Hello, my Name is Tim Dreby. I am a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, and I have been working at Highland Hospital Outpatient Psychiatric Unit since 2002 approximately 24 years.  I think back to so many stories of oppression and suffering that I have witnessed in our clinic. These are gut-wrenching stories. Stories I have never had the sense that the public see or understand. It is a place where people process years of shelters, board and care homes, hospitals, homelessness, jails, family struggle, alienation, and exclusion. Many of these are stories complicated by abuse and neglect, by extreme experiences and by isolation. In the clinic, we transform this into powerful subcultural stories of endurance and community resilience.

The thought of closure is so concerning. I understand that many day clinics in Alameda County will be shut down at the end of this fiscal year. I wonder what is going to happen these stories I speak of without safe spaces. In the current climate, does our local government really want to fold to federal policies of mass deportation and psychiatric incarceration? That’s what these layoffs are doing, paving the way for federal agents targeting vulnerable people for incarceration and warehousing. We are in stage one now and we are being set up for stage two and beyond. Where will our clients go and how will they survive? In and out of psych ER is a cycle of abuse that is hard to come back from. It’s hard to understand unless you’ve experienced it yourself.

The post My Speech to the Alameda County Board of Supervisors Against Closing Highland Outapatient Psychiatric Program appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

This is a last call to join the 2026 Journey Through Madness Workshop, which meets monthly the first Sunday of each month for ten sessions. The workshop is designed to introduce a new eight part definition of psychosis that gives participants a better understanding of what psychosis feel like inside and that highlights ways to work with it that involve sharing stories and becoming more aware of what we experience and felible in how we interpret what we experience.

I have created the workshop along side running professional groups over the past eighteen years that went toward experiences associated with psychosis and that emphasized story-telling and problem solving. I performed the workshop in 2024 online and had a strong group that gave me feedback and engaged in discussion points, videos and excercises aimed at helping sufferers be more comfortable with going down the rabbit hole with support and gain direction on working toward social rehabilitation.

I currently have 10 guests signed up to take the course. Please don’t let cost be a factor. I grant scholarships very easily. Simply contact me at my email tim@specialmessages7.com and make the request and I will answer questions and make sure the workshop is a good fit. You will join a mix of providers, loved ones, peer suporters, and people with lived experience. We will explore the material in community using the expertise of all involved. There is still space for more participants so do not hesitate to learn and weigh in on this important subject.

If you can easily afford the suggested donation of 200$ or want to learn more information about the content and what others who have taken the course have said, simply click the link below:

Sign up for the 2026 Journey Though Madness Workshop

The post Journey Through Madness Workshop in 2026: Last Chance to Join appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

Are you, as a therapist, family member or case worker, feeling stuck in your relationships with people who have extreme experiences of psychosis? Maybe it feels hard to envision a world of recovery activities and you are wondering if distant, passive, and impoverished relationships are as good as it gets.  Maybe it seems like the only help you can provide is to ask them if they took their medication.

Or maybe you struggled with these challenges yourself and would like to help other people join you in better healing from these challenges. Maybe you don’t feel safe talking about what happened and mask your personality because you don’t want to go back to problems that can be monumental and scary.

If you are in either of these two categories, I have created a twenty-hour training workshop that aims to help achieve better outreach to people in extreme experiences of psychosis. This community-oriented workshop is built to help you feel comfortable exploring the contents of what has been experienced in a psychosis with a road map of healing suggestions so you can join people on their journey and help them be more flexible in how they make meaning of their experiences and work towards recovery.

What people go through in psychosis can be scary and overwhelming or joyous yet destructive; regardless, a lot can be learned from studying these experiences and there still is the chance for relationships to flourish when sharing happens. To demonstrate the value of this, I share several of my stories and there is opportunity for others to share as well.

I am currently recruiting participants to attend ten two-hour training sessions in 2026 from 4-6pm the first Sunday of the month. In 2024 I completed said training and disbanded a troop of supporters who I will invite back.  It was hard to give up that community.  I have missed the camaraderie and connection I experienced over the ten-session year. I hope you will consider joining me for 2026.

Working with people who experience what I prefer to term as special message crisis can be challenging. Often people suffering may hold you at an arms distance and refuse to share the contents of what they are experiencing with you. I find that reviewing components of the training helps keep me hopeful and creative in my work. When I am not working on the contents of this training, it is easy to feel stuck and hopeless.

I am aware that I may be competing against CBT for Psychosis, a training that is accredited. To be honest, I have not taken that training to compare it to mine. That’s why I wanted to take a minute to explain that I have not come to develop this training by reading accredited books or completing research. I have crafted this training being in community with message receivers where I work running clinical groups. This training comes from the perspective of someone with lived experience and who in addition has seventeen years of experience running these groups as a practitioner. It aims to better prepare you to come up with creative interventions

Yes, I have attended Hearing Voices Network Training and I have both participated in and facilitated these groups as well. I found these trainings were exceptional, but I also think my work gives guidance toward being able to bring the wisdom of a community experience to an individual relationship with techniques and activities that bear the potential of helping prepare you to change lives. Perhaps you may find as I do that working in community helps inspire you in the moments you have with a message receiver to provide something they may need.

There is a suggested price of $200 to attend the training. I see this more as a suggested donation as I plan to admit people who can’t afford the fee. If you are thinking about joining me but are scared off by the fee please reachout to me in email, I want you to join us.

Once you have paid the fee, or joined me for a while, you can continue to participate in future trainings until you are satisfied and have mastery over the material. As I stated before, this is a community-oriented workshop full of didactics, stories, videos, exercises, and discussions which means that participation also helps me learn grow and improve the training.

Sign up for the 2026 Journey Though Psychosis Sessions

The post Currently Recruiting for my 2026 Journey Through Madness Workshop appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

On June 12^th this year I have been invited to do my first keynote at the OCEACT Conference in Bend Oregon. This is a conference for providers who work on ACT teams throughout the state of Oregon. I feel it is a good fit because early in my career I used to work on a case management team as such.

I have created a speech that addresses my concern about California’s recent passing of Proposition 1 that targets people with my diagnostic history as a means of addressing the homelessness issue that is rampant throughout the state.

I will be examining the impact of my exposure to a violent section 8 housing authority project in Seattle WA called the Morrison Hotel and my three-month psychiatric incarceration at Montana State Hospital to examine the impact of involuntary treatment. I will be highlighting how difficult it is to come back from such catastrophic loss and how mandating two years of treatment bears the potential of making social rehabilitation more challenging.

I have felt neglected in terms of gaining an opportunity to do a keynote. I have fears of public speaking that I have worked to overcome by doing workshops. I repeatedly failed to get support from local leaders and eventually stopped going to CASRA Conferences because even though my ratings came back very positive, I was never given the opportunity to do a keynote.

I recently got diagnosed with two bulging discs in my neck and severe stenosis down my right arm adding to the challenge that lays before me. This morning, I got an injection in my neck that I hope will offer me some relief and improve my ability to present.

After my Keynote, I will lead a breakout session. I will present an abbreviated hour and a half version of my Journey Through Madness Training to demonstrate how culturally specific training can vastly help case managers improve their connections with people like me. I hope to gain participants for my 2025 training and maybe sell a few books. For more information about the conference click: https://oceact.org/

The post My First Keynote appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

The time of this training is officially being changed to accomodate people from different time zones. We currently have six people registered and approved at the new time and there is still space for you to join. Learn a system of care that teaches participants how to work with people who experience special messages. Special messages are things like voices, reads on peoples energy, intuition, dreams, punny liguistic and numeric coincidences, mind reading abilities, visions, symbolic objects and hosts of other types of experience that trigger awareness about conspiracy, spirit and reality that are different than the norm.

Participants will learn a system of care that accepts these experiences as valid, yet helps direct people toward the kind of functioning they need to survive and thrive in society. The presenter is a person with lived experience who has survived a schizophrenia diagnosis and managed to run professional groups exploring the contents of special messages and the stories and journeys they create over the past sixteen years. The training will be 16-20 hours dpending on the group input Unforunately CEUs will not be offered. Also, the trainings will recorded and shared with participants for their review and contents of recording may one day be used towards the creation of an online course..

The training is meant to help family members, providers, and peers learn how to reach and connect with people who are in a special message crisis, Trainees might be able to count the training towards their license. By the end of the training participants will have a different definition of what psychosis is across diagnostic categories and hosts of intervention strategies that offer hope for better relationships and social functioning than might have been previously imagined. The training only costs 100$ but scholarships are available to those who are willing to commit to the whole year.

I will be reaching out to people I am familiar with and anticpate that there will be quite a few more participants by the end of the month so don’t hesitate to confirm your spot. The training will be starting March 3 and unavailable to join again until 2025 so act soon.

The post 2024 Training Rescheduled to 4pm-6pm PST, First Sunday of the Month appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

I recently found myself explaining to a relative why the involuntary psychiatric treatment via California Care Courts being suggested on the March ballot under Proposition 1 is not a good idea. I suggested to my relative that there are many other innovative approaches to address the problem of homelessness that are being ignored. I mentioned having training for mental health workers on how to build collaborative relationships with people who are or have experienced a break from reality. I feel the public’s understanding of what is happening during a break from reality is profoundly lacking and as a result the arranged interventions are not at all helpful. Even mental health workers rarely get specific training to understand appropriate responses. They tend to learn from the machine that pushes warehousing options.

I am currently attempting to reach out to three local graduate schools to promote a training I have built over the last fifteen years that is based on the premise that service workers need to learn to explore psychosis with the people enduring a break. Working with graduate students with specific training may help them have better experiences when they do their time in community mental health. It may help them specialize in working with psychosis and commit themselves to dealing with the problem of homelessness. At this point community mental health often attracts workers early in their careers who learn off the backs of our society’s most vulnerable. Many of us who start in mental health move on once we’ve built up our confidence and skills. Many of us end up shaking our heads about the trouble we’ve seen.

Unfortunately, I am finding that it can be hard to get the needed support to get my word out to graduate school students. Would-be supporters are skeptical that because the training is 16-20 hours, I might not have concise bulleted messages one coworker suggested. Others are concerned I don’t possess a doctorate. They may figure that if no institution or movement is sponsoring this effort, that it must not be a worthy endeavor. Perhaps they note a little social anxiety in my demeanor and think I can’t do it. Some of these claims are baseless. I wrote an award-winning memoir about my experiences with madness. I know how to be concise. With regards to other concerns, like my anxiety, I am practicing to better the chances of a smooth delivery. Luckily, I am finding some promising support along the way. If I can get my training into just one of the schools, I am looking at. I may build enough of an audience to make the endeavor successful. I already have several participants.

My training argues that whether the afflicted person is in or out of emergency, it is still crucial to learn how to engage with someone who has different ideas about what is going on in society and the universe. It suggests that it’s important to study ways that what they are saying is correct so we can validate rather than reality check them. Most of the treatment out there doesn’t teach people how to understand and explore the rabbit-hole; and, as a result, experiences are typically treated as though they are deviant, taboo, and have no value. If any mention of their experience is uttered the afflicted are punished or excluded. The fact that exploration is not a common societal practice creates problems that lead to power struggles, incarceration, and trauma associated with involuntary treatment.

I used to be a social worker working with people who experience breaks and I used to label people as carrying diagnoses of all the interrelated schizophrenias when the DSM used to divide them up into types. I did not know how to be helpful because I received no specific training. I fought to preserve my job and did what my supervisors told me to do. As time wore on and I started to better understand the environments in which the afflicted resided, it started to seem like what I was being asked to do was incredibly cruel and inhumane. Then as started to work in a section 8 housing project that was highly regulated yet rife with drugs and prostitution, I better learned what it was like to live in such a realm. I started amp up in compassion and advocacy until I went of my medication and experienced a catastrophic break myself.

Six years after I recovered, I obtained my license. I started running professional groups that explored the contents of psychosis. I wrote a curriculum and shared my lived experience. What resulted was a fundamentally different understanding of psychosis that incorporates not only the internal experiences of those who are struck with it, but also the social processes involving loss and exclusion that prevent many suffers from returning to social functioning. My training offers a great deal of direction in terms of what is helpful as it redefines psychosis into something that is healable. The training is not based on reading books and research, it is sharpened by experience, observation, self-reflection, and the perspective of the people who have worked with me.

I have found that many who experience trauma also relate to many of the extraordinary experiences that I identify in the training. Thus, I believe that the training is helpful to the mental health of other challenges, not just those who have breaks from reality. Indeed, those who dissociate, who study mysticism, who have trauma, or are neurodivergent have a history of benefiting from such groups. I believe I have something important to bring to the world that has value and can change practices. I could have been locked up and subjected to care courts when I was homeless. Instead, thanks to the relative who helped me and who inquired as to my thoughts on the issue, I have been of service to others and have created something that could help you have more success connecting with others like me. You could help me sell these ideas to the universities and to the young social workers who might be willing to learn in a different way.

The monthly sessions will be recorded, and participants will have access to the videos for review and study or in case they must miss a month. There will be group exercises and practice interviewing me to learn skills and apply techniques.  To learn more, click here.

The post Currently Recruiting for my 2024 Training appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

Completing eight-hours of the Journey Through Madness Workshop in the month of November was a great learning experience. It was a humble but auspicious beginning for what I hope to be a fruitful effort to train people how to feel comfortable going down the rabbit hole with someone who has extraordinary experiences and extreme beliefs.

I was wrong about the fact that eight hours would be enough time to complete the whole training. I don’t think I completed a half of my material.

I also started with four and ended up with two loyal participants who want to complete the whole training. I now have four two-hour tapes that can be viewed on YouTube.

By the end of the training, I became comfortable with the situation and started to enjoy presenting the work. In the beginning I plowed through significant social anxiety that may have interfered some with the quality of the product.

I believe my work can transform a person’s perspective and ability to work with people who have a break from reality, and many others who have had extreme experiences that haunt their current relationships. I believe understanding how people who experience a break come to believe the things they do is useful to humanity. It humanizes the process when participants learn how they can relate to the experiences.

However, I also learned that my participants need more time to complete the training before they truly feel confident managing the anxiety associated with going down the rabbit hole.

Turns out I will need at least sixteen hours to complete the full training and plan to pace myself during recording sessions. I will need to do a little better with recruiting participants and deepen the pool of interested parties. I believe I may achieve this by recording one Sunday night a month.

Keep in touch with the Sign Up for the Journey Through Madness Workshop box on my website at https://timdreby.com/product/masterclassfor the latest in your opportunity to participate.

The post A Humble But Auspicious Begining . . . appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

How To Be A Healing Presence Without Becoming Anxious, Power-Struggling, Or Referring the Mad Person To A Hospital

How It Works

Starting this November in two-hour sessions on Sunday evenings, I will teach you a new model for understanding psychosis that will help you be able to relate with a person in madness in a manner that helps them heal. We are looking for nine volunteers who will receive the training for free in a webinar format on zoom. Volunteers may be professionals (including peer counselors) looking to hone their skills, family members seeking better relationships with their loved ones, or people with lived experience who want to share their perspective and contribute to a new model. The sessions will be taped and edited and eventually sold at an affordable price. Come bring your stories and perspectives to the discussion, ask questions, and we will all learn in community.

Here’s what we’ll go over:

Week 1

• How listening to stories and reflecting on commonalities helped me deconstruct experiences into solvable problems and formulate the structure of the rest of the presentation

• Why the medical model definitions lead to limited solutions and ultimately to the poor outcomes, stereotypes and the dehumanization we see.

• The way the thirty differential diagnoses that include psychotic experiences in them may have kept us from creating a counter culture and focusing on solutions. 

Week 2

• Why the notion that this is a thought disorder is wrong, and the importance of considering the conglomeration of experiences that cause one to experience a break from reality.

• The reason trying to stop a person from perseverating about their experiences by telling them that they are ill only decreases mindfulness and thwarts efforts to stop perseveration.

• Why it is often important to research and know about real government conspiracies to gain a message receiver’s trust and learn about what they think.

Week 3

• How expanding the ways message receivers think about what causes their experiences adds to flexibility and can have a positive impact on functioning.

• Learn to use what we term “the trickster concept” to likewise increase flexibility and open up faith without reality checking and sabotaging your trust with the message receiver.

• Why processing past behavior and negative outcomes is essential to help a message receiver start to accept boundaries and use the social skills that work for them.

Week 4

• How social, institutional, and internalized stigma are linked to a message receiver’s irrational thinking making timing and context important as cognitive therapy is used as a tool to help them. 

• How a mindful understanding of special messages can still be a valid part of an individual’s effort to discern reality without leading to a crisis or an emergency.

• How to use this system of care in group and individual contexts so that you can meet the message receiver where they are at and develop intervention strategies.

Hi, I’m Tim 

Early on in my 27 years of working in the trenches of community mental health, I thought I was a good worker when I did things like: 1) take care of people who were experiencing a break in reality by doing things for them to build trust; and 2) reminding them to take their medication. As I realized what people were living through in impoverished warehouse circumstances and fought for better services, I started to notice ways I was being followed by the company that owned the housing project where I worked. When I received a threat from a close friend, I myself descended into madness. I tried to flee to Canada  and was rapidly warehoused as a ward in a last resort State Hospital. I learned very quickly that madness wasn’t what I was trained to believe it was in school. I learned 1) that being treated like I was incapable of doing anything myself felt insulting; and 2) being told to take my medications was pointless; these kinds of interventions were not the help I needed.  

It was a lot harder to get ready to go back to work in mental health than I thought it would be after three months in an institution. Enduring housing insecurity, moves, and underemployment was very hard. When I did manage to get my license I started to run professional groups that explored not only what psychosis was, but also what could be done that was helpful. I used my lived experience to help other silenced individuals open up. The things we all learned in the process of sharing stories were astounding. I have documented these learnings over the past fifteen years and want to release to you my findings in a course that will help you know how to intervene when faced with someone who experiences a break from reality.   

Click to Schedule Interview with Tim

There will only be only nine to ten participants so set up your interview today

The post Nine Volunteers Can Join Journey Through Madness Webinar for Free appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

Over the last fifteen years, I have dedicated significant chunks of my weekend towards writing. I wrote a memoir, I developed draft after draft of my special message material, I built a website, and I grew my writing platform. It used to feel comfortable, like all this work was a natural part of my healing journey. I used to look forward to the weekends and my projects.

I recently got to the point where needed to take a break from writing blogs. I focused on developing my training so that I could teach the system of care that I have created that guides my interventions. I geared the training for providers and family members. But now I am done, and I am just not sure what to do. I am no longer comfortable creating my work. Could it be, it is time to share it?

I have suggested across my platforms that I want to build an online course and have set my website up to help me sign people up for a low-cost Beta Course so that I might practice and assess interest in this endeavor. I believe that the course will take eight hours to complete so I am starting to advertise for four Sunday evenings. I am currently targeting the month of November for this project. That would be November 3^rd, 10^th, 17^th, and 24^th 6pm-8pm PST.

The training is for providers, family members, or peer workers who are anxious about addressing comments that seem to be “delusional” in their work with people who hear voices or who experience “other” special messages experiences. In addition to clearly defining “other” types of experiences, the training provides an eight-part definition of psychosis and asserts eight solution constructs that can guide one in developing interventions.

By the time it’s over, the participant will have a system of care that can guide them in their work with others who struggle with these dilemmas. This helps the supporter keep from getting anxious or angry (which triggers trauma) and decreases the need to use the hospital to further marginalize the loved one.

I recognize that eight hours is a lot of time in our busy lives to dedicate to learning skills that will address a challenge like psychosis. It feels like a lot to ask; and perhaps that is the reason for my current sense of paralysis. But I also believe I have done a good job shaving down the material so that it is concise and fun. And understanding psychosis does take some time.

Now I’ll admit that before I decided to reach out with this email, I was trying to decide if I would be better off writing a book and using the platforms I have built along the way along with a launch plan to spread my work in that manner. I consider myself to be more of a writer than someone who enjoys looking at myself on the Zoom or YouTube platforms.

But for you, my followers, I have decided to cast these doubts away. It’s time to ask for your support to see if my work has what it takes to transform the understanding of psychosis, so that providers and family members know how to relate to it better.

The post My Training in the Month of November appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

Okay so creating an online course these days is quite the rage these days. Every entrepreneur and their cousin are out to sell you an online course. Therapists are becoming coaches and selling courses so they don’t get trapped in the therapy mill. I must say that fifteen years ago when I started work on building my course, I didn’t anticipate all this rage. I didn’t know about creating funnels and email campaigns and perfecting an evergreen project that I could sell. I didn’t know about testing it out on my audience and making sure that it will sell etcetera.

Writing my award-winning memoir has taught me the importance of marketing. It never occurred to me during all those rewrites that I would get to the end of the project and find that no one cared about me, my story, or my awards. I did what I could to build a writing platform so I could market the book in spite of this. I blogged for years, built my website blogged three more years, and the results: maybe three books sold off my website.

It’s true my frustration about the futility of this effort did start to make it into a few of my blog posts. I recognized that I was feeling negative and putting out stuff that was attracting nothing but negative. I retreated and licked my wounds and finished my course.

Now thanks to Facebook I am learning that I need to go through a process so I can create a business so that I can sell my course.

I remember fondly days when I was writing my book and learning to present my training. There were some good times.

I remember one year I stood in front of an attentive crowd at a CASRA Spring Conference. I was explaining how it had seemed to me like the traffic lights were getting messed with to set me up to be late to the conference. I was explaining that I had to stay cool and not become emotionally impacted by these thoughts as I had in the past when I thought I was being harassed by the Italian Mafia. Right when I said the word mafia, smoke started filling the room. I recognized this as the likely work of a smoke bomb in the air conditioning vents. The hotel workers suggested maybe the air conditioning was broken. The room was forced to evacuate, and a woman looked at me through the smoke and said that that was real smoke coming out of the vents. Believe it or not, I knew that the smoke was real! I laughed.

Determined to finish the presentation we found a new room and got through what I had prepared. In fact, I got very good feedback for the hour and a half presentations year after year. I learned that I had to get comfortable and be myself in front of the crowd.

The online course I have created is approximately twelve hours. I plan to run it a few times with about ten participants. I hope to be able to do this over the summer.

Because there are a lot of moving parts to creating an evergreen course that will sell, I am shopping for a coach who can tell me what I have to do. It seems key to finally building an online audience so the same thing that happened with my book does not repeat itself. I know I am needing to find a way to get more support on social media. That might mean having to come out of my shell a bit more because blogging didn’t work. So I have to get someone to teach me how to do this.

January 25^th at 3:32 am I got messaged on messenger by someone I must have accidently friended. It reads”

Illuminati Invitation

Based on the membership criterion of the illuminati,

we find you are of great interest in possession of a good

manual dexterity and academic proficiency. With this,

we look at you as the class that will be the platform for

which you stand to meet the wealthy people who can raise you

to wealth, power, fame, and glory. I strongly

recommend that you join us in the illuminati.

Joining us you become wealthy and live the life you desire.

Do you accept the offer?

Now if you are thinking I don’t have to hire a coach and jump through internet hoops to get my presentation out there, then you don’t know me very well. A month and a day after I received this message, this man named Larke followed up and I still haven’t answered.

Sure, one could argue, all I really must do is keep quiet and accept wealth and power and find out if the illuminati is real by having a conversation with Larke. But clearly, I believe in transparency and no secrets. I have tried to avoid belonging to secret societies as much as possible. Being part of a treatment team at my job is bad enough. Joining the illuminati takes belonging to a secret society to a new level.

Sure, I want people to read and consider what I have to say, but I feel I have been harassed by secret societies in the past, I don’t want to join that which nearly broke me and ruined my life. I was told that I had schizophrenia, would need treatment the rest of my life, and that I could not be cured. I believe I lived the life of a modern-day indentured servant, and no one cared or believed that what I went through was real. I wrote a book that got some good reviews, but still people didn’t care. Many people I knew judged me. I guess many prefer to use words like sick or crazy to describe me.

So I choose to ignore the Facebook message I got from a man named Larke. I just keep trying to do what I believe is needed to get my work out there. But all this effort suffering and hurt that I have gone through feeling invisible continues because I am stubborn. The whole thing makes me feel the world is fake and stupid.

To learn more about my course click here.

The post My Plans Moving Forward . . .To Evade the Illuminati appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".