian women for the first time in her life through him. She says about this period, "My life with Frank Sargeson was for me a celibate life, a priestly life devoted to writing, in which I flourished, but because my make-up is not entirely priestly I felt the sadness of having moved from hospital where it has been thought necessary to alter the make-up of my mind, to another asylum where the desire was that my body should be of another gender. The price I paid for my stay in the army hut was the realisation of the nothingness of my body. Frank talked kindly of men and of lesbian women, and I was neither male nor lesbian. He preferred me to wear slacks rather than dresses. I, who looked on Frank Sargeson as a saviour, was forced to recognise, through the yearning sense of gloom, of fateful completeness, that the Gods had spoken, there was nothing to be done."
When I wrote my previous post about Frame, I hadn't, unfortunately, quite finished An Angel at My Table. There is a chapter towards the end which is significant and which I'll talk about now. A friend of Frank, a woman who calls herself Paul, appears on the scene. Frank tells Frame, "She's a lesbian, you know." Frame goes to stay with Paul at Mt Maunganui. Prior to going, Frank explains to Frame what lesbianism actually is (she would then be about thirty or thirty one.) At Mt Maunganui, Paul makes the point of telling Frame, "I'm a Lesbian" (spelt with a capital L). They discuss poetry and Paul's life. Paul lends Frame The Well of Loneliness, the first book ever written about lesbianism, published in the Victorian Era and the cause of a considerable stir at the time, perhaps one of the books that invented lesbianism. Paul talks of past loves. Frame says of this brief stay the following: "I decided that I liked Paul, that she was just another of the misunderstood misfits of the world. I was repelled by the idea of both male and female homosexuality yet I was learning slowly to accept the sacred differences in people although I was then ignorant of biological and hormonal facts. I knew then only that such sexual differences threatened and hurt those who loved the opposite sex."
The passage requires some comment. First Frame's use of the word "repelled" sounds horribly un-PC to modern ears but, still, it is true that most heterosexuals have an aversion to homosexuality although people don't like to say this out loud today. Second, although Frame talks of "biological and hormonal facts", when she wrote An Angel at my Table doctors then didn't know the cause of homosexuality – and they still don't today. The medical profession is stupid. What I think is that someone provided Frame with a serviceable theory which she clung to to reassure herself that she wasn't a lesbian. Third, when I read this, it also struck me as profoundly sad: Frame clearly loved the opposite sex but apart from one short-lived fling, news of which emerged only after her death (and which I know little about), I don't believe she ever had any relationships with men at all.
The difference between Jon Stewart and Janet Frame is that Jon 'knew' what homosexuality was from childhood whereas Jean didn't find out until she was thirty.
The last person I want to talk about is Katy Perry. Katy has had a horrible year this year I think. In 2007 she became famous for the record "I Kissed A Girl" and I can remember in 2008 or 2009 Perry coming to Auckland and being asked by a reporter if that song was based on a real-life experience. Perry denied it. In the years since she has had a number of high profile relationships with men, including a two-year marriage to Russell Brand. In March of this year, Perry, during an acceptance speech at an LGBT awards ceremony, 'confessed' for the first time that the song was in fact based on a real life lesbian encounter, a relationship which she said had gone further than a kiss. In the months since, she has cut her hair short and dyed it peroxide blonde; she has talked of suffering terrible mental anguish. Perhaps she can't talk explicitly about has happened to her. It seems 'coming out' has caused her dreadful pain.
Queer theorists may at the moment be trying to convince the world that sexuality is 'fluid' but the heterosexual community simply doesn't seem to want to believe it.
I have said that my illness was a choice between Katy Perry and Lady Gaga. Katy actually featured briefly in my imaginings back in 2009 and I have for a long time liked Katy Perry more than Lady Gaga. In the end I decided to choose Perry over Gaga. Lady Gaga was wrong and Katy Perry was right – but it is Perry who has been punished. It seems, and this is the point of this post, that the world we live in routinely does terrible things to good people.
Wednesday, 30 August 2017
Talk of Class Warfare
People say outrageously bizarre and stupid things sometimes. A couple of months ago Stephen Miller accused the media of having a "cosmopolitan bias". When I heard this, I simply couldn't understand what he was trying to say. The word "cosmopolitan" literally means "familiar with and at ease in many different countries and cultures". 'Cosmopolitan bias' seems to me an oxymoron or contradiction-in-terms. How can someone have a 'cosmopolitan bias'? Surely to be cosmopolitan is by definition to be unbiased? It perplexed me so much I even looked up an article in Politico about the phrase, an article that argued that this term has an ugly history in Russia and in Eastern Europe. I wondered though: has the term 'cosmopolitan bias' ever been used at all in English-speaking countries? Miller's employment of this expression isn't evil, it's stupid. Ironically he used it in a press conference in which he was promoting Trump's policy of only admitting English speaking immigrants – ironic because it seems to me that he can't speak English himself.
I felt another sense of disconnect or unreality in the wake of the Charlottesville riots when I saw on TV clips of neo-nazis chanting "Jews will not replace us!" Again, I simply couldn't understand what they were trying to say. I had a vision of something like The Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, in which Jews take over the bodies of poor white trailer trash. I think now that what they were trying to say is that the US is presently and rightfully ruled by WASPS and that they don't want it taken over by Jews. There are two reasons why this chant confused me. First, the white supremacists were, as I said, poor white trash, not senators or congressmen or billionaire Republican sponsors. They don't currently own the country, they aren't the ruling class. Second, there are already plenty of Jews in the elite already, on both the Left and the Right, in the entertainment industry, in business – and in the Trump administration itself. This is not I should say to posit a Jewish conspiracy, it's simply to state facts.
Another problem with the white supremacist movement is with the word 'white' itself. What does 'white' even mean? Does the term designate only those descended from the English? From the Germans? In 1900, the Irish weren't considered white and today they are. Arguably Ashkenazi Jews are white, although they often don't identify as such. As I said in a previous post, I concede provacatively, you could argue that white supremacist movements are the bastard children of identity politics.
A huge chunk of the American electorate suffers from what Marx called 'false consciousness'. The white working class privilege their colour over their class. This insanity, in which the poor identify with the rich, is a massive part of the problem with modern America – the Republican Party has bamboozled the lower classes into supporting a corrupt wealthy few. Everyone in America seems to think he or she is going to be a millionaire one day. A second part of the problem with modern America relates to Evangelical Christians, who tend to support the Republicans. The Christian Right is so hypocritical, the religion has become a parody of what it once was. The Prosperity Gospel, for instance, holds that the rich are rich because God wants them to be rich and that if one prays to God sincerely enough, one will be rewarded with fame or money; climate change can't be happening because God is omnipotent and omni-benevolent and He wouldn't allow it. The status-quo is part of God's plan. These Evangelicals cling to Trump, continue to pretend he's a Christian even though, as the Pope rightly pointed out, he isn't, almost seem to accord him magical powers that will somehow miraculously improve their lives (so long as Washington 'insiders' can be conquered or at leat bypassed). Now, I don't think Trump is exactly 'racist' but I do think him a narcissistic confidence trickster whose whole raison d'être is to be followed and praised by his base and by Fox News, and will say anything he thinks will make his followers like him. I certainly don't think he's a Christian.
Christianity, as it was originally conceived, was the religion of the poor and oppressed. It was a movement for political change; it was left-wing. This has not been the case in the US for decades. What has happened in the States is that a religion once dedicated to love and helping the poor has been captured by hate, by hypocrisy, by the powerful.
If there is insanity and stupidity on the Right, there is also irrationality on the Left and I need to mention this as well. Yesterday I read a front-page article in my daily newspaper reporting a study that purported to show that in New Zealand approximately eighty percent of the pay disparity between men and women could be attributed to 'sexism'. Now, I may be wrong but something ineffable about this article struck me as bogus. 'Sexism' is a simple word for a complicated concept, something hard to identify and even harder to quantify. The article didn't explain the study's methodology, a study which perhaps oversimplified a picture that is probably far too complex to sum up in a single word. It overlooked the fact that maybe the top 1% of the wealthiest people in New Zealand are all men, probably all with trophy wives; 'sexism' seems an inappropriate word for this. The intuition that something about this study was bogus is a feeling I get from a lot of social theory, a lot of official and academic discourse. So much of social science is suspect. It has been argued by John Cranshaw for instance that because there is a correlation between alcohol abuse and youth suicide, that alcohol abuse causes youth suicide. Surely alcohol abuse and youth suicide are both effects of something temporally and environmentally antecedent? Ideas like these, that alcohol abuse causes youth suicide or that the pay disparity between men and women is simply the result of 'sexism' (whatever that means) float out of academia and government departments and simply get reported uncritically. I read a poem once with the line, "Reification won't get you out of the parking lot" and this sentiment applies here. Sometimes I feel issues like the ones I mentioned are raised by the media simply to distract attention from the real issues, such as the concentration of money and power in the hands of a very small few.
What I'm getting at here, perhaps indirectly, is that the Left, here in New Zealand and in America, has a problem with propagandist political correctness and with an uncritical reliance on the social sciences.
This post started off about America and I'll get back to it now, even though I'm an outsider who is probably not entitled to lecture anyone at all about it. The American Left needs to change. It needs to focus on social class, not group allegiances. For one thing it needs to bring in Christians, good Christians who value honesty and fairness. Christianity needs to change as well and it is changing a little – Pope Francis seems to me a very good man and the Anglican Church in Scotland a couple of months ago altered doctrinal law to permit gay marriage. The challenge the American Left faces is how to bring Protestant Christians in under the Democrat umbrella while still including the various other groups that make up the liberal Left: atheists like Bill Maher, Catholics like Stephen Colbert, Muslims like Hasan Minaj, Buddhists, Scientologists, Jews like Sarah Silverman and Lewis Black. This of course has been the problem for a while now – but one way to unite people of different colours and creeds is to find a position that everyone can agree on, the pursuit of social justice and truth, and to face up to the common enemy, the unscrupulously wealthy, the powerful who misuse their power, the dishonest. Barack Obama when in office was reluctant to talk about 'income inequality' because he was afraid people in the media, particularly the rightwing media, would immediately accuse him of trying to incite 'class warfare', but maybe a little class warfare is precisely what the Left should embrace. The rich should be taxed more, not less. There is a related problem with respect to attempting to bring Protestant Christians into the Democrat fold: how to represent Christians who have a problem with homosexuality and still also represent openly gay men and women. It is a problem that would never have occurred if psychiatrists and psychologists hadn't invented homosexuality in first place.
Although I have said the Left needs to bring in Christians I myself am not exactly a Christian. I have sometimes thought God might be evil. In Ulysses, Stephen Daedalus says "God is a shout in the street"; I think God might be what other people think. Sometimes I identify as a Gnostic. During my life people have sometimes mistaken me for something I'm not and on several occasions I myself have even been mistaken for Jewish. I am not denying that racism and sexism exist, but perhaps everyone contains a little of everyone else.
I felt another sense of disconnect or unreality in the wake of the Charlottesville riots when I saw on TV clips of neo-nazis chanting "Jews will not replace us!" Again, I simply couldn't understand what they were trying to say. I had a vision of something like The Invasion of the Body-Snatchers, in which Jews take over the bodies of poor white trailer trash. I think now that what they were trying to say is that the US is presently and rightfully ruled by WASPS and that they don't want it taken over by Jews. There are two reasons why this chant confused me. First, the white supremacists were, as I said, poor white trash, not senators or congressmen or billionaire Republican sponsors. They don't currently own the country, they aren't the ruling class. Second, there are already plenty of Jews in the elite already, on both the Left and the Right, in the entertainment industry, in business – and in the Trump administration itself. This is not I should say to posit a Jewish conspiracy, it's simply to state facts.
Another problem with the white supremacist movement is with the word 'white' itself. What does 'white' even mean? Does the term designate only those descended from the English? From the Germans? In 1900, the Irish weren't considered white and today they are. Arguably Ashkenazi Jews are white, although they often don't identify as such. As I said in a previous post, I concede provacatively, you could argue that white supremacist movements are the bastard children of identity politics.
A huge chunk of the American electorate suffers from what Marx called 'false consciousness'. The white working class privilege their colour over their class. This insanity, in which the poor identify with the rich, is a massive part of the problem with modern America – the Republican Party has bamboozled the lower classes into supporting a corrupt wealthy few. Everyone in America seems to think he or she is going to be a millionaire one day. A second part of the problem with modern America relates to Evangelical Christians, who tend to support the Republicans. The Christian Right is so hypocritical, the religion has become a parody of what it once was. The Prosperity Gospel, for instance, holds that the rich are rich because God wants them to be rich and that if one prays to God sincerely enough, one will be rewarded with fame or money; climate change can't be happening because God is omnipotent and omni-benevolent and He wouldn't allow it. The status-quo is part of God's plan. These Evangelicals cling to Trump, continue to pretend he's a Christian even though, as the Pope rightly pointed out, he isn't, almost seem to accord him magical powers that will somehow miraculously improve their lives (so long as Washington 'insiders' can be conquered or at leat bypassed). Now, I don't think Trump is exactly 'racist' but I do think him a narcissistic confidence trickster whose whole raison d'être is to be followed and praised by his base and by Fox News, and will say anything he thinks will make his followers like him. I certainly don't think he's a Christian.
Christianity, as it was originally conceived, was the religion of the poor and oppressed. It was a movement for political change; it was left-wing. This has not been the case in the US for decades. What has happened in the States is that a religion once dedicated to love and helping the poor has been captured by hate, by hypocrisy, by the powerful.
If there is insanity and stupidity on the Right, there is also irrationality on the Left and I need to mention this as well. Yesterday I read a front-page article in my daily newspaper reporting a study that purported to show that in New Zealand approximately eighty percent of the pay disparity between men and women could be attributed to 'sexism'. Now, I may be wrong but something ineffable about this article struck me as bogus. 'Sexism' is a simple word for a complicated concept, something hard to identify and even harder to quantify. The article didn't explain the study's methodology, a study which perhaps oversimplified a picture that is probably far too complex to sum up in a single word. It overlooked the fact that maybe the top 1% of the wealthiest people in New Zealand are all men, probably all with trophy wives; 'sexism' seems an inappropriate word for this. The intuition that something about this study was bogus is a feeling I get from a lot of social theory, a lot of official and academic discourse. So much of social science is suspect. It has been argued by John Cranshaw for instance that because there is a correlation between alcohol abuse and youth suicide, that alcohol abuse causes youth suicide. Surely alcohol abuse and youth suicide are both effects of something temporally and environmentally antecedent? Ideas like these, that alcohol abuse causes youth suicide or that the pay disparity between men and women is simply the result of 'sexism' (whatever that means) float out of academia and government departments and simply get reported uncritically. I read a poem once with the line, "Reification won't get you out of the parking lot" and this sentiment applies here. Sometimes I feel issues like the ones I mentioned are raised by the media simply to distract attention from the real issues, such as the concentration of money and power in the hands of a very small few.
What I'm getting at here, perhaps indirectly, is that the Left, here in New Zealand and in America, has a problem with propagandist political correctness and with an uncritical reliance on the social sciences.
This post started off about America and I'll get back to it now, even though I'm an outsider who is probably not entitled to lecture anyone at all about it. The American Left needs to change. It needs to focus on social class, not group allegiances. For one thing it needs to bring in Christians, good Christians who value honesty and fairness. Christianity needs to change as well and it is changing a little – Pope Francis seems to me a very good man and the Anglican Church in Scotland a couple of months ago altered doctrinal law to permit gay marriage. The challenge the American Left faces is how to bring Protestant Christians in under the Democrat umbrella while still including the various other groups that make up the liberal Left: atheists like Bill Maher, Catholics like Stephen Colbert, Muslims like Hasan Minaj, Buddhists, Scientologists, Jews like Sarah Silverman and Lewis Black. This of course has been the problem for a while now – but one way to unite people of different colours and creeds is to find a position that everyone can agree on, the pursuit of social justice and truth, and to face up to the common enemy, the unscrupulously wealthy, the powerful who misuse their power, the dishonest. Barack Obama when in office was reluctant to talk about 'income inequality' because he was afraid people in the media, particularly the rightwing media, would immediately accuse him of trying to incite 'class warfare', but maybe a little class warfare is precisely what the Left should embrace. The rich should be taxed more, not less. There is a related problem with respect to attempting to bring Protestant Christians into the Democrat fold: how to represent Christians who have a problem with homosexuality and still also represent openly gay men and women. It is a problem that would never have occurred if psychiatrists and psychologists hadn't invented homosexuality in first place.
Although I have said the Left needs to bring in Christians I myself am not exactly a Christian. I have sometimes thought God might be evil. In Ulysses, Stephen Daedalus says "God is a shout in the street"; I think God might be what other people think. Sometimes I identify as a Gnostic. During my life people have sometimes mistaken me for something I'm not and on several occasions I myself have even been mistaken for Jewish. I am not denying that racism and sexism exist, but perhaps everyone contains a little of everyone else.
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