When a person has a break from reality, others often feel a sense of urgency. Most people think that if this does not get treated with antipsychotic medication immediately, grave and progressive brain damage will ensue. Friends and loved ones may fear that this is the beginning of degenerative process that will leave the person shuffling between institutions and poverty for the rest of their life.

This article is written for the loving supporter or social worker. It invites you to learn about the world of your loved one. My hope is that it will help you gain strategies for how to handle the relationship with someone experiencing psychosis.

The State’s Social Control Model

When you think about the public mental health system, images of crowded psychiatric emergency rooms, violent police restraints, rapid tranquilization needle sticks, jail time, or substandard warehousing barracks may come to mind.

These are all realities of the system. They are mechanisms of the state. These realities either neglect the person in the break or set them up to be forced back into consensus reality. It can become a punitive and damaging process.

Ultimately, I view the goal of the state as enforcing social control, not healing and recovery. It can become about saving money or making the afflicted impotent. It can become about endless submission, silence, and the perpetuation of lies.

There are times when the social control model does help a person improve their behavior. Improving one’s behavior can help a person minimize their risk of escalations of trauma via social punishment. It can be better than nothing. Sometimes, people can learn lessons from abuse, improve their circumstances, and even heal.

Efficacy of the State’s Social Control Model

Still, in America, state social control that guides behavioral change has a low efficacy in terms of promoting recovery. It’s more a part of the problem than the solution. Even of the people who receive early intervention treatment for psychosis, only 42% have a response classified as “good.” And studies in developing countries show higher recovery rates than developed countries! Could it be that state social control is still part of the picture?

Social myths and stereotypes leave many people thinking that degenerative decline is to be expected if schizophrenia is left untreated—when actually it can be the result of treatment. When such social myths are maintained, it can seem like social control is the only option to prevent a horrible outcome.

Still, as I suggested above, stints of incarceration can result in an increase in compliance with consensus reality. However, they also reinforce the idea that it is unsafe to talk about what is happening. In many cases, the follow-up homelessness or warehousing can be so hard that incarceration starts to look better. Throughout all such “treatment,” exhibitions of psychosis are systematically shut down rather than explored. Many go through this process and give up hope of ever working through their experiences with other people.

In this culture, when incarceration and trauma happen, all is not lost. As someone who went through a three-month incarceration that left me outraged, I believe we can learn healing alternatives instead of nurse-ratcheting up social control. Ultimately the fear of returning to dilapidated and neglectful situations did help me conform. I eventually found that with medication I could get better jobs and more quickly restore my social standing. However, it was a two-year process, and I feel like I barely got through. And the night terrors were bad!

And so, I believe that “healing” is not the most likely result of forcible social control.

Few Approach Psychosis in a Curious Manner

To promote healing instead of social control, I believe it is important to understand, normalize, and navigate the break. This doesn’t happen often enough in the system because most people are too afraid to be curious about psychosis.

Society doesn’t understand, and so neither do our psychologists and social workers! Mental health professionals are forced to do the work with little guidance. I was once one of them. Many are untrained interns/workers, and their managers may not be curious about psychosis.

Who is trained to be curious? None of my supervisors ever were. Many I work with question my tactics. There are few organized trainings for being curious about psychosis. Even if professionals are trained to work with psychosis, they may not be able to listen in a validating matter. Invalidating body language can trigger their loved one and they can conclude it is not worth it.

It is very hard to offer treatment when a person is incarcerated against their will and feels betrayed by the people who put them there. Curiosity about psychosis is imperative to initiating voluntary treatment. People who learn alternative ways and grow like flowers through the concrete cracks are so often marginalized.

Meanwhile, the basic myths are maintained. Most are trained not to reinforce the delusions. Others fear they will catch the disease if they listen. Still others fear retraumatizing the respondent and making them angry. Then they do because their fear is apparent.

There are ways around that—by validating the experience of psychosis, so keep reading.

Why Do We Choose Social Control over Healing?

There are several reasons that “treatment” via social control is so vastly promoted in the United States.

There is a very poor, medicalized understanding of what psychosis is. Unproven theories about the biomedical basis of psychosis—like the chemical imbalance myth, studies that find a tiny, clinically insignificant connection with genetics, and dubious, poorly conducted twin studies from 50 years ago—are all represented in the media as if they somehow explain psychosis as a medical condition.

If someone starts talking openly about hearing voices or referencing beliefs about being targeted or enlightened, the average person will flee or mock them. This translates into ridicule, social rejection, and pain—and couple that with the state’s aggressive treatments.

Too many people in the state and the public invalidate the trauma that ensues when social control measures occur. So many people feel it is justified. The state’s goal is simple: spend as little money on the victim as possible, tranquilize or imprison them, get them to fill unskilled labor markets, and don’t let them speak out against our cultural delusions. At least, that’s what I must conclude after a three-month hospitalization in a state hospital.

It can feel like there is not much left for loved ones and good social workers to do besides support the effort to socially control the person they love and wait and see if they will recover.

Some Basic Alternatives to Social Control

In order to promote healing from psychosis, it becomes very important to become uniquely adept at listening, validating, and contributing without getting confused, combative, or dissociated. Asking the right kinds of questions—being curious about any conspiracies the person expresses, rather than trying to argue against them—helps the person realize they are not alone. Trust building is very important.

It’s also important to assist your loved one in adhering to the requirements of work or making it possible for them to continue to socially network and have a social life. As L.A. psychiatrist Mark Ragins suggested in a CASRA keynote speech, work, or building relationships (to which I’d include studying spiritual traditions) are ways to teach us social skills, not incarceration.

Indeed, research in the United States behind Dartmouth’s IPS (Individualized Placement Services) model of vocational rehab suggests that a self-directed effort to conform to work with support is a real way to achieve behavioral benchmarks.

In the IPS model, a job is provided until the subject fails, and then another job is found and maintained until it is lost. Keeping the person moving through the job situation and adhering to social dictates until they can master the needed behaviors to keep a job has been shown by research to be the way to go. It’s in the research! Everyone loves research.

Perhaps we can add this mentality to social and spiritual connectivity and enhance outcomes even further.

The majority of persons with psychosis want to work, have friends, and believe in god. They want to avoid a life of poverty, imprisonment, and isolation. Work is a good motivator, and a good way for many to learn to comply with rules. But it requires emotional support which can be hard for people with psychosis to find.

Avoiding Pitfalls

Sure, some social workers and perhaps some families may form secret societies that monitor their loved ones. These secret societies (like treatment teams in the hospital or family discussions/gossip) can easily be abused and defame the person with psychosis. I think family members and social workers must realize that when they do this, they mirror the oppression of other organizations that may be real and may have something to do with their loved one’s awareness and ire—the police, the FBI, prison gangs, corporations, fraternities, the military, religious cults, and others.

Thus, when family or social workers recognize that they can function as agents of the state, they can be open, communicative, and transparent about the secret societies in which they participate. This can greatly enhance trust.

This might include taking responsibility to learn about things the person has experienced that pertain to you that you don’t feel are accurate. Consider asking about the things your voice has expressed to your loved one (as auditory hallucinations). Then try to see the reality of what they are saying so you can confirm ways the communication is and isn’t valid. Always lead with the way it is valid. Instead of denying everything the person experiences, consider how the hallucinations may express their feelings of persecution or danger. How might their hallucinations help you understand your loved one?

Focus on What Healing Interactions Look Like

Consider the opportunity that you have when the person enduring a break from reality gets mad and confronts you, their loved one, with something of which you are sure you’re not guilty.

I’d strongly recommend that before you confront that person with the reality check of your innocence, that you consider whether you want to avoid falling into the role of social control.

If you find yourself determined to prove your innocence, and confront your loved ones with your facts, I want to suggest they may see this as just another social control effort. It is a lot of the same kind of stuff they get in the state amidst the jails, hospitals, and shelters. It might not be appreciated

In other words, I am saying that defending yourself is a power play. It may gain you some compliance with consensus reality, but it also puts you at risk of diminishing trust between you and your loved one.

In contrast, I suggest you take this intensely emotional situation, a potentially false accusation, and keep the goal of healing in mind. Instead of asserting the power play, let the loved one explore all the experiences that the person who is in a break has had that indicate your guilt. Then, communicate and clarify without invalidating.

When This Does Not Go as Planned

I know this is an exceedingly simple suggestion! Let us not forget that asking the above question is a real test of the amount of trust that exists between the two of you.

For example, when I don’t trust the person who asks me to prove what I am saying with examples, I find I am often rendered speechless. It can be hard to put words to those experiences when you know they will be shot down.

In other words, unless I trust you and feel safe to speak about a misperception or two, words that define my experiences elude me.

Thus, if you are a social worker or a loved one and you don’t get any information, it is likely that you have rejected your loved one’s reality so much over the years that they are afraid to communicate with you. It is likely that they have no hope you would ever understand.

I believe working towards a healing relationship involves cultural curiosity into your loved one’s experience. If you can get yourself to be trusted to the point where you can explore all of your loved one’s associated experiences, then I think you are on the road towards healing them.

If you don’t have that kind of relationship with your loved one, focus on trying to get there and forget about the false accusation. Explore with curiosity other kinds of experience they have had.

Understanding the culture of your loved one’s psychosis to the point where you can admit the ways they are right about you is far more likely to reality check them in a more healing manner and really move your relationship forward.

Adapting Your Strategies

Also, it’s worth noting that people who experience psychosis often come from distinctive cultures, have different needs, and approach a break with different moods and core beliefs. In my experience, I believed I was being persecuted by secret, illegal societies overseen by the government. Other people can have vastly different experiences with secret societies.

For example, some may believe they are being spiritually aided by secret cabals like elite police and/or politicians on their mission. Perhaps not all people experience social control in their family of origin the way I did. Still, you can inquire about euphoric experiences that your loved one may have had. Just remember, you don’t want to come down forcefully on the side of your loved one’s punitive state administrators.

Consider the ways that some positive spiritual experiences really don’t need to be healed. Explore enough to identify those positive experiences that have consequences that might be curbed. Consider what happens, for example, if you make the person descend from heaven back into a living hell on earth. Staying on earth can be a challenge.

This may involve envisioning a world in which they do not have to endure social control to force them to come back down. Helping them takes communication and rational, healthy choices. It becomes more about reviewing the consequences that the state will impose if they go down that road. It becomes about mitigating those realities while maintaining your collaborative standing.

Either way, delineating yourself from the mechanisms of control that may have led to trauma or got in the way of healing is an important thing to do! As a parent or as a social worker, this may involve changing the historical role you’ve taken with your loved one.

This means, instead of telling them what to do, you should consider exploring their experiences.

Takeaways

Do not forget that psychosis, special messages, or a break from reality is a collection of experiences. When you force your loved ones to defy their experiences and accept your reality via reality check, it is really about you imposing consensus reality on them and it puts you on the side of social control. They may know better.

I feel this becomes about your power. Ultimately it puts them down. When you do this, they will recognize this and it may trigger trauma from their run-ins with the state. Thus, differentiating yourself from the state becomes an important strategy.

Helping your loved one heal is about using your relationship to help them to navigate consensus reality so that they can achieve their hopes and dreams. If you care about them and their relationship with you, adopt a collaborative approach to their experiences. This is far more important than them respecting consensus reality, which might be full of ignorance and propaganda.

Supporting their autonomy and freedom is needed. Learning about the mistakes you made can also be important. Give them transparent information about what you have said and done on their behalf. Ask them how they would like you to assist, then communicate.

It’s true, doing what they say and working on their behalf does require boundaries. Even if you are a lawyer, you can’t help them beat the state, only evade it.

But most importantly, differentiate yourself from the organizations that impose social control and discriminatory laws on your loved one. You really don’t want to be on the side of marginalizing them!

The post Support Healing from Psychosis Versus Imposing Social Control! appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

A Definition of Psychosis that Includes Internal Processes:

I believe there are fundamental ways that the inaccurate social definition of psychosis and schizophrenia lead to mistreatment in mental health institutions. The historical definition of psychosis in all the Diagnostic Statistical Manuals is: hallucinations, delusions, and disorganized thinking. In master’s level training I never got more information than that when it came to working with psychosis. I did not understand psychosis. With that limited framework, I was paid to work with schizophrenia for seven years. Oh, how it limited my view of the potential for recovery.

Now, decades later, I think calling it a thought disorder is a fundamental misunderstanding of what is happening. I believe there are processes going on internally to create the external behavioral descriptors of the mainstream definition. I think its high time mental health workers get trained to pay attention to the internal processes that create these anomalous behaviors. Instead metal health workers team up to madly try to correct behavior through incarceration, medication, and behavioral health treatment like case management.

I believe it is important that people we call psychotic or schizophrenic be more self-aware of what they are doing as they are playing truth detective. In the process, it is important for supporters to be aware of those processes and to support, learn about and eventually collaboratively guide those internal processes.

I believe that people like me who experience them need them to be so aware of their internal processes that they can willingly let go of them and chose to behave in accordance with consensus reality. I call this ability to let go and comply with social dictates, message mindfulness.

Applying Mindfulness to Psychosis:

Six years after I was able to suppress my experiences to the point where I could resume my career, I got my Marriage and Family Therapy License. I began my quest to define those internal processes. I wrote a curriculum for groups. I ran them, and I revised and sharpened my views. I have developed eight components of which to be mindful and eight resulting solution strategies that can help a person create a social rehabilitation. I am writing today to present the first concept in my list of eight solution concepts, message mindfulness.

Mindfulness is currently a popularized concept in mental health that involves going toward your feelings and getting close enough that you can fully experience them enough to process and let go of them so they don’t linger in your body and overwhelm you. Marsha Linehan has done a good job identifying six skills associated with mindfulness, which is based on Buddhist Philosophy.

According to Linehan’s training, one can achieve mindfulness by noticing your feeling, putting words to it, and taking the time to fully participate with it. It is also important not to judge the feeling, only do one thing at a time, and focus on trying to do what works in the situation. All this allows the feeling to be released and forgotten about. Those who live mindfully stay present and engaged in the moment.

With mindfulness, we balance our thought processes and our emotional processes so we can let go of painful emotions and the occurrences that cause them. Instead of changing our thoughts, we experience our emotions.

When I talk about message mindfulness though, I am not talking about emotions, I am talking about experiences that trigger the sleuthing process that lead to thoughts that diverge from consensus reality.

Indeed, in that short sentence I have introduced the first three internal processes of psychosis. These are my first three components and are essential to understanding message mindfulness. Thus, it is important to help the person with psychosis pay more attention to what they are doing. This actually entitles them to talk about their experiences without getting shut down, rejected or controlled.

Suppressing triggers to psychosis is a fundamentally different process. Often the person who is trying to suppress their experiences does so because they have been punished for having them. The person may end up at war with those experiences and tormented, they only increase the frequency and intensity with which they experience them. They start to trust them more and to trust people with cultural delusions less.

I am arguing that suppression conversely makes those experiences stronger.

Hence, if someone is traumatized and rages in defeat without trying to function through it, their quality of life and social functioning, declines into a stew and everyone rolls their eyes and calls them a bump on a log. If they fight for survival, the world will see them as a royal pain in the ass and torment them because they are different. Both are recipes for ongoing trauma and suffering.

In contrast, message mindfulness suggests we not judge these experiences, we experience them fully and we move through them staying focused only on the present. It becomes important for supporters and the person experiencing them to learn this lesson. The outcome can be some interesting metaphysical philosophies. With the right kind of balanced conclusions, social life can resume and persist.

Hence, I will officially pause to abolish the words psychotic and schizophrenic because they are profoundly judgmental words to those of us who have experienced them. Instead I will call the person who experiences these phenomena message receivers who will benefit from gaining awareness of message mindfulness

 The First Component of Message Mindfulness: Special Messages.

Message receivers deal with special messages. These are experiences that trigger awareness of an alternate way of making sense of things that others may or may not understand. The definition is very broad because there are a lot of types of things that can be special messages.

Special messages may involve things that everyone can relate to: a sense of intuition; a dream; or the nonverbal sense of another person we get that is based on body language. In a state of hypervigilance, people can be very attuned an sensitive to these experiences. These experiences alone can lead to pondering conspiracies, positive or negative.

Special messages can also be more peculiar voices or visions, tactile, taste, or olfactory hallucination that are unique to the individual but that others probably do not experience in the same way.

These special messages get complicated and mix with other special messages.

For example, a voice says, “I am the devil and you smell like shit!” Perhaps the person figures that the devil is criticizing them for lack of cleanliness. But there is still so much to consider like the race sex and age of the voice. Is the devil really coming from telepathy with the message receiver’s German Sheppard who is just talking wuff talk?

When there is a stabbing pain in the back when the message receiver is not able to get to the shower, one might feel tortured by the devil. It might help to engage with the devil and assert oneself and try to compassionately stave of the stabbing.

Maybe we’ve studied the devil’s voice over time and learn the right ways to heal it so we can prevent the stabbing.

These kinds of messages need to be drawn out and interacted with to help people heal. There is a growing body of literature on this: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-rUvtCwt_cvc5_yqWQX7uA?fbclid=IwAR0clCSfZOWp3u8tCUmFb3OOehLvzWO5IVivdmiTIBV7hSTqUZNy4UQCY3I

Extra sensory perception is also an example of a special message, as are de ja vu experiences, serendipitous coincidences, or mindreading telepathic abilities. Many of us may have these abilities/occurrences. At the same time, it can be hard to know when we have access to them. Thus, we successfully mindread on three occasions, and then we think we are doing it on a fourth but are incorrect. Also, we may assess that others can read our minds when they can only do so fifty percent of the time.

Coded words, double meanings and numeric associations can also lead to special message experiences. For example, pigs in a blanket for a dollar means a hot dog on a bun; not police in a sleeping bag by a campfire, or raw pork chops rolled up in a newspaper. Or does it? Also consider the meaning of the name of my favorite rapper: KRS-ONE, Knowledge Reigns Supreme Over Nearly Everyone. Or consider the name of another rapper: fifty cent, 50 cent or 5-0-scent. Playing the game of punny coincidences can get very complicated especially when spies are involved. Just watch Austin Power’s, The Spy that Shagged Me!

Additionally, the written word may lack a clear emphasis or have an unintended emphasis to make significant conspiracy inferences that may or may not be true. Finally, words can be metaphors with entirely different meanings, like children’s song, puff the magic dragon means a bone of cannabis getting smoked. Or Captain Jack will get you high tonight mean booting heroin into your veins.

The world and reality become full of symbolic occurrences. So does TV and movies. There may be more learned about reality in art than there is on the local news.

These may be guided by corrupt powers in the government, by a wide variety of secret societies, or by righteous spiritual processes. Perhaps time travel has influenced covert futuristic codes. Then, these coded coincidences may mix with the actions of people around them that are acting in similar manners or using TV or movie references to make a point.

Welcome to the work of divergent views, causation theories/frameworks, and spiritual trickster and self-fulfilling prophesies. All of these are other components of psychosis that we gain with mindfulness. There still are others.

To get a better sense of special messages, you can sign up for my mailing list and more extensive list of examples: https://timdreby.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=875d1a8dc62c7e575c8572fc9&id=d384b7dd74

Mix all the special messages up in a bag and it can lead to some very troubling or wonderful interpretations of reality. Each interpretation might need to be experienced and understood mindfully without letting the emotions get negatively impacted and affecting the message receiver’s behavior. That’s a lot to ask. As a result, to achieve message mindfulness, there may be massive conflicts that need to be worked out or metaphysical beauty to be distracted from. Often it is a mixture of both once you really start to explore a message receivers experience.

The Second Concept of Message Mindfulness: Sleuthing

When a person gets a special message, they may need to get busy in their mind to figure out what the message means. Behind the sleuthing process is an intense emotional alarm that results from the special message. As a result, the message receiver may be on high alert for other details or messages that may add to their plot/journey. Once they are convinced a conspiracy is present or alternative ideas of what is going on are at play, they may end up on the lookout for more clues. Suddenly with a heightened awareness, clues and messages become more frequent and support the concept of the conspiracy. Figuring out what is going on, can be like a twenty-four hour a day job that is rarely interrupted by activities or tasks.

I call this state sleuthing. It is also called making meaning in the hearing voices movement. In a sense, all these special message experiences become highlighted and are often received as they are traumatic or enlightened. Thus, making meaning becomes a coping strategy that helps the message receiver endure. Tell them to stop doing it and distract themselves from these dilemmas and the intensity of the sleuthing is likely to increase. They may sleuth while they are trying to accomplish something making them slow in accomplishing it. They may not get reinforced for their efforts and may feel discouraged in comparison to chronically-normal accomplishment.

I believe that effective therapy becomes sleuthing alongside the message receiver. It means helping them be more aware of the special messages they are receiving that lead them to formulate their thoughts or conclusions. That in a nutshell is message mindfulness. But it also means learning more about and normalizing the next component of psychosis, divergent views.

Additionally, as mentioned above, there are still other parts of psychosis, like studying causation theories or frameworks, or studying negative/positive self-fulfilling prophesies can cause errors, oppression and persecution, Thus, later concepts exist and can also can assist with working with divergent views to change the trauma or elation they may cause.

The Third Concept: Divergent Views

Many message receivers are trained not to share their divergent views. Divergent views can be spot on accurate and they can lead to errors. Usually, reality is a mix. If a divergent view is expressed others are likely to call them crazy, psychotic, or schizophrenic. Many of us have lost many friends and supports this way. Some people get consequences that bite them back within the system in which they are embedded.

The funny thing about divergent views is that so many of the divergent views we have, as I mentioned above, are true.

For example, if we say our phones are tapped it is a major admission that make people call us schizophrenic, but, in reality, the phones are really tapped. Thanks to international fugitive, Edward Snowden, we now know this to be true. But when it comes down to it, people don’t want to hear about intelligence secrets. Message receivers need to learn not to talk about those elements of reality when they experience evidence of them. However, there also needs to be safe havens where they can discuss like therapy and support groups.

With the sleuthing stoked by divergent views, the message receiver wants to talk about it. However, if they share their concerns, they get identified as a schizophrenic. That may intensify the secrecy and privacy of the sleuthing process. They are constantly tempted to behave as if their divergent views are accurate, behavior that could lead to incarceration. Thus, they make an effort to bury that information.

In their swirls of special message experiences, message receiver’s emotions get peaked. They learn that some of their divergent views are accurate and it is a strong positive reinforcer. Intermittent punishment makes no sense. What I am arguing is that divergent views need to be normalized instead of punished.

However, a good way to start discussions about special message experiences is to talk about conspiracy theories associated with governmental abuse or social control. There are many of them out there in the media from the secret knowledge of alien involvement in the evolution of civilization to the history of the Templar Knights in the crusades. Conspiracies theories about all the assassinations in the sixties are another good way to discuss conspiracy. Once you have identified the conspiracy, it is possible to try to identify the special message evidence that reveals the conspiracy to the message receiver.

Message Mindfulness:

Ultimately message mindfulness is the ability to accept the special message experience with no emotional charge and with complete acceptance. It is the ability to let go of the divergent view and divert your attention from sleuthing. It means staying engaged in an activity that will help you survive. This may mean setting limits with sleuthing and doing it after the fact.

Message mindfulness is the ability to act as if consensus reality is all that matters when that isn’t true. It is a willingness to engage with lies and flawed paradigms of the modern world and constructively work to better them.

In another sense message mindfulness is the ability to be aware of the experience, detach from the meaning that is made from the experience, and make peace with the resulting conspiracies in a way that they can be released from the thinking mind. Staying busy and focused on a task can help accelerate the mindfulness phenomena

There is more to message mindfulness than we have reviewed in this blog. Remember there are still five other components of psychosis in my definition. I have alluded to only two others on a few occasions.

The awareness of all those concepts makes it easier to accept things the way they are and resolve the conflicts with society that usually get highlighted by special message experiences. Once the issues are addressed mindfulness becomes easier.

It only takes a bit of faking your way through and projecting the cultural delusions that modern society depends on to survive. That is how you can achieve message mindfulness.

The Madness with Which We Are Treated in the Mental Health System:

In behavioral health treatment they tend to believe that psychotics and schizophrenics of the world are better when they give up on their pursuit of the truth, and behave in concert with the millions of social myths that make up consensus reality. When they can do so they can take care of themselves. If this is the goal, there are good and bad ways to achieve it.

Though its arguable that it can work to criminalize and incarcerate schizophrenia and psychosis, there is also carnage in the process. There ends up being many people who get permanently warehoused or stuck in crisis states. Incarceration and homelessness happened to me and I managed to make it back. I could have been trapped a lot longer if I had not used family support.

I just think it can be done more gently with far less institutional damage and punishment.

I am arguing that this starts by understanding how our internal processes are different. Once we understand we can join with people who are trained to understand and form trusting relationships. We can find people who are supports rather than adversaries and controllers. In doing so, we can learn to be mindful of our internal processes, let them go and act in accordance with the cultural delusions we all agree upon in order to function in nation states.

Message mindfulness, just does not happen in hospitals and treatment facilities on a regular basis. Instead, for everyone’s safety, we get locked up a one size fits all system that forces us to behave in accordance with behavioral norms. If we comply, we may end up living in warehousing conditions, dependent on social security, and perhaps feel like cash cows. Something is foul in the state of Denmark!

Indeed, in the hospital we find ourselves locked up, stripped of our rights, and not even allowed to talk about what we are thinking about and going through. We must suppress what we are going through and act as if it doesn’t matter without becoming violent. Then we can get set free. It isn’t a great deal of help.

We get released unto a world where we must suppress our experiences enough to make a living and, in many cases, pull ourselves out of poverty. Maybe the family takes care of us and becomes responsible for figuring it out all on their own without any guidance. Maybe the family learns the social definition of the problem and the illness mindset and is able to control the situation utilizing warehousing or providing sanctuary. Ultimately this may lead to satisfying relationships, but it often does not.

The question becomes can we train people with the message mindfulness mindset and insert them into our institutions to improve the outcomes? Can we build this into our punitive system via changing the definition of psychosis one mind at a time?

The post How Message Mindfulness Can Help Change the Madness Within Our System! appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

Consensus Reality and Psychosis (or Special Message) Reality:

I believe there are a lot of errors among those who remain in consensus reality. I mean it is quite clear when we in the United States consider that different cultures have different consensus realities that there are errors in any reality. Look at Fox News verses MSNBC, realize they are reporting on the same events and you get a feel for the way consensus reality must have errors in it. I mean how can both diametrically opposed viewpoints be true at the same time.

We all learn to accept a consensus reality in spite of errors. There are different people embedded in different cultures. Sometimes we fight and kill each other. Sometimes we get along. And sometimes we put people in concentration camps like jails, prisons, psychiatric hospitals, shelters, public housing authorities, and board and care homes. Sometimes we maintain entitlements of the few by suspending the rights of others.

I say these things because I think it is important for more people to accept psychosis reality or what I prefer to call special message reality even though there can be occasional errors much as there are with different forms of consensus reality

Indeed, I am going to argue that in reality special message reality is a part of many of our lives. If we all understood what it was, many would agree that it is a significant part of reality. Instead we think it is a magical medical brain defect.

Managing special message reality is tricky especially when we are told it is not real.

To get along with others, however, we must respect that it has to be suppressed and behaviorally managed. Much as diametrically opposed cultures that hate each other need to somehow understand each other enough in order to coexist, special message reality needs to be accepted, balanced, and integrated with the modern material world to move forward.

When this happens, I am going to argue, a person can be the recipient of intuitive knowledge and have a sense of connection to spirit. Instead, consensus reality is balanced via a state of misinformation and global delusion.

What Happens to Special Message Reality in an Emergency State:

Many people object to the process by which someone receives their information when they are in madness. I believe that this is because in an emergency state, message receivers believe absolutely in their special message experiences. They may not honor the basic tenants of survival to which we all agree. They may break various forms of social contracts in ways that scare many.

However, regardless of many peoples’ objection to how that information was obtained, there are many ways that “psychotic,” special message information is correct when consensus reality is not. It does not take long periods of psychosis for a message receiver to realize this is true once they’ve experienced psychosis. Too many people don’t realize that special message reality can be accurate. Some do, but just don’t know what to do about it.

Perhaps this is because when a person is in psychosis, many loved ones and supporters tend to disbelieve their experience because it doesn’t fit with their cultural sense of consensus reality. It becomes very clear that things the message receiver knows to be true will automatically be denied or ignored.

Sure, there can be some things the message receiver believes to be true that aren’t. But I believe that most message receivers in the early stages of a break, can tell the difference between something they know for sure verses something that is less certain.

What happens in a crisis is that the message receiver gains the experience of having their less certain beliefs confirmed to be accurate. Then, message receivers become absolute believers in all their messages. Often, many established forms of mental health treatment complete this cycle via protocol.

Once this happens enough, message receivers may need help and support to change from being absolute believers in all their message experiences to being skeptical believers. If the message experiences magically stop, they are not forgotten and it takes time to heal them.

If our loved ones and supporters know how to relate to us with respect for special message reality, they can help us return from being absolute believers, to more skeptical believers over time. Then we can learn to adjust to erroneous forms of consensus reality enough to survive. Often times, loved ones and supporters do not have any interest or understanding of our experiences.

Learning ways Special Message Reality Is Correct and Ways it Isn’t:

I have been working on defining the ways that people in psychosis or special messages emergency derive their information from experiences. Twelve years ago, I coined the term special messages which are the collection of experiences that lead to psychosis reality.

Many of those experiences lead to what I have chosen to call divergent views. When divergent views are expressed people start to get concerned about their accuracy. When a divergent view proves itself to be wrong, we call it the “D” word, delusion. Consensus people wonder why the person can see that it is an error the way we do.

Yes, some divergent views are wrong, but many aren’t.

For example, consensus reality suggests it is safe to talk on the phone and to walk naked in out private space without worrying about being caught on camera. If not for whistleblowers and wanted fugitives like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, the public would not know that consensus reality is actually incorrect about this.

In fact, we are not granted those civil liberties. If we get upset about that, we may struggle with anti-government sentiments. If we cannot behave as if we are not bothered by these realities, we may get targeted.

In other words, when you are naked, and mad at the government, do not glare into your television, say you hate the president and give the camera within it the finger. If you use the right key word, you may get surveyed, for real.

An Example of How Special Messages Lead to the “D” Word:

When I was in special message crisis, I was submerged with evidence of these realities. Although I thought the cameras were in my lights, not my television, it was clear to me that I was under surveillance.

My distress about being surveyed showed in my tortured, illuminati pupils and in many comments I made. Until I learned to suppress those realities, accept the state of my civil liberties, and shoulder the violence of police searches, haphazard community harassment, and my business mail being opened, I was not able to behave appropriately in consensus reality. When I learned to explain all this by calling myself a schizophrenic and concealing it all, I moved on.

What I did was suppress those realities and wait. I got a job in my field, mental health, and I saved my money. Eventually, thanks to wanted fugitives, I was able to learn that myself and many other targeted individuals are in fact more correct than consensus reality.

I learned to pretend it wasn’t so. Eventually, with the help of God, reality was revealed to me. I was, to a certain extent, correct.

There are still many ways my special message experiences are correct. Still, I have to recognize that I must behave as if they aren’t correct and work towards outcomes that lead to my survival. Then when the time comes, I will find out if I am correct or if the divergent views I have are, in fact, incorrect.

Ultimately, there were a few ways that I was incorrect. For example, I thought my father was covertly the head of an Irish Mafia Organization that was responsible for victimizing people in the streets. I thought everyone knew this and was compliant with scapegoating me.

While it was true the genetic tests did reveal that we were unwittingly and predominantly Irish, just as I thought—I was also inaccurate. To understand the ways it is true, the consensus reality supporter needs to know my traumatic history and how I was struggling to escape that history. Then, much of it makes sense.

Of course, I didn’t have any supporters.

Assessing Connection to Higher Powers Over Time:

In many cases I believe the message receiver is obtaining some sort of intuitive knowledge coming from a higher spiritual power or realm. If we train people who are in psychosis, how to have a high level of emotional intelligence and faith, I believe they can learn to assess special messages for intuitive reality and become truer beholders of reality than Fox and MSNBC news combined.

Toward a Definition of Reality that Includes Special Message Reality:

It is arguable that there are many dimensions of reality. Indeed, there are quite a few different subjective perspectives in the world, making the notion of ultimate reality very hard to pin down.

However, in studying special messages in group therapy I have tended to divide the world into two kinds of reality: material world; and special message reality. Defining each feels like differentiating my inward world from my life in the modern world.

Ultimately, I wonder if most of us can relate to both kinds of reality. Is it possible that the special message reality that dominated my life during my emergency is something to which anyone can relate?differentiating inward beliefs against the ones that I must engage in to maintain my professional life.

Indeed, I believe we all have special message experiences like intuition, dreams, and interpersonal perception. Not all of us have lived in an emergency in which we are immersed.

and profoundly preoccupied with these, but many of us have.

Additionally, there are other types of special message experience. Add phenomena like voices, premonitions, strange experiences with the television, telepathy, punny linguistic codes, to the more common special message experiences and emergency gets intense.

Perhaps, some people are graced with more of these experiences than others. For that reason, they have to learn to behave as if they don’t know when in some cases they do.

In the theory of reality that I have presented on the slide above, survival is a mix of both types of reality. Science is limited by paradigms that don’t explain everything and good mental and physical health is based on having our physiological, social, and meaningful activity needs met.

Thus, most engage in the modern, material world for mental health. Then, those of us who care about reality engage in the spiritual/message world to check and see if we are doing so in a way that is giving and loving to others.

The Reality for Those Who Are Neurodiverse:

What I argue, is that for message receivers who may be born with spiritual genes, generational trauma, or neurodevelopmental diversity primarily engage in the spiritual message world. Then, if they care about reality, they have the option of engaging in the modern material world to avoid concentration camps and homelessness. Sometimes family support helps.

How Do We Know What Is Real?

It’s true that in the paradigms of western psychology there is often thought to be emotions, cognition, and behavior. Essentially, like dumbass Freud and Carl Jung, I am simply arguing there is another category. Instead of calling it unconscious or collective unconscious, I am calling it extra sensory perception, spiritual contact, or special messages. It’s really not that complicated. We consensus reality western cowboys just have to acknowledge that we all have different degrees of special messages contact.

If we want to understand our reality, we need to check what we have going for us with the opposite theory of reality. Over time with emotional intelligence and faith we will learn what areas of our experience fit into both the spiritual and the profane world. The parts of our experience that fit both areas is the closest we can come to our reality or god.

Instead of seeing people who are different as sick and defective and rejecting and supporting the genocide against them, we need to partner with them and learn more about their special message experiences so we can all have a real experience. I don’t think this is rocket science, but it’s not likely to happen because things like superiority and privilege are so hard for so many with which to part.

Towards a More Dual Society:

So, many people need to get their ass to spirit and a few of the 1 percent and the bulk of those in poverty need to get their asses into more fitting relationships with the modern world. A good and peaceful society would make it possible to balance these realities. There would be good work/life balance and enough finances for all.

A bad society would amass power and use it to suppress its dissidents, veterans, incarcerated, and diverse-immigrant-worker-peoples-of-color into concentration camps. In my perspective the United States concentration camps exist in things like jails, prisons, mental hospitals, shelters, homeless encampments, or various forms of lawless, unregulated, public-housing-poor-houses. Of course, that is a generalization as not all such situations are that bad, but still. Future, conspiracy theorists predict that these concentration camps will be transformed into the red and blue rooms in Walmart. It’s already like that to some extent, but it could get much worse.

The question comes down to which pill you choose to take: the red pill or the blue?

In this world we call the matrix the red leads to the incorrigible Walmart rooms, and the mass incarceration industry,

In reality, if we want a peaceful, equitable, and spiritually healthy society, we all need to take both pills.

So, I don’t know what we’re going to do as the corona depression hits; not really.

The post How “Psychosis” Can Lead to Intuitive Knowledge and Connection to Spirit: appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

While treating voices as though they are real things may seem like a revolutionary step for a mental health clinician to take, I feel it can only be a small piece of the picture for some of us. Sometimes hearing voices is just the tip of the ice burg. Ultimately the clinician needs to understand more of what is experienced to provide people with revolutionary guidance that the survivor must assert to contribute towards making the world a better place.

It’s true, normalizing voices by estimating that one in every ten people hear them is a very positive thing to do! Taking away the pathology helps! However, I believe that in many situations, it is only a piece of what is going on when someone is experiencing an emergency, a “break from reality,” or what I prefer to term a special message crisis. Getting a full understanding of their experiences is imperative to help direct them to the social action they must take to heal.

I believe there are hosts of other experiences that a clinician needs to be aware of when working with someone who has experienced or is experiencing a crisis or emergency. Examples of these types of experiences are: intuition, dreams, spiritual enlightenment, serendipity, nonverbal interpersonal feedback, coded slang words, numerology, and symbolic associations. I’d argue that most everyone can relate to these experiences.

However, at some point these experiences can conspire with or without voices to overwhelm and push someone into an emergency state. Sometimes coincidences with these phenomena may be natural and sometimes they may be gaslighting by systemic agents of abuse. This can be hard to understand and differentiate. When a person is in an emergency state, the frequency of all these experiences are more intense and can fully preoccupy a person to lower their ability to contribute in a meaningful way.

A Longitudinal Approach to Special Messages in Treatment:

Like voices, all special message experiences need to be treated as real. Often, they are more real than many people want them to be, but there is some gray area in which they can be tricky to interpret and inexperience, social corruption, and trickster spiritual experiences can lead to errors.

When the chronically normal class detect these errors, they are quick to dismiss them as being the “d” word, delusions. However, instead of declaring the “d” word and dismissing all these other experiences as irrelevant, it is important to do longitudinal studies with the person over time paying acute attention to the emergency state, past or present, to uncover and understand all forms of these kinds of experiences.

Eventually it is possible for a person to get a sense of when they are being tricked. Spiritual tricksters become important to understand. Sometimes they can be the result of secular corruption, and in most mystical systems the spirit world can play tricks on the spiritual person like they did on Jesus in the wilderness.

People who have survived emergencies need to understand how they have been tricked to move them back to a place where these other experiences become more manageable. It may be important to understand the skewed regulations of the social world that tricks them. It may be important to trust people again instead of just messages. It may be necessary to change the survivor’s relationship with their message experiences because messages will always be there. Maybe in some cases they just don’t need to be so loud and carry so much impact.

In fact, once the trauma and danger are removed, these experiences like voices can become very helpful to a person if they are managed well. Indeed, I believe people who are sensitive about this aspect of life may have a valuable and acutely keen sense of reality if they work at it. Encouraging them to work and study can be beneficial. They can play valuable roles that have meaning and purpose for them.

Why Letting People Share Their Stories Becomes So Challenging:

In many modern societies there is a norm of managing all associated experiences through means of suppression and control. There is a history of institutionalizing people who become too sensitive to these realities. Meanwhile, chronically normal people continue to be influenced by these experiences and even act out based on the same experiences without being reprimanded. There has become a medicalized notion that these experiences are illness for some and okay for others and the injustice that can result can appear to be horrific to the person in an emergency.

All mental health systems that I have worked for train a person to suppress these experiences and deny that they exist. There is a strong sense of punishment that teaches people to suppress what could otherwise be valid. Learning to suppress is not always bad. It can teach us to dissociate and respond rather than react. This skill is taught in our institutions and through job training by forcing the individual to honorably submit and focus on behaving in ways that can earn them cultural capital. The problem is it doesn’t teach people to be mindful of when their messages are happening and which to believe. The result is often social withdrawal and inaction.

By the time I get to work with people, the stories of special messages are so suppressed that many will conceal them even when others are talking about them. It takes a great deal of time and trust to get people to talk and be mindful about these experiences. There is much fear that doing so will result in incarceration de-habilitating doses of medications, or isolation and restraints. Although I believe in things like trust and mindfulness, I am careful to convey that talking openly about these experiences may lead to random consequences elsewhere.

Why Suppression is Thought to be Important:

One reasons that voices and special message experiences may be systematically attacked, even though many people can relate to them, is because in crisis they may invade the space of peoples’ privilege of secrecy.  Often, people who get punished for their special message crisis do so because their sensitivities to reality cause them to challenge the hypocrisy of others in a revolutionary manner.

In short whether to the social structure of the family or to the social structure of the world’s most powerful Cabals, madness ensues when special information becomes threatening to people who use boundaries and mechanisms of oppression to protect themselves.

People in power don’t like to be accused of being evil. When you hold a position of power your reputation is on the line when a mad person confronts you. Thus, this medicalized illness also serves to protect you and support the part of you that is good. While people who are in crisis are less likely act out with physical violence, they are revered as being dangerous. I’d argue that it is because their inexplicable power is a threat to others, that fear loss of privilege and power. Or maybe those others have done their best and just feel hurt by having their ills highlighted.

Alternative Solutions:

Additionally, the revolutionary behavior of the person in crisis (which significantly varies from person to person) becomes very difficult for people to manage. It may target power in meaningful manners on a small or grand scale.

This is precisely why it becomes key in the exploration of special messages experience that people be trained to use the acts of suppression so as not to act out on the secrets of the mechanisms of power. Because the message receiver is often correct, there must be a slow enduring effort to change things within the bounds of rational input.

Respect for power and acts of revolutionary change are often guided through religion, philosophy, and metaphysics. Thus, there can be much guidance within these subject matters that teach people how to use discernment and judgement to promote change. I believe these are subjects that clinicians need to be ready to work with to be successful at bringing people back to social functioning.

I believe that teaching people to use discernment and judgement in this manner can also be done to improve the mental health system. In the process, the message receiver becomes able to function at most jobs without being a threat to the power structure. Instead, they may need to accept that as a paid worker they are only afforded a contributing voice that can be used to improve things and make things better.      

Transforming Valuable Perspectives into Meaningful Contribution:

I think normalizing voices is a good starting point for many people in their journey to find meaningful ways to contribute.  However, to be thoroughly affective, a clinician needs to remember that voices may not be the predominant source of special message experiences for a message receiver.

In fact, they might be the easiest to discern, but once they are better managed, it may be time to work on other real special message phenomena like telepathy, premonitions, energies off other people, reading into media for special meanings.

I like to argue that no special message experience is more or less sick than another.

When I was in crisis, and I was asked about voices I had no experience of which to speak. It wasn’t until I came out of crisis that I was able to discern that sometimes when I was upset, I may have been hearing voices.

In my experience of running thousands of special message groups, people have different sources of alternative information available with different levels of truth attached to them. That is why groups that enable people to explore associated conspiracies and compare and contrast their sources of alternative, intuitive knowledge is so important

Message mindfulness is extremely important to maintain as it enables people to use discernment and respect for power structures. It is extraordinary how helped people can be by merely having the freedom to explore their experiences with others.

I don’t think doing so really puts power structures at risk. It cultivates relationships and builds social support. It helps people. It gives people a fighting chance to find a meaningful role and contribute to making the world a better place. I think the world can be a better place, especially for those stuck in the mental health system!

The post Why Mapping Out a Person’s Voices Is Not Always Enough! appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

When in the throes of what is commonly termed a “psychotic break,” people often become focused on good and evil causing interpersonal friction. Whether you are a parent, therapist, spouse, or a friend or colleague this can translate in you being viewed as evil. Perhaps, this projection is not a comfortable feeling for a supporter to sit with.

Often, providers and family members are systematically trained not to go down the rabbit hole with the subject. Often the rationale for this is that we do not reinforce the delusions. Many people think this is a sign of good boundaries. But I am writing today to primarily wonder if this strategy is little more than a just a systematic fear reaction. Those who go down the rabbit hole may get pinpointed as being the root of all evil! Perhaps it is reactive fear of this that prevent us from learning about what our loved one is experiencing.

Case in point, I regularly go down the rabbit hole with people at the inner-city clinic where I work. When I do so, I share my own history of being diagnosed with a schizophrenia disorder. I also share associated stories. I often find myself the subject of being assessed for evil. Sometimes it can be hard to get out without becoming a villain. Occasionally I get a person who concludes that I am the head of their persecution system.

Remembering that there are Good Reasons I May Get Called the Cap Villain:

There are many reasons I might be singled out as a Cap Villain. Sometimes, I come from a different race and class background than many of the people I work with. One could rightly argue that my approach to establishing rapport is different and that makes me suspect. Also, it is arguable that it is my karma that causes me to get placed in such a villainous position. I once thought my father was the cap villain and now it is my turn.

When I become the cap villain, I know I need to work, but believe that I am in a particularly good position to do a lot of good. I personally feel I am lucky am I to be given the chance to do this valuable work?

Perhaps there are reasons for my good fortune. I have advantages that people who haven’t experienced what it is like to be in a break don’t. Maybe that’s why I am so eager to break the mold and jump down the rabbit hole. Of course, there could be other reasons to fear the rabbit hole, but still I wonder if sometimes it might be fear of the conclusion that you are pure evil that keeps people from learning about their loved one’s experiences?

As a survivor, I have advantages.  I know some of the language of “psychosis” and am able to occasionally anticipate from where a person is coming. Perhaps it is because many conscientious family members can do similar things that some people in crisis come to believe their loved ones are evil. Maybe it seems like if you go down the rabbit hole you are only going to get false accusations and hatred. That’s why I am here to embolden you.

How I Respond as A Clinician:

When I sense it is going down, I tell myself that this may mean I am one of the safer people the person has experienced who can communicate with them in their language. I tell myself that a high percentage of providers and family members avoid going down the rabbit hole because they fear or distain being viewed as evil. I remind myself that the unfortunate result is that the persons experiences are presumed to bear no semblance of meaning. We all have good and evil in us, why fear if someone has insight into our evil side?

Still it is hard to do. Sure no one wants someone in a profound state of knowing to hold them in contempt over things they cannot control. It’s uncomfortable, I get it. I have had victims of sexual abuse see visions of me having sex and get mad at me in front of a group of people. It’s hard not to feel embarrassed or defensive. It can feel like I am personally threatened by such an accusation.

But maybe that person is viewing that for a real reason that we can’t understand easily. And if they don’t have a space to work these things out, they will have to live under their explanation for why it happened in silence without support.

The tendency to get defensive and take it personally may be particularly painful for loved ones who revere the person and fear they have done a bad parenting job. But if you can remember to try to feel good about it, perhaps it becomes an opportunity.

As a survivor who sometimes knows how my patients feel, I am constantly trying to absolve myself from having done things that hurt the person, like making a living off their poverty. I remind myself that it is possible that a lot of good can be achieved if I hang in there. I think if I don’t, I become just a cog in the mental health wheel and it becomes less likely the person will benefit.

Things I Look to Accomplish:

I look to the survivor to test me to see if they are accurate. If I see them testing me, I do my best to pass the tests. I pass test by being good, healthy and supportive to them. I will do so repeatedly until I get it right if I need to.

When I am open and curious, I can pass the trust tests they may put upon me. I hope that by proving to the person that I am not defensive and that I want to learn about the evil within me so that I might change it I think that when I do that the survivor will be challenged to realize that the whole world is not against them.

In contrast, if I am defensive and reality test and am righteous about my world entitlements to not be abused in such a way, I believe I am likely to reinforce the vileness of my position as the cap villain. I believe this does make the situation worse and might cause a lasting rift in the relationship.

When someone holds on to their views of you over time and you are not able to wiggle out in such a gentle manner, it is important to remember that you don’t know what they are experiencing. It is a good idea to inquire and respect that what they are experiencing is real and valid for some reason.

Remember that those experiences may rear up from real hardships that the person is going through. Consider what else might be going on to cause a spike in your level of evilness. Perhaps the participant is being neglected over the holidays, or there is neglect in the board and care home, or there is a grief anniversary of a deceased love one. Perhaps, then, instead of being defensive, I can try to be compassionate about the source of the disturbance. I try to share this compassion non-verbally first and foremost and then verbally if it is working.

Reflections on What I Went Through that Support This Process

I remember that in my crisis my father was the head of the mafia that was tormenting me. It is true I accused him of things for which he was not responsible. It was also true that he had done things to me when I was younger that I was ailing from; and yet he was the safest person in my world both as a child and within the dimension of reality I was enduring.

See, in the dimension of reality that I was living in, people were really corrupt, dangerous and guilty. I do still believe there were people like that for real. In my mind at the time they became my father’s minions. Blaming or holding them accountable for the hell I was enduring simply was not an option. If I did confront them, in reality they may have seriously harmed me. And ultimately in my journey I needed to forgive them and be friends with them again. I often observed consequences for blaming things on my Dad. Sometimes they came directly from him.

I feel bad for taking things out on my father, but I also faced a lot of real threat and abuse and I needed to express it to someone. Maybe I pinned everything on him because I thought unconsciously that I might best be able to work it out with him.

I try to remember how I was truly appalled when my father would get defensive and yell at me. They were real low points and I will forever remember how hideous I felt. Feeling alone, pissed, and righteous only made me shut him out longer.

Working Things Out with My Father:

I still feel that my father did have real power and responsibility for me and when I had a break. He did somethings that were right. He flew all the way out to Montana to see me. But when that did little to impress me, he didn’t believe a word I said. I told him things that I knew for a fact were true and they didn’t matter. This strengthened my conviction that he was a mob boss. When he thus sided with the establishment, it gave me gumption for staying away and avoid him longer.

My father did call out a missing-persons report on me and then did not want me to leave the horrific institutional living in which I was confined. He suggested that the same thing would happen to me again if I was set free. That was power he had, and using it the way he did was not helpful.

I ended up homeless and destitute and indentured to low wage work for a year. In the process he did step in and support me again. The time we spent together really did matter! The real connection we have did function as a reality check to me. Somehow, we both had to change and we were able to do so.

Eventually, over time we were able to get it right. But if my father hadn’t persisted to support me in my efforts, I might not have changed my mind about what was going on with me. And from my vantage point it was often I who took the lead to change my negativity toward him. This helped us work together again. I also might not have been willing to take medication which helped me with the process of changing my mind.

Understanding Why Your Loved Ones View of Good and Evil Has Amplified:

As I mentioned initially, already the issue of good and evil is amplified naturally by special message experiences which some find to be spiritual, and others find to be responses to trauma. I believe unpacking those stories and getting people to teach you what they have learned about good and evil is important.

Consider that in modern civilization, many with special messages spiritual connection have their experiences defined in mental hospitals as illness. The result can become a profound mistrust of power and a struggle against the power structure that wants to institutionalize them. Suddenly the world becomes full of evil people. People in institutions may seem to nullify all gifts and abilities. When there is a sense of interconnection, and loved ones have initiated institutional care, evil is more likely to be projected onto the loved ones.

Let’s not forget that the institutional system may be traumatic and violent at times, thus, amplifying an amplified process. In many locales, public institutions seem to purposely show people in crisis the door to institutional living as if to say: this is what will happen to you if you don’t shape up.

It can be argued that institutions are set up this way because they aim at curbing behavior. Of course, how the person takes the “treatment” is different for each of us. Additionally, different staff people use punitive, irrational interventions in unique manners some for the better and some for the worse.

Don’t Take it Personal, Explore and Work it Out!

Unfortunately, I cannot tell you what your loved one may be thinking of you and whether they have ways they are correct and ways they aren’t. In this blog I have tried to speak for myself and how I navigate these dilemmas as a patient and a therapist.

When I was in crisis, I was told by my therapist to avoid the issue of good and evil so I wouldn’t be crazy! It was true, I didn’t think she was a very good person to me when I was vulnerable. I listened to her and honored her keeping my true feelings buried. It did lead to recovery.

But I don’t deal with that therapist anymore! To her credit, she did encourage me to write. Perhaps she would change her mind if she knew how I had to write about her to recover from the treatment. Ultimately in my world, I escaped the control of my cap villain and went on with my life.

But moving forward I encourage loved ones and therapists who want to be supportive instead of a thorn, to explore what they’ve done with an open mind and learn about whether it was good or evil. They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. It is only good and evil. We all have the capacity to do both. If you do a good job you will get the truth. If you do a poor one you will get fake answers.

Keep exploring even if all answers are fake. That can be part of the work that may not happen if you don’t persist over time.

The post What Do You Do When Your Loved One Thinks You Are Evil? appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

Therapists and peer supporters learn not to impose their beliefs on the people they help as part of their cultural competence training. Why, then, do so many people who suffer from psychosis flagrantly have beliefs imposed on them in treatment?

A huge part of knowing how to provide treatment that does not impose beliefs involves understanding and acknowledging the extent to which beliefs are being systemically imposed and countering with an oasis of techniques that counter that tendency. If you stick with me through this you will attain a sense of what it feels like to have reality imposed upon you and the need for skilled treatment providers who know how to recognize and counter this.

Many of us who endure treatment in the mental health system develop refined radars that detect when beliefs are being imposed. When supporters do this, they may immediately link themselves back to the system of involuntary care that can be equated with detainment, involuntary medication, and a fundamental loss of human rights.

Perhaps the tendency to impose beliefs stems from the misguided cultural norm that expects people in psychosis to suppress the experiences that lead to their immediate crisis. The concept that involuntary ideas can be changed by physical punishment and containment may work immediately but is fundamentally flawed.

The fact is that this often is the only help available to families is an assault on people who experience psychosis. As supportive healers, it is essential to offer places where experiences are honored and explored with coping strategies in mind. I believe the way to do this is to build a relationship that does not impose beliefs. However, as you will learn, this may require working against the grain and a willingness to explore those experiences, even though everyone else isn’t.

Imposing Beliefs Statistically Extends Periods of Suffering:

I got better from two-years of continuous psychosis. The fact that I was expected to suppress my psychosis through punishment prevented me from learning some very simple lessons that could have saved me a lot of grief. All I needed was someone to teach me about the rules and regulations of the black market. I learned those lesson from trial and error without guidance or support. The sense of punishment was unrelenting and I had to utilize all my strengths and privileges to endure.

Although negative, statistics in E. Fuller Torrey;s book, Surviving Schizophrenia, suggest that sixty-five percent of people learn to suppress behavior and thrive like I have, they also suggest that half of us who do endure ten years of rocky and traumatic experiences and loss. Many of us fall into periods of extreme poverty that makes social rehab very challenging.

Usually, treatment starts with experiences of involuntary hospitalization during which victims are held until they start to suppress. This can seem like a nightmare for many of us who already have trauma and struggle to suppress. It is my intention to put a face to this struggle and motivate healers towards establishing non punitive places where experiences associated with psychosis can be explored and mindfully expressed.

Imposing Beliefs via Containing Behavior Results in Resistance to Treatment:

The message in the local public psychiatric emergency room is, “you can’t beat us. You must contain your behavior.” If you object and cannot control your behavior involuntary medication may be used and the incarceration is extended. Other counties and states throughout the country set up distinct strategies to impose and contain. In Montana, I was held for three months and spent the first two weeks locked up on the ward. A month of that experience involved exposure to warehouse conditions which are very degrading to one’s self esteem. Being treated in that way seemed to speak to me that was what was inevitable and that there was no use trying.

Many people who are released from this situation will not want to follow up with therapy because injustices witnessed during incarceration. It can take years of decline and high degrees of suffering before many suffers willingly accept treatment.

This is often blamed on a nonexistent disease (instead of a neurodevelopmental difference as science suggests) and I assure you there is very little reflection on the process within social institutions. For many who work in such contexts, it often isn’t clear whether the goal is social rehabilitation and recovery or to fuel the mental health industry with passive contained smokers and coffee drinkers who will stay out of the way.

While experienced patients may learn to utilize a given hospital and system to contain themselves or get a break from the stress of being on the streets, the situation is not likely to springboard social rehab efforts in the community. The set up is more likely to reinforce isolation rather than rehabilitation and for many this may decrease the idea that therapeutic encounters can help.

Squandering of Personal Resources and Trauma

Often the support system, if there still is one, is more eager to get the recipient care than the sufferer (post hospitalization) trusts the thought of therapy. Many of us who suffer fear stereotypes associated with our diagnosis. Sometimes, our family may have stronger beliefs in our worthlessness based on stereotypes, than we have in ourselves. If we fear having schizophrenia and being subjected to warehousing, many of us will do everything we can to stay free utilizing our personal resources and avoiding therapy.

Perhaps if the sufferer is not informed of the ill effects of poverty and public warehousing, they may internalize the efforts of the institutions to turn people into contained, powerless compliant cash cows. I was a social worker and knew well the ill effects of being on social security and warehoused. I refused to believe that I needed warehousing and that I couldn’t work.

Currently, if youthful suffers are lucky, they may get discharged back to their family which may not necessarily be part of the problem. Some families can learn how to continue to be a support to things they don’t understand, and some don’t change their minds so easily. For some, early prevention programs help avoid immediate decline into board and care home environments.

When I finally got released from the hospital, I was transient and moved around trying to find work. This added trauma and fear of permanent homelessness as my own cash dwindled. I felt followed and threatened on a daily basis when I ran out of my medication. My perception became populated with threats and symbols. When my resources were getting low and I was unsure of my ability to hold a professional job, I was forced to get help from my family.

Many sufferers are better at surviving on the road or staying independent. They may utilize drugs, alcohol, associated peer connections, and crime or crime syndicates to tolerate these experiences. Currently in Oakland, many are getting into community encampments. I have met many who were resourceful enough to travel. Many do not have families with resources available to them like I had. Many, like me, may have good reasons for not wanting to return to their families.

The Reality of Economic Sanctions Imposed on People with Psychosis:

Released from the hospital, people in psychosis face the high cost of therapy. Specialists for psychosis are few and far in between. The standard of care among many mainstream therapists is to refuse to work with psychosis and refer back to the hospital. A person may need to get on benefits that will pay for treatment if a therapist is even willing to consider it.

Poor prognosis presumptions result in many sufferers being encouraged to go on social security. Consider the several year process of getting on social security. Unstructured time or adjustment to free programs that may expose the participant to sufferers who are impacted by poverty and years of institutionalization. This can be new for some of us. Though this does not have to be a negative experience, to many it feels like it. To many it is just another punishment or poor prognosis reality. Again, early prevention program may fill the void for some.

High cost of therapy is often coupled by disparity in the quality of facility. In the hospital where I work, for example, the facility is an old psychiatric back ward with bubbled widows still intact. While the facilities for most physical conditions are very modern, investment in cleaning services is clearly lower in the historical part of the hospital. I observed this in other programs as well.

If the person is so unlucky as to land in a board and care home or shelter, they might be forced to be out of the house all day and required to attend program. People who are thus subjugated may feel as if they are owned and must comply for others to get paid middle-class salaries. These things are often noticed by participants and they are upsetting. They may suffer just from facing this alternative. These realities may function as economic sanctions that teaches people to underestimate their value to society.

The Devil is in the Details:

Every journey that involves madness is difficult. The details of what one goes through need to be considered. I believe the survivors perspective is important. Thus, I share my perspective on what happened to me to demonstrate how economic sanctions may play out.

When I first went to therapy three months after I was released from the hospital, I tape recorded the interview because I was so afraid that talking at all would get me returned to the hospital. The only reason I went was that it was a requirement for me to get support from my family.

While some part of me knew I needed help, the way I was financially controlled remains unforgettable. I thought my family was the mafia so they arranged to get me a job at an Italian Delicatessen with a twenty mile a day bike ride and two additional hours riding the rails to work. All this effort was needed for a nine-dollar-an-hour job. It has taken me years and covert conversations with family members to unpack and understand the web of relationships that imposed such a reality on me.

Worse, to get financial help with rent, I had to spend $250 a week on imposed therapy. The bike ride and rail ride to therapy was longer than the ride to work. I lived this way for six months using my free time to unsuccessfully get hired elsewhere until my mother relented and gave me three thousand dollars to enable me to purchase a clunker automobile. She defied my father to do this and still feels she made a mistake.

If the therapist had referred me to food stamps and made the therapy voluntary, I might not still suffer the way I do. However, the therapist insisted that the situation was fair and refused to validate or acknowledge the hardship I endured. “I believe you are working hard, but believe me working at a Deli is not so hard. You are giving your power away to those teenage kids. They are not so bad, really. You are letting them bully you!”

By the time I finally left this therapeutic relationship two years later tens of thousands of dollars later, I knew better than to contest the therapist. She said she was not a greedy capitalist. She told me not to become a wounded healer. She told me that in reality I hadn’t been close to homelessness.

I agreed that I was not really hungry and strapped for cash during this process. I concealed all the night terrors and peeing the bed at night during the process. Of course, I lied! I worked until I got my Marriage and Family Therapy License and I wrote an award-winning book about my experience.

I have become a wounded healer! I use insurance rather than demand cash for my services. At least I am not a pretender.

But still, my life is limited due to affects of trauma and mistrust.

Using Therapy Techniques that Don’t Impose Reality!

I think it is important for healers to halt the process of imposing reality upon sufferers and give them choices and options as to how to manage their situations. Instead of siding with forced treatment and using this to impose your values and ideas on the vulnerable individual, listen to the story of what they went through to get to you. Give them resources that give them choices about whether they want to work with you.

Instead of telling the sufferer what to do and what is safe, be curious about what they are experiencing that causes them distress or delight. Know that real important experiences are behind the alternate reality that they are facing. Know that alternate reality has meaning and purpose that can be understood and supported. Alternate realities may be profoundly different from the world you understand, but be brave and curious. If your conduct becomes part of the problem be curious and learn more about what you are doing.

Don’t use the threat of hospitalization to silence or disrupt behavior associated with alternative experience. Instead, go down the rabbit hole with the sufferer with a road map of coping strategies. Know what your doing if you are going to make coping strategy suggestions. If you don’t know what your doing, it’s okay, admit it. Problems with voices and alternate realities are hard. Just being there without imposing reality will really help. Also, it is usually appreciated if you puzzle through the muck to the best of your ability.

Consider that dangerous and scary experiences are not going to be openly shared with you if you are going to laugh and call them crazy. I would not tell my therapist real experiences that were disturbing because she wouldn’t take my less-disturbing experiences seriously. What ensued was entirely unhelpful to me. It was a total thorn in my side.

I concealed as much as I could and she had absolutely no understanding. Then, when I did things that could have got me killed, like call the FBI, she threatened me with what seemed to be hospitalization instead of understanding and exploring the experiences that led me to do so. That is an example of what happens when treatment is imposed!

A Challenge to the Status Quo Best Practice:

Throughout I have referenced the existence of early prevention programs. Locally and nationally they usually utilize a best practice called CBT for Psychosis.

I’d like to argue that when the best practice for psychosis, CBT for psychosis, allows healers to separate themselves from the beliefs of the client, it makes the process of safe connection much harder. This is a boundary and policy that makes it harder for recipients of treatment to trust because it reinforces the idea that reality may be imposed. Especially, if the helper turns and refers them back to the meatgrinder of psychiatric inpatient to send them a message, it can add to trauma.

I am not saying that challenging irrational thinking cannot be helpful at times. However, not everyone who is abused can control their thoughts. Experiences like disassociation and hypervigilance often interfere with cognition control. Let those who can learn use cognitive therapy use it, but don’t come with a cookie cutter mentality. You may help some, but don’t presume that those who you can’t help aren’t reachable. Consider learning additional strategies.

I utilize broader strategies that include mindfulness strategies, curious inquiry about psychosis as a culture, medication, positive psychology, trauma informed reprocessing, behavioral strategies in addition to cognitive strategies. I believe broader strategies are needed and will leave far fewer people behind. There is a lot that can happen when reality isn’t imposed.

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No, I still don’t believe schizophrenia is an illness! Many would say I still demonstrate poor insight into my illness for the declaration. That’s okay with me.

I received the diagnosis from a pony-tailed man wearing rodeo work boots with a decorative slab of leather along the base of his lace. He walked with a light stepping swag.  He wouldn’t identify his role to me. I did know I was in the state hospital because I had been set up by the police who I successfully evaded for three days.

Staff denied my request for food before the interview. I was just waking up in the p.m. after my 4:00am arrival the night before. I hadn’t eaten since noon the day before when I’d only walked to mile ten. I was miffed because the paper with the list of police officers on it I had collected for my competency hearing was missing out of my pocket.

***

Three days earlier I had stopped at a gas station to refill. I prepared to dive under my car in the event of gun shots from the passing cars. And then I was in the mart. The police were standing by the merchant as I approached with a coke. Part of me was relieved to see them.

“Oh, did Mommy and Daddy say your brain chemicals are distorted,” mocked a state trooper in a falsetto. He looked like a social-working co-worker of mine back in New Jersey who use to pretend he was a CIA operative.

It was true I had a slight bone to pick with the Seattle PD for leaving law enforcement up to black market forces. I had been contracted to set up services in a notorious section 8 housing project within six months of moving to Seattle. I had received a significant verbal threat from an old friend from back east who said he had the power to harm me. I was on my way to Canada to seek asylum. I had leaked corruption to the press. I now believed these actions would one day be uncovered if they hadn’t already been.

I felt my face turn red from the comment. I was angry that my parents did want me hospitalized just as I had intuited on the road before I decided to head to Canada. My intuition was proving to be correct once again. I could feel myself grimace.

The police were on me and used pain tactics to get me to my knees. They bruised my wrists from handcuffs to prove their control. For the most part, I remained limp and passive.

I knew how to evade hospitalization. I assured the copper of this on my ride to the hospital in the calmest of voice tones. I kept my eye on the mileage. I practiced what to say to the quack doctor in the ER to get released.

The doctor was a reasonable man. I told him I was having memories of being sexually abused. As soon as he said I could go, I left abruptly out the glass doors. I had my life savings in the inseam of my jean. The game wasn’t over.

Outside the hospital at dusk a pack of the local PD floated toward me like rowdy ghosts and the ringleader asked me if I was Tim Dreby.

“Leave me alone!” I shouted. I didn’t identify myself. I braced for another attack, but it never came.

A day later, after testing out what I could and could not get away with, I feared retracing my steps to my car. I also feared taking a flight from the local airport. I knew I could not risk another hospital incident. Instead, I decided to walk from Helena to Butte Montana in one day. I had hiked fifty miles in a day before. But I hadn’t counted on the midnight temperature on the mountain pass. I surrendered to the state troopers who happened to be looking for me with their bright shining light before I made it to Butte.

***

The diagnosis from the pony-tailed man came after I finished this and other parts of my story. I told him I thought my parents were part of the mafia and were pulling the strings behind the scenes.

After I finally got a small portion of cold slop on a plate, I met my roommate.

“I am here to tell you that the Mafia really is after you,” said the Native American man who dressed in a hillbilly hat. “I am just a hillbilly, schizophrenic man in the hospital with a hundred and thirty IQ,” he said during my extensive interview of him. The friend who threatened me knew that I had a hundred thirty IQ.

“Did you know Marylyn Monroe died when Jack Kennedy stuffed cyanide up her ass,” he also said.

“So, I want to ask you a question, and this is important,” said the hillbilly with a pause, “when did the mafia to start following you?”

With a certain Alan Alda vulnerability, I said, “I think I was raised by a mafia family.”

The hillbilly looked uncertain. I wondered if I had said the right thing to the pony-tailed man.

The next day the pony-tailed man testified against me at my competency hearing. I was sentenced to a three-month incarceration.

***

I would be deeply wounded in the hospital. Being confined to a day room for two weeks was very hard. Getting my back reinjured by the cowboy security squad during a misunderstanding also hurt. I was known to be entitled because I tried to hold my workers accountable for not doing their job. As a result, no worker would speak with me. Even my psychiatrist took two months to meet with me. However, the neglect of the chronic unit was the worst. A year of nightmares would ensue.

When I got out of the hospital I took a greyhound and started over with $4,500 in assets. I only had one month of medication. Withdrawing off the medication caused me to lose the job I managed to attain at a daycare. I pounded the pavement daily for three months for any job including Walmart and McDonalds. I did manage to get an offer from a foster care agency, but I was afraid to take it with all I was going through.

My family agreed to intercede if I moved to the Bay Area and I obtained an arranged job at an Italian Delicatessen. Perhaps it seems ironic that this was the only job I could get. I went through a great deal of harassment, gaslighting, and persecution. Finally, when I returned to taking medication ten months later I was able to come out of the emergency state. I stopped being prejudice against the teens who were taunting me at the Deli. I realized that my family was not pulling all the strings.

***

Nineteen years later, I make a daily choice to continue medication to prevent the catastrophic loss associated with an emergency state. Maybe I haven’t made it clear: I still object to the word “schizophrenia” and the idea that what I go through daily is an illness. In fact, the latest reports define schizophrenia as more of a syndrome or neurodevelopmental condition than a disease. They even suggest that it is something that affects people across diagnostic divides something that I have argued for years (Vinograndoy, 2019, p.1.)

I do accept that some of my perceptive abilities are different than others. I do accept that they can lead me into an emergency state if I am not careful. However, I believe the word “illness,” was behind the treatment, I received at the State Hospital. There, I was trained to be controlled by the industry. No one would let me talk about my experiences. I was forced to suppress them even when aspects of them were one hundred percent accurate. I was not encouraged to learn from others. The hospital only prepared me for poverty and to be abused in a local board and care.

I continue to perceive that many people who believe that schizophrenia is an illness internalize treatment that can communicate such negative forecasts.

Turns out the outcome of my journey didn’t coincide with the “sick,” mainstream delusions associated with schizophrenia. I’d read those delusions in school where the twin studies proved the genetic component and there was a noted progressive decline that would get worse and worse and result in brain damage. Turns out twin studies weren’t so reliable, and abuse results in brain damage, not the syndrome which is more an expression of neuro-diversity.

Even if the latest research and I are wrong, and the illness causes brain damage, how was I able to endure some harsh conditions in the community, resume working and eventually passing licensure exams in spite of my learning disabilities? For six months I had to bike twenty miles a day, take the rails for an hour each way to a wealthy suburb, and work in the belly of the beast to prove to my mafia family that this was not my destiny.

***

Now I am a licensed psychotherapist on an outpatient psychiatric unit.

Eleven years ago, I heard about the hearing voices network in Europe, and started to run professional groups in which I disclosed my lived experience with “schizophrenia.” I learned to use my experiences to facilitate storytelling and reflections in group therapy. I have found doing this in a group transforms what was once terrorizing, maddening, and unspeakable into something that can provide insight and inspiration to help others.

Furthermore, there are many details, coincidences, and evidence that I was in fact being monitored in ways many might not think possible. There are also many extremely oppressed people who share experiences of being monitored to which I relate. Such experiences include voices, disassociation, viewing bizarre television scenes, having an apartment ransacked, secret service badges, receiving job related mail that was broken open, being tailed by police officers, and oh so much more.

I may not have all the answers to all the questions I have, but, finally, I know I am not alone. Knowing this is such a relief!

Vinograndov, Sophia, M.D., “Cognitive Training for Neural System Dysfunction for Psychosis Disorders,” Psychiatric Times, Vol 36 Issue 3, March 29, 2019.

published in:

click logo to purchase the issue

The post Why I Still Don’t Think Schizophrenia is an Illness! appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

When you think a person has a delusional idea, it is so important to remember that they often have amassed a significant amount of evidence to convince them they are correct. They likely know what they used to think, it is just that what they currently think seems to be more accurate. In fact, we consider ways the persons’ course of study might make some of their ideas more accurate than mainstream ideas on some occasions!

Ask Yourself: How Did You Get So Lucky to Witness a Delusion!

In many cases, the delusional person has experience in the mental health system has had other people tell them they are delusional in the past. Thus, the fact that they have let you know their thoughts is significant. To know how to respond, it can be important to know why they have told you their thought in the first place.

Maybe they have told you because:

• You have spent time with them so that they trust you,
• They have hope that you can help them,
• They presume you and everyone else have had the same experiences that they have,
• They are desperate and endangered in their emergency,
• or perhaps they are just testing you out to see where you stand in the conspiracy.

It is a good idea to understand why they have shared the idea and be delighted that they did.

In group therapy, I have found countering with your own experience with delusions and stories about what happened to you, and encouraging others to do the same, helps invite exploration. More on this later.

Don’t Presume Delusions are Wrong, Explore and Confirm Ways They Are Right:

In dealing with people in a mental health setting who are labeled as delusional, across the board, I think the worst thing that you can do is confront them and tell them you think they are wrong! They historically don’t have enough support in the world to be able to agree to disagree and it can really hurt them to hear that you too don’t believe or care about what they are going through.

Ultimately, more and more we are finding that voices and other experiences that make them delusional have value! The hearing voices movement has helped emphasize the importance of this. Often, the delusional person will need to know that you believe this before they will let you be of assistance to them.

Even if a delusional person asks you your opinion and says it will help, I believe you will be far more valuable to them if you are willing to spend a little time getting to know the journey of what they are experiencing without having an agenda.

Believe me they will be testing you to see if you have an agenda.

How can it hurt them or you to listen for a while? We often entertain ideas from distinct ideologies and look for common ground to make relationships. Instead of looking for ways they are wrong, confirm ways that they are right.

Join in and Contribute Conspiracy Ideas:

It is far more effective to share conspiracy ideas that you have yourself to normalize their experience. Do you think JFK was really killed by Lee Harvey Oswald? Clearly there is some degree of conspiracy that you can buy into! In group therapy that I have run over the past eleven years, it is helpful to normalize conspiracy topics and collaborate with them.

When “delusional” people get together and get invited to share, they often help each other by working together to excavate these ideas or experiences. Often, they will not volunteer their thoughts unless other conspiracies are on the table. Expounding on conspiracy with peers is a great way to tease them out.

I have learned to respect conspiracy ideas as bearing the potential of being more correct than mainstream ideas; but also bearing the possibility of being wrong when examined over time. I find that most delusional people can accept this with reflection. A group is often effective if it just lets the conspiracies rip and gets people talking.

The Importance of Finding Out How the Idea Came into Being:

As I suggested above, conspiracy ideas don’t come from nowhere. They come from a long string of experiences that get put together. I call these experiences special messages. A lot can be achieved when a delusional person is willing to identify what experiences they have had that help them think this way.

When experiences can be uncovered and identified, I believe the delusional person will feel a sense of relief and will be more mindful of those experiences. I don’t believe that identifying experiences only serves to reinforce them,

Think of it this way: being more mindful means, they judge them less and accept them more. Instead of racing to solve the conspiracy that may threaten their existence, they can reflect on the one experience with someone else. As if each experience was traumatic, uncovering it and clearly explaining is more likely to help the person let go of it.

Identifying These Underlying Experiences in a Group Context:

In group therapy with other delusional people, defining the different kinds of experiences that can lead to delusions (or what I prefer to term divergent views) can help facilitate associated stories that highlight certain kinds of special messages. A group facilitator can share their own experience with an experience and others can relate to it. This way individuals become more aware of their experiences.

Examples of special message experiences are things like:

Uncanny intuitions,

ESP,

Sensing the thoughts of another,

Having others be able to sense your thoughts

Premonitions,

Hearing voices,

Visions,

Dreams,

Tactile torture,

Interpersonal feedback,

Seeing clues of conspiracy in media,

Seeing clues in words,

Seeing clues in numbers,

Seeing clues in the world that surround you

Not Moving too Fast:

Often, before a delusional person is willing to disclose their underlying experience, they may need to have a corrective experience of making sure they will not be punished or incarcerated again for sharing their ideas. There is a tendency in mainstream treatment to impose reality on delusional people that often comes with loss of rights, unwanted medications, and, most commonly, by being ignored or called “crazy” or “delusional.”

Additionally, many have experienced severe poverty, like homelessness, as a result of their delusional ideas and these kinds of depravations can be perceived as an even worse form of punishment.

Thus, a facilitator is wise to recognize when a delusional person just needs to tell their shocking stories and beliefs without connecting with others or disclosing underlying experiences. This story, while it may raise eyebrows, may be getting told to establish safety and freedom from punishment. It needs to be encouraged and valued by the facilitator even if other delusional people don’t get it.

What About Reality Testing?

Someone who is delusional for some years likely feels oppressed in the mental health. Reality testing often leads to an end in the exploration or relationship.

It is important to remember that, in most cases, the person who is looking for reality testing would prefer being in control of the test. They may ask you questions and trick you to get authentic answers.

For best outcomes, anticipate this and provide persistent authenticity. Thus, all questions need to be answered with honesty, without defensiveness, and with congruent non-verbal and verbal responses.

Rarely will your feedback resolve the issue and experiences they are having. It is possible that the experiences they are having will continue to some extent for a while. But hopefully they can get to the point where they trust you through it all.

I work with delusional people a long time before I try to provide reality feedback. I generally do this when the person is testing me to see if I am the mastermind of their problems. When I am aware of this happening, I believe correcting them via non-verbal cues, and communicating about the feedback they are receiving from me can help.

In general, I will support what I think they believe to the best of my ability. Indeed, I still believe that often delusional people are correct in ways that are surprising.

Teaching the Public What You Know:

In fact, delusional people are quite common. But when delusional people are treated in the mental health system, the result be very severe isolation. Too often, this isolation is totally reinforced in repressive treatment that tries to further suppress traumatic experiences, rather than heal.

A far better strategy is to try to change public opinion about underlying experiences like ESP or voices. are and how to further include people who experience an influx of them in crisis. Most people get feedback from dreams, nonverbal communication, and intuitions, which are types of underlying experiences. They can learn to relate

The post How to Help When You Think Someone Might Be Delusional appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

How many parents out there would rather learn that their child had developed a life-threatening cancer, than hear that their child carries a diagnosis of schizophrenia? Historically burned-out doctors may be known to make such negative statements about schizophrenia at the time of diagnosis. If they end up being wrong, they simply re-diagnose the sufferer with bipolar; but still their comment happened. Perhaps, it challenged you to devalue your loved one.

Well, I am a mental health professional, and nothing excites me more than meeting someone else who has experiences associated with schizophrenia. I instantly know aspects of what they have gone through. It makes them a potential friend to me. Additionally, I come equipped with handfuls of tools that I think may be helpful for them. I am additionally curious to see what they might teach me about myself.

Strange thing is, I am not alone in my world view. Maybe you have heard of the international movement called the Hearing Voices Network? Originating from a psychiatrist in the Netherlands named Marious Romme and Sandra Escher, this movement seeks to normalize one of the many experiences associated with schizophrenia? The movement points out that one in ten people hear voices and that not everyone needs to be institutionalized in the mental health system as a result. In fact, the movement has proved that people who have been institutionalized for years turn out to be great leaders and advocates.

Stereotypes You Are Up Against:

Maybe, it is not fair to blame anyone for a negative response to the above dilemma because of all the negative stereotypes associated with the schizophrenia word. Many people think of a homeless person who is out fighting for their survival on the streets, posturing, or bearing a cardboard sign beneath the underpass. Those a little more informed of the norms may think of a crowded board and care home with nothing to do but to smoke and drink coffee. Still others in some states imagine a lengthy state hospital stay or transitions through hospital recidivism and homeless shelters. Of course, there will be those who think of shows they’ve seen like Criminal Minds or The Guardian. They may conjure images of mass shooting events that are blasted through the media quicker than our very apparent national homeless crisis.

Of course, as a parent or loved ones there is the stereotype of the fresh-out-of-school social workers supervised by burned out administrators who dehumanizes their patients the minute their backs are turned. Perhaps it is hard to watch this happen and easier just to stay out of it. Perhaps, some of you will shield your kids from this reality and try to take care of them on your own. Meanwhile, much of the public feels that we as a nation were kinder and gentler during industrial times when we provided mental institutions. We all know stereotypes are bad but still they exist are real and scare us.

When Stereotypes Become Real:

I can relate. I worked in mental health and greatly despised the life I saw many of my clients enduring. I respected my supervisors, but it never felt right. When I advanced to be able to work independently, I was so successful at advocating for better care, that it is part of what landed me in a State Hospital myself and discharged to the streets.

“You see Tim,” I was told in my second meeting with my psychiatrist two months into my State Hospital stay, “one time we had someone come in here and say they were being followed by the FBI and we found out they were in fact being followed. They hadn’t done much, but they were under investigation.”

Was she really referencing me? I had tipped to press of to murder and mayhem on several occasions. Yes, many of those stigmatized scenes are real, but they are only a small piece of the picture.

Indeed, I was willing to call myself autistic long before I was willing to call myself the schizophrenic that I am. It took me fifteen years of recovery before I started to embrace the ugly word because the stereotypes were so threatening to me.

Hard Decisions You Face:

Such stereotypes may bring really hard decisions. Your relationship with your loved one, the extent to which you perceive justice in social institutions, and your own stigma about mental health challenges may influence your take on what you are hearing.

Remember, that even though your loved one is in an emergency state potentially flailing around with conspiracy ideas and opinions about you, they know you well enough to know how you will respond. They may sense your response and resent it. Historical problems in the relationship may become exacerbated exponentially. For a minority, there is the potential of real violence while your loved one remains in emergency state? How are you to respond if someone you love suddenly sees you as the root of all evil?

And what will your friends say? How may they judge your parenting or partnership?  How do you handle privacy needs? How have you done this throughout their lives up to this point? Do your actions further shame your loved one? How much credence do you put into the medical diagnosis? What have you heard about the word: recovery? Does your loved one deserve the best treatment, or do they need to be treated fairly, just like everyone else? What is the best treatment? What kind of money and resources do you have to play with? How willing are you to support someone who isn’t behaving appropriately? How much do you value your own safety verses theirs?

Support for You:

Providers will generally refer you to the power structure of NAMI for support and you will mingle with others who have faced these dilemmas for years. If you are even willing to stay involved, you can use these groups to figure the most humane decisions to make.

Often, with this referral comes a clear concept of a chemical imbalance to which your loved one is victim. Suddenly you are surrounded by volunteers who give their time and expect you to do the same and support their views. Accepting the power of the illness, setting behavioral boundaries, imposing medications, and accepting dilapidated housing options may be the standard with which you are encouraged to comply.

Indeed, people and families are very different as are regions and NAMI boards. A variety of things can be helpful.

What it Feels Like to Find Meaning in Stereotypes:

When I was going through dehumanizing stereotypical experiences, I only felt victimized. I had always thought I was critical of dehumanizing practices; but still, I was shocked! Oh, how much worse that horrific, maddening, and dehumanizing treatment seem when you are in an emergency state. No one believed a word I said. I didn’t think I would ever be glad for enduring it. I could see no value to losing all my social standing and being incarcerated in impoverished circumstances. I feared for my future.

Now eighteen years later, I use all those degrading experiences which lasted two years after I was discharged to the streets to convince patients I work with that I know what they are talking about. I still feel overwhelmed when I think of what I went through, but I now can say I went through them for a reason.

I often say that if I had known that my suffering could lead to a lifetime of meaningful work, it wouldn’t have been so terrorizing. Instead of waking up in night terrors, or having urinated in my bed, I could have gone through what I went through more gracefully. And I wouldn’t have been as hard to manage for all the low wage work community that surrounded me. I mean any innocent child who saw me coming would run the other way. My negative energy was quite off-putting.

You May Be Needed to Make it Possible:

Meanwhile, my father had made his opinion known, he felt incarceration and mental health warehousing would be as good as it would get for me. Just like the treatment system at Montana State Hospital which was set up to help me adjust to poverty and disempowerment, it seemed like deep down he wanted to be right about his negative prediction. Still, he gave me a year of economic support to get it together. Though I could have got food stamps, my parents did help! And I still call them weekly. The memory of them being so concerned they were just enabling me while I was biking twenty miles a day to work a forty-hour week still burns.

Thank god it worked! I was able to get back to my career.

Can you imagine how great I feel with a career in mental health, a wife, a dog, and a home?

Many Others Can Do It:

Many others of us who suffer can do a lot of healing and earning of social empowerment by helping each other out. We can do this by using our experiences to reach others who may appear unreachable to outsiders. However, we also need to be paid for our livelihood.

Not only have I been blessed with the opportunity to find meaning from my suffering, I have seen others do it as well. I have helped employ a team of four to use their experiences associated with psychosis to help others. They outreached and learned to run groups in agencies.

What Is Missing for Schizophrenics in America?

Perhaps not everyone who suffers from experiences associated with schizophrenia naturally takes to becoming a therapist the way I have, but the mental health system really lacks a vision for sustainable roles for us schizophrenics to occupy. And I believe the first step towards creating such roles involves seeing schizophrenia as a culture rather than an illness.

In other countries the hearing voices movement has taken hold, healed many, and given people valuable roles. The premise is simple: let people who hear voices from different walks of life get together and share their experiences in un-monitored support groups. Wow, so much can come from that!

For the last eleven years I have run such support groups as a professional who openly reflects on my lived experience with schizophrenia. Like many hearing voices groups, the focus of my groups extends beyond simply hearing voices. I like to include and normalize all kinds of experiences that lead people to alternative thoughts about the way the world works.

I think these kinds of support groups help direct schizophrenics to care about the experiences of their brethren. Mutual learning and coping strategies result. Hence, letting schizophrenics acculturate and be schizophrenics is a marvelous step in the right direction.

The Need for A Living Wage:

However, in my opinion, support groups are just a start to what is needed to give the culture a meaningful role. In Oakland California, services that outreach to homeless encampments, board and care homes, agencies and shelters can invite institutionalized individuals out to support groups. Many of the people I serve off the streets of Oakland, can greatly benefit from having visitors who come and bring the support groups to them in their board and care home. Then, they might then learn to come out to groups in the community and get around some of the obstacles that keep them isolated.

An organization as such can significantly train and employ schizophrenics to develop a variety of skills. It can give them a chance to make meaning from the stereotypes through which they may have lived or to which they feared Thus a training/outreach program can help schizophrenics move on to better and better jobs.

How You Can Help Your Loved Ones Realize this Vision?

I think it is important to end the medicalized view of schizophrenia. Updated research is defining psychosis across diagnostic divides as more of a syndrome or even a neurodevelopmental disorder like autism or dyslexia. This really supports the work of the Hearing Voices Network which contends that voices and other experience do have value and carry real meaning that must be addressed for healing and survival.

Believe me, there can be complex underlying issues to address.

Thus, as you live schizophrenic stereotypes through your loved one, remember that they may be transformed into your child’s mission in life. You cannot possibly be responsible for all the meanness in the system, but you can take updated research and success stories from the Hearing Voices Movement to your NAMI meetings. You can find ways to support employment for schizophrenics through empowering organizations like the one I proposed above. I ran such a program for a year and a half until the temporary funding was done. I know it can be done.

Successful Schizophrenics:

There are many things that can help schizophrenics find roles that utilize their passions and interests. As a culture, schizophrenics are historically oppressed like heretics in western society. However, if we are to explore many traditional societies, we may find many of the skills that are labeled as an illness to be shamanic and spiritual. There are many wise traditions to explore in creating solutions.

I personally do not throw the tradition of psychiatry down the toilet. I myself utilize medication and work with others who do as well. I also admire and champion people who do not. However, we must offer solutions that help heal the localized abuses that have occurred within the medicalized system. One solution does not fit all.

Ultimately, I still wouldn’t mind using another word besides schizophrenia. I call my groups and my program special messages.

The post How to Help Your Loved One Be A Successful Schizophrenic? appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

When I was in psychosis, or what I prefer to call the message crisis, I was extremely angry when my family used leverage to force me into treatment. For starters, they contacted the police and supported a three-month hospitalization that kept me from seeking asylum in Canada. I concluded that they were a mafia family and the reason I was getting followed and harassed.

Perhaps this scenario sounds familiar to the reader? It lasted for two years after I was released from the hospital.

I continue to feel hurt by many of the things that transpired due to leverage. I may be able to act as I forgive, but I will never forget what it was like to experience such cruelty alone.

Thank god I was wrong about some of it!

Back in those days, I never imagined that I would someday write a blog about how to effectively leverage a message receiver into treatment. I would have sworn that I would never sell out so much to even suggest such an action.

Rethinking the Issue of Leverage:

Thanks to the word, “recovery,” I have been blessed with an opportunity to return to my career in mental health and work toward providing treatment for those who suffer from message crisis. It’s true, I have had to look the other way and swim against the tide a bit, but I have seen a few things work. I have witnessed how even things that I think would have been detrimental to me, can be helpful for some people.

Now, with hindsight as twenty-twenty, I ponder the issue of leverage for the conscientious family member, loved one, or helper who deals with the message receiver who is stuck. While a lot of my work emphasizes the fact that message receivers have a lot in common; there is also vast diversity in terms of strengths, preferences, support, and resources. I want to consider the message receiver who withdraws from their support and the world into the confines of their room or board and care with nothing but, perhaps cigarette smoke, and the wonderland of their messages to comfort or torment them. A recent Facebook post and unassociated conversation encouraged me to do this

 Establishing Treatment Instead of Confinement:

I think the first hurdle to clear is to assure that there is treatment available. This means that message receivers need to work with people who do not engage in senseless confinement and exploitation.

In my opinion, it is rare that using leverage to impose hospitalization and involuntary medication works out. Unless the person is on board due to their own large amount of suffering, imposing involuntary hospitalization or medication may sabotage future treatment. Let involuntary hospitalization happen as a natural consequence, not something to leverage. Anyone who is familiar with trauma research might tell you, it can take a long time for a person to work through being punished for an involuntary experience that is already traumatic.

Finding real treatment is a very tall order in a public system that primarily trains the message receiver to use medication via the revolving door of incarceration. Many therapists go against their licensure training to even attempt to treat a person in psychosis. I was taught to refer out or utilize the psychiatric emergency room.

I have found that developing treatment often involves a space to process how traumatic and confusing incarceration feels.

Additionally, I have come to believe that treatment involves workers and supporters who are curious and knowledgeable about psychosis with copious and flexible coping strategies, and the humility to engage in ongoing learning. I do not believe true treatment can happen when the content of psychosis is not welcome in the relationship. I think when the reality of psychosis is always suppressed, exploitive confinement might be as good as it gets.

The Natural Benefit of Community and Structure:

During the crisis, when the message receiver responds to their terrorizing or spiritual messages via social withdrawal, treatment may require community and structure of intriguing tasks and efforts that help draw the message receiver out. In the process of trying to create such an environment, teaching the message receiver to be interested in and respect their peers can really help.

While good treatment offers the safety of time to heal, it might also require an ongoing nudge toward challenging the message receiver to move on to their hopes and dreams when they are ready. If treatment doesn’t do this, it may easily get misunderstood as confinement. I do not believe productive trust can truly exist until the full extent of recovery hopes and dreams are supported.

I acknowledge that the function of having treatment communities available, which are costly and often scarce is a real service to the special message community. Still, I am not saying that they are for everyone. Treatment might also involve the freedom to say no, but the option of less restrictive alternative actions, such as individual treatment mixed with self-support activities away from the treatment team.

Yes, a treatment facility needs to sustain itself by making money, but it also needs to not treat the message receiver like they are a commodity. It may be okay to ask for some level of commitment to services, but it is not fair to push commitment if it does not lead to something that involves substantial sustainable community integration.

 Importance of Supporting Structured Activities Outside of Treatment Milieus:

Even if community and structured activity treatment exists, it is important not to overly leverage them. If they don’t exist or if they are unwanted, it may be important for the message receiver to receive support towards the social rehab endeavors that most matter to them and to have support in those endeavors.

Social rehabilitation support needs to capitalize on healthy, goal directed activities away from psychosis. Thus, any interest needs to be acknowledged and supported regardless of their ability to meet immediate career needs. If the message receiver is working against their psychosis, there is no need to impose leverage towards things they don’t want to do, like treatment.

A savvy supporter will try to help a message receiver do what they can to reflect positively on any activity away from message crisis. Likely these efforts are happening, but in my experience, they are not always talked about because they may seem to pale in comparison to the rat race we are all supposed to be in. Championing them may mean uncovering them and holding them up to the light instead of presuming that all is lost.

Processing and Reflecting on Messages:

I think it is fair to presume that the message receiver will need to take some time to process and reflect on their voices or other relevant experiences. As I suggested earlier, not inquiring about the magnificent learnings and focusing only on their inactivity with negative comments is rarely fruitful. Rather, encouraging a message receiver to schedule reflection/process time is important, as is encouraging them to join others this endeavor. The message receiver might be encouraged to do so with a therapist or mentors in a self-support group, or at least during exercise.

If a message receiver comes to therapy, it is important to be curious about the experiences they are going through and marvel and champion them, just as you marvel and champion activities away from psychosis. Support groups that bring out the silenced stories and give them time and perhaps some collective wisdom are important.

My Own Experience with Leverage and the Importance of Picking Your Poison:

My parents required me to take six hours in addition to my sixty-hour work week (two-125$-hours, plus travel time to and from the office) to meet with a therapist. A modest but life-sustaining amount of financial support was attached.

Had I been able to talk to this therapist about my messages without getting judged or treated disrespectfully, I may not have resented the large chunk she was taking away from my future nest egg. I may have been thankful. The exercise on the way to therapy plus the exercise I got on the way to my job was helpful.

Even though I did feel like a resentful slave or a piece of human traffic, what did help me get through this trying time was the fact that I had chosen it.

I wanted to work. I had happened to have worked in too many structured programs to feel they were worth my time. I felt that many programs I had worked in were too disempowering and provided little future.

I knew deep down that being a social worker was likely not feasible. Indeed, I had obtained a social work job and had an opportunity to risk homelessness for that job, or work at an Italian Deli when I believed my family was the mafia. That opportune choice was key to enduring a large amount of torment and suffering.

As a result, I did do my best to make the exercise time and therapy time work. It could have been easier for sure, but I avoided jail, homelessness and more psychiatric incarceration—things I was truly scared of.

Consequences of Using No Leverage:

While now one might argue that such drastic, do-or-die leveraging as I went through was harsh, I now reflect on how life might be with no leverage at all.

I work with some people who were once warehoused in State Hospitals and who live in board and care homes. When people are trained to withdraw into messages for years, stories become buried and goal-directed behavior get blunted. I am also aware that there are people who withdraw into messages who live at home. I am aware of the natural consequences of this: when their loved ones die, they are likely to become sequestered in board and care homes.

Thus, I think that there are times when working with leverage can make sense in lieu of negative consequences that may lie in wait. If treatment means getting to know people who are worse off, it can be an eye-opener that can help motivate. I think knowing local services and getting help with communication during the leveraging process can be helpful.

I have seen small, slow, humane amounts of leverage work without causing trauma. I think protecting a person from the harsh realities of the mental health system needs to be done with reason. Helping suffers know their choices and lead the lives they want to live even if it does not fit your own hopes and dreams for the person is certainly a brave thing to do.

 The Need for Ongoing Support and Encouragement When Leverage is Used:

I still reflect on times I wanted to give up. I can say that it was helpful and redeeming when my parents credited my efforts as mattering and being financially relevant. Being encouraged at these times was very important.

I feel compelled to add that if the leveraged message receiver tries and fails, all is not lost. It is important to remember that important learning can be capitalized upon from any failure. Good support does not use a failure to impose an agenda, but rather is there to support the learning that can happen. Advocate to apply the learning to the next opportunity of their choice! Good support maintains a positive perspective on the effort put forth regardless of the outcome.

Remember, this is supported by an evidence-based practice that is applied to vocational training (The IPS Model.) If you lose a job, get a new one. Keep going until you get one that sticks.

Conclusion:

I still wouldn’t advise using leverage very often. Remember that it is possible that unprocessed ill use of leverage might be part of the problem that is keeping the message receiver stuck. Still, I have come to believe that treatment does exist and can be helpful. Now I can say that apt leverage involves a mixture of timing, series of least restrictive choices and ongoing, attentive support. It involves holding hope for full recovery when the message receiver doesn’t have it.

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