"You Need to See A Doctor!"

H. Saps have been seeing doctors for remedies to treat their maladies for millennia. Modern medicine would seem to suggest that these remedies cannot have been effective, the patients would have become well again of their own accord given time and rest. 

 

It could be perhaps possible that maybe the belief in the ability of the doctor to cure the patient stimulates endogenous hormones responsible for spontaneous remission, a placebo like effect. 

 

It would appear to me that seeing doctors for treatments is an ingrained cultural habit that causes a superstitious type of thinking, "The doctor can make me well again!"     

 

In Britain Psychiatrists are regarded as the most powerful doctors in the land, they are taught they are top of the doctor hierarchy in universities and the belief is held in practice. 

 

In 2005 I sought to speak to a doctor about both my neurological complaints and the background issues that I was faced with; the rock singer David Bowie had been making albums about me that were excuse rationalisations for murder, he had told lies, and misrepresented, there were threats of violence. The doctor although sceptical at first seemed to listen and understand, but shook his head resignedly unable to think of solutions to my quandary. 

 

Aside from my troubles however, within and without, the doctor was able to manifest some of my suggestions out into popular mainstream culture. They were Richard Dawkin's book The God Delusion, and I think, although nobody has confirmed this for me, the basic story outline for what became the movie Blue Jasmine. "A woman, spirals out of the middle classes because of neurological issues and winds up on the streets, a homeless person, talking to herself". 

 

The following year I began working for the mental health charity Re-Think at Dagenham in East London where I would see a client on a Friday morning-early-afternoon. He and I would buy bread from a local store and we would walk over fields and around a lake where we would feed the ducks. He was an Irish man, Catholic, a fisherman who would journey by public transport to a pier on alternate weekends and cast his line into the sea. He often talked about fish, he could talk about them for hours in fact, and one time a fish leaped out of the water and plucked a berry from an overarching branch and he named it. 

 

My client had a history of self-harm, he had showed me a scar across his wrist which had put him in hospital and which had brought him to the attention of psychiatric services. He did not have a history of been violent towards others, he was maybe a little slow, had a large head, and an unusual smell. He was diagnosed with the label, "Schizophrenia," his upper distal extremities were symmetrical and of normal size.

 

Within weeks of beginning work with Re-Think I was also accepted to work for the mental health charity MIND as my CRB had come through clean. The role would be to act as mentor to individuals with mental health diagnoses. One day the manager and I drove out to a town in Bromley in her car where we met with another Irish man with a mental health diagnosis of "schizophrenia". His name was Paddy; he was in his mid-fifties, thin, talkative, and suffered from alopecia. We sat for an hour in a cafe drinking coffee and talking; he wanted to be a part of our service and was happy for me to be his mentor. 

 

He seemed to like music, particularly rock n' roll, but as we crossed over the road, heading to register him with an institute he said to me, "I hate David Bowie," surprised I asked "Why?" He was shaking his head from side-to-side with a look of contempt for the singer, but I wasn't sure if I heard him respond or not with words.   

 

Paddy was assigned to me as my regular client, but every time I attempted to phone him to arrange a meeting he wouldn't respond and he never got back in touch with me. There is nothing at all unusual about this behaviour in this field. At Bromley MIND's HQ I was introduced to Julian who was Italian and a manager who worked with an Assertive Outreach Team that was based at Penge and I was told about some of their services and invited to work alongside the team as a mentor. 

 

The work was in a voluntary capacity, and therefore unpaid, I had to pay for my own travel as well, from Streatham Hill Station to Beckenham on a Monday, and to Crystal Palace on a Tuesday. On the Monday the clients from the psychiatric hospital would use the gymnasium and swimming pool facilities and then join our team in the cafeteria afterwards. On the Tuesday we were based at Antenna Studios at the top of the hill at Crystal Palace and the clients and staff were making a CD consisting of largely rock music cover songs. Some of the clients seemed fantastically talented to me, there was a gifted guitarist, a brilliant drummer, a rap singer who truly astonished me when he switched from the quiet person I had previously perceived into this animated professional ad libber with all the moves when he picked up a mic. Each client had the mental health diagnosis of "schizophrenia," they were all symmetrical with no noticeable hand deformities. In the twelve months of working with the people I never encountered an episode of violence.

 

I'd been directed by the manager at MIND to attempt to prevent the revolving door effect which is that some clients operate in cycles of been in-patients and out-patients and over again for long duration's. I worked with an individual client for a year outside of the Monday and Tuesday slots. He was in his early twenties, a writer of some merit, I read his book that he had dedicated to me, one scene I remember he had written involved David Bowie sitting in Beckenham train station cutting and pasting lyrics into songs, Bowie had grown up in Beckenham. In addition my client liked video console games, read tremendous amounts of literature, he was a culture-vulture. He wanted to be famous and sing on Stars in Their Eyes, I had never seen an episode of this show and when he talked about Simon Cowell I was ignorant. I seem to remember determining that the client had imprinted the hospital as his home, it had seemed to me like a back-brain survival imprint, and had become a familiar and easy creode for him to navigate in. The doctor seemed to have become a kind of father figure to him, he was so what like Lorenz with his goslings. Reasoning with my client into staying in an apartment in the community seemed futile. 

 

Psychiatry seems to be a continuation of the Catholic Church, the practice didn't emerge out of the field of medicine. The first psychiatrists were priests and when religious belief systems were on the wane they looked to and adopted the successful model of medicine to keep them in business. Medicine proper wouldn't take their diagnoses seriously a hundred years ago. Much of the head doctor seems still priest; they are the bishops on the board. 

 

"Schizophrenia" seemed to me to be a miscellaneous category that sounded scientific but seemed to be applied to human beings with problems in living. Julian once said to me, "You have to remember that these people are diseased", but they didn't seem like that to me. I modelled them as being like seals on a beach in a kind of evolutionary in-between stage, what would they become in the future? A marinal species or land species? I believed they needed channels upwards, realistic opportunities; psychiatry was the place below that Dante wrote about and put everyone he disagreed with in. 

 

In December, two weeks after receiving a Dear John text from my girlfriend, the staff and I stood in the yard outside of the studio, the clients were making music inside, the CPN was standing to my left hand side, the occupational therapist to my right and Julian and the doctor before me. I thought, now is the time to tell, I will present them with my quandary. "David Bowie was threatening to kill me in songs and albums and he had been doing since 1999. What can be done about this?" The doctor shifted demeanour, he communicated the signal for a psych evaluation game, I was in the dock, I was on trial, the consequences for me were that I could wind up been involuntarily committed in a prison called a hospital. The doctor was convinced this was a "schizophrenic delusion", he thought he had seen this same thing many times before. I had worked with the team for a full year to the month, in this time the doctor had never suspected that I had an illness and myself and the team had no issues at all with one another. 

 

Out of fear Julian was thrown into immediate conformity with the doctor, the doctor was going to have serious words with him afterwards for allowing a "schizophrenic" to work with the team. I'd had three previous evaluations with different players in different settings and I'd hated every one of them. They were always petty, ignorant, trivial, mean people for the duration, and this evaluation was no different. 

 

The doctor was convinced he knew exactly what was happening, but he was entirely aloof to David Bowie, his music, what the singer was doing and saying. "If you are a psychiatrist then you really need to know and understand this".

 

I tried to explain, "He incorporates the language, thought, and ideas of his victim's into his albums and then kills them, he's done this since the seventies, Vince Taylor was one such individual, he was a rock singer in the sixties, had quite a large following, he came to see himself as Jesus," the team started all round nodding their heads at one another, "... he came down from the stage, started blessing people during a performance. The fans turned their back on him, he lost them. Bowie based his character Ziggy Stardust on Vince, he will have murdered Vince Taylor and taken his eyes". The doctor was convinced I was crazy, Julian was conforming to the doctor. There were more head nods all around, Julian was in trouble. I talked about how I had gotten lyrics in his previous three albums; there were more head nods as though their ignorance needed confirmation. I mentioned some of the lyrics, "Everything's falling into place," the doctor laughed at this, the CPN at first astonished and amazed quickly turned to envy and jealousy as I talked of other lyrics, for this he needed to play a counter game which involved making me as small as possible. He saw himself as a man of destiny; he was in his mid-fifties, played guitar in a band in working men's clubs. His interpretation was that I was being pompous, as though I was gloating or boasting, but I wasn't, I was trying to explain what was happening, his attitude was, "Why should you have lyrics?" and I tried to explain, "Because David Bowie has spent his career writing about mutants to kill them off". The psychiatrist and Julian were nodding at one another when I used the word "mutants". I said "if I'm schizophrenic," they were all nodding at one another, "... then why are all your schizophrenic patients symmetrical? Are you saying I have a symmetrical disease?" I showed them my hands, the CPN had never seen this mutation before. "Why don't you just test people's hands if you suspect schizophrenia?" Psychiatry was a rouse. 

 

I became aware that the CPN wanted to run off to David Bowie with tittle-tattle, he wanted to use me, to get to Bowie in the hope that Bowie would make him famous. When I talked about my involvement with the albums he would zone out and systematically remove all the ostensible negatives from the equation, but it was the negatives that had brought me to ask them if they could help me in the first place. The mechanical and clichéd say, "You need to see a doctor," which converts as meaning, "I cannot think properly about your situation and a doctor may well be able to". The doctor couldn't think and he felt his status to lead the group challenged and needed to prove himself powerful to his uneducated minions. In theory my survival problem should have been his intellectual problem to solve, but he couldn't. He wasn't even on the correct page. What he thought of as my delusion was his delusion. I was telling the truth.

 

If what one has said to the doctors has become interpreted through the subjective declension filtered gauze of "schizophrenia" one can be in for a torrid time. One has to keep very cool and temperate as the play their head nodding game and it is probably best that you do not mention any other living human being because when they are in this mode anyone mentioned immediately becomes also seen as "schizophrenic" and a potential target to attack, this is not a science, and these people in the people catching business are very hungry for food sources. They comprise a new Inquisition and "Schizophrenia" becomes primary bureaucratic excuse language, the magic word in a diagnostic box for removing human rights and arbitrary false imprisonment. One of their favourite games involves turning oneself and casting oneself into role of informer. "But they don't have my mutation!"

 

I was informing on David Bowie, he had been informing on me, I told them how I was sold to the singer through a nightclub in Leeds in 1998. How he was already working through the nightclub in 1995 three years earlier and that this was evidenced by the remix of the song Niteflights that featured on the Sound and Vision box set. David Bowie's songs are a kind of primitive police profiling, and like a police profile he lies and misleads. He is the tyrant exploiting and gathering excuses to kill.

 

The song called the Informer was another terrible and dreary effort that to be consistent with his nature threatens me with my life again. This song was included on the Next Day Extra and was released shortly after my wife and I had moved into our new apartment together in the USA, he sings, "It's the end of your life, the end of your life". The song came from the CPN, I had also voiced my concern at this time that in his next album he could turn the volume up to Def-Con 4 and have them chasing me down the alley chanting for my death. The fans have called Bowie a kind and pleasant and thoughtful man, one fan said this because he covered a song by the Legendary Stardust Cowboy which enabled the Cowboy to receive royalties for the first time, it had come from me, but what I had actually meant was Vince Taylor, the man who inspired Ziggy who was homeless with a mental health diagnosis receive royalties. I didn't know Vince's name at the time, and I hadn't known he wasn't still alive. The song was Gemini Spacecraft which was also happened to be my star sign. The fans don't seem to understand that Bowie has been singing about a specific individual for twenty years. I'm sure most of his fans wouldn't agree with Nazi eugenics, blinding, demasculinisation, and murder.

 

The CPN seemed a bullish and boorish brute to me who wasn't fighting the mutation at all, that he knew nothing about, nor cared about, it wasn't a part of their assessment criteria, he was primarily selfish in envy and jealousy and at war with the English and the bourgeoisie. He inaccurately adduced that I was some privileged spoilt rich kid that he was pre-scripted to attack, even for having had a TV in my room as a child which was enough of an excuse for him to play oppressive domination games. His game was unprofessional and irrelevant. The CPN became portrayed in Bowie's brainwashed child's attempt at film making in the ugly motion picture called Warcraft. The CPN was presented as a young, moral and fair character who runs off to the Guardian to warn of a great evil, that would be me. The CPN had seen himself as an old school communist, all were equal, nobody was permitted to have done or achieved anything he hadn't, nobody was allowed to make him feel inferior and as he was by nature or nurture a sufferer with deep issues of inferiority he demanded everybody be knee height with the leprechauns and I said to him, "You're not going to be imposing this equality game on Bowie when you see him". There is a scene in the movie that captures this, the character that represents Bowie puts him on the floor. 

 

The CPN believed he wanted what he thought I had which in my world amounted to some very dodgy songs on some very dodgy records, he thought that I was ungrateful and therefore undeserving of them, that he himself would be much more deserving had they been about him, "Bowie didn't understand me," I said, and the CPN agreed with this and wanted to make sure Bowie really did understand me, and I complained, "If we're equal, which rock star do I run off to to sing about you to?!" This made no sense to him, it was what he wanted. 

 

They were attempting to control me through the terror tactics of threatening to run off to Bowie and also to attack everybody that I knew. This was a technique of brainwashing, and was fun and sport to them whilst being traumatic for me. When I said that I’d formally worked at a nightclub called Icon the doctor reacted negatively, he didn't like the word Icon, and based upon no other information, he began masterminding a plan to close the nightclub down. When I mentioned the town I came from and extolled the virtues of the art college, he wanted to close the art college down and I was rocked back. Wakefield was just some backward city to conquer, in the North hundreds of miles away. Years later, when I was living in the state's I saw the college had been closed down and I think I must have screamed all morning long. At the time I compared their behaviour to that of rapists, I called them, "psycho-the-rapists".

 

The worst ignorance assumes the form of superior knowledge, but also has authority. The doctor's knowledge amounted to a shallow surface reading and interpretation of textbooks, he formulated snap judgments from them, he seemed to assume he was the only one who had read the ink stains on wood pulp, but I too would have known when to nod my head as I had also read the textbooks. Julian and the CPN did not like me outsmarting the doctor. 

 

I had once read in a textbook that "Schizophrenics" believe music is written about them," and at the time I had the Keep it Unreal album on my CD rack and I exclaimed to myself, "They're trying to sit on my birthday cake!" Years later I learned the album had been released just a few days before my 22nd birthday, an apt and pertinent metaphor, I thought.

 

I tried to explain; David Bowie writes songs about mutants, the Hours album is named after the shorter hand on a clock, the first song after the introduction on the Outside album makes clear his target, "The mental and deva's hand", I had met the "small friends", an artist who discovered my condition, his friend the music promoter who had worked with Bowie, they had released a single version of the song Seven together that was named after my door number in the hostel the year the album was released. Bowie had an obsession with blinding men on account of his anascoria, "Oh my, naked eyes", "I am the blood at the corner of your eye", "I am the blind man, she is my eyes", "five years, stuck on my eyes", "it's the return of the thin white duke throwing darts in lover's eyes", "turned away from it all like a blind man", "and the price for our eyes", "I knew a government man who was as blind as the moon". I explained the targets to beat from his song and album "heroes", these were "the sons of the silent age, stand on platforms, blank looks and note books, playing dead, coming and going on easy terms", and "Joe the Lion made of iron, who was a fortune teller". I explained that "Bowie had looked out of his window and seen a HAND reaching down to him". But this made no sense to the doctor, occasionally he would burst into spontaneous head nods like on the words "playing dead", I recognised Laing myself, and said the doctor was "dumb", he looked at me like only he had read the textbook, and that it was me who was ignorant. In frustration I said, "I know it all!" and the CPN snatched the words to take to Bowie, I said, "I mean with regards to Bowie and his agenda, I'm not ignorant of the wisdom of Socrates". The CPN looked as though he hadn't read Socrates and perhaps should have done, it made us unequal, but he seemed certain to want to take the words to the singer, I said, "The Shaman is the one who knows". 

 

After an hour of talking to the immovable object and in frustration I said, "I only told you to f**k over your theories," the words were last straw bottom line rhetoric and were immediately snatched to take by the CPN, but the doctor, not wanting to be made a complete fool of momentarily became aroused to the possibility that he may be wrong. There was a crack opening up in the hard rock. I told them that their textbooks had given them "Canals on Mars theories, as a psychologist it's my duty to overturn those tables". 

 

The line became a lyric in the 2017 song, "Just killing time", where Bowie sang, "Just a handful of songs to sing to sting your soul to f**k you over", and then of course the obligatory death threat, which was the reason I was speaking to the Mind-Police in the first place. "Just" as in a name and "Kill in a little time". 

 

I felt that I shouldn't have said a word to these barbarian people hunters and I wished and said, "I should have walked!" The hour was the most stressful and unpleasant that I'd suffered in years and knowing what they didn't know, that I have an amygdala retention complex on my right nuclei that creates a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder, I swore to myself that I would never again think about this event. I would cast it from my mind completely. I would not anger, frustrate, or upset myself, and I did pretty well with this. After I walked out of the studio's gates, they were gone. 

 

Seven years had passed when I heard my name encoded into the single, Where Are We Now? The title was taken from a poem in a book of poetry I had written and published. The lyric was "Justin Case" and it had come from the CPN. 

 

To my left hand side I can still see an imago of the CPN if I look. He is goading me, threatening me, he wants to attack my friends, my family, my former work colleagues. He wants to knock people out of jobs and close down businesses and he insists that he's going to do this. He wants to run off to Bowie to ensure that he knows the "real me", that Bowie had made a mistake in selecting me, because I didn't deserve it, and I am not worthy of these songs. He wants to make his claim that he would be more grateful if the songs were written about him. He wants to be equal with me, he's desperate to be equal with me.