Schizophrenia and Homosexuality: My Experience and Case Studies

39
1232

Robert Whitaker, in his book Mad in America, writes: “Little is known about what causes schizophrenia” (p. 291).  He is apparently unaware that a recurrent theory concerning the etiology of schizophrenia is almost as old as the word itself.  I am referring to the idea, first popularized by Sigmund Freud, that a frequent cause of schizophrenia is the repression of homosexuality.

In 1908, the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler coined the word “schizophrenia” and introduced it to the public in a lecture in Berlin.  Just three years later, Sigmund Freud started promoting the idea that schizophrenia is often caused by repressed homosexuality.  In 1911, Freud published his book The Schreber Case, in which he attributes the schizophrenic psychosis of the German judge Daniel Paul Schreber to his homosexual repression.  The purpose of the present article is to see how this theory, that homosexual repression is a frequent etiology of schizophrenia, has survived the test of time.

3D illustration of a green tree emerging from an unlocked prison-cell like door shaped like a head

By “homosexual repression” I refer to the conscious or unconscious choice of a homosexual not to engage in homosexual relations.  He may have homosexual desires, nocturnal homosexual erotic dreams, diurnal homosexual fantasies, homosexual urges and a homosexual identity and still choose to lead a celibate life or to live as a heterosexual.  Such a man is in a permanent state of trauma, since his superego wants him to be heterosexual while his libido insists that he is homosexual.  He is most often afraid that if people knew that he was homosexual, it would ruin his reputation, compromise his career, disgrace and dishonour his family and lead to permanent disaster.  Most people grow up in religions that condemn homosexuality.  The fear of having one’s homosexuality discovered creates paranoia.  This paranoia accentuates the trauma that one constantly feels and leads to a full-blown schizophrenic psychosis.

In today’s world, a psychotic homosexual would probably be taken to a mental hospital and given antipsychotic drugs with their devastating side effects.  It would be much more effective and certainly more compassionate if his psychiatrist recommended his visiting his closest gay bar, but I have never heard of this occurring.

According to Freud, all humans are basically bisexual.  If a young man suddenly notices that he has homosexual tendencies, it can lead to what is called “homosexual panic.”  Since everyone has both male and female characteristics, a stronger presence of feminine qualities in a man can provoke what is called bisexual confusion.  If this conflict is not resolved in a healthy way, psychosis can result.

I am interested in this subject because I was forced to undergo psychiatric conversion therapy at the age of sixteen.  This torture lasted two years.  It resulted in my becoming a schizophrenic and being hospitalized in mental hospitals for fifteen months.  During my confinement, I was convinced that the forced repression of my homosexuality was the true etiology of my schizophrenia.  I made it my life’s goal to prove to the world that psychiatrists can actually drive their patients insane, that there is never any justice for victims of psychiatric abuse, and that homosexual repression can indeed cause schizophrenia.

I began reading books about schizophrenia right after my first hallucination, in 1963, at the age of seventeen.  I am now seventy-eight years old, which means that I have been studying this subject for 61 years.  During my research I have discovered four famous schizophrenics whose mental illness I attribute to homosexual repression.  They are the German judge Daniel Paul Schreber (1842-1911), the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), the QuĂ©bec poet Émile Nelligan (1879-1941) and the American mathematician John Nash (1928-2015).  I have published articles about all four of them in the Journal of Literature and Art Studies.  They are available online.  I would now like to add a few words about each of them to shed new light on what I have already published.

All four of these men came from a religious, puritanical background, which made it especially hard for them to fulfill their homosexual desires.  For example, in his autobiography Memories of My Nervous Illness, the judge Daniel Paul Schreber says: “Few people have been brought up according to such strict moral principles as I, and have throughout life practiced such moderation especially in matters of sex, as I venture to claim for myself” (p. 249).  There is no reason to doubt his honesty when he makes it clear that the only person with whom he has ever had sexual relations was his wife, and at the time of writing his book he confides that it has been several years since they were physically intimate (p. 373).

Schreber had fantasies of being transformed into a woman.  He wanted to have a woman’s body so that he could make love with God and have children with Him.  But mostly he looked forward to the pleasure of playing the woman’s role during sexual intercourse.  He writes: “It really must be rather pleasant to be a woman succumbing to intercourse” (p. 46).  In his imagination, he confesses, he has “a pretty definite foretaste of female sexual enjoyment in intercourse” (p.239).

But because of his puritanical upbringing and his social status as a respectable judge he could never allow himself to have real homosexual experiences.  “Fancy a person who was a judge allowing himself to be fucked!” (p. 164), he exclaims.  The clash between vivid homosexual longings and the strict morals of his upbringing and profession caused his schizophrenia and provided the material for Freud’s theory of sexual repression being the principal cause of mental illness.

At the same time that Schreber was confined to a mental hospital in Sonnenstein, Germany, Friedrich Nietzsche was hospitalized in an asylum at Jena, 195 kilometers away.  They were both repressed homosexuals and schizophrenics.  They both resisted fulfilling their homosexual desires.  They were both driven insane by their bisexual confusion and homosexual panic.  They both came from strict puritanical, Protestant, bourgeois backgrounds.  They both had religious obsessions.  They were both worried about their reputations.

It should be remembered that at this period of time, homosexual acts between men were punishable by imprisonment in Germany.  (Paragraph 175 of the German law, which made homosexual acts illegal, was not annulled until 1994.) Thus, Sigmund Freud could ask: “Is it not an irresponsible slight, an indiscretion, and an act of calumny to accuse an ethically so elevated man as the retired Presiding Judge Schreber of homosexuality?” (p. 33 of The Schreber Case).  Freud answers his rhetorical question with a resounding “No,” simply because Schreber himself had revealed his homosexuality.

It is remarkable the number of books written about Nietzsche which do not dare even ask the question of his sexual orientation.  He never once had any sexual relationship with a woman.  German homosexuals of his generation often travelled to Italy for their adventures, since homosexuality was not illegal there.  Nietzsche made regular trips to Italy, and it was rumored that he contracted syphilis in a male brothel in Genoa.

Nietzsche and I have so many characteristics in common.  We both grew up in nineteenth century puritanical Protestant households.  (I say nineteenth century since my parents were born in 1903 near Boston and our home life was more Victorian than modern).  We were both linguists.  We both spoke German, French and Italian.  We were both at the University of Bonn, he as a student and I as a lecturer.  We both had religious obsessions.  We were both homosexuals.  We were both schizophrenics.  Despite all these similarities, I have never liked Nietzsche’s philosophy.  I am a non-Marxist socialist and he disapproved of socialism.  I am a pacifist and he glorified war.  I find some of his invectives against the Christian religion to be offensive or blasphemous.

Many Nietzsche fans were angry at me because of my article entitled “Friedrich Nietzsche’s Homosexuality and Schizophrenia.”  They assumed that I was trying to insult Nietzsche.  I was just trying to reveal to the world what I alone know about Nietzsche, knowledge that only a schizophrenic can possess.  They seem to underestimate the fact that Nietzsche spent the last eleven years of his life in a vegetative, schizophrenic stupor.  An entire book has been written about Nietzsche’s homosexuality: Zarathustras Geheimnis (Zarathustra’s Secret) by Joachim Köhler.  Sigmund Freud was the first person to make a public statement about Nietzsche’s homosexuality, which he did at a meeting in 1908 of the Viennese Psychoanalytical Society.  Nietzsche hoped to create a new religion, and his fans now treat him as a prophet.  They cannot imagine that a great religious leader could be either a homosexual or a schizophrenic, despite all the evidence.

Émile Nelligan, QuĂ©bec’s most famous poet, was hospitalized at the age of 20 in 1899 for schizophrenia.  His internment lasted until his death 42 years later.  His bisexual confusion went hand in hand with his bilingual confusion and his bicultural confusion.  For his father was an English-speaking Irish immigrant whereas his mother was a French-speaking Quebecker.  Much to the anger of his father, Nelligan very early in life showed a preference for his mother as opposed to his father and for his mother’s language, culture and country.  He wrote all his poetry in French.  There is some speculation that much of his poetry was actually written by his friend Louis Dantin, who chose to use Nelligan’s name in order to remain anonymous, but that is not the subject of our enquiry.  In the book Le NaufragĂ© du vaisseau d’or by Yvette Francoli, we learn that Dantin was a homosexual (p.210).  It is not impossible that he and Nelligan were lovers.  It was also rumored that Nelligan’s friend, the artist Charles Gill pulled Nelligan into alcohol abuse and debauchery.  People said that they had a homosexual relationship (p. 211).  The Catholic Church condemned Nelligan’s sexual orientation and his father condemned his preference for the French language and Quebec culture.  This was enough to drive the sensitive young man insane, creating one of the most tragic chapters of Quebec literary history.

The film A Beautiful Mind misrepresents the truth about John Nash’s schizophrenia by hiding his homosexuality.  It is based on the definitive biography of Nash by Sylvia Nasar with the same title, but unlike the book the film makes Nash seem to be a heterosexual.  His basic sexual orientation was homosexual and his occasional forays into the land of heterosexuality were unhappy ones and resulted from his bisexual confusion.  Nash had an important job working for the RAND Corporation, which had highly sensitive contracts with the United States Defense Department.  All employees were required to have a strict security clearance.  Anyone suspected of being homosexual was automatically excluded from working for RAND, since homosexuals were vulnerable to blackmail and thus represented a real security threat.  (My doctor in Washington, D.C., told me when I was fifteen years old: “You should not be a homosexual because homosexuals are a threat to national security when they work for the State Department”.)

In 1954, when Nash was working for RAND in Santa Monica, he went to a public men’s room at two o’clock in the morning looking for a homosexual adventure.  Unfortunately, the man whom he attempted to seduce was a disguised police officer who had been given the task of ridding the beaches of Santa Monica of homosexuals.  Nasar writes: “Nash was charged with ‘indecent exposure.’  That’s going into a public head and making a come-on to another man.  That means taking out your penis and masturbating.  That’s the come-on” (p. 186).

Nash was immediately fired from his job with RAND.  At this precise moment, he began a strict regime aiming to repress his homosexuality.   He married Alicia Larde in 1956 and abstained from all homosexual activity.  It was subsequent to his renunciation of homosexual activity that he fell into an acute paranoid schizophrenic psychosis and was hospitalized in various mental hospitals, starting in 1959 and lasting until 1969.  He was given strong antipsychotic medicine like Thorazine, which is no longer sold anywhere because of its devastating side effects.  He was forced to undergo insulin coma therapy, which he described as being “torture.”

In the film, Nash’s wife is portrayed as being his savior.  In reality, his psychosis did not start until he married her.  His deliberate attempt to repress his homosexuality was the true etiology of his schizophrenic psychosis.  The film was made for a naïve American audience.  Naïve Americans simply cannot believe that a good, brilliant man can be a homosexual.

In the year 2003 appeared a most fascinating book entitled Schizophrenia: The Bearded Lady Disease by J. Michael Mahoney.  The book’s goal is to provide evidence supporting Freud’s theory that homosexual repression, also called bisexual confusion, is the most frequent cause of schizophrenia.  Mahoney analyzes 639 quotations from scores of different schizophrenics, all of which portray the conflict and confusion resulting from the difficulties of accepting one’s bisexual nature.  Mahoney says: “All schizophrenics are basically ‘bearded ladies’ – persons who do not know at a deep unconscious level whether they are male or female” (p. 3).

All of the case studies in the book are fascinating to read.  They confirm both Freud’s theory about the cause of schizophrenia and my own personal experience of this illness.  Because of the attention recently brought to Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, by Luigi Mangione, it is appropriate to cite Maloney’s treatment of Kaczynski to show his approach to all his subjects.  Maloney writes: “Mr. Kaczynski actually went so far as to schedule an appointment with a psychiatrist to discuss his wishes to be transformed into a woman, but cancelled the appointment at the last minute.  It is obvious from his own words that Mr. Kaczynski was no longer able to repress his intense homosexual cravings and that they had now gained ascendency in their struggle with his heterosexual drives.  It is important to point out that it was not Mr. Kaczynski’s sexual feelings per se which caused him to develop paranoid schizophrenia, but the denial, or repression, of these powerful urges.  In and of themselves, they would cause no problems at all, but repressed, they literally drove him insane” (pp. 432-433).

Unfortunately, Maloney insists that all mental illness, including bipolar disorder and various neuroses as well as schizophrenia have their origin in bisexual confusion.  This, I believe, goes a little too far.  For example, there are myriad soldiers who become schizophrenic as a result of the traumas that they have undergone on the battlefield.  Their psychosis, once known as shell shock and now called post-traumatic stress disorder, has nothing to do with their sexual lives.

Recently, a psychiatrist said on CNN that Luigi Mangione was a schizophrenic.  He was thus falling into Kaczynski’s footsteps in more than one way.  They both had a Messiah complex, wanting to save the world with an apocalypse of their own design.  Mangione insists that his back pain prevents him from having intimate relations with women.  If Freud, Maloney and I are correct about the etiology of schizophrenia, the absence of women in Mangione’s life probably results from his bisexual confusion or homosexual repression.  There are countless women and men who would be willing to accommodate Mangione’s back pain during moments of intimacy.  He is extremely good-looking, highly educated and rich.  Why should back pain discourage suitors?

There is a very curious sentence in Sylvia Nasar’s book about Nash.  She refers to “Freud’s now-discredited theory linking schizophrenia to repressed homosexuality” (p. 259).  She does not say which psychiatrists discredit Freud’s theory or why they do so.  To me the answer is obvious.  If Freud, Maloney and I are right, then these psychiatrists are wrong.  To find a reason why they should want to discredit Freud, we need only look at the nature of present-day American capitalism.  If schizophrenia can indeed be caused by homosexual repression, then antipsychotic medicine is useless.  A trip to a gay bar would be more effective than all the pills in the world.

The psychiatrists in question want to uphold the pharmaceutical hoax based on the idea that mental illness results from a chemical imbalance in the brain.  When the public realizes that it has been duped once again by the big pharmaceutical companies, these companies will lose billions of dollars every year.  Robert Whitaker’s books reveal how these companies pay large sums of money to psychiatrists for them to write positive reviews of their medicine.  This is the real reason that some psychiatrists discredit Freud’s theory.  Maloney’s multiple examples and my own experience show that Freud was right.

***

Mad in America hosts blogs by a diverse group of writers. These posts are designed to serve as a public forum for a discussion—broadly speaking—of psychiatry and its treatments. The opinions expressed are the writers’ own.

39 COMMENTS

    • Sylvia Nash contradicts herself when she claims that Nash was not gay. On page 151 of her book, A Beautiful Mind, she says: “Milnot says now that Nash made a sexual overture toward him.” On page 43: “Nash climbed into Zweifel’s bed when the latter was sleeping and made a pass at him.” On page 310 we read, “Nash said, ‘I’m interested in getting the addresses of Jean Cocteau and AndrĂ© Gide. I have to write them letters’.” Cocteau and Gide were France’s most famous homosexual writers. Little did Nash know that they were already dead.

      Report comment

      • I think your unearthing the hidden homosexual histories of these men is fascinating and well worth including in cultural studies of how homosexusality is expressed and experienced through history. Your argument that religious fundamentalist believes contrasting with their homisexual desires is believable, after all Charles Darwin’s Christian father might well have abhorred the theory of evolution that Charles developed and that might be the Genesis of his life long illnesses as some theorise. Whether these conflicts on their own were sufficient to cause psychosis is something I question.

        Report comment

  1. This is dangerous and speculative nonsense which tries to find within the almost infinite influences on human consciousness and life one factor we can blame for the phenomena you call ‘schizophrenia’ without ANY facts about what this thing actually is. You are arguing that same sex attraction causes schizophrenia because of sexual repression, but sexual repression was far, far more severe in Victorian times for both men and women regardless of sexual preference then it is today yet the rates of what you call ‘scizophrenia’ were a mere FRACTION of what they are today – vanishingly rare. Now in our ‘sexually liberated’ society even DISABILITY due to mental health has gone up 5 fold in America since the first psychiatric drugs were released in 1957. So sexual repression certainly is not causing what you call schizophrenia in people attracted to the same sex, and these things would be easy to investigate if you actually were concerned to uncover the truth rather then display your non-factual clever arguments which can only benefit yourself and damage the cause on this website.

    So there is no legitimacy in theoretical speculation on a website devoted to an urgent human problem, and therefore concerned with the truth, the facts, the actual. You could as easily be arguing that being ‘black’, another concept invented by the white man and stamped on your forehead as who you are, causes schizophrenia because of the higher prevalence in Western black populations, or being poor. You don’t see all this because a prejudice has circumscribed and constrained your perception to see only the terrain relevant to your false theory which entirely lacks perception of the whole picture. Therefore you will damage the understanding and intelligence of people who read your article and many others on this website by introducing the noise of theoretical speculation the overwhelming majority of which ends up being refuted if you examine the history of speculative theories in the Western scientific and intellectual traditions. For example, there are multiple theories on the true nature of what you call scizophrenia and homosexuality and consciousness itself, so manifestly only a minority of them can be true, and therefore this speculative theoretical noise does damage people’s sense of reality by engendering socially conditioned prejudices and falsehoods into a mind already destroyed by a culture of psuedo-experts and conspiracy theories, and truth be told the above is rather like a conspiracy theory if you ask me.

    You introduce speculation and noise and try and explain one thing that science has no actual understanding of (the phenomena you call scizophrenia) by something else that science has not fully understood, which is sexual preference, but you are saying it is not same sex attraction per se but sexual repression. Obviously sexual repression was far more prevelant in the early 20th century but scizophrenia was far lower.

    Report comment

    • No-one, I agree with your refutation wholeheartedly.
      I furthermore object to the author’s characterization of post-traumatic stress syndromes resulting from harrowing combat or bombardment as “war schizophrenia” (previously termed “shell shock”). From from being a mental “disorder” necessitating psychotherapy or hospitalization, these states of distress are a totally understandable and natural response of a normal brain to unbearable conditions.
      Were the Allied flyers who experienced emotional collapse after being sent repeatedly on near-suicidal missions over Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II really suffering from a genuine illness?

      Report comment

      • Exactly. We must have learned this insight from being a perceptive human being because few so called ‘mental health professionals’ and academics seem to stumble upon it (proof that their training and education blinds and stupefies them eh). Shell shock – it’s a nice clear example, thank you.

        Report comment

      • I tend to use the word “schizophrenia” as being synonymous with the word “psychotic” unless there is an indication that the illness was bipolar. If an “emotional collapse” was not psychotic, then it obviously was not schizophrenic or bipolar. The German philosopher Paul Tillich was hospitalized twice during the First World War for shell shock, in 1916 and 1918. He himself described his psychosis as being schizophrenia.

        Report comment

    • The cases of homosexual repression and schizophrenia that I comment on were from the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. I agree that there is now less cause for sexual repression and that schizophrenia is more common in America now than before. However, my article was about Sigmund Freud’s theory that homosexual repression causes schizophrenia, as seen in the cases of Daniel Paul Schreber and Friedrich Nietzsche and others. If schizophrenia is on the rise in America today, it is because America is a very sick society. Its violence, cruelty, materialism, hatred and general confusion provoke all types of mental illness. I suggest that you learn the difference between “then” and “than” and the difference between “phenomenon” and “phenomena.”

      Report comment

      • It’s clear to me that you accept the stereotypical categories of bipolar disorder, psychosis, and schizophrenia (and presumably other forms of “mental illness”) as valid. I for my part (following Thomas Szasz, Jeffrey Schaler, Jeffrey Masson, and other incisive critics of this artificial construct) reject the very concept of mental illness, which I regard as a stigmatizing metaphor for certain patterns of thinking, feeling, and behavior that are proscribed and often punished in accordance with prevailing social norms that evolve over time.
        How, may I ask, was Paul Tillich able to determine that his supposed psychosis was a form of schizophrenia? Did he undergo medical testing to confirm the presence of faulty brain circuitry or a chemical imbalance? Did he use the criteria of Emil Kraepelin, the founder of now outdated hypotheses on the biological origin of schizophrenia and other psychiatric maladies? And what about the countless thousands of other combatants who have displayed similar behaviors (e.g. the two traumatized American soldiers who were slapped by General George Patton in World War II for being cowardly malingerers)? Unless you can cite objective, scientifically or medically verifiable criteria for confirming the existence and assessing the severity of the putative disorders you mentioned in your article, I fail to see any substantive merit in your argument.

        Report comment

        • You reject the very concept of mental illness. Thomas Szasz says that schizophrenia is just a word (p. 44 of his book Schizophrenia). I would like to ask you how you would describe the following events of my life, which all happened before I left America in 1968: running around naked shouting messages coming from God, like Isaiah in Jerusalem, visual hallucinations, voices, delusions of grandeur, mystical rapture, a persecution complex. I still have the razor blade scars on my wrist from a suicide attempt. Then there were fifteen months of incarceration in insane asylums, heavey doses of Thorazine and Stellazine, my parents being told that they should sell their house so that they could pay for my presumably life-long confinement. For you and for Szasz my schizophrenia was just a word and not a real mental illness. I assume that you are an American because so many Americans seem to be incapable of sympathy for those who have suffered. Your idea that mental illness is just an invention of evil psychiatrists reminds me of neo-Nazis who claim that the Holocaust never happened.

          Report comment

          • “I would like to ask you how you would describe the following events of my life, which all happened before I left America in 1968: running around naked shouting messages coming from God” – etc etc etc. Robert, you are interpreting it all according to your social conditioning by society, academia and psychiatry. Unlike you, not only did I undergo years of the non-ordinary experiences you call ‘psychosis’ (scizophrenia IS psychosis, but a term for the imaginary chronic brain disease which only becomes a chonic problem precisely because we don’t understand it even though we pretend to), and unlike you I began to observe, understand and go beyond it, and discover what it was all about. You can’t learn anything about the phenomena if you approach it through all the prejudices that you have, and being afraid of it you explode with fear and try to escape the appearances and this explains the chaotic expressions you describe. I learned that if instead of fearing it, calling it this or that (evil, psychosis etc), then without these mental reactions there is not the subsequent cascade of emotional and physical reactions which produce more mental reactions therefore an escalation and mega-crisis. I have had such crises but learned about them and overcame them. Mental health is ALWAYS constituted in a particular society and a particular social circumstance, and the correlations between social trauma (including familial etc) and mental illness is undeniable. But the only known terrain that the problem is known to occur is in consciousness, and the physical and emotional reactions to those happenings in consciousness. The brain cannot be the origin of these problems given there exponential explosion over the century so what Joel is saying is exactly right, and you can’t claim any kind of authority just because you went THROUGH the non-ordinary psychological phenomena you call ‘psychosis’ and hypostatize into a disease you call ‘schizophrenia’. There is as much truth in these concepts as there is in witchcraft, and that’s someone who didn’t just go through and mentally interpret the experience according to their social conditioning but someone who observed the non-ordinary phenomena and through years of observing and overcoming it, developing a true understanding of what was taking place. So I’m afraid the one and only thing that stopped a similar journey of understanding for you was your social conditioning by society and as an academic. I don’t expect anyone else to take my word for it but I just want to put my cards on the table here. See what confused human beings we are. Thank you Joel for taking up the cause of the truth with great references, although your own insight stands on it’s own for me without these references which serve only to those who are conditioned to believe only intellectual authorities have the answers. It would certainly be necessary to reference so called authorities for Mr Dole unfortunately because we can see he defers to them even on a critical psychiatry website.

            Report comment

          • I would describe your behaviour, “running around naked shouting messages coming from God, like Isaiah in Jerusalem, visual hallucinations, voices, delusions of grandeur, mystical rapture, a persecution complex,” and then the way people around you reacted. Personally I agree with others such as Mary Boyle that schizophrenia not a scientifically valid way of describing anything. I am still capable of offering sympathy for a time of great distress in your life.
            https://www.amazon.co.uk/Schizophrenia-Scientific-Delusion-Mary-Boyle/dp/0415227186

            Report comment

      • Just how do you know that “schizophrenia” is more common now than a century or more ago? Does this supposed increase in psychosis affect western societies alone, or does it occur in cultures throughout the world? If so, which ones and why? Can you cite any comprehensive anthropological, historical, sociological, or other data to corroborate your sweeping assertion?

        Report comment

          • How do you feel you have any standing in this debate if you don’t know the basics of the research on which the whole critical psychiatry movement and this website rests? See Robert Whittaker’s papers, YouTube lectures or books if you want to find it out, and all the historical and cross-cultural research is comprehensively and forensically set out by him in his excellent book Anatomy of an Epidemic. MIA, please – the quality of expertise in your contributors worry me and it’s highly damaging to try and tie schizophrenia to sexuality when obviously sexuality comes with additional social traumas, social trauma being the ubiquitous factor in mental health disorders.

            Report comment

      • “I suggest that you learn the difference between “then” and “than” and the difference between “phenomenon” and “phenomena.”” – I suggest you don’t make suggestions to me, but I will make one to you. I’m dyslexic, so get off my case. You judge me normatively here, jut like society judges skin colour and sexual preference. This is an indisputable fact. And it clearly has no substantial relevance to anything besides your desire to retaliate for giving a correct refutation of your speculative argument based on the intellectual authority of Freud which is nonsense and the prejudices of psychiatry and society which are also nonsense. So your theory, or the one you are ripping from Freud, has, I suggest, no factual content at all. This website is devoted to a critique of an industry that is damaging 1 billion human brains every day with drugs known to make long-term outcomes worse, and damage the other 7 billion brains with their psuedo-scientific theories, propaganda and labels, and sir, one of these damaged brains is your own, and just because you lack the insight to see this please don’t doubt that others can and will call you out for your ignorance. There is no need to shoot the messenger because you don’t attack my argument – you attack my spelling, so obviously that is a form of attempted punishment for contradicting your views. This shows you are not concerned with the truth but with promoting your views even in the face of correct and substantial criticism which you punish by way of insult.

        To correct this damage to your brain, I will furthermore suggest that you research the actual facts of scizophrenia, the actual state of the research, and then maybe, just maybe, you will have something true to say, and hopefully that is to concede that your theory is undemonstrable and indeed very doubtful indeed. Have a nice day.

        Report comment

  2. This is a very interesting hypothesis.

    Schreber’s autobiography is a must-read, grappling as he does so openly about his psychoses. He considered himself at times to be a man from the waist up and a woman from the waist down. These days we would call this non-binary, which isn’t necessarily equivalent to homosexuality. However, his experiences aren’t straightforward, and he struggles to make sense of them.

    Repressed sexuality is a problem broadly, so no reason to doubt it wouldn’t occur in a schizophrenic population. These days there are lots of hyper-masculine men, that spend a lot of time looking at themselves and each other, and who spend a peculiarly large amount of time expressing their moral panic about non-heterosexual sexuality and identity and some of them are undoubtedly in the closet. But is the strange obsessional reality-break of the “anti-woke” a kind of psychosis? It seems to meet the criteria. But is overlooked as it’s in step with the culture.

    That is, hetero-normative oppression continues to mess with peoples’ lives and minds.

    Report comment

  3. While I believe the lgbt community has higher rates of all kind of distress I do not think that is the only factor in the Genesis of psychosis. The people I know who are prone to psychosis, while gay, have suffered many slings and arrows of misfortune, mainly family violence and child sexual assault. Homophobia is merely the dark icing on the bitter cake of crippling psychological distress.

    Report comment

  4. Dr Dole,
    Here’s what science has taught us…
    Schizophrenia patients have low Folate, high homocysteine and low Betaine.

    Low Folate concentrations are associated with increased homocysteine and schizophrenia.

    In 2006 Muntjewerff demonstrated a 70% increase in the risk of schizophrenia for every 5 mM increase in homocysteine concentration and many studies since have corroborated it.

    High homocysteine is correlated with altered DNA methylation and it’s toxic to neurons.

    Low Betaine plasma concentrations have been demonstrated in patients with first episode schizophrenia and can cause high homocysteine (Betaine lowers homocysteine).

    There are high rates of MTHFR mutations in schizophrenia which cause low Folate and high homocysteine and can trigger psychosis genes.

    SSRIs and antipsychotics lower Folate and increase homocysteine.

    So based on that, perhaps it is the high homocysteine that’s partly to blame.

    Would you be willing to have an MTHFR test and homocysteine checked?

    Report comment

    • I do not believe anything that so-called scientists say about schizophrenia or other mental illnesses for several reasons. The first is their assumption that a mental illness is an illness of the body, or soma, while I believe that it is an illness of the soul, or psyche. Psychiatrists can change the chemicals in the body but there are no chemicals in the soul to change or replace. A psychiatrist who denies the reality of the psyche or soul is just as useless as a dentist who denies the existence of teeth. Since this website is called Mad in America, I assumed, falsely it seems, that participants here have read Robert Whitaker’s books Mad in America and Anatomy of an Epidemic, which document the horrors of the bad science that you cite.

      Report comment

      • You speak of “an illness of the soul, or psyche.” I contend that it’s misleading and harmful to employ medical terminology (e.g. pathology, disorder, illnesses) to describe various states of mind, unless we are dealing with patterns of thinking or behavior that have a clearly identifiable biological cause, such as dementia. This misappropriation of language gives rise to confusion and to the use of neurotoxins, ECT, and psychosurgery in “treating” metaphorical brain diseases.

        Report comment

          • Mr. Dole, you claim that living amidst high levels of violence has made Americans callous.
            I can immediately think of certain regions of the world, including the Middle East (Syria, Turkey, Iraq), South Asia (Afghanistan, India), Latin America (Venezuela, Mexico), and Africa (the two Sudanese states, Nigeria, South Africa), where interethnic tension, rape, and murder rates per capita are much worse . So, if I were to follow your logic, wouldn’t it be reasonable for me to assume that people in those countries would be far more callous than citizens of the U.S.?

            Report comment

        • Once again, more assertions on your part that lack any meaningful verifiable evidence. Each one could serve as a topic for a lengthy disquisition far beyond the scope of this comment section, so I will try to address some of your remarks as succinctly as possible.
          1. Yes, indeed, I am an American. Does my nationality automatically invalidate the points I tried to make? What sociological or other data can you cite to prove that American citizens are incapable of sympathy for people in distress? Are they less emphathetic than Brazilians, Australians, Slovenes, Vietnamese, Hungarians, Moroccans, the Inuit? Do Americans have a constitutional defect of some kind that accounts for their alleged callousness?
          2. I do feel great compassion for those who suffer emotional anguish, especially the countless millions of victims harmed and even prematurely killed by neurotoxins and other brain-disabling psychiatric treatments. You might want to read some of Dr. Peter Breggin’s books and articles if you require detailed information regarding this particular subject.
          3. As for the question of how one should properly characterize the various events that occurred in your life (obsessive suicidal thoughts, self-mutilation, hallucinations, voices, rapturous visions, etc.), any interpretation is necessarily context-dependent. So-called mental health professionals adhering to the reductionist, biologically oriented western model will no doubt diagnose them as “symptoms” of psychosis, schizophrenia, or similar hypothetical illness affecting the brain. Will such a diagnosis hold true for medieval flagellants, Shia Muslims who cut and whip themselves bloody in annual rituals, early Christian hermits who mortified their flesh, sat on pillars, or lived in caves, Indian yogis who lie on a bed of nails, Jain mendicants who starve themselves to death in order to escape the eternal cycle of reincarnation and karma, or shamans who undergo long, painful, arduous ceremonies to achieve supernatural powers and insights? Were Isaiah and other Old Testament prophets, or Jesus, who claimed to be the Son of God, all deranged megalomaniacs?
          4. Lastly, with respect to your invidious comparison of Szasz’s rejection of the concept of mental illness with Holocaust denial, your logic is faulty. There is abundant documentation and eyewitness testimony corroborating the Third Reich’s extermination policy towards Jews, Roma, and disabled individuals; I’m not aware of any credible findings of biological markers for the hundreds of purely hypothetical disorders listed in the DSM.

          Report comment

          • Mr. Stern, Violence always begets more violence and violence always makes people callous and vengeful, no matter in what country the violence occurs. Not one of the nations you mention, however, has a Second Amendment, and not one of them has killed millions of civilians in wars at the other end of the world.

            Report comment

          • Mr. Dole, this discussion about national propensities for violence is taking us far afield of the original topic: your groundless claim that so-called schizophrenia is an “illness of the soul,” which I consider a totally absurd concept fraught with harmful consequences for people who are arbitrarily diagnosed with this psychiatric disorder.
            I will therefore end this verbal jousting by reiterating that you have failed to prove your original point that Americans are MORE callous and LESS emphatic than other peoples. I suggest that you acquaint yourself with the well-documented history of the large-scale genocidal massacres perpetrated, inter alia, in Cambodia, the Soviet Union, Uganda and Rwanda, Maoist China against Tibet, and during the bloody conflicts Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh waged intermittently between 1947 and 1971. Perhaps if the civilian populations in these countries had had their own version of the Second Amendment giving them the right to bear arms in defense of their freedoms and lives, at least some of these atrocities might have been prevented.
            Lastly, in regard to violent actions committed overseas that you seem to lay exclusively at the door of Americans, I suggest that you read up on the Italian campaign against Ethiopia in 1935-36 (in which poison gas was used), the German genocide of the Herrero in Africa in 1904-5, and the total extirpation of aborigines in Tasmania by British colonial settlers in the nineteenth century, not to mention the wholesale murder and enslavement of millions of Congolese natives by Belgian mine owners before the First World War. I should think these few random examples should be sufficient to demolish your argument.

            Report comment

      • But you rigidly claim that scizophrenia is a real disease – you did so earlier in your comments, and that is a non-factual assertion by psychiatry, so you DO believe the lies of psychiatry and you can’t even see that. Sorry mate but you’ve strayed well out of your depth here, venturing into the field you think of as mental health with destructive consequences because I am certain that homosexuality per se doesn’t cause psychosis: it is the attached trauma, and the trauma of discovering, comming to terms with, disclosing to loved ones and friends and others and facing the judgement and discrimination etc is traumatizing, as is facing a gay culture that is excessively party based, sexually oriented. I have had experience of it and live in the ‘gay capital of Europe’ (Brighton): I’m not what you call ‘heterosexual’ and I say here and in most cities sex is way too much like a drug, and the party, sexual, superficial ‘gay culture’ (which is kind of apartide too) generates long term unhappiness in a lot of gay people and there are much higher adult rates of addiction. None of this is caused by one’s sexual preference: it is the product of our social conditioning, including by socially constructed identities, and our social experience, and social trauma, and wrong beliefs, such as the idea that partying and clubs and saunas and sex can ever lead to real happiness. Please don’t censor my genuine experience. People never talk about this stuff but it’s the damn truth. And for me people are human beings, not who they want to f*ck or their skin colour, and as human beings they need the whole of society, not to be separated into exclusive gay cultures and gay scenes. Appartide is not integration or freedom and in most countries the non-integration of immigrants is made into a huge problem. I want to suggest that being estranged from your community in this way is incompatable with true emotional wellbeing. A community based on sexuality is, at the end of the day, a community based on sex, because that’s the only fundamental difference between gay and straight people. I would like to see much less single unhappy gay men as well, because this is what a superficial sex-oriented culture does – basically withdraw interest and affection once you’re past it. These points are why I’m afraid I was rather appalled when you recommended going to a gay club might be a solution to schizophrenia. Such rubbish. I’ve only been traumatised or else way too drunk at gay clubs and that is the truth.

        Report comment

      • But you don’t seem to have read Whitakers book yourself, or if you did, you failed to grasp it’s implications which is yet a further indication that this is poorly researched, speculative nonsense. I say there is no relationship between homosexuality and what you call scizophrenia besides that mediated by social trauma, hence also black and Hispanic and poor people also have higher rates. Are ou going to say that being black causes scizophrenia too, and not the normative, destructive society? Obviously not, because racism is entirely based on our Western social conditioning and social environment.

        Implicitly I feel that your argument linking schizophrenia and homosexuality must, if it has any rational coherence at all, be based on an implicit and possibly even unconscious assumption that the two cause each other on the biological level, because if the two were causally related, on what level would this causal connection take place besides in the biology or neurology? If you say mind, what is mind? Do you mean consciousness? So how does being gay generate psychosis in consciousness? So I feel it must be a material (hence biological or neurological) connection, and this is drinking the koolaid of the biomedical model of psychiatry. Or perhaps you can’t even say on what level the causal connection coud take place, which would be a shocking thing for you not to consider. So spell it out – on what level, or through what possible mechanism, could this causal connection be active? I am absolutely certain you will not answer this question, because it is unanswerable unless it’s through a preposterous or skirting, evasive answer. MIA – please do see the seriousness of this problem which effects to some extent most contributions to this website. Sure it’s far more general then this but see the Centre for Evidenced Based Psychiatry website which is far more rigorous about facts but has less articles and news and other coverage. It is possible to do better but more difficult in America for obvious reasons.

        So again by saying you don’t believe any of the science around so called mental illness you demonstrate your lack of self-insight, and it is this lack of self insight that prevents you seeing all the contradictions you are saying. But others can see these contradictions and point them out to you. You are arguing yet not really with facts if you notice, but rather with subtle attacks or attempts to side step the criticism, both of which you did in your response to my comment. MIA – PLEASE. You’ve seen your media turn into conspiracy theories – don’t let this website succumb to a similar impoverishment in terms of truth content, which compared to Robert Whittaker’s work it clearly has.

        And please don’t criticize the spelling here because given I’m dyslexic, that’s rather like ridiculing a psychotic for being delusional isn’t it, or like criticizing a gay person for coming across as gay. I’m liable to make more mistakes responding to you because I am not going to invest a great more time and energy into writing this then I need to, and I only need to write this in the first place because of all the problems which I outlined and which you’ve given know substantial response to.

        Report comment

  5. “It would be much more effective and certainly more compassionate if his psychiatrist recommended his visiting his closest gay bar, but I have never heard of this occurring.”

    I introduced my gay son to the only gay bar owner in his city, by having him watch him in a play, and we happened to be friends with him. So I can agree with your recommendation for how to help a gay child feel comfortable in his own skin … but I will say I left my former psychiatrist, because I’d been handed over the medical proof of the abuse of my beloved child at a deplorably young age, and my former psychiatrist, and a former misdiagnosing psychologist and subsequent non-clinical psychologist, all thought my now multiple award winning child, should have been, and now should be, psych neurotoxic poisoned forever.

    Obviously, I don’t stand in support of the psychological and psychiatric industries’ neurotoxic poisoners, their by DSM design systemic child abuse covering up system.

    https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/your-child-does-not-have-bipolar-disorder/201402/dsm-5-and-child-neglect-and-abuse-1

    And I most definitely don’t stand in support of their bad advise to mothers of child abuse survivors, who end up gay or trans children.

    Report comment

    • Homosexuality is associated with higher rates of trauma, obviously, both social, psychological and emotional, so an association between homosexuality and scizophrenia is OBVIOUSLY mediated by this trauma. Otherwise why being attracted to the same sex be a cause of scizophrenia when the sexual repression of contemporary gay people is so much less then in Victorian period and early 20th century? Scizophrenia, as it is called, was vanishingly rare then (see Robert Whittaker’s paper or book both entitled ‘anatomy of an epidemic’: the paper is much briefer but contains the main points, and he has innumerable excellent lectures and talks too on YouTube).

      Report comment

  6. I’ll paraphrase what I said in a previous comment, but should have said it in the first place here, and this is the bottom line that PROVES Dole’s argument is pure speculation, and also add a summery of the refutation of his argument which I think is undeniably true….

    1. Homosexuality is associated with higher rates of trauma, obviously, both social, psychological and emotional, so an association between homosexuality and scizophrenia can OBVIOUSLY be mediated by this trauma.

    2. The mechanism by which he tries to explain the association between homosexuality and schizophrenia is repression, but far more repressive societies then ours such as in the strict Muslim countries or in the Victorian period and early twentieth century had far lower levels then we have today, and I’m talking about disability due to mental health (see Robert Whittaker, Anatomy of an Epidemic).

    Can Robert Dole possibly refute these points? If he tries to he will prove his own ignorance. Prove me wrong.

    Report comment

    • Hi No-one,
      Thank you for your comments and trying to create inclusivity when we disagree.
      I agree with most of your rebuttals but I want to comment on this particular one.

      One of the many factors behind why most Muslim countries do not associate schizophrenia with homosexuality is that Islamic teachings emphasize a clear distinction between belief (intuition) and knowledge (reason/emotion). Religion is based on belief, while knowledge pertains to reality. Because of this distinction, mental illness is perceived differently.

      Schizophrenia, in this framework, would be classified as an issue of belief rather than knowledge. This distinction is significant in these cultures because it allows for structured ways to manage this type distress—through prayer (multiple times a day), meditation (silence), fasting, or communal rituals (where the body is moved certain way while crying or screaming or expulsing —providing a conscious release of tension while being supported by the community. The whole group acts similar manner to normalize the behaviour.

      IMHO, this does not mean that schizophrenia does not exist, but as I suggested earlier, it may be more related to the repression of instinct rather than ideas about sexuality only. This has been my my personal observations.

      Report comment

  7. This is quite an intense article and discussion, but I’d like to make a couple of points. I think it’s important to develop an awareness of perspective-taking. For example, as someone mentioned, yelling, screaming, and being naked are not inherently “mental illness”. If a person is under extreme stress, they may engage in these behaviors without seeing them as signs of mental illness—after all, an intense experience naturally elicits intense behaviors. Otherwise, it would be no different from everyday stress. However, society perceives such actions as indicators of mental instability.

    If a person is running around naked and crying alone, they might not inherently interpret this as a mental health issue unless they have internalized society’s view that such behavior is abnormal. In other words, their understanding of mental illness is shaped by their awareness of how society judges them. But let’s consider someone who has not internalized these societal judgments. If they are alone, naked, and highly distressed in their own home, they might not see themselves as experiencing psychosis but rather as undergoing an intense personal stress state or even a euphoric state—such as those positively observed in psychosis-like states induced by extreme meditation, dancing, or rituals.

    However, if they are aware of how others would judge them, they might adopt society’s perspective and label their experience as psychosis or schizophrenia. The safety of one’s environment is paramount in interpreting schizophrenia. Even if a person is physically alone, the presence of society lingers in their mind as part of their superego, shaping their self-perception. This raises an important question: if someone identifies as being in a particular state (e.g., “schizophrenic”), how do they define that state when they are functioning differently? What does it mean to be “schizophrenic” one day and not the next? If one cannot articulate this transition, it becomes difficult to understand what is happening internally. Are they always “schizophrenic,” even if they do not outwardly appear as such? What defines their identity when they feel outside of themselves?

    In an example, consider an individual who is highly aware of their internalized societal judgments. During times of extreme stress, rather than reacting outwardly, they retreat into a more somatic state, focusing on bodily sensations rather than external perceptions. If they are in a secure and private environment, they may experience this state without immediate consequences, allowing them to process their stress without external interference. However, if placed in an unsafe or socially scrutinized setting, the same behavior—disengagement from external reality—could be perceived as dysfunctional or even dangerous, potentially leading to negative consequences such as social isolation, misinterpretation as a mental health crisis, or intervention from authorities. This highlights how environmental context plays a critical role in shaping the interpretation and impact of an individual’s coping mechanisms.

    Reading these discussions, it seems possible that “schizophrenia” is linked to multiple deeper issues, potentially including conflicts around sexuality—but perhaps even deeper, extending to gender or the soma itself. This raises the question of whether the body is inherently medical at all functions or if it is truly in need of external chemical intervention. However, I believe the core issue is neither sexuality nor gender, but instinct.

    A closer reading of Judge Schreber’s writings may support what we now describe as transgender or non-binary identities (as another commenter noted), rather than necessarily being about homosexuality (transgender was much deeper repression than homosexuality during Freud).

    Our language is structured around binary gender norms, primarily for heteronormative and reproductive purposes. The tension between gendered language, instinct, and reality—especially within society—can create cognitive dissonance, potentially leading to what some might describe as a psychological break or schizophrenia or bipolar etc. In my opinion, it would benefit humanity to explore, in more literal and concrete terms, the “how” so-called “schizophrenic” compensates for not being “schizophrenic” without medication – that level of depth is missing study!

    Moreover, we often suppress instinct in favor of rationality and emotion. However, feelings and logic without instinct can create a kind of spiritual disconnection that might manifest as psychosis. Instinct is our primary, animalistic response—it comes first, followed by emotion or affect, then logic. But in different states of functioning, this order can shift; sometimes, we process logic and emotion first before reconnecting with instinct.

    Take, for example, encountering a snake. Instinctively, you react with fear or some other safety maneuver, such as muscle mobilization. However, modern society might reframe this response as a matter of perception—implying that your interpretation of the snake is more significant than its actual presence. This kind of framing can contribute to a broader disconnection between individuals, society, and reality itself. Anxiety is often framed this way—it’s not about what is happening in society, but about “your” take on it. While this may be true in some cases, psychiatric language frequently uses this framing in a way that can obscure genuine external realities.

    It’s akin to convincing a black American person or a woman that society is safe all the time when their lived experience tells them otherwise. This psychological and bodily contradiction can create a form of double consciousness (W.E.B. Du Bois), where one is forced to reconcile conflicting realities—how they perceive the world versus how society insists they should perceive it. For those who are too young to navigate this tension, or who exist in a culture that fails to acknowledge the full spectrum of individual and collective experiences, this dissonance can become overwhelming. In vulnerable individuals, it may even lead to a psychological break or a so-called “schizophrenic” state. It seems everybody’s experience speaks to a part of the whole and disagreeing may be what is holding us back rather than moving us forward to find the common ground of understanding!

    Overall, I find this article and its comments to be an important and thought-provoking discussion. Encouraging open dialogue rather than attacking others is crucial. Expanding the conversation allows us to see beyond our own perspectives and understand how others experience reality differently. What is true for one person may be entirely different for another.

    Report comment

LEAVE A REPLY