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The purpose of this exercise is to create a thought experiment, which is a model much like the writings of John Le Carre. In this process we examine the possibility that:

• It’s sort of a nice theory because it is taking a theory which we already know works, and extending it to a new regime by copying its success, but with different numbers. The problem is that these new models have been developed quite a bit, and they somehow don’t seem to fit the data: they make predictions for precision measurement, but so far none of the measurements give us any evidence that there is some substance to the process, or any other process we know.

• Among modern forensic psychiatrists it is circumstantial evidence (it is not set in stone) that that recidivistic tendencies within patients remains the favourite theory regarding schizophrenia and psychotic offending behaviour. It is not the only theory out there; there are alternatives.

• The alternative theories, for better or worse, are falling by the wayside, one by one. The field of forensic psychiatry believes it is making progress in psychiatry by ruling out some of the favourite ideas. These days there are very few adherents to the idea of schizophrenic insanity : but we don’t know yet. We have to keep it in mind as a possibility, and keep trying to move forward, because somebody else might have a better idea.

So we are exploring all of these different possibilities; we need some guidance. These are ideas basically inspired by the “known” fact that schizophrenia can’t be the whole story. There are so many possibilities, that we can’t simply go out and say, “Well, maybe this, maybe that, maybe something else” and eventually hope to hit the right answer. We need a little guidance. So guidance comes in the form of clues or puzzles in the existing data – in what we know. The most prominent example comes in the form of the question, “What are the parameters within schizophrenic psychosis that are attached to offending behaviour?”, and “Why are the two factors of symptoms of hallucinations, or voices; and the second factor of medication to counter these deemed so small in significance by the field of forensic psychiatry?”. To a lay-person the factor of voices might sound significant, but to a qualified specialist, as it turns out, it is comparatively small to the scales of other factors.

The following is extracted from a letter I wrote to a friend, December 2017.

Before I continue, I must confess that I have a vested interest in a change in The Mental Health Act. Law is about predictable, fixed, and predetermined outcome; and without such a change I will be likely to be incarcerated another 20 years on top of the 6 years already done (as of 2018). Some people would wish this to be the case, but I hope to illustrate an example of the way things actually are, before leaving it to somebody else to measure how to make progress and implement changes within the law.

There are 4 over-riding principles of public opinion which need to be addressed.

1. Everyone needs to be sure that I won’t offend again.

2. I should rebuild my life to my benefit without risk to anyone else.

3. I should have treatment for my illness, and help to manage my behaviour.

4. I should receive continued supervision.

In the British Mental Health Act 1983 – at least, so I gather – was enshrined a principle of “the least restrictive practices”. The motive behind this was to assist me to rehabilitate myself within the community, or nearby to that.

So, the question remains : why are the public so much in danger by current practices? I put it to the reader that they are. I put it to you that dangerous people get released, safe people don’t, and a wider risk from an illness called schizophrenia is very prevalent among sufferers with a non-forensic history -– who seem to go off like a box of Roman candles.

I am aware that the public don’t have my level of experience of my own observations, which I hope the reader will be interested in, in order to receive information to make a viewpoint: hopefully a well-balanced one, instead of a guttural response – which is not always a viable way to understand risk, or a current danger.

It has taken me a number of medicated years to make my observations, so I hope to influence public opinion. One of my literary heroes is George Orwell: not because he wrote “1984”, but because he wrote “The road to Wigan Pier”, and “Coming up for air”. I suspect similar works to these influenced politics and social policy, which I am attempting to do now. Okay, so that is my confession out of the way.

Before we can continue, I must point out that an “idiot” according to the unpolitically-correct viewpoint of psychiatry in the 1950s, was that of a person who had a learning impairment. This is not the definition of the word “idiot” that William Shakespeare used. In Macbeth, “a tale told by an idiot” was “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”.

My experience of a certain type of patient matches Shakespeare’s description. My observation about them is that their memory is not in any way impaired, but that of a treated schizophrenic is missing bits –- at least, mine is. Stuff happened that I think happened, and in a way I know it did; but the sequence of events whilst living with a zone where time was continually re-writing itself I cannot tell. The Shakespearian idiot can reel off detail after detail of factual events. However, they are lacking in social awareness, or care about other people’s social appraisal. This is not necessarily the case within a schizophrenic –- who I am now going to call a normal person. The word “imbecile” is not relevant to anything here discussed; neither is the word “cretin”. So I shall not be using these words, but they were common parlance in the 1950s where a psychiatrist may have felt superior by categorising people into these groups. As far as I am concerned, a learning impairment is not what I am discussing.

So why did I call a schizophrenic a normal person? Well, I certainly did not say that schizophrenia is a normal illness. It isn’t. It is rare. It is denied to be a split within the mind by lay-people and professionals, who state as a fact that there is not any such thing as a split within the mind. I know otherwise. I suspect that within Ancient Rome (from what I have learnt according to the lectures of Professor Fagan, course number 340, with “The great Courses”), a split within the mind was known to be a phenomenon that people did not deny. I also suspect -– because of the proliferation of lunatic asylums in Victorian Britain –- that this phenomenon was very real to people then too.

I know that the core beliefs of forensic health care professionals are not in accordance with these older viewpoints; and I would like to pause here and pose a purely theoretical hypothesis, which is: what if we are wrong, and they were right? What if the reason why spontaneous acts of harm keep emerging today is because of social policy, but more importantly the sort of misinformation upon which present social policy is built? What then?

So, I think –- or at least, I hope -– I have caught the readers’ attention, and it is my endeavour to continue.

It is a widely held viewpoint that there is safety in numbers. Even Shakespeare said “a dog is obeyed in office” –- I believe that this may have been within King Lear.

A psychiatrist is an expert in the correct combinations of medications to be applied. Oh, but they are so much more than this. They are the last vestige of an older world with old-fashioned laws, where people had absolute powers to dictate the lives and futures of patients. If you have a complaint then speak to your psychiatrist. But what if my complaint was about the psychiatrist misappropriating a position of clinical influence? This is the hypothetical thought experiment I started off this article with. This is purely imaginary in the sense that novels about one spy-catcher discovering the Russian mole within the secret services are no more based upon truth than anything else. So, having said that, let us take the following scenarios.

1. A psychiatrist has presented an unreasonable argument by distorting facts, not about crimes that have been committed, but about clinical progress.

2. They all believe that they have super-wonderful qualities, which they adulate each other about, while a member of the public might worry that absolute power corrupts absolutely.

None of this is necessarily true, I hasten to add. I say it to draw an analogy between the industrialised scale of human rights abuses that have occurred historically within the 20th century within Great Britain, regarding child welfare; and how often the abused party had nobody to complain to except the abuser. Later, this was widely recognised to be an unacceptable state of affairs: and after this was known about, things changed in this regard. Authorities did emerge and children are now a lot safer. So, if the psychiatrist and psychologist are judge and jury, then who do I turn to if they do something wrong? More importantly, would they diagnose such a view as a paranoid symptom of psychosis and change my meds? Best keep my mouth shut then. Smile at them instead.

Okay, let’s bring it back. Why is a schizophrenic a normal person? Because you are not lung cancer if you get it. The schizophrenic might recover -- as I have done -- or might not -– like my sister. But in either case the real person might still recover within the broken machinery of a human mind; and to believe that stating that a split mind is an inference that the real person is not still buried somewhere in there, is not logical. Some people deny that the mind can be split, upon their belief that to hold such a viewpoint is to dehumanise the psychotic schizophrenic is some way. I do not share this view. One of my primary nurses once stated to me, “You are the schizophrenia”, as though a broken arm and a person are the same thing; and another good health care worker, told me that a thought which is a schizophrenic delusion is just like any other thought, or fantasy, he or anybody else who is a non- schizophrenic might have had. This viewpoint is so opposite to my experience, I cannot overstate that.

So, now I would like to point out the Shakespearian fool –- as in King Lear -– was the court jester, who was acting as though he had some type of a learning impediment. So a Shakespearian fool has a learning disability; and the modern word “foolish” has the same meaning as the Shakespearian word “idiotic”. Oh dear. I hate it when this happens. Now, if you pick either word, you might insult somebody, because nobody knows what these words means anymore. I shall use the Shakespearian versions, i.e. a Shakepearian fool has a learning impediment.

Now, a Shakespearian idiot is not at all slow (as would be implied by the modern interpretation of the word). They can be good at arithmetic, with good language skills, and talented at card games. However, they can be noticed by what I shall call “idiotic laughter”: which is contagious between idiots, and usually about something which non-idiots would not find particularly amusing; and this laughter is an irritant to non-idiot patients. The sort of laughter is distinct. It involves one idiot saying something, which precipitates another idiot to laugh, which in turn causes the original speaker to break forth in laughter even more; then another one joins in, until there is a cacophony of laughter usually about something very trivial.

The conversation between idiots usually descends to conversations about taking and acquiring illegal drugs, and crime: crime which is not particularly heinous in nature as far as their own relating of their personal experiences are concerned; but there is an endless stream of these incredible stories -– all true –- whenever a group of idiots gets talking. They sound quite scared of gangsters -– at least they seem to revere them. An idiot is not a gangster. Prior to (and even during Victorian times) idiots probably got themselves hanged; and prior to the 18th century, first-class lunatics (which I was) would have gotten themselves burned at the stake as heretics. Now, it is easy to blame this on religion, but Professor Hale, for The Great Courses, points out in his Exploring the Roots of Religion course, that druids and predecessors to Christianity were often practicing human sacrifice (as was then commonplace across the world within agrarian societies). I like to think that people stopped burning lunatics at the stake because of the doctrine of one of the major faiths, if not all of them.

A lunatic laughing is not a social experience. A lunatic will laugh at factors which the lunatic is receiving about events within a parallel Universe. Often these events can be hilariously funny. Have you ever laughed within a dream? I don’t remember most of my dreams, but when I am falling asleep at night my mind drifts, and during later rapid eye movement I am presented with a series or events with conclusions and a punch line: there is a designer to these films who apparently isn’t me, else I would have known the punch line in advance, and hence it would not have been as apparently funny.

Modern day forensic psychiatry relies upon the principle that lunatics and Shakespearian idiots are the same.

Now, an idiot can have god-like delusions about themselves being God, for instance, and hold these beliefs unquestionably and immutably. They can be paranoid, and the slightest hint of paranoia within themselves gets acted upon. Most of them end up in prison –- where they are not selected for the hospital system -– and then they are out again; then back in prison. If and when a psychiatrist gets hold of them they get treated well, and well looked after by nurses. By now they have a psychiatric record, and the system will eventually let them go. Why? Because they meet the criteria for treatment. Do I as a treated lunatic meet this criteria? The answer to that question is no: and this is what I would like to discuss.

In 1896, the Indiana general assembly passed a bill indicating that the Greek letter pi (a mathematical constant) was equal to 3.2. The Indiana senate postponed this bill indefinitely. Why was this proposed? Farm areas are often circular, so for taxation, deeds, and ownership, it is important to know the exact amount of area. So they were trying to standardise pi.

Modern psychiatry is regrettably internationalised and codified. This is a big mistake for public protection. It means that a psychiatrist is effectively behaving religiously – like some kind of a zealot of a faith –- with all answers to all questions written in this big internationalised book. If some relative of a sufferer tells a psychiatrist that the personality of their loved one has profoundly changed, this big internationalised book dictates that this is not the case, that there is no such thing as a split mind, that the Victorians and the ancients were all wrong because we have advanced and know so much more today about the field of forensic and non-forensic psychiatry –- so says the book. The book also dictates that if a scientist with a good brain and an enquiring mind makes such a claim as to disrespect the book, that this person should first gain qualifications about what the book says –- else is completely wrong. The book says, “don’t say idiot” (Shakespearian meaning), and, “don’t say lunatic”, because calling an idiot an idiot would be untherapeutic and cause offence; and the word, “lunacy”, is not to be used because it is now deemed incorrect and unscientific. The book dictates that a split within the mind is impossible; and the law we currently have is totally subordinate to this big internationalised book. Does this sound worrying?

Before I continue, let me just say that it is important is understand that nobody is perfect, authorities can be biased unintentionally, and the intent of an ineffective law is not akin to dastardly laws with mal-intent. But I would like to proceed with the ineffectiveness of the current state of play at public protection.

Also, I must point out that idiocy is not the same thing as a personality disorder; and these are unrelated to each other. I shall not be discussing personality disorders, as this is totally unrelated to a schizophrenic split within the mind, and schizophrenic psychosis.

An idiot often sounds like a phrase book for English when it is being learnt as a foreign language: “What are you doing?”, “Who are you phoning?”, “What type of T-shirt is that?”. An idiot has difficulties anticipating and solving immediate problems such as using the toilet before dinner time, knowing fine well that they will be locked in the dining room until the cutlery is counted in. An idiot is often desperate for the toilet at this moment; whereas a person with another type of diagnosis wouldn’t be. An idiot does not manage to get a surplus of stamps and envelopes, or their weekly supply of 20p coins for the telephone. Instead they know that they can impose their perceived normality of saying, “Have you got? Can I have? Can you change a five pound note?”.

We can classify patients into those who have a high rate of responsiveness to treatment, and those who don’t. The assumption being is that we can do a test to determine which condition a person has: and it personalises the care; because it may not be useful to give psychological treatment to patients who cannot use it in that way.

All the information that the doctors have gotten thus far can help to answer the following questions:

1. What is going to be the route of administration of treatment?

2. How often are we going to give this treatment?

3. How much treatment should we give, that won’t harm the patient?

Remission means after 5 years we can find no symptoms. This does not mean the symptoms aren’t there, as the symptoms may be hidden.

Cure means that there are no symptoms after 10 years.

“Control” means that symptoms are there, but are not growing.

The following is extracted from lecture 36 of Professor John R. Hale's Exploring the Roots of Religion, course number 3650, The Great Courses:

Professor Hale continues:

He says:

Okay, so why did I include that beautiful chapter from my favourite lecturer of all time? Well, because it has -- or at least I think it has -– parallels with the Royal College of Psychiatry, in the sense that the human psyche apparently seems to have a built-in need to trust a quasi-religious expert: i.e. a qualified psychiatrist or clinical psychologist. When a defendant makes a plea, it is often after having received advice from a legal team; which is influenced by the sort of inferences which may be contained within psychiatric and psychological reports. If such a report concludes that culpability was present within a paranoid schizophrenic, then it would be unwise for a defendant to hope that the jury would be able genetically to override the built-in hardwiring of the way that their human psyche operates. People have an innate need to trust in a forensic psychiatrist, and thus I realise the enormity of the challenge I am up against presenting this writing to you.

Within psychiatry, the word “clinical” means, locked away within a prison-like institution where no patient can get his or her clinical decisions properly peer-reviewed.

Within animal testing, there are numerous bodies of regulatory control to ensure the animal is not suffering —- at least, not too much.

It is a fact that current social policy (i.e. the lack of distinction between idiocy and lunacy) is economically harmful to the economy of Great Britain. Not only does it cost millions, or the best part thereof, to, in effect, throw away the key; but the country loses my capabilities of wealth creation, or entrepreneurial qualities. How can I work if I am locked away for 23 and a half hours a day on a corridor with a television playing the music channel? The simple answer is that I am never expected to work or start a business ever -– and that is stigmatisation. I have a friend who is now in Egypt, and he is not allowed to return to Great Britain because he had a spate of insanity (causing harm) whilst he was studying here for his phd in chemistry. Now he has to live his life as a freeman but within Egypt. Maybe that is good for Egypt, but it is bad for the economic interests of Great Britain.

So, let’s go to a clinic and ask, “How much of a regime for a specific treatment should we have?”.

---

My number’s up here. I am not going to get out. I can’t dig myself out of a hole. Rose Jones has produced a report I may not challenge or compete with; and what I am attempting to do here now: by writing this down, and publically communicating it, will become indelible nails in my coffin, in the sense that I am now here to reveal what I do disagree with, and this –- when I do arrive at the Asperger’s clinic, run by wonderful colleagues -– will become further evidence of how, due to my ASD, I am totally incapable of ever undertaking, or completing, the required work to attain a reduction in the level of security I live under. So here goes.

One might ask the question, “Why did I do it?”. Well, I wouldn’t have done it if the Universe wasn’t in peril, and that was the only way to save it. To understand is to forgive; but my plaintive claims have no resonance upon the authorities who are condemning me to a life-time of incarceration, whilst pretending to do the contrary.

What follows now is an expatiation of my psychotic delusions and hallucinations.

I include the excursion into the realm of paranoid schizophrenia to illustrate:

1. The context in which offending behaviour may occur is rational, though the information it is based upon is false. The offending behaviour appears irrational to the lay-person, but not the clinical forensic psychologist: who has a theory to say that thinking is rational, even though judgement is severely impaired. It is easier for both parties to believe that the schizophrenic ideation was that of a clear mind, and a sound mind: like criminality.

2. The formulation about my offending behaviour is divorced from the context of the stories I have outlined -– which formed the basis of my sense of self, and identity, at the time of my index offence. Forensic clinical psychology abhors stories about white witches and so forth, because this is not in the guidelines set forth by the Ministry of Justice, which are totally subordinate to the big internationalised book.

3. The authorities are scared to label anybody as insane, because that way this would open the door to any old idiot being given the green light to commit offences. As I am sure you are aware, anxieties about the impending end of the Universe due to a split within the mind, and an idiot jumping up and shouting, “The world is about to end”, is not really the same thing: although the wisdom of modern forensic psychology and psychiatry would say that it is.

To proceed with writing at this point is quite difficult, not because I don’t know what I want to say, but to do so in a productive manner is rather tough, when the views I am presenting are quite radical and different from the norm. I shudder to recall, how, in the prodromal phase of my illness (which lasted 15 years) I struggled to comprehend that I might be wrong about anything, and in many ways this was an extension of a survival mechanism I had learnt as a child. My mother, after my Dad left when I was of the age of six, changed from being attempting to be productive supportive care provider, into a monster who attempted to destroy my mind and emotional development by waging a campaign of delusional destructive war-fare upon myself and sister (who is on year older than me): whose mind, I hasten to add, did not recover.

During the years I have been in hospital (post 2012), one of the topics I have studied has been the policies and politics of Winston Churchill. I hope to emulate what I have learnt from some of his works, in the process of writing this now. I suppose that if I don’t look back, and keep on typing away, like a blind monkey hitting a keyboard, by some random quirk of fate, a genius masterpiece may emerge.

Okay. So far, I have been talking about the blurring of distinction between various categories of personality and character, with that of the mental health disorder of acute psychotic schizophrenia. Unrepresentative data occurs whence the sample of a wider population contains sub-elements, or sub-groups, which are wildly out of proportion with those same subgroups in the underlying population. Thus, as my hypothesis, I would like to posit that due to the advent, and wide-scale distribution of effective anti-psychotic medication in the developed world, forensic psychologists and psychiatrists over recent decades, have seen fewer and fewer cases of lunacy being an underlying cause of behaviour which is harmful to others, and so nowadays conflate social and interpersonal idiocy to match the same diagnosis as lunacy, because this has been the experience of the medical profession. For every lunatic who has committed serious harm, there are dozens of patients whom are interpersonal idiots whom have committed probably lesser harm.

I would like to posit that the experience of these clinical professionals, is not the same thing necessarily as an external reality, which may or may not exist with, or outside of the conscious awareness, of these professional forensic clinical psychiatrists and psychologists. It may seem that I am attacking the profession of psychiatry and psychology, and indeed I probably am, but it has been my experience that to bolster a scenario where the emperor has no clothes on, where nobody points this out, to be not a very responsible contribution to public debate, or developmental politics. I have seen scenarios time and again, of well-behaved people serving decades in these mentally decrepit establishments without being treated humanely or fairly in law, beyond expecting to be spoken to with compassion, and the right to complain about the food menu. I would like the reader to question whether is right, or economically viable, that people can disappear from the community, almost permanently, to be cloistered away from where the public at large can have any say over whether they can facilitate the return of such segregated and isolated people. This all happens upon the pretext that a harmful event has occurred in the past, without any concern or compassion given to the underlying motives, or even thoughts, occurring in the state of mind of the perpetrator. What I am saying is that the public are being sold a lie. They are told that due to mental health disorder that the perpetrator (now deemed a criminal) has to go to a hospital where they can receive treatment, and only be released after they are better. But these events don’t occur on anything like a realistic or developmental time-frame, or even linearly in my case. In reality, the supervision and socially controlling mechanisms which an ex-lunatic experiences, far, far, out-weighs those which any gangster would be likely to experience; and moreover, the professional authorities wilfully and blatantly attempt to separate psychosis from offending behaviour, thus treating the ex-lunatic as though they were of clear mind in the same way that a gangster or criminal would be. Then, the onus is about criminality as far as the law-men and law-women are concerned, thereby sending out a clear and socially naive and irresponsible message to all the non-forensic schizophrenics in the community that it is the person, not the illness that is dangerous. As in reality, the external truth can, and will, exist behind the backs, and conscious awareness, of the medical professionals, and law-people, social mayhem and madness ensue because (as a rare event, but still statistically probable due to the sheer number of events possible) people get hurt by psychotic schizophrenia as a dangerous illness: which is unhelpfully not treated by the mental health professionals, who seem to overtly believe that they know more, or have some special kind of insight into the human mind, due to their believing what they have read in a book. Previously, I cited evidence which outlined how a belief in an intermediary between our world and the spirit world, or similar of any religious thinking, is almost a basic human necessity, which may or may not be hard-wired into our genetic make-up. The evidence I cited was Professor Hale.

It is my observation that a psychiatrist purports to be an expert in some kind of a specialist insight into protecting society from wider harm. But I would like to postulate that due to an absence of evidence, this may be bunkum. In reality, the mental health professionals treat non-forensic patients as forensic ones at the moment at which some event occurs which should be deemed a crime if it occurred by any person of clear mind; and the forensic professionals don’t really believe that such harmful events can occur due to acute psychosis alone. They have read this in a book, and they believe what they have read, and this facet of human behaviour of believing the religious expert, who in turn probably believes other experts religiously, may be hardwired into the human genetic make-up. So, their response to this would probably be, and has been, “David is angry with a wider society for not intervening to detain and treat him before his index offence occurred.”. This is quite a shallow viewpoint to say in response to myself articulating myself quite clearly. It is as though the clinical forensic psychologist who wrote this in her report seems to believe that the only motivation for anything is anger. It is like something akin to saying, “Winston Churchill was very angry with Adolf Hitler for invading Poland.”, and this was his prime motivation in his socially responsible conduct,, and his shaping of the political sphere at the time. I suppose that being unfair and all-powerful, they would then go on to say, “David has grandiose ideas about comparing himself to Winston Churchill.”; the point I am making is that being all-powerful within the sphere of influence of how I may be condemned, this is the sort of remark they have not yet made, but would probably make. I have direct evidence of this, and may quote it, but I am reluctant to do so because I do not wish to turn a general political discussion into a debate about one individual case.

Dr. Steven Gimbel, who is an American Professor of Philosophy, states that as humans, “We may not be rational animals, but we certainly are rationalising animals. We suffer greatly from what sociologists call, ‘conformation bias’.” and he goes on to say that confirmation bias is when we hold a particular belief, we search out that which we believe supports the belief and explain away, or outright ignore, that which undermines rational belief in the proposition. It is my purpose to explain here that psychiatry and psychology are far removed from scientific scrutiny, and indeed criticism from the rest of the scientific fields. This is partly because, to become qualified at all in either psychiatry or forensic psychology, one needs to have spent many years, if not decades, upon religiously adhering to believing what one has read in a book. Another reason why psychiatry and psychology are far removed from scientific scrutiny is that the nature of the institutions within which people like myself are detained, are very closed prison-like places where not only does no information from the inside filter out to the outside world, but backwardly, little from wider scientific thinking arrives within these places because of the levels of security requirements, and policies which are put in place to protect staff and patients from troublesome patients. It seems like everybody within these places has exactly the same type of personality, says exactly the same things at the same times, and that highly creative temperaments are categorised as different in some way which requires, to them, a diagnosis to explain why individuality exists, and why people are not all exactly the same. The staff in these places are populated by people who seek and require a job for life. They seem very stable and settled in their yearly routine. They also seem to be quite family-orientated, whether they are parents or not.

What the forensic psychiatrists and psychologists would almost certainly deny, is that obedience to the hallucinations would make a recovered patient more likely to be obedient towards authority and supervision, if in the unlikely event that such a person could be approved by the psychologists to be released into the community. Again this is an example of confirmation bias. What they would almost certainly say, is that obedience to the hallucinations demonstrated poor problem solving skills, which need to be an addressed by undertaking psychology work in problem solving: at which time this perfunctory course will have radically changed the person to become set up and made for life. Another factor which they would refute is that after an index offence the recovered ex-lunatic would be in a better position to foresee and evaluate his or her illness, with the hindsight of knowing that something did indeed go very terribly and spectacularly wrong last time. In other words the person who has had the illness of schizophrenia would now have direct evidence that schizophrenia is a dangerous illness, because it is almost certainly the case that the health professional would not say this, and would probably expound the view that it is person with schizophrenia that makes the illness dangerous. The response of the health care professional towards such an idea might be to say something like, “Oh, so you’re saying you’re glad it happened?”, or something equally bent. This is an example of attacking a straw man, where the interlocutor broadens the claim made in one of the premises, and puts words in the original arguer’s mouth that the original arguer did not say. In doing this, the interlocutor has weakened the argument. Also, it is unlikely that such a patient could undertake the necessary psychology work which is focussed all around the person with schizophrenia becoming less dangerous, not the actual illness being a dangerous thing. It is most unjust the the public and society should not be able to reach into these institutions, and pull a patient away from such peoples’ misdirected clutches. I wrote a poem about something this called, gargoyles. Perhaps it is unwise to refer the reader to a poem, of all things; but then as I do think it is quite a good poem I shall include this link.

For an authority to be considered an authority, they should satisfy three criteria. A legitimate authority must:

1. Have material existence.

2. Be an expert in the field.

3. Be impartial, and not profit from my belief or ability to sway it.

Now, a psychiatrist most certainly does have material existence, and they believe themselves to be an expert in the field. But they do profit by getting paid far in excess of the national minimum wage. It is in their interests for the judge sitting in a tribunal to have far more in common with them, than with any patient whose tribunal it is. It is in their interests for the general public to believe that they, as psychiatrists, are immensely qualified: as this may justify a hefty pay package at the expense of the tax-paying public; and as far as their pursuit of science goes, all they really have time for, is to write a 30 page document for each of their patients repeating why, over and over again, this particular person is not fit for the community, whilst not acting upon any of the positive comments which are patronisingly made about this patient. They also seem to believe that the field of psychiatry knows a lot more about psychosis now than it did in the past. I would like to expound upon the possibility that perhaps the reason why the present day psychiatry believes that it knows a lot more than the older practitioners of the field is because of the fallacy of an appeal to novelty, whereby what is considered newest may also be arrogated to be the most improved version available. Contrary to this, is the intransigence of an an appeal to tradition, where we are all reluctant to remove a small unelected elite from a position of total control, and influence, upon the lives and well-being of patients, and a wider society, because we have pretty much always let psychiatrists rule the roost, whilst believing what they say.

I have come to believe that it is false that field of psychiatry knows more about psychosis now than it did in the past, because of reasons of the nature of details of a particular inductive argument. Inductive arguments are ones in which their conclusions do move beyond the premises, to give us rational belief about something we have not yet observed. That argument is basically that, before the advent of effective anti-psychotics that actually worked, the illness of schizophrenia was by and large untreatable and chronic. When the patient moved from a prodromal (or early warning phase) into full-blown insanity, by heck, was the wider society and public fully aware that the patient’s judgement was more than chronically impaired. Modern psychiatry believes this view to be false, and they can’t be persuaded otherwise, because they believe that they have a special insight, and are indeed trained to believe so. But reality, the external world, does not change; and the nature of an external phenomenon does not change neither. It is my purview that in the older times (and I am not primarily talking about Britain 1950s) the psychiatrist (or alienist – as they were then called), had a far broader range of experiences of meeting actual psychotic lunacy in a patient, and experiencing its then immutable effects. Since the invention of anti-psychotics, the experience of the health care professional has changed dramatically, and they speak now to people who tend to have something behaviourally and mentally wrong with themselves: be that impulsive decision-making as part of their personality, poor financial choices, lack of empathy with others and victims, self-adulating behaviour, grandiosity, histrionics, delusional self-ideation -– all outside of the impulsivity of experiencing ones mind and body being controlled by outside forces. As you can see, I am not a psychiatrist, and any so-called uneducated person can speak their language, look down their noses at people, and expect a judge to believe that they are not committing a fallacy of faulty authority. What makes someone an expert? Is their expertise general or specialist? Does this person have a requisite background to be an authority? This expert must also be objective or disinterested: they must not have a vested interest in my believing them one way or another. They should not stand to gain financially by such a process.

Because of the way psychiatrists behave towards patients, this in itself is a deterrent for people in the community who have mental problems coming forward to receive help. At least it was for me. Sadly, my experiences of psychiatry and psychology after becoming sectioned (pretty much permanently for the last six years) have confirmed what I previously feared would be the case with how I would get treated. I would like to elaborate upon these experiences now. As you may be aware, when I started this article, I articulated that I had been diagnosed with Asperger’s. At the time of writing this diagnosis was immanent, so I hedged my bets that it would occur, and got the prediction right. Since it is difficult to keep a patient detained forever upon the grounds of a treatable schizophrenia, this newer diagnosis can, and will, warrant possible grounds to facilitate such that I will never be released into the community. Indeed, the specialist who they brought in to do this job has said in his report, that my, “inability to form relationships, his indifference to the emotions of others, and his inability to reflect in any nuanced way about his actions, and responsibility, all seem to have played a part [in the offending behaviour chain of my index offence -- ed]”. Now, Andrew Pope, who is the specialist they brought in, is allegedly an expert in autism. However he does get paid to effectively drop bombs on people. He does not have to be brought to account for his actions, and can pretty much walk away from a situation after saying what he likes. Again, because he gets paid to write a two-page document for half a day’s work he should not be considered legitimate authority. Previously in his report he says that, “[David -- ed] avoids events like the Christmas party of Karaoke.”. Yet this is not well-grounded. At one Christmas party I hurt my voice by singing the Karaoke so much. 'He can do small talk for very brief period; perhaps 2 or 3 exchanges at most. With regard to interacting with his peers he told us “small talk’s not too bad but it’s mostly about food, football, films and fitness.” '. Andrew Pope doesn’t have to live within the ward environment. He just comes along and visits it. If the truth be known, often interaction with these so-called “peers” becomes a case of listening to them all trying to shout louder then each other about these four major topics. That is to say, we don’t have much going for us within our lives. I explained this to Mr. Pope, and I also explained that I choose to receive some level of communication which is not centred around “hospitals”, be that watching a video lecture, reading the bible, or even reading some book like Winston Churchill. It would appear that Andrew Pope has a problem with individuality, or understanding that people can be individuals.

In response to myself telling Andrew Pope that my mother had been “very abusive”, and had periodically punished me for my father leaving, Andrew says, “There was no sense at at any point that David might have any sympathy for his mother’s difficulties, or any sense that he might have been a difficult child.”. I believe that Andrew Pope has demonstrated a lack of empathy with the victims of child abuse here. In reality my mother attacked me, confronted me, and chastised me for any type of small talk. She behaved in an uncommunicative and anti-social way almost effortlessly, as though this came naturally to her, and overtly appeared to attempt and succeeded in causing distress in myself and my elder sister with the express purpose of causing distress for the sake of causing distress in itself. Her behaviour was tantamount to psychological and emotional torture. I am reminded of stories about mental health professionals in the 20^th century who believed that reports of child abuse were hysteria. My mother was, and still is, a very talented social manipulator. She seems to seek the people in the outside community to have sympathy upon her. Although the diagnosis of Münchhausen’s syndrome by proxy is usually associated with physical harm or poisoning, I suppose that if it were possible that psychological scars are more easy to achieve and cover up, then the mental health profession would be incapable of learning this, or modifying their viewpoint in any way. Their views are rigid and not nuanced in a reflective way.

Andrew Pope says, “If laundry or meal times were changed this would stress David more than other patients.”. Yet this is not well-grounded. At no times have meal times ever been changed in six years of my hospital stay. As for changed laundry times -– and this is all becoming rather petty now –- only I have ever requested that my slot be changed to when I am not out on an allotment leave. I did also request in a community meeting that patients, instead of using my slot, use their own. I mean, this fellow Andrew Pope, being a so-called expert in autism, does seem to receive a large amount of tax-payers’ emoluments for doing comparatively little. Andrew’s report goes on. The gist of things is that I have a “complete lack of concern [for the welfare of others -- ed].”, and am “indifferent to the emotions of others”. Not bad for half a days work for more than a full day’s pay. I really must point out that my Dad has Asperger’s and he is not indifferent to the emotions of others. He just can’t anticipate them. I think that what Andrew is attempting to do is within his own mind -– and I am sure that this makes sense to him –- addle selfishness with autism. It is as though Andrew is saying that all forms of selfishness, as far as he can make it out, are autistic. What is Aspergers really then? Well, I have already outlined what I think it is, which you can access by clicking on that link. When Andrew Pope conflates selfishness with autism is he saying that all psychopaths are autistic too? What Andrew is actually doing here is committing the gambler’s fallacy. He is also cherry picking.

So, moving on. The second assessment for autism was the “Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule”, known by its acronym “ADOS”. What they do during this test is behave in a discombobulated way, and then say that because I had to modify my interactions to bring the conversation back to a relevant topic, that the examiner had to “modify her behaviour throughout in order to maintain the interaction”.

“The examiner described a very distressing experience when her money was stolen on holiday. David listened but showed no empathy or interest, and immediately spoke about himself. There was no reciprocal conversation noted at all.”. But what they have omitted from this account is the inappropriate context in which she mentioned her lost holiday money, which she repeated later in the test. What they had actually done was given me some type of an intelligence test to perform with props and picture books. She asked me to perform a series of tasks, and then interrupted me by talking about her holiday experiences. I couldn’t care less, but that is not Aspergers though. That is called drawing a distinction between formal and informal. I did not wish, and do not wish, to have an informal relationship with that particular examiner. She often comes out with remarks such as “Eeey, did you read the story in the paper the other day. A baby’s first words were “Alexa” –- you know, that robot you talk to and can buy from google. How sad is that?”. Well, I don’t think that is sad. That is an important moment. Not sad at all. She has also expressed her opinion that all politicians (a most notable example of which is Winston Churchill), have some sort of a personality disorder in order to attain such positions. I disagree, and wish to keep our relationship very formal. So if she had her holiday money stolen, that is very tragic, but we were supposed to be here to perform some kind of an evidence-based test, not perform mind-tricks on each other. If humans can be trained to literally drop bombs in the military, then I suppose they can be trained to perform mind-games.

Some people in the public may believe that I can have a tribunal to get out of my detention. Yet the format of a tribunal is very formulaic. It is a court-room setting. I may not speak unless questioned, and then I may only answer the specific questions, not present a case of my own. It is in no way an example of the outside community having the ability to reach into an establishment and extract from there an erstwhile member of society. In fact, the mental health professionals can present their reports, but I am not allowed to present any case of my own. It is a myth to presume that I am permitted to do this. One might ask, why don’t you have a managers' hearing, and ask them to release you. The answer to that is that they are not granted the power and permission to make such a decision, and it is has been my experience that they are scared of undermining or over-riding the professional opinion of a consultant forensic psychiatrist.

So a circular argument is to say something like “David has Aspergers because he has Aspergers”. Why is that the case? Because he has been diagnosed with having Aspergers.

These days, the medical profession seem to believe that attributing offending behaviour to acute psychosis is a “cause and effect” reasoning error called, causal over-simplification. They do this by ignoring the details of the nature of the delusional Universe to which I was attached at the time of my offending behaviour. In actuality, the psychosis was a necessary condition for it. They contend that, if necessary, it was not sufficient, and there must have been other factors at play. This surely must differ drastically from the alienist of yester-year who experienced acute paranoid psychotic schizophrenia to be a condition of chronically impaired judgement. In fact, one psychologist said, “If there had been a policeman there in the room would you have continued with your offending behaviour?”. Well, that depends upon whether I would have believed that the policeman would have been there as part of the delusional Universe: which is that he would have been there in what I would have deemed at the time, “within deception”. It depends. Probably not, because I believed that everybody in the world was watching me on invisible cameras, and that was one motivation which allowed me to continue within the event chain of my offending behaviour (I had grown to be uninhibited and unreserved). Because I have said, “probably not”, the response of the clinical psychologist has been, “There. You knew what you were doing was wrong.”. But my dilemma at the time was to save the Universe by preventing its destruction by providing celestial viewers with the data, scene, and information they required. None of that was real. So to say that the other factors can be dealt with in isolation from this is to neglect a common cause. I knew that the reality I was within was not real, and I knew that neither was the victim. I knew that my behaviour was “within deception”: that it was scripted by angels, who were repeatedly resetting time to ensure that I would obey the life-force instinct. The psychologists call what I am doing now, “minimising”, or "externalising the role which my illness may have played", or failing to take responsibility by blaming the illness, and not myself. Is preventing the destruction of the Universe wrong when all you have to do is act nasty and tough within an angel scripted environment? Does one actor actually commit a crime when acting out a scene within a play? The medical authorities aren’t interested in these dilemmas because they are not part of the “domains” set by the British parliament, and communicated through the Ministry of Justice. But the external Universe won’t change in accordance with our laws, and disastrous circumstances will keep on emerging if the money is perpetually spent upon closing the gate after the horse has bolted, rather than adopting changed policies to ensure that society as a whole can be protected from similar incidents, without blaming and castigating the individual for having been ill. This is not only inhumane, but it is very costly. It is vastly inefficient in terms of the public expense. It is like the scenario where an electric pylon falls over. Instead of surveying all such similar pylons, they focus upon bolstering that one that fell down originally, over and over again. This is not logical, and is only the case because the medical professionals, who are the putative experts into the human mind, spend vast amounts of mental resources blaming, castigating, and judging, the individuals who happened to be so ill that they were not responsible at the time of their offence. Indeed, things could have been different. But I avoided seeking help because I was scared to do so, and because the voices told me that that would be suicide. Due to all my experiences, after two years of hallucinations, being non-grounded, I was suffering cognitive illusions: which are ways of thinking that convince us we are right when we are actually wrong. My social facts were out of kilter with what they had previously been, prior to the two years of hallucinations.

An ad hominem attack is where, instead of attacking the argument, we instead focus on attacking the arguer. In many ways I feel that this is the nature of a tribunal. I repeat that I am not allowed to present my own case, which is my prime motivation for presenting it to the wider public here in writing.

In relation as to whether or not there was an element of criminal culpability, you might say “Well, of course you’d say that: you stand to profit if it is true.”. That is correct; but there is a difference between not accepting a faulty authority who stands to gain, and rejecting an argument from a non-authority with a vested interest.

With regard to the potential misdiagnosis of autism which has been made about me, I am reminded of the words of Professor Hale who in Exploring the Roots of Religion says that in his opinion knowing exactly what you are looking for is a dangerous thing, because it makes you think that whatever you find you have discovered it. This scientific viewpoint was also shared by the late Professor Stephen Hawking, who said in his book A Brief History of Time, that in relation to a 1919 British expedition to West Africa, which showed that light was deflected by the sun, “Their measurement had been sheer luck, or a case of knowing the result they wanted to get, not an uncommon occurrence in science.”.

In the interests of selecting the best viewpoint -– to paraphrase Herodotus –- it is necessary that all views be heard.

In a tribunal in 2018, Dr. Barathy said that I don’t pick up on social cues, and that interventions need to be put in place because there has been no change of my views, and therefore I am not able to recognise my risk in the future, or recognise my autistic spectrum disorder, and this may lead to yet more external measures being put in place upon me. She said I externalise my role in my offence, and lack genuine remorse, and that all my remorse is superficial, in that I am only able to express that I never want it to happen again, and merely express regret about what the victim went through. Yet I spent years feeling so much remorse that I was beating myself up about it emotionally until a psychologist pointed out to me the difference between a cognitive analytical trap, and that of a snag. The gist of this was: the problem still remains, the past cannot be changed, it remains unaltered, and the process of beating-up on yourself does serve nobody, not least of all society, beneficial purpose. Indeed, it might become so problematic that it becomes a risk factor in itself. In fact, the viewpoint that I only superficially felt remorse was backed up by Nadia Burman -- who had been my primary nurse for about 18 months. She said that I would only express remorse in the context of doing so when prompted, and it was of the type such as “why did this event have to happen?”. Dr. Barathy referred to my limited progress. Yet I have in front of me a letter, dated 2016, which is signed by Nadia Burman, as an outcome for one of the twice-yearly review meetings which are held, in which Nadia states, “You are to continue looking at improving social interactions and understanding emotions in psychology work with Andrew Curran; you have made a lot of progress so far.”, and “It was decided that there is nothing outstanding for you to work towards prior to applying for unescorted leave.”. When this leave was taken from me after I had used in successfully for 16 months, I wrote to Dr. Barathy asking why. She said that they had more recently become aware of “further information relating to my offence” and she only revealed what this was in the tribunal. It was that the voices had told me that women were available in street -– effectively put their by angels –- if I would touch them without asking. I did not do this because the life-force instinct told me not to do so: i.e. it did not feel right at the time to do. And that is it. That is her additional grounds for which I pose a danger. Basically, because I drew a distinction in my mind, at that point of extreme psychosis, between this scenario and that of forcing a paid sex worker to whom I had gone to looking for consentual sex, that somehow this leads to “grievance thinking”, or “excessive sense of entitlement”. They have maintained these viewpoints by refusing to discuss life-force instinct, angel role play, or celestial viewers. They have also said that because I made this distinction in my mind then, therefore I must do so now. That is fallacious also. It lacks evidence, and has not been explored.

So prior to the tribunal, in one of the review meetings Dr. Barathy said to me (and I wrote this down) that:

• The only world you have the prospect of changing is your own world.

• The way in which you, and your life, is managed by authority will respond to the patient.

• You haven’t addressed issues. You probably don’t even know whether you have addressed issues.

• You don’t engage with issues.

• You don’t listen. You believe that you know better than others.

• You don’t recognise or accept that you might be wrong.

• According to what you do now, there will be different consequences which will depend upon what you do.

• You have shown one train of thought, which has not shifted when faced with evidence. You have not participated within normal discussion, or expressed normal opinions.

She also referred to my “developmental disorder”.

CODICIL

It is unlikely that I will have sufficient access to word processing and the internet in the future as a consequence of myself publishing this, to update this article; so I bid the world a farewell, and I am glad that some information got out of the black hole that is these restrictions that I live under.