I’ve been re-watching Patrick McGoohan’s classic ‘The Prisoner’ TV series again on YouTube. It was one of my favorite shows as a child. In the series, McGoohan’s character was a British spy who had for an unknown reason resigned suddenly, and then quickly found himself imprisoned in ‘the Village’, where all the inhabitants were known only by a number – McGoohan was ‘Number 6’.

In every episode, the controllers of the Village, led by ‘number 2’ (played by a different actor each week), attempted to play mind tricks on number 6 in order to break him and get him to reveal why he resigned. One of the cleverest episodes is ‘The Schizoid Man’, in which Number 6 is subjected to extreme and elaborate gaslighting which leads him to doubt his very identity. Using behavioral science techniques, his warders succeed in making him believe that he is a look-a-like of number 6, sent by his spy bosses to gaslight the real number 6 (who is, in fact, the fake number 6 gaslighting HIM) into doubting his own identity.

Patrick McGoohan was a classic, unflappable, stiff upper lip British actor of that bygone period. The Prisoner series was a sort of follow up to ‘Danger Man’, a popular spy series of the early 1960’s in which Patrick McGoohan played the lead role. I believe McGoohan, one of the finest actors of his generation (none other than Stanley Kubrick was of that opinion) was also offered the role of James Bond before Roger Moore took the part.

Yet despite being the epitome of the unbreakable British secret agent, Number 6 often does break down under the gaslighting he is subjected to throughout the series, although he is never broken completely.

It appears that the Met police and their colleagues in over a dozen European countries have, for the last 13 years or more, been pointing me out to thousands of security guards, as well as members of the public (or the security guards in turn point me out to them). Every one of those security guards (and members of the public) has been encouraged to mock me for ‘not liking to be looked at’. It has never been admitted to me that this is happening to me, and in fact it has been denied dozens of times. I have substantial video evidence now that they have done this (and are still doing it). They have done this in the knowledge that I have in the past suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. In fact, they have clearly done this because I have suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, and because they know it will cause me extreme psychological suffering, probably to the point of killing me or causing me to lose my mind completely. Some of these bent psychopathic sadists will eventually go to prison for life for this, under the Criminal Justice Act of 1988 which explicitly makes psychological torture an offence carrying a life term when committed by a member of the police.

And yet despite what I’ve been subjected to for nearly a decade and a half, despite the toll it’s taken on both my physical and mental health, I’m still here. I’m calmly typing this on my computer. I’m independent. I’m functioning. Sometimes, quite rarely, I almost lose it and cause a scene. I demand to see the manager of, for example, my local Marks & Spencers. I articulate my complaint to him, and he nods his head patronizingly, and reassures me in front of members of the public that the security guard, who always makes a point of standing watching me when I am checking out my items, and then walks off as soon as I’ve finished, just like hundreds of other security guards in the UK and Europe, is ‘not looking at me’. Other shoppers look over at me with a mixture of pity, contempt, and fear, thinking that I’m just another sad ‘nutter’.

In fact I’m confident that 90% of the population couldn’t have handled what I’ve been put through for over a decade. I’m doubly confident that 99.99% of male schizophrenics would not have handled what I’ve been put through as well as I have – to put it mildly. Most wouldn’t have handled it for more than a couple of weeks, let alone 13 or 14 years as I have. Even ‘The Prisoner’ could not have handled the gaslighting I have suffered, as well as I have. Even if by some technicality which meant that what the police have done is in fact legal, despite psychological torture being explicitly and clearly illegal in the UK, then the top police chiefs involved need to at the very least lose their jobs for so obviously endangering the public.