A Need for Providers who Specialize in “Psychosis.”

This story is for the mental health providers or peer counselors who are invested in developing treatment for people who have experienced “psychosis” across diagnostic categories. I know firsthand that this can be achieved. I want to help other interested parties develop their own practice so that an important need gets addressed.

Maybe the reader can relate to me! I was hired straight out of college into work in the counseling field. I started to work with an adult mental health population at my second job at the age of twenty-three. Since that time I have been increasingly focused on how to make therapeutic engagement meaningful when working with people in “psychosis.” In the field there are many who will say or imply this is not possible. They may argue that the mental health system is the best we can do.

I believe uniquely talented specialists are needed primarily because the mental health system fails so many people. We need outreach specialists with lived experience who can meet sufferers wherever they are at to encourage them to seek out therapy specialists, competent in group and individual practice. The more people with lived experience the better! Even better we need a system of self-support to sustain people outside the system, like the hearing voices network.

 

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Special Messages Excerpt: Self-Exploration through Causation2

Following up from my last post that featured political causation ideas, this post features examples of some spiritual causation ideas that I frequently use to understand some of my current message experiences. These  last two posts are from my second to last chapter which documents psychological, trauma, and scientific causation explanations in addition to the political and spiritual explanations I am including. I assert in the chapter my belief that the more causation understandings that a message receiver has at their disposal, the more they are able to establish or maintain the flexibility that is required to break out of a message crisis or “psychosis” episode. As I describe below, key to being able to break out of an episode is a willingness to leave causation up to god, and choose the causation explanation that enables you to function with the least amount of distress.

Ultimately there are more causation arguments than I could possibly identify and the more we listen and learn to new explanations for unique individuals, I’d argue the better off we will be.

 

Detailed Spiritual Causation Examples: Continue reading “Special Messages Excerpt: Self-Exploration through Causation2”

Ode to Self-Discovery

To hell with the insipid emptiness

That keeps good people ineptly drowned!

Gaze into the perplexed distress and bless

The self that is so often shackle bound!

This is my pledge to the introspection

That so often is betrayed or unknown

Or left to rot in the gutter of dread

And then scavenged for the insurrection.

Together we starve and wither alone

Our thirst being a statement left unsaid.

 

There is numbness that grasps the bone

Which is surrounded by layer upon layer

Of prickle that persistently drones

Out experiences that do conjure

Recurrent traumas of spirits within.

Like swollen flesh, nothingness throbs

Throughout enduring routine of day

Expanding its reign under your skin

Until your inner turmoil sobs

Containing misery you cannot delay.

 

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Special Messages Excerpt: Self-Exploration through Causation

This excerpt is going to operate with the contention that there are five causes of “psychosis”: political, psychological, scientific, trauma, and spiritual. In the chapter I have written, I extensively review differing types of causal arguments that can arise within each causation style. Clearly in the chapter, there is some cross over as science mixes with trauma and politics etcetera. In the chapter, I post ideas that I clearly disagree with and that are not for me. I do so because I have nine years of experience listening to the causal arguments of other people and I respect that other causal arguments may be true for other people. Indeed help comes in different forms for different people. In the chapter, the intention is that as the reader reads through these causation examples, they may relate to some new causal explanation they haven’t thought of. I believe that increasing the number of causal arguments that you have gives you more power to be resilient and flexible when you face threatening or distressing messages as you go through life.

But here, in the excerpt below, I am just going to share three political causation ideas I have heard over the years. This is the theory style that I was most stuck on when I was in crisis. Though thinking this way was toxic for me at the time, in recovery I can reflect on ways that some of my special messages were in fact political in nature. I personally was able to dig myself out of crisis when I shifted to the spiritual causation theory style, a style that causes some to get stuck and marginalized. In the chapter, I legitimize these two causation theories in addition to thoroughly exploring the other legitimate theory styles, psychological, trauma, and scientific.

 

Detailed Political Causation Examples: Continue reading “Special Messages Excerpt: Self-Exploration through Causation”

Five Steps that Leaders Might Consider to Keep Groups that Focus on “Psychosis” Inclusive:

I believe with fervor that having survivor-led mad group therapy available to the public can greatly reduce the suffering that people who experience “psychosis,” or what I prefer to call special message crisis, go through. Over the last nine years I have been leading mad-focused groups in multicultural settings mostly in, (but sometimes outside,) the system. I have found not only that they can be run safely, but that they can have the power to transform lives. However, I do feel motivated to assert that when it comes to kicking people out of group to maintain group equilibrium and safety that I believe there are five steps leaders need to be prepared to make first.

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Dining Room Discourse

Come travel the depths of this lonely night

Where knotted roots grope for a morsel

Amid the pale faces of flesh undressed

Whose pathways are smitten with pools of blood

That had once been pumped by a vital heart

Now lay stagnant, solitary tear drops.

“Besides,” she says: head bowing, smile sly,

“My boyfriend would really hurt you if he

Found out I was going to leave him for you.”

And suddenly I am flushed through the vein

Into cavern where the vultures might digest

The grim reality we all might call truth.

Outside I dine in tavern with maiden,

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Excerpt from Special Messages Book, Chapter Seventeen, Anti-Stigma Cognition for Social Rehabilitation

Philosophy of Reality that Promotes Anti-Stigma Cognition:

In order to sell the good parts of cognitive therapy as a tool for social rehabilitation, I have had to create an underlying philosophy about what reality is. This is a model that can come up at various points in individual and group therapy as a means of motivating a message receiver toward using the material world to fact check their spiritual insights.

In this model, I consider reality to be a dialectic between the spiritual message world and the material modern world. The spiritual message world involves all the message experiences that I took pains to identify in chapter four and throughout the text. In short, this includes things like ESP (i.e. reading minds,) hallucinations (i.e. hearing voices) and intuited reality discerned through things like coded linguistic coincidence and loosely associated coded symbols that inhabit a real or imagined world. The spiritual message world is very much in the subjective perspective of an individual consciousness.

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Writing for Mental Health: Six Basic Considerations

I like to think that I could recommend writing to some other people who have been subjected to a diagnostic labeling process that diminishes their hopes and potential. Indeed as emotional tension pulses through my back and appendages, I have found few other outlets that are there for me like the mixing and mastering letters.

Sure, I have been sent to a shrink for being who I am. Sure, I have been buried in institutions at different points of my life. Indeed life on that trajectory has filled me with loss and lack. But when I’ve found myself incarcerated immobile, I’ve been blessed to find value in defining it. Initially as a teen, I found  appreciating expressive words through music got me started. The more I switched from song to verse to story, I found the problem-solving that takes place in the editing process satisfying. Indeed for me there are few other outlets that rival writing in terms of learning about life and wellness.

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A Vacation Day for a Schizophrenic:

Fifteen years ago, I remember hearing a psychiatrist who had just been away for two weeks say, “There is no such thing as a vacation when you are schizophrenic!” As an unlicensed professional vying to get a staff position on the unit, I had carefully avoided rolling my eyes. I had politely nodded my head as though it had been a thoughtful thing to say.

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This year’s weekend of April 1st, my wife supports me in insisting that we take a vacation day. She packs up her hybrid SUV with camping materials and when I finish my Friday commute, we hit the interstate headed north. We plan to camp and hike at the Kings Range on the Lost Coast in Humboldt County, but we know even before we sift through the remains of the Bay Area traffic, there’s no way we are going to make it the whole way.

We make it to the city of Ukiah and drive until we find a Safeway. I am about ready to drop as we load our shit into the front of the car and depart to hit the restroom. We pass the panhandlers and the no camping sign and I start to stress about the possibility that the security will force us to move on in the middle of the night.

“Don’t worry about it my boobie,” says my wife.

I look into the eyes of a particular panhandler and hate our privilege. There sure are a significant amount of late night shoppers who are finishing their long weeks. I ponder the meaning of it all over the urinal. After we regroup, we steal into the back of the SUV.

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