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".

PART ONE–Introduction: 

Perhaps it can seem daunting to agree with some of the radical conspiracies that get tossed around during extreme states of psychosis. When people experience what I prefer to term a special message emergency, sharing their stories becomes very important. However, it can be hard for supporters to truly believe that the resulting beliefs they have about the world are valid. When they are talked about and aren’t believed the participant can become retraumatized. That is why I argue that it is important to honor such beliefs if you are ever to form a collaborative relationship

Maybe aliens aren’t your thing. Maybe you actually believe the earth is round like they say it is. How can you entertain ideas that just don’t fit your training and experience?

***

I have been honoring such beliefs for twelve years and have grown in my ability to have an open mind to conspiracy that doesn’t fit my experience.

I still remember one of those beliefs I heard about which I didn’t believe. One day in the group room I had a participant suggest that there were in fact cameras in televisions so that the federal government could spy on you.

Now, to be honest, I have believed similar things. I may have chimed in that I had believed that my apartment was bugged with cameras in the lights. I easily relate and share those past beliefs to contribute and help that participant feel included. But cameras in the television? Really? A part of me felt that concept was ridiculous.

Well years later, I still remember listening to the radio when the latest wiki leak exposure was released. There it was. Suddenly, there were cameras in television that the government could use to spy on the public. And within the week, the president was accusing President Barak Obama of spying on him in like manner during the probe into Russian interference.

And so I’ve learned to use that story to help me give credit to conspiracy theories in my groups. It helps me remind people that conspiracy ideas and intuitive knowledge need to be honored even if they sound unusual.

***

Sure, at one point I thought the mafia had a tracker implanted int my dog when I had her fixed in the pound. Sure, that sounds unlikely. However, helpers need to be on the side of validating such thoughts. Remember, when I walked with my dog, I experienced things that suggested that I was experiencing an increase in harassment.

If a helper was to work with me and use information to challenge me, knowledge and evidence of potential for such conspiracy is needed. For example, if I was really such a high-level target, maybe it wasn’t the mafia, maybe it was the federal government.

The fact is, if you study phenomena like what transpired in South Boston during the Whitey Bulger years, or when you realize that the intelligence reports reveal that Jack Kennedy turned to mafia assassins during the Bay of Pigs, you start to better realize how high level targets get dealt with in the United States. Facts about real conspiracy can be very helpful. If I were to get that support during my time of need, imagine the decrease in anxiety I might have experienced.

It’s true that when I learned to ignore these realities, I was removed from the blacklist and allowed to work amidst the drug toting public again. But to get there it took a great deal of time and work.

The bulk of this article will explore real theories of causation that can help the supporter know productive ways to validate conspiracy. The point is to create flexible, mindful responses to distressing content. This can involve validating conspiracies in ways that include other modalities or frameworks. Often, offering healing alternative suggestions can help a sufferer feel safer and less stuck.

Quid Pro Quo Stories Leading to Collaboration:

Something that has clearly helped me make such alternate suggestions is my own experience with psychosis, and having achieved a social rehabilitation and the position I hold as a mental health therapist. With my demonstrated ability to work with people who recite the pledge of allegiance and participate in consensus reality, I am also able to choose to tell my own story in ways that are believable and in ways that aren’t so believable.

I know that the America that I’ve experienced is not the America that kids are taught about in grade school and that adults understand by listening to the news media.

I still notice the furrowed brow look I get when let people know what I think about what happened to me.

I believed I was being harassed by my mafia family and the only job I could get was a job arranged by my family at an Italian Deli. But when I tell my story in a way that might arouse doubt, I can quickly add details that are a bit more credible that can help someone understand how I could have come up with such beliefs.

When I am well, I can talk about evidence that sounds suspect and con a person into reality checking me. Then I can use parts of my story that are a bit more valid and suggestible and help them realize that their reality check was a bit premature.

Remember, that when a therapy participant doesn’t believe the conspiracy that I went through and tries to reality check me, there is an unspoken quid pro quo that arises. Now this gives them the ability to tell parts of their story. Now they have something on me. Now if I disbelieve them, it will not be so morally devastating.

See, I believe that whether I say so or not, I will disbelieve them. I believe they will be able to sense that I disbelieve them. I need to establish that permission to work with them and ultimately be a validating, trustable force. If they see I have the ego strength to reconsider my experience, they maybe they can muster the same ego strength.

This is a strategy I’ve learned to exploit over the years to get people to talk to me who otherwise would have only seen me as an officer of oppression or a sell-out. It’s about developing a trusting rhythm that can be used to validate conspiracy. I believe that this is achievable for people who haven’t experienced psychosis and van learn to believe that intuitive knowledge is a force with which to be reckoned

How Understanding Components of Psychosis can a Help A Supporter Validate Conspiracy:

I think it is important to understand that when confronted with experiences like voices, visuals, or other hallucinations, there are also other experiences to consider. Consider powerful intuition, premonitions, or interpersonal observation of non-verbal behavior; consider dreams and linguistic codes; symbolism and imagery, dreams; and consider ESP or mind reading abilities that may in fact be inexplicably real. Imagine being inundated with these vast lists of anomalous experiences so that they preoccupy your mind and dominate the day.

People who get inundated make meaning of these experiences. I have called this making meaning process sleuthing. This is the important process of understanding what these experiences mean and how they may affect your survival. During this process of sleuthing, the person focuses hard on trying to understand where each message or experience or hallucination is coming from and what it means. According to the Hearing Voices Network jargon, this process is termed making meaning and results in developing frameworks.

Message receivers or people who encounter psychosis, spend hours sleuthing by making meaning and exploring frameworks and weighing the consequences of different actions. What I am suggesting is that by better defining and exploring frameworks a message receiver has developed a strong capacity to understand and validate conspiracy. Thus, in groups, exploring frameworks is an extremely important thing to do.

It is my intention to are findings from twelve years of doing this in professional groups with the reader. My hope is to help the reader understand the importance of validating conspiracy frameworks no matter how unlikely they may appear.

From holding these discussions in groups, I have identified five types of framework or styles of conspiracy that can be explored all of which have value. It’s true these ideas may bleed together a great deal, but I believe a lot can be learned by understanding these five frameworks better. I believe that understanding each framework can help a supporter feel a whole lot better about supporting conspiracy because perhaps they will see how all are all possible.

PART TWO—Five Validating Frameworks:

One, Political Frameworks:

This is the controversial argument that persecution is real because social power structures are conspiring to harm a person who is rebelling and outing the real presence of secret societies and corruption in American Society. In other words, schizophrenia is a formal way that snitches end up in ditches.

In this framework secret societies meet and conspire behind a persons’ back to try to control their behavior. This can be like the treatment team in a hospital or case management team. It can involve teams of people with access to covert databases of information like the local police or the FBI. It can involve secret crime syndicates that likewise have access to those same databases, like cartels, foreign agents, or other entities that engage in black market activities. Finally, there are other kinds of secret societies like the illuminati, the masons, skull and bones, scientology, MKULTRA, the AMA, the APA, the Prison Unions, or other powerful cabals that illegally or legally protect the privileges of the powerful.

Discussing the realities of these secret societies can help validate many message receivers concerns and help give them valid insight into the way they are being marginalized and controlled in the community. When someone is on a psychiatric hold, it is often the cabal of the person’s family working in concert with other power brokers. It is helpful for a political prisoner in a state hospital to understand that they are not alone and that it isn’t safe to out secret societies.

A helper can really validate a special message receiver by revealing what they do really know about what the secret societies want from them. If you know about the rules and workings of a secret society, it can help a message receiver weigh the consequences of their rebellious actions. Of course, you don’t want to out individual members of the team and set them up to get attacked, that is not what I am suggesting. It is, however, possible to give the sufferer a general glimpse into the mentality of the secret society that might be controlling them.

Validating the injustice connected with the existence of secret societies is a good way to validate conspiracy. And so, studying Whitey Bulger in South Boston, oligarchies in the United States, and speculating on other top-secret realities starts to make more sense. Now we may start to weigh the difference between natural evolution and alien intrusion back when civilization first started back in the Sumerian days.

These things aren’t so hard to validate when a person starts to value the role of secret societies from the white house, to high-level administrative healthcare meetings, to medical ethics panels, to the multidisciplinary treatment teams that control behavioral health decisions.

Two, Abuse Frameworks:

Many of the special messages that message receivers get may be related to past abuse. For example, a voice may be that of a past perpetrator that has had negative influence on them. Also, there can be triggered by events, people or objects. These are people or symbols that have the same energy or attitudes that the past perpetrator did. Then, the message receiver in on guard and triggered to re-experience associated feelings.

Police and psychiatric ER nurses may be examples of trigger people. People wearing bow ties may likewise trigger fear of secret societies. Seeing someone restrained and rapidly tranquilized may trigger mistrust for authority. It is arguable that hypervigilance to these roles, events and symbols that oppress and take away the message receivers rights that may further fuel sleuthing.

In simpler terms, messages may become noticeable because of hypervigilance when bad things that happened in the past seem to be happening again. In another sense, they may not be as upsetting to a person if they realize they are being retriggered and evade danger.

In a very real sense, unexplained intuitions and illogical responses may include generational trauma. For some of us who become inundated with hypervigilant awareness some may come from trauma from past lives or historical realities.

It is also arguable that psychic numbing or dissociation may cause message receivers to get in touch with different parts of themselves. On some occasions these parts reflect voice characters that may have uncanny knowledge or even be triggered for better or worse by external events. In situations of severe dissociation people may black out and lose their memory and sometimes have another personality come forth. Some people describe this as a voice taking over and controlling their bodies.

While there is a great deal of controversy over whether a dissociative identity is real (often by people who believe in imprisonment and capital punishment,) I think a lot can be explained and validated through dissociation experiences. Perhaps some of the hallucinations that are experienced are dissociative and point to different dimensions of reality or phenomena like time travel, astro-planning through the neighborhood, derealization, depersonalization and other checks on the mental status exam. For example, dissociative experiences may take over the body and cause blindness, deafness or other hysterical phenomena.

Within this framework a supporter can learn about past trauma and help the message receiver make connections and realize that they are being hypervigilant or dissociating because of particular triggers and restore them to a state of safety.

Additionally, as the science of body energy is currently being acknowledged, it is fully understandable that some people develop senses of stress or energy waves that are getting emitted off the surface of the body. Some even may see colored auras around a person.

Also understanding of neurobiology has taught us new ways of helping people revisit traumatic content through EMDR and bilateral stimulation. One could argue meditation has done this for years. There are ancient eastern practices like Chi Gong or Tai Chi. And what is walking meditation? It is bilateral stimulation.

Often psychosis itself is very traumatic and leads to abusive responses. Consider what it feels like to lose your rights and be hospitalized against your will for having experiences for which you did not sign up. When safety is restored and hypervigilance and dissociation can be reduced the messages will just go away.

Conversely when abuse is not seen or a person is judged negatively for emitting signs of abuse; when people become warehoused and forced to submit to abusive directives; and in the worst case scenario when they learn to trust such circumstances, it not only validates the hypervigilance and dissociation, it activates associated messages which get more extreme especially when they are not allowed to be talked about.

Three, Spiritual Frameworks:

It might sound strange, but a lot of people believe that there is an all-knowing spirit that is sometimes even thought to come in the form of a human being. Perhaps, like Kevin Smith envisions in the Movie, Dogma, such visions take the form of Alanis Morrisette. But oddly, there are also other formulations.

Based on this concept, there is the sense that things happen that are beyond the human realm. There can be good energies and bad energies but generally something larger is behind these experiences that promotes good. There may be good entities and bad entities; there maybe telepathy with loved ones; there may be ghosts or aliens that intermix with human history; there may be inexplicable emotional connections and things like church, scripture, meditation, or Sunday School that cause people to believe such obscure principles.

While many people generally have faith that good will triumph over bad. Still the idea that some people are connected to this spiritual realm has often caused people to be killed as heretics, witches, lepers, or schizophrenics because such beings challenge the social order and power structures.

It’s true the idea that some people are touched by bad spirits or are angry and abused. Currently, the medicalized notion is that what people think is spiritual contact is really just a deficit caused by neurotransmitters called dopamine. Also, many also believe artificially micro-dosing with ketamine and LSD can help heal and advance functioning through likewise tampering with dopamine.

But who’s to say some born with different kinds of minds are born with spiritual genes, kind of like the Jedi’s in Star Wars. Or, maybe god creates people who are different who may be there to challenge or change humanity with developing mutations like Darwin suggested. Either that, or god’s sends divergent aliens to tamper and change the human beings to be more aware of spiritual realities. Some people get more in touch with those kinds of realities. Perhaps these prophets are trained to walk the earth like Job and suffer despicable mistreatment only to become wise kind of like Siddhartha.

Ever talk to an exceeding wise homeless person? I work with them.

The issue of good and evil and a heavy reliance on spiritual texts, from the Bible to the Koran to the Bhagavat-Gita can cause people to reflect on history in really profound ways to make sense of good and evil with spiritual interventions. And many people who experience psychosis do feel they are being blessed and reporting wonderful experiences. It’s just better not to speak of such realities with anyone, otherwise they will call you crazy.

Sometimes people need to learn not to incite these states because of the social consequences. They may believe they are prophets but most people just thing they are broke and crazy and fail to be impacted by the true beauty of their spiritual interventions. These realities need to be worked with carefully because spirituality can lead to Smith Wigglesworth behavior that seems harmful and abusive in consensus reality.

Certainly, there are great mysteries of nature and existence that do happen so that people are greatly comforted and live happier and healthier lives because of what they learn from spirit. It’s a good thing to validate, support, and assist people in making sense of the supernatural. When, however, people are faced with an anomaly like a person who can predict the future, experiences that challenges their own belief system, persecution and hospitals can happen.

Four, Psychological Frameworks:

The idea that messages originate within the mind of the afflicted person I define as a psychological framework. This may suggest that the person is working through their inner conflicts that may be subconscious or based on early attachment issues that have created the conflict that cause the mind to act out.

It’s true that some might argue this is similar to the abuse formulations. However, psychological frameworks stem from a tradition that honors corruption of power. This tradition tends to presume all the experiences of psychosis are happening within the mind of the afflicted.

This is often the explanation or tact that many mainstream therapists take. In contrast to the political explanations which may be thought to be misunderstandings and the abuse theory associated with neuroscience, there is often a push to get the sufferer take the responsibility to change themselves because they can’t possibly change the world.

Thus, messages are seen as the result of their own troubled mind. In some cases, this may be true. The thought is that with understanding and insight of the true conflicts within ones mind, that a person can stop thinking that what is happening is political or trauma and start using personal responsibility.

Particularly with dreams, which are special messages according to my formulation, things experienced are thought to bear a particular meaning that can be uncovered. A trained analyst can tell you what the unconscious is processing. Consider, the belief that you are being followed and the message evidence collected along the way that proves it. This might be signs that you imagine because you are hurting and once you realize this and stop hurting you can choose to ignore them. Same with voices.

Historically, if the therapist learns how to be a secure attachment for the person with the troubled mind, they can heal the issues through the relationship. Thus, the rapist therapist (notice the linguistic code in the word, a special message?) adjusts and proves to you that the world is not so awful.

Psychological approaches tend to focus on insight and understanding yourself so you can explain the reasons for the suffering and struggle which are not true.

Although the reader may pick up on some sense of frustration from me with these processes, it is wise to validate these kinds of processes even when they are not true and other processes are more operant. To be honest, many therapists do not tend to validate these processes even when they are more accurate. It’s true that the relationship can heal so why not allow for that.

Five, Scientific Frameworks:

Right now, the dominant paradigm that gets perpetuated in college texts and abnormal psychology classes (as was done back in the nineties when I studied these things) is that schizophrenia is a eugenic hereditary disease that impairs social functioning. The medical explanation for this rests in the regulation of neurotransmitters between the synapses of nerve cells.

While many message receivers tend to rant and rail against such negative medicalized notions, secretly they may fear that it is the truth about them and that they are doomed to live meaningless lives of poverty and squalor. It’s arguable that the good people among us do accept and live such lives.

Many of us in crisis rebel against such outrageous claims and lash out until we lose our rights and citizenship. We may end up warehoused in situations where they are forced to comply with the most simplistic notions of consensus reality.

What gets conveyed when all is lost in warehoused conditions is that social punishment that is not beatable will be put upon you if you fail to cooperate religiously with the basic tenets of consensus reality.

Being confined in solitary suicide watch in jail for months or years on end makes this situation unbeatable. In the process of being forced to sit on your ass and be patronized, neurotransmitter adjustments are mad to make it easier to comply with the basic tenets.

The fact is that such heinous beliefs and treatment must be conveyed and integrated into a persons’ journey. Many survivors spend their lives condemning and rejecting all aspects of this kind of thinking.

Many who endure the extremes of this experience dissociate and advance in the extremes of their experience. But many do learn and improve. Given a chance to achieve and function within the confines of consensus reality many will work and achieve incredible manners just to battle this cursed social contract.

In my opinion, the fact is that these realities need to be conveyed to people who are at risk of enduring them to help them accept consensus reality to the point where they can achieve social rehab.

In other words, people who experience psychosis need to share and learn about the harsh social abuse that ensues and can be perpetrated by the people who are most close to them. This needs to be taught and conveyed in ways that are not invalidated! There needs to be places people learn about these realities without having to lose their rights and go through it.

Let someone who’s suffered teach the group about this reality and protect them from it. This is a clear win-win.

Message receivers need to put the pieces together and understand the abuse they’ve experienced in order to heal. They must learn to know their enemy. They must protect each other from being hurt, not functioning and becoming warehoused. Additionally, to avoid failing the social functioning tests, some of us may need to learn that medication helps them function better in spite of the detriment that does to their physical bodies.

PART THREE—Conclusion:

Overcoming an Anti-Psychiatry Class Division in Our Culture that May Get Exploited:

Ultimately, I believe people have a right to honor the hell that they’ve experienced the way they chose. Some may condemn all parts of the scientific paradigm and others deserve to function the way they chose to in spite of the damage that gets done to their human organs. I think the division that gets perpetrated here is class-based and it prevents survivors from working together.

At the same time many people who play a role in enforcing consensus reality must learn to dehumanize subjects and do not want to hear or think about their participation in enforcing a ridiculous atrocity.

Personally, I feel guilty for the role I have played taking money from such a system. To go from utter poverty to bay area home ownership in the course of eight years of espionage is despicable. Many in the movement exploit that vulnerability in me. And they don’t want me to be a spokesperson because I take medication.

Then again, I look at what other professions get and how many people accept the crimes of free Wall Street money and deflect some of the criticism that comes at me from other survivors who may hate or distrust me. I particularly cut myself a break if my judgers have been given more than me and use what they have to silence, slander, marginalize, and mistreat me. That’s right, I don’t have too many friends.

Get a sense of my anger here? Consider that this results from a three-month state hospital hospitalization, only one month of it was in true warehouse circumstances. Then, consider what a person who has been through months of solitary on suicide watch and years of hospitalization all for instigating a violent conflict with gang members. This stuff is hard to come back from and leaves permanent isolation scars.

Ultimately there is a strong need for diverse groups for those touched by institutionalization in different ways. There needs to be space for all participants regardless for their takes on medication.

Conclusion:

Really, to understand and heal from the scientific framework atrocity, space to study and explore all of all these frameworks need to be granted. All frameworks deserve equitable space in our minds, bodies, souls and spirit. Learning how to be fluid and perform in consensus reality is important in social rehabilitation.

Often, when one framework dominates the day, mistakes are more likely. Then, pronounced messages dominate the mind-space, and social decline and issues associated with poverty become threatening. For example, internalizing the psychological framework when you are in a psychiatric hospital might be a problem. What I learned from trying it out was that treatment just doesn’t exist in those contexts. Outside of two or three anomalous staff people, the scientific framework will dominate the day.

Accept that the system is rigged and act like brer rabbit in the briar patch to get your needs met. Then, the scientific paradigm becomes less traumatizing.

***

It stands to be noted that there can be other valuable forms of frameworks that can be identified, many of which may fall in between these frames I’ve laid out today. For example, I considered adding artistic frameworks, but due to space limitations, I would argue that art falls under the spiritual realm. At the same time, I could certainly argue that studying dreams and cultural archetypes is an artistic venture, but they are discussed in psychological frameworks because of the fathers of psychology.

The point I am making is that no framework should be invalidated. There is a time and a place for all of them. I believe that the more a message receiver explores and studies anomalous experiences, the more flexible they are likely to become in interpreting what they’ve experienced. That’s why, rest assured, it takes time to learn to recovery. Patience on the part of providers is important.

The greater the flexibility, the less likely message receivers are to act out against consensus reality in ways that will get them in trouble.

***

I think the resistance to the exploration of validating conspiracy comes from being closed off to different kinds of frameworks. Often, the belief that there is one presiding framework that makes up reality. If we think of reality as being multi-faceted or not immediately clear it reinforces the mindfulness and emotional intelligence that is needed to respond and not react to the dilemmas posed by the existence of the message receiver.

For example, the message receiver who is entrenched in the scientific framework I laid out should not bring those discussions up at the formal family Thanksgiving meal of the people who perpetrated that system against them. They may need to borrow from things they’ve learned during their spiritual frameworks and scripture or healing modalities from the trauma framework.

It doesn’t mean that they may not be right about their family having overemphasized the scientific framework, but to change the reality of eugenic oppression they may need to teach their family new frameworks so they don’t have to be forever, mistreated or misunderstood.

***

If what I am saying makes sense, the system is ridden with this very eugenic framework which punishes message receiver for involuntary experiences. The quicker a message receiver is able to understand this, accept the system, and join safe zones as promoted by the hearing voices network or therapy specialists who entertain all frameworks, the quicker they will be able to learn to manage their experiences in ways that evade social decline.

Again, if what I am saying makes any sense, it becomes the responsibility of professionals to tolerate and respectfully learn about conspiracy thoughts from frameworks other that the dominant paradigms of scientific and psychological conspiracies that dominate oppression of the system that is creating homelessness and justifying warehousing.

The post How to Validate Conspiracy When Working with People in Extreme States of Psychosis: 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".

Stories related to psychosis can be intense, and can lead to traumatic recall when a sufferer retells them and does not feel contained or believed within the relationship. Perhaps this is the reason many therapists, family members, and psychiatric wards learn to shut down the telling of the story.

Shutting down stories can be seen as protecting the psychosis survivor from unnecessarily reliving the experience and going through the distress again. Perhaps this is done to avoid a fight or yet another power struggle over reality. Activating trauma that you cannot stand to consider is a bad idea, right?

Imagine being a person who has experienced psychosis and having the entire mental health system agree not to let you tell your story as a boundary. This strategy is employed over and over again despite the fact that recipients of this kind of care often become progressively more isolated and distressed over time.

Perhaps no one in the system can imagine what it is like to experience systemic indifference to traumatic material. Indeed, is it really so impossible to believe that these experiences are real and there for a purpose? Is it really so hard to believe that the person in psychosis may have some perceptions that are spot-on accurate? Not acknowledging them can be cause for further social withdrawal, instill a sense of hopelessness, and do further damage to an already ailing self-esteem.

Trying to stay on the same page as everybody else may teach a person to suppress their experiences. While symptom suppression may decrease social attacks and ridicule, I also believe it is the wrong tact for many. Too many people suppress, isolate and withdraw from social functioning. Is it not possible to create spaces and relationships in which experiences of psychosis can be dealt with in mindful manners? If survivors can be believed by supporters, if their experiences can be credited with having profound meaning, then perhaps outcomes could be better.

A New Strategy with Survivor-Led Groups

I have come to strongly believe that shutting down stories related to psychosis is the wrong thing to do. I believe this so strongly that I have come out as a therapist with lived experience with madness. I regularly share my experiences in group therapy to facilitate group reflection and the telling of stories.

I credit the Hearing Voices Network for prompting me to take this plunge. Word of survivor-led groups achieving remarkably different results prompted me to start a curriculum for professional groups. In the curriculum, which I have turned into a training and a group therapy guide, I deconstruct what psychosis is into solvable components.

It’s true that there are times when I wonder if coming out mad was the best career decision. I have had to bravely admit my vulnerabilities, which sometimes seems to hurt my credibility. And yet I find that being an artfully unreliable narrator helps guide people to their own truth more effectively. I feel I get better results having taken the plunge.

Being out has helped me exponentially in creating specialized care for psychosis survivors. As a result, I have a number of suggestions for how to encourage the telling of stories without retraumatizing survivors in group settings and in individual encounters. Many of these suggestions are based on replicating realities that happen in survivor-led groups.

1. Eradicating Stigma and Grounding Participants

Many supporters actually believe that people who experience psychosis are fragile. It is one of the three most dominant stigmas about mental health challenges, according to Patrick Corrigan’s research.¹ As a professional, I have heard this said so many times and I am convinced that my colleagues say this because they don’t know what “psychosis” feels like. At times, simply reversing this stigma can help ground someone who is in psychosis and remind them about how tough they are to be handling such real trauma.

There are other grounding techniques that I have utilized when I sense the group is starting to feel traumatized. Often, acknowledging the trauma in the room and allowing the groups to socialize and focus on related movies, music, or art can help. If group members initiate this process, it is good to compliment and acknowledge what they are doing as being helpful. Instead of controlling the group and staying on course, collaborating and enhancing these efforts is advisable.

2. Believing that Psychosis is Happening for a Reason and Holds Truths

I already said this, but it stands to be further emphasized.

I believe that if classifying experiences that trigger psychosis as an ‘illness’ can retraumatize many, finding value in those experiences will help ground many psychosis survivors who are in distress. In other words, when the helper meets the content of the survivor’s experience with curiosity and interest, the psychosis survivor is less likely to be traumatized. In contrast, if the supporter exudes the belief that the psychosis survivor will be traumatized, this outcome will be more likely to come true.

Often the survivor leader is excited to learn that others relate to them, and has a high level of hope that others can achieve wellness in spite of disturbing material. Thus, getting naturally excited when a person is sharing details and having strong beliefs about recovery being possible helps deepen the threshold for what others can bear.

Additionally, studying different causation frameworks that psychosis survivors hold gives participants a basis for understanding how experiences that trigger psychosis are possible.

In therapy groups I have often suggested there are six styles of causation frameworks that operate in different ways at different times. Sometimes the experiences may be caused by or related to political, psychological, traumatic, scientific, spiritual or artistic factors.

Knowing which framework explains a given trigger is often impossible! However, I believe that the more types of frameworks the psychosis survivor uses to explain the triggers, the more likely that they will be able to navigate the trigger in a functional manner. Positive knowledge about all explanations helps one find the value of each experience.

The more explanations the supporter learns, the better they can help make valuable meaning of these disturbing experiences. Giving up and calling the experiences meaningless does not help.

When there is a purpose for suffering, it is far more helpful.

3. Sharing Your Own Experiences with Psychosis

One of the huge benefits of survivor-led groups is that the leader also shares their own experience with psychosis. This opens people up to telling their story because it defies the dysfunctional boundary that exists between clinicians and patients—the presumption that the clinician is ‘well’ and the patient needs to learn wellness from them because they know better.

Additionally, when a survivor leads the group and discloses their own experience it sets the stage for more sharing.

One reason I believe this works is that if group members are free to judge the leader as being delusional, they get the chance to do some projective identification testing. If they do judge the leader as being delusional and see that it doesn’t bother the leader, they will become more emboldened to take the same risks and withstand others who may try to reality-check them.

Another reason self-disclosure in survivor-led groups works is because many in the group will believe the leader’s story and support them, as that is the way they want to be treated if they tell of their own experiences. Therefore, a leader who is prepared to believe some pretty outrageous stuff in a reciprocal manner is generally appreciated by many in the group.

Whatever place the group participant may be in, the tendency is to become compelled to share. I believe that sharing breaks down defenses and helps the participant let go of the traumatically reinforced material.

4. Spotting and Sharing Related Experiences to Achieve Cultural Competence

Many workers in the mental health system might say they can’t share their experiences with psychosis because they haven’t had them. Though I agree that it can be harder to relate to psychosis material if you haven’t had those experiences of being in a crisis, I think most workers likely have had some related experiences; if they learned to identify these and articulate them it would be helpful for psychosis survivors.

If a mental health worker sits in group and understands the experiences that trigger psychosis, they will probably learn to be able to relate. Additionally, being able to relate normalizes psychosis experiences and makes it safer to disclose without feeling like others don’t believe you and don’t care. In the definition of psychosis that I have created, things like dreams, interpersonal interactions, and intuitions can trigger alternative realities. I think workers can learn to relate using those common experiences and learn to join the conversation.

I think this is a measure of cultural competence. If you can see serendipitous events and imagine thoughts that may come up from them, why not share those with the psychosis survivor? Why not think about how you might explain those experiences in creative manners? Doing so isn’t going to hurt you. It is a sign of wellness and empathy.

5. Knowing When the Story Is Really There to Test You

It is important to know when a psychosis survivor is simply trying to establish her or his right to tell the story. In the past, survivors may have been interrupted or challenged when they tried to tell their story. Some will tell fragmented stories to see if they can get away with it and keep your interest and concern. I have been known to get in there and fish for special message experiences to demonstrate that I am there with them. However, it can be important to notice when this isn’t wanted and just let the person tell their story without being judged for doing so.

In many cases, the traumatic response may happen when the test has failed yet again. Indeed, I think it is important not to be concerned about whether the psychosis survivor’s comments are accurate or fit into your reality. Perhaps it is possible for the leader to make a few inaccurate-sounding comments themselves. This helps normalize and permit those experiences and paradoxically challenges the psychosis survivor to question themselves.

This is not to say that there is not a time to challenge an inaccurate comment that is made about you; there is a point where this can be effective. But first you have to repeatedly pass the tests. And acknowledging that you don’t understand everything about yourself and that they may be seeing something you are not aware of can help put off the challenge until the test is passed.

6. Bringing Other People or Situations Into the Discussion

If I am afraid that a person is going to get triggered by sharing their psychosis story because the group is inattentive or emotionally absent, I may try interrupting and identifying a triggering experience the participant has referenced and ask other group members if they can relate to the experience. If I am not in group, I may think of a similar experience I have heard before and share that experience to prove that the person is not alone. Usually, at least, I can relate to the triggering experience and share a story. This not only prevents the participant from feeling quite so alienated, it reminds them that others can relate and deepens the support in the room.

Likewise, if I am able to listen and discern some conspiracy ideas that might explain some of the triggering experiences and I fear retraumatization, I may propose that the group talk about that particular brand of conspiracy and how it really is possible. Again, this may help the participant feel like they are not alone. Group conspiracy talk is another way to deepen the threshold of what the group can tolerate and invite stories.

With other people relating and participating, the person telling the story is less likely to be retraumatized and may feel more supported. Then, it is a great idea to return to the story and hear it out intensely without having need for reality tests.

7. Addressing the Fact That You May Be Recording What Is Said

In many countries where the Hearing Voices Network has flourished, such as England, the Netherlands, and New Zealand, socialized medicine enables support groups to be funded outside the system where there is no need for clinical notes. This also helps create a sense of safety that invites disclosure.

Indeed, if group records are going to be taken by the facilitator for reimbursement purposes, that needs to be addressed in the room, identifying the potential for conspiracy.

Letting the participants know what I believe about the notes and the potential for them to be used in an abusive manner without my knowledge is a strategy I often employ. I point to computer screens and light fixtures and suggest that if they can put cameras down peoples’ colons, they can certainly bug the room without my ability to protect the group participants. I believe it is a disservice to promise a psychosis survivor that their material is safe. We are not in control of their ideas of reference that may be confirming unsafe realities. At least when the helper acknowledges the limits of their power it validates the concern.

When I document what takes place in a group, I also note that I have used my own lived experience to crack open stories. I tell participants that I do that. I think doing so demonstrates integrity and clarifies that the note is not written with the intent to do them harm. I also think doing so reduces stigma of the chart reviewers and takes away the perception that the helper will turn on the group participant and abuse power.

It is ideal when these issues can be avoided, but I also think it is possible to address them if you have to take notes in order to bill in the health care system.

Specialized Care Is Necessary

I believe that utilizing these strategies and other well-documented efforts of the hearing voices movement can help clinicians grow and come to a point where they can listen to stories of psychosis and contain them just like survivors can. I think that people who choose to specialize in this type of care need opportunities to grow and learn to contain such stories, and that survivors need opportunities to become specialists and lead groups themselves. Specialized care is most certainly needed.

The post Seven Strategies to Use that Help Avoid Retraumatization While Working with Psychosis: appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

I contend that the trendy depicton of psychosis as a thought disorder misleads the public and can lead to misunderstandings that sabotage treatment efforts. I am writing to suggest that psychosis should not be defined as the result of spewing distorted thoughts that need to be corrected, but is actually the result of uncanny perception and efforts to cope with that perception. I think that people who relate to those who experience psychosis need to understand that it is perceptual triggers that lead to self-sabotaging thinking and distress. Recognizing those triggers can be key to better strategies for coping.

Even the most advanced research on schizophrenia, which suggests that it is a neurodevelopmental syndrome rather than a psychiatric illness, alludes to the thought disorder narrative. I suspect that this is a political act of supporting the best practice of cognitive behavioral therapy. I am personally in favor of a therapeutic approach that is specifically created for people who experience psychosis across diagnostic divides.

For example, in her groundbreaking article in The Psychiatric Times, Sophia Vinogradov, MD suggests that the problem is cognitive:

We now understand that these are neurocognitive disorders (ie, how neural systems in the brain represent and process information). We also understand that they are neurodevelopmental disorders with genetic components and antecedents during gestation. The developmental course unfolds with increasing signs, symptoms, and cognitive dysfunction . . . (2019).

When problems are depicted as cognitive as such, the conclusion is that the thinking is faulty and that thoughts need to be changed. Too often, people hear this and believe that all such thoughts are incorrect and must be stopped. This can cause pressured and unhelpful communication. I think it is more important to listen and understand before there is an effort to challenge thoughts.

The Importance of Exploring the Meaning of the Experiences to Engage a Sufferer:

I intend to delve into better defining what psychosis in this post and will highlight the importance of other processes beside irrational thoughts that go into a “thought disorder.”

I have come to believe that experiences that cause the thoughts are valuable and need to be further explored for meaning and understanding.

I experienced a two-year crisis during which I thought my family was a mafia family and was persecuting me. I can attest that admitting that two years of my life were wasted on meaningless blither was not a way to engage me in meaningful change. Moreover, although I did need to change and stop making meaning of many things, I have since found that I learned a great deal of meaningful things during those two years that currently enrich my life.

Behind me, sits my eleven years of experience running professional groups in which I revealed my own experiences with psychosis. Behind me is also an international movement called the Hearing Voices Movement that has a considerably longer history.

The Experiences of Psychosis Fit into Different Causation Frameworks:

Those of us who learn to openly share experiences in group therapy, learn a host of different explanations for why our experiences are happening. The hearing voices network define these as frameworks. In other words, experiences are often interpreted from a framework and I am going to characterize five styles of frameworks that are representative of thousands of individual examples.

Often, experiences are perceived based on the dominant framework that the sufferer trusts the most. The framework often dominates the sufferers mind and makes it hard for the observer to even know the experiences that exist beneath the surface.

The first framework that I am going to present is that these experiences can come from spiritual experiences. Perhaps the magical perceptions seem to come from good or bad higher powers, depending on the tradition. At times, good and bad guidance may be mystical and at times those experiences can be erroneous. Experiences that are wrong can be characterized like Carl Jung’s concept of a trickster, they can cheat the sufferer and cause material loss.

All spiritual traditions include the concept of a trickster. Often, it can be hard to tell the difference between mystical wisdom and tricksters. Learning how to manage spiritual feedback takes time and training,

The second framework that often influences message receivers is the concept of political oppression and exploitation. Sometimes, and far too often, there are real people who belong to secret societies that are behind real abuse and marginalization. Consider a treatment team that meets without the patient present and misrepresents that person and extends their hospitalization!

Also, there are powerful government conspiracies that involve secret societies to prevent rebellion and promote public misconceptions. For many frameworks there are criminal, governmental, or intergalactic organizations that work to control the environment. The concept of targeted individuals validates and expresses the realities experienced by many sufferers. Such alternative realities suggest the phenomenon of gangstalking. Thus, learning to stop challenging power can help.

The third framework that is important to note is that there are ways that traumatic events and dilemmas can cause the mind to fragment and re-experience trauma. Differentiating trauma from the reality of current situations can be a lifetime project. This becomes a real issue that most people who experience psychosis have to deal with.

The fourth framework that is often used by treatment providers is that experiences are made up from unconscious psychological processes in the mind that may be related to attachment or fractured personalities. Such frameworks suggest that experiences are made up in the individuals head. Some people respect them and seek to explore and integrate them and some people just think they need to be ignored as a result.

Finally, there are scientific processes in the body that may be behind faulty thinking: misfiring of neurons, schizophrenia genes hidden in DNA that make people permanently impaired. Of course, there are more positive scientific frameworks out there like that some people have spiritual genes that are likely to get persecuted, or that some minds have an ability to perceive on the psychic energy of others, through observing scientific gamma, delta, or other radio waves rays that bounce off the body.

All these different frameworks represent different ways underlying experiences can be explained. Take an experience and put it in a different framework and the meaning of the experience vastly changes. Sometimes hearing thoughts without understanding the framework and experiences that accompany them can make the thoughts appear wildly distorted. Additionally, sufferers tend to get locked into a particular framework that adds to a tendency to interpret experiences in ways that may appear incorrect to someone who hasn’t listened and understood.

In fact, I like to argue that people like me who think the world is against them can lead lives in which the world really is against them. Telling them they are thinking wrong or that those underlying experiences don’t matter becomes invaliding and may result in further trauma and sense of alienation.

Learning the Value of Different Frameworks Can be Used to Disempower the Experiences: 

I believe people who experience different frameworks in the stories of peers can learn to diversify the manner in which they interpret their experiences and begin to see how they come up with thoughts that appear faulty to the mainstream. Ultimately, I think that using different frameworks is necessary to take away the power of the underlying experiences so that a person can function in the social world.

In making such an assertion, it is arguable that there is real benefit of sitting in groups and hearing people’s stories. I believe it teaches a participant in a different manner than a genetic researcher learns through looking through a microscope at the neuroplasticity of neurons. One thing that I have personally learned from running up to three such groups a week over the years, is that people are extremely unique in the way they come to cognitive distortions.

It takes a great deal of work in order to open someone up to talking about their private experiences and to consider listening to others with genuine curiosity. Often, it is important to forget everything we know and listen with a psychosis mindset to make sense of another persons’ experience to draw out the story so that commonalities can be displayed and observed.

One thing that I believe is toxic in such groups is when a leader tries to impose their reality on participants. It is different for example to learn about a different framework by listening to a peer than it is to being told that your experiences really definitively fit a different framework. I believe all frameworks have merit at different times. Just because you know what works for you, doesn’t mean you know what works for someone else. The danger of overgeneralization is a valid concern.

That is why I really like a principle that the hearing voices network advocates for: participants are to speak from their own place of knowing, not the sense of knowing. I have used my experiences of learning from others to stop jumping to conclusions about my experiences and to wait and see. Thus, I am more mindful of my experiences and less attached to them.

As such, disempowering the experiences is helpful, but sometimes to do this it becomes important to pay more attention to them and rationally solve the problem of what is going on.

Identifying the Types of Experience that Lead to Cognitive Distortions Can Help:

It has also helped to do significant work in groups defining examples of underlying experiences. I call these experiences special messages. They include not only voices, visuals and tactile sensations, but also other experiences that trigger conspiracy ideas. Special messages are things like intuitions, premonitions, body language and use of codes and symbolic associations that hide alternate meanings. Some of us have gifts of knowing things that we become overly dependent on and that cause us to get focused on these experiences and trying to learn how they are possible.

Special messages provoke thoughts particularly when the person is trying to figure out what is happening. I define this as a state of sleuthing and the hearing voices network define it as making meaning. When multiple messages are happening fast the experiencer can get an internal buzz of trying to figure out experiences that only leads to having more and more experiences. It becomes very hard to distract from these herd-to-contain thoughts. So often the thinking fits a singular framework. The thinking and thinking about the experiences coupled with the way the public reacts to the person experiencing the thinking can turn the thoughts into distortions.

The interesting thing about the experiences is that they can often be preconscious. Indeed, the person can be more aware of what they are thinking than what they are experiencing. Of course, the thinking can be influenced by a framework and past experiences that have influenced the formulation of the framework. Thinking can affect behavior and cause the person to be treated in negative manners that add to and confirm the framework suffer. This can increase the power that is given to the underlying special messages experiences and the state of sleuthing and making meaning of what is happening.

The experiences will always happen. They can be real and at times hurtful. Additionally, the more a person sleuths or makes meaning of them, the more vulnerable they become to being impacted by more experiences, or special messages. However, sleuthing in community with others forces the sleuthing process to slow and be better defined. Moreover, doing so with support of others can help the sufferer solve the problems and make changes that can help them transform out of the emergency state.

How Behaviorally Changing Relationships with Underlying Experience Can Help:

Whether dealing with a bullying voice, a negative outcome, a bad energy perceived, or distressing serendipitous occurrence, there are times when the sufferer can be coached to change their behavioral relationship with the underlying special message experience. Talking back to the voice, or humbly adjusting to the situation can be exactly what is necessary.

If this is to happen the message receiver must spend time increasing their awareness of messages and changing the behavioral relationship they have with the experience. This can be just as important as challenging an irrational thought. In fact, it might be necessary to do before rational thinking can be expected.

Challenging Internalized Stigma Can Help:

Clearly there is an element of cognitive dysfunction experienced by those who experience psychosis. However, I believe that a majority of that dysfunction comes from the social definition of schizophrenia as being a progressive illness that gets worse over time. This misunderstanding of psychosis is so rampant in our culture that it leads many to stigmatized views of a sufferer’s abilities that then get internalized. I contend that a majority of these negative beliefs are reinforced by the way associates and mental health workers start to treat their subjects.

While clearly the level of support varies a great deal in a person’s experience, the negative treatment that people experience and the fear of schizophrenia often can set up the basis for extreme cognitive dysregulation. Thus, countering these stigmatic realities with support that emphasizes rational thinking can lead to help. However, getting people to use rationality as a tool to help balance them and increase their resilience does not prove that the problem is a thought disorder.

Conclusion:

I believe there is a lot more to recovery from psychosis than just depicting reality as being rational thoughts. Many philosophers argued against rationality. Hence, I am arguing that depicting the problem as a thought disorder is misleading.

The post Depicting Psychosis as a Thought Disorder is Misleading! appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

“So, you have bipolar,” said the well-meaning psychiatrist, “So what’s the big deal?”

I had been talking about the stigma associated with presuming that all mental health challenges were disorders. He interrupted me.

But wait! This was the first time anyone ever suggested that I had bipolar!

Was I supposed to give up my perspective and feel I had achieved something? Somehow was this a more socially acceptable diagnosis? Was getting the right diagnosis supposed to fix everything that happened to me?

As a statistic, I was being moved from the 3.2 million individuals in the United States diagnosed with schizophrenia to the 5.7 million who experience bipolar. Of those with bipolar 70% experience psychosis during mania and 50% during depression.

I had been stable ten years. For the past four years I had been running innovative professional group psychotherapy that focuses on exploring psychosis across diagnostic categories.

I’d had the privilege or cracking open hundreds of stories and contrasting them against the diagnosis of differing staff psychiatrists. I felt I learned a lot about the mentality of each distinctive psychiatrist by doing this.

You see, if your bipolar is like mine and includes experiences associated with psychosis a lot can happen to you in the mental health system. If you stick with me through this article you may learn some innovative ways to cope with psychosis across diagnostic divides.

Common Reasons that People with Psychosis Get Diagnosed Bipolar: 

From my vantage point, there are many subjective reasons for bipolar to be selected over schizophrenia or schizoaffective. These subjective factors do not always involve a perfect equation of DSM-V criteria. I’ll go ahead and admit that I do not believe DSM criteria really helps the professional understand the reality of psychosis. Nor is being diagnosed with a psychotic disorder likely to result in more humane and appropriate treatment.

Perhaps, you get diagnosed bipolar because you have suffered a mood component and have a history of being expressive about it in the past. Maybe, your psychosis experiences are intermittent and discontinue with proper support. Perhaps you express experiences that are positive and spiritual that can make your mood and energy soar. Or maybe your body is responsive to small doses of antipsychotics.

Many get diagnosed bipolar because they have enough judgement to convincingly conceal or minimize their psychosis experiences. Sometimes you get the stamp because the psychiatrist respects and has hope for you. If you are a person of color or don’t come from a class the professionals relate to, you are less likely to get the bipolar stamp. I don’t feel I personally need research to believe this to be true. I believe my observations over time are acute enough. However, I do understand that this research does exist.

In my experience some professionals are open to learning and seeing people through the bipolar lenses, and some are more chronic in their ways.

Why Upgrade Your Diagnosis?

When in madness, there was no need to upgrade my diagnosis. I was living in an alternate reality, and I only wanted to feel safe. Being bipolar only meant that I was in danger of being killed and having it called a suicide. All I wanted was to get out of the reality as quick as possible.

In my experience of wellness, there is more of a sense of social acceptability associated with a bipolar diagnosis. Perhaps this is largely because of the misconception that schizophrenia is degenerative or only gets worse over time. Although this is not true, it’s arguable that social stigma does not lead the majority of people to believe otherwise. For example, in 2006 schizophrenia.com suggests a host of negative statistics about schizophrenia including that only 35% of sufferers experience repeated episodes without returning to functioning.

Still, negative statistics (like the one above) enhance the damage that gets done when supporters act without understanding that it is likely that people will heal from psychosis. Good people become institutionalized by bad statistics. Families may not finance a sufferer the opportunity to recover if they keep in mind statistic like that.

Looking closer at that 35% statistic, they come from E. Fuller Torrey’s 2006 statistics which suggest that after ten years, 15% of schizophrenics will be permanently hospitalized and 10% will have killed themselves verses those studied over thirty years during which 10% end up permanently hospitalized and 15% will have killed themselves. This starts to sound like a 35% throw away rate.

Consider that many health plans do not even offer treatment to people with schizophrenia. Likewise, I know locally it is easier to find a professional bipolar group or specialist than it is to find a professional schizophrenia group or specialist.

Less stigma, less negative statistics means less social persecution. That is why many people who are looking to make social rehabilitation gains try to suppress their psychosis and fight against a schizophrenia diagnosis. Many suffers learn to do this so people don’t reject you.

What it Takes to Suppress Psychosis Regardless of Diagnosis?

How does one suppress psychosis? I think it has a lot to do with having a project that is very meaningful to you and vying to be successful with it. Then, the sufferer just cannot let anything get in their way. Sound stupidly easy? The best way I can convey that it isn’t is to share pieces of my experience.

In State hospital, most staff who thought I was schizophrenic would just dominate and humiliate me. I believed that if people knew I was schizophrenic that that type of treatment would resume. My complex appeals to staff to convey that I okay with the FBI resulted in a beat-down by the cowboy security squad. Begging for aspirin with a highly uncomfortable fever, caused one nurse to write a note that I was sexually inappropriate with her. These are not the types of things you want to see happen to you on the outside,

Meanwhile many of my peers tried to recruit me into their white supremacy gang, or the Mexican mafia, or the FBI, or in one case, the Navy Seals. Sound safe in there?

These kinds of experiences cannot be spoken of when you suppress your experience. Nothing happened! They become buried secrets.

But the treatment that had the most lasting impact was the experiences I had to suppress in the community.

There was the woman who flashed me a secret service badge. She initially said I would be safe if I took the over-priced apartment. She showed up again the day I came home to find my apartment had been ransacked and accused my uncle of doing it.

There was also the mail that came from my county work applications that was repeatedly torn open in spite of my complaints at the postal service.

There was the occasion when I was followed on my way to work by a resident I knew from Seattle (I was working in California.) He had handcuffs and a jean jacket with a hand made sign that read CIA on it.

There was the time a computer hacker marked-up my resume at the local library. Several encounters later he told me that he worked for the multinational corporations.

This kind of treatment accompanied me for two years and stopped when I got professional employment. It was traumatic and perpetuated my emergency state, but I learned to pretend it didn’t matter.

If you can ignore the fact that you have no rights and just persist at your immediate project you can overcome psychosis.

It’s Just a Political Discussion:

Resuming professional employment, I worked seven days a week. Eventually, I managed to get a psychotherapy license and earn enough for a down payment on a house in the bay area. I met my wife and got married.

So finally, once I got that kind of support behind me and put a well-meaning psychiatrist in a spot that challenged his perception of disorders, I got bumped up from schizophrenia to bipolar, yay!

Now the DSM-V, which wasn’t yet written during my escapades, says that people with bipolar who go through psychosis in a low mood can experience fear and paranoia. This is exactly what I experienced. Perhaps, one day I’ll get out of my depression and become hypomanic! That gives me something to look forward to!

However, when we examine the recent research this point may become moot.

Laboratory Science Supports Treating Psychosis Across Diagnostic Divides!

In the laboratory they are coming out with scientific findings that strongly support the view that diagnostic differentiation is irrelevant.

In fact, in a very recent article published by The Psychiatric Times, schizophrenia is being considered a syndrome that is more of a neurodevelopmental disorder than an illness or disease. Additionally, these findings do not support different kinds of neurodevelopmental evidence for bipolar verses schizophrenia verses schizoaffective, verses depression with psychosis.

If treated poorly, the neurodevelopmental process will become more extreme! Thus, sufferers can be trained to cope like dyslexics can be trained to read. This vantage point can help promote training in social functioning like specialized job placement programs like the IPS model out of Dartmouth. This practice can help participants in early prevention programs, or at any stage of recovery. get back to work.

Of course, there are many other social skills to learn when you have to suppress trauma! Of course, social skills are gained through socialization groups.

Other Considerations Stemming from The Research:

Moreover, I believe that understanding that you have an underlying condition like ADD, Dyslexia, or Autism can save you from living out your depression and mania to their fullest. Instead of feeling like a slave to the moods, neurodevelopmental understanding helps understand the basis for the moods. By learning that there are reasons you haven’t been included, one can use it to make meaning of depression and play back tapes of the consequences of mania.

Additionally, sufferers can learn about ways they have been traumatized for being different. Also paying attention to real underlying trauma that exacerbates the expression of the syndrome becomes important.

All this can help people with bipolar psychosis learn how to live in their strengths and focus on their abilities and the ways they are exceptional. Albert Einstein, Temple Grayden, and Earnest Hemmingway are just a few of many examples of how people with neurodevelopmental issues can contribute to society in very advanced ways.

As a society, some of us are learning that celebrating neuro-diversity, like they do in some more traditional societies, can lead to better outcomes for people who are built differently. In fact, some might argue that if the problem is neurodevelopmental, expecting symptom suppression without accommodations and providing support groups is just not humane.

Treatment for Psychosis Across Diagnostic Categories:

Here is where I can help other bipolar people if they are willing to explore those terrifying experiences with other good people who are stigmatized. This may involve getting to know people who are from different cultures and may still be in challenging circumstances.

Losing privilege and connecting with those less fortunate is so counter-intuitive in this land where the haves hate the have-nots. But oddly going against the grain in this manner can help exponentially!

If your bipolar experience includes psychosis, treatment can exist in group therapy that normalizes and permits you to express your stories without getting punished. If you are encouraged to work with people with differing diagnostic histories you can learn to be a leader and supporter.

No doubt, the mental health incarceration system varies based on the socioeconomics of your locale. Regardless, it will train you to suppress those psychosis experiences and pretend like they are not real. If you fail to suppress, you will be rejected and ridiculed by others and if this upsets you, you will be punished by going back to the hospital.

If you are able to play the game and can return to work, go ahead and become the bipolar diagnosis. To do so you can simply engage in social rehabilitation and work without upsetting the applecart. It becomes a political discussion with a psychiatrist like the one I had above.

Group Therapy for Psychosis:

Okay, I’ll admit, suppression is not always so easy for all of us. But over the years I have seen many individuals hide their psychosis, avoid my groups, and pretend like what they went through was just bipolar stuff. Indeed, I had to play this game for six years. I had to start over again without anyone knowing anything about me.

However, if you are like me and had to overcome some dramatic circumstances, suppressing all those experiences and trauma may turn you into a traumatized droid. A part of you is permanently disassociated and all you can do is work and try to act in ways that keep you out of trouble.

I am here to promote one potential outlet that I was eventually able to use: group therapy in which the content of psychosis is shared and participants learn from each other.

For example, I hear very few voices and never thought of aliens, but when I learn from people who do, it helps me be more flexible in the meaning I make of what happened to me. My desire to collaborate and support helps me be flexible and decreases my distress.

As a psychotherapist, I started leading these groups and sharing my story to prompt others to feel comfortable in doing so. I learned that by sharing my story and demonstrating that I had recovered, I could use my suffering towards a useful purpose.

Whether you do it as a professional, a peer counselor, or a volunteer, getting support for those things you’ve been through and teaching others how to survive with psychosis can be very rewarding. It can help bring you back to life!

Opportunities to do this can be available through the hearing voices network movement. This is an international movement that seeks to set up peer support outside the mental health system. In the United States, you can click: www.hvn-usa.org!

Clap for me on Medium!!!

View at Medium.com

The post Learn How I Upgraded My Schizophrenia to Bipolar, And What That Means appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

I contend that the negative power of a label is a significant part of a sufferer’s condition when they experience a “psychosis” or what I prefer to term a special message crisis. Indeed, many acknowledge that words like schizophrenia, schizoaffective, and bipolar lead people to being treated as though they have a hereditary brain disease with a poor prognosis that limits their ability to thrive.

It is arguable that the degree of stigma or what a sufferer’s surrounding social world starts to think about them varies a great deal. However, I contend that more often than not, it is based on an inaccurate understanding of what “psychosis” is and means. Many sufferers object to the social definition and deny that psychosis is what is going on with them. In treatment they are encouraged to suppress their experiences especially when they are in the hospital. If they disagree with the social definition, they may be labeled with poor insight and a poorer prognosis.

This article is about how the words associated with “psychosis” and the system of care work together in irrational ways that erode one’s sense of self, dignity, and identity. I believe that stigma deserves a place at the table when it comes to defining the experiences associated with “psychosis.”

Stigma in the Community and Clinic:

Before sufferers even arrive at the clinic, they have faced social stigma in their communities or the streets. Perhaps, they were confronted about being wrong, teased, talked about behind their backs. Then others caught wind that something was different, came to test it out and laughed or taunted. Maybe the message receiver has had this happen before, or maybe finding themselves alone and rejected is new. Perhaps, suddenly some people treat the sufferer like a charity case. Of course, people who care about them may give them orders that they sense are coming from a good place. The influx of stigma to perceive is alarming and it may become interwoven into the conspiracy that is for or against them.

In the emergency clinics and hospitals, many workers believe that this “psychosis” will cause progressive social decline and brain damage as time progresses. Thus, involuntary medication is ordered and administered. So many psychiatric survivors report hearing that they will have to be on medication the rest of their lives. The best they can hope for is to return to their functioning-level baseline. Often, supporters report getting told by professionals that they would be better off learning that their loved one has a diagnosis of cancer, rather than “schizophrenia.” So many treatment providers presume that therapy is a waste of time and behavioral control in a clinical setting is as good as it gets.

Not only is there is an absence of therapy specialists who have strategies that help reduce the suffering, often, supporters are encouraged to vie to reduce their loved one’s self-determination so that they can impose consensus reality on them and correct behavior. In worst case scenarios, the mentality is that if we all ban together and work together, the sufferer will be forced to listen to us and ignore those anomalous experiences.

Perhaps the sufferers’ valid extra-perceptual experiences sense that this is going on and it only adds to their distress.

Case Study—My Real Extra-Sensory Abilities and Confusion:

 For example, when I was on the streets and walking along the highways, I could sense via intuition and energy that some people wanted to support me, and others wanted to destroy me. While I may have been accurate in these perceptions, there was confusion that resulted from this ability. I did not know whether people were presuming I was ill or whether I was receiving these sensations because I was capable of exposing mass corruption. I believed in the latter to a greater degree.

Of course, believing I was a targeted individual as such, I tested people out to see whether they knew who I was or how quickly they would pick up on my purposely bizarre behavior. If people just thought I was ill, I was safe, if they thought I was a whistle blower, I was in danger. I couldn’t ask them these questions directly, I had to feel it out.

It’s true some targeted individual or voice hearers have the skills to evade treatment and live with their secret abilities. Many can survive in fringe communities or perhaps via using substances or through family support. Those able to conceal these experiences still face stigma. Others may think they just aren’t living up to their potential. Then, they may feel ignored and stigmatized as an underachiever, rather than as a “schizophrenic.”

I was one who was unable to evade treatment. What I found was that some people presumed I was ill, and others seemed to know about my ability to expose corruption, which was significant at the time. Even when this dilemma led to a three-month incarceration in a state hospital, there were different camps. Many were trying to figure out where I stood, and there were many opinions for me to perceive.

Was my dilemma real persecution or was I sensing different takes on the stigma of presumed illness because of my erratic behavior? It has taken twenty years, a return to my profession, and pioneering groups that specialize in treating psychosis to realize that I am not alone in experiencing these dilemmas.

Seeing and Accepting the Reality of Stigma:

The stigma of a label that is not accurate robs people of their identity and the roles that give them meaning and purpose. However, to minimize incarceration, message receivers must learn to lie and accept stigma.

The belief in inevitable decline is a lie. Even our imperfect research suggests to us that 25% of those with schizophrenia will recover on their own, 50% will take ten years to recover, and only 25% fit the stereotype of inevitable decline. Still many professionals presume message receivers are going to face inevitable decline. The idea that you can go into a hospital for a tune up and a board and care home to establish independence without facing inevitable decline stigma is naïve. Living like that is degrading and chaotic and in fact can be a lot to come back from. The goals of so many of our DSM financed institutions remain to impose upon the suffering the insight that they are ill and in need of medication, even in cases in which this is not accurate.

The pervading message is that sufferers are ill. As a result, many workers do not engage us with curiosity about our experiences with voices, visions, illusions, codes, synchronicities and extra-perceptual perceptions. These experiences may be streaming through sufferer’s lives but they must keep quiet and suppress them to earn back their freedom. Medications and drugs encourage us to suppress them and pretend they are not true. Even if we know they are true, we must pretend they don’t exist. Indeed, the realities we perceive are defined as symptoms whether they are accurate or only somewhat accurate.

Therefore, I contend that we are all facing stigma which is part of the “psychosis” process! Suffers like me need to know that this is the case. We need treatment that enable us to look at our experiences and strategize with each other.

Stigma is Irrational and Yet Pervasive in the Mental Health System:

I believe message receivers need to learn that stigma is not rational reality. This becomes hard to prove in mental health institutions where stigma is so pervasively embedded. However, message receivers who have been removed from such oppression can learn to use rationality as a tool to challenge stigma. Indeed, when we finally recognize the effects of stigma clearly, stigma becomes the spiritual trickster (see my previous article) that might come true if we believe in it. For many of our people, trust in stigma has left us to rot in poverty, inactivity and distress for so many years.

So many have determined that cognitive therapy for psychosis is the answer to this stagnation. However, teaching cognitive therapy may not help people in institutional settings like board and care homes. Most of the time message receivers may be forced to accept irrational stigma and submission in the institution. In the worst case scenario, the institution turns around and, in treatment, tells then that that irrational thoughts are part of their illness.

This is precisely why I believe that we sufferers must teach each other to acknowledge our skills and abilities yet conceal and not act on them. This serves to save us from being stigmatized. Pretending I was ill then, but now am well becomes a lifelong task for a person like me. I am a licensed therapist living life on the playing field of the oppressor—this has become my destiny. In reality I haven’t changed much other than gaining a sense of social power.

More on Using Rationality as a Tool:

It took me a long time, but I learned to conceal my anomalous experiences, and use emotional intelligence to wait and see what happens. Often, the truth becomes revealed to me at some point. Until then, I need to collect hard facts before I fully trust my message experiences even though often they prove to be correct a significant portion of the time.

In learning to survive amidst stigma, I have learned to respect people’s privacy and not expose corruption. That doesn’t mean I like and approve of corruption, but I am guarded with my suspicious version of truth until I know for sure. I have come to learn that there are many high powers that keep secrets and use them to manipulate. Secret societies are an epidemic in our nation and easy to confuse. Sometimes these powers may be good to me and sometimes, cruel.

I am only privileged with so much information. I do not know the whole truth unless I am watching Sons of Anarchy, Nine Seconds, the Wire, or Breaking Bad. Until facts are revealed to me, I will advocate for the truth to the best of my ability. That means info that I get from extrasensory I try not to act on, even when I believe it may be true. So often doing so comes back to haunt me.

At the same time, eradicating social, institutional, and self-stigma from my life means doing away with the hierarchy of corrupt and distorted facts. I do not trust information that others may believe. My goal is to help people live in their strengths and truth so that they can experience the meaning and purpose they deserve. To achieve this, I may use rationality and facts as a tool to empower people. Thus, instead of saying that the illness is caused by irrational thinking, I endorse cognitive therapy as a tool that is sometimes needed to eradicate the stigma. When presented in this manner, I argue, it becomes more palatable to the oppressed message receiver who already receives more blame for their lives than they deserve.

Acknowledging A Diversity of Stigma:

 I have learned a great deal being a Caucazoidal man working in a community that is predominantly African American. Indeed, there so often are multiple layers of stigma to face in a single institutionalization. In addition to mixing Caucasian and African American cultures there is a lot of other diversity in my workplace. In my opinion, mixing of cultures takes a little more care and effort but is an optimal place to reconstruct a culture of “psychosis” that can stand on its own two feet with stigma as part of its definition.

Participants in the program learn about oppression of many different types of cultures. Some of us may have a sense that their culture has turned on them when they send them to the institution. Others identify with the oppression of their culture’s history as a source of strength. Not only must they learn about deconstructing their own culture in a way to collaborate with others, doing so helps them understand themselves better and the trauma associated with special message crisis. Additionally, gaining cultural skills makes it easy to find common ground. I believe that “psychosis,” anomalous experiences, or what I prefer to call special messages experiences is its own culture that is dominated by stigma.

Learning to overcome multiple stigmas and greeting people where they are helps participants get a sense of their strengths. Eradicating stigma may well involve giving up privilege for me as a white male, but it is the right thing to do. It feels great and helps me accept myself for who I am and mutually grow with other people. As a therapist, I find myself constantly belittling my role to create mutuality.

I would love to say I am not guilty of racism, sexism, legalism, educationalist or stigma of any kind. But the fact is, to eradicate stigma from my life I must accept that it exists and be on the lookout for it in myself. That is part of my healing process. Judging things increases stigma.

Internalized Stigma, A Part of All “Psychosis” Related “Disorders:”

 Regardless of the stigmatized word, the public and the stigmatizing people in the institution have a way of getting into the message receiver’s head. Suddenly the message receiver starts thinking very irrationally about themselves. Distorted thoughts get expressed and must be countered with what I prefer to call anti-stigma cognitions.

When stigma gets internalized, the message receiver’s positive traits, inclinations, productivity, and the things that give them identity starts to decline. It doesn’t really matter what word gets used, what matters are willingly working with social skills and cognition to overcome stigma. Many message receivers can’t stop sensing that stigma is going on. They may effectively overcome it, but sensing it is a burden.

While currently the best practice for treating psychosis (CBT for Psychosis) involves eradicating irrational and stigmatizing thoughts, I must express my belief that it is also important to give message receivers the opportunity to map their voices or review their special message experiences with people who will not invalidate them. Telling their stories and collaborating with others who might help them change what the hearing voices networks calls “their frameworks” or what I have elsewhere termed “their causation theories” to make them more flexible in how they make meaning of these experiences.

Voices and messages may be an ongoing experience for many. Much like racism or sexism, suppressing or denying them may make them worse, while mindfully accepting them and letting them go may make them less burdensome. I believe that the more these experiences are stigmatized and suppressed, the harder it becomes to quit being impacted by them. The public, the institutions and the individual all need to learn to eradicate stigma to solve a person’s “schizophrenia.”

The post The Need to Include Experiences of Stigma in the Definition of “Psychosis:” appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

In creating a new definition for psychosis, I contend that we not only consider internal processes operating during psychosis or special message crisis, but also external ones. Though much of the eight-part definition for psychosis I propose is, in fact, internal, the last three components are not. This article is about the first two of these external components which involve studying the external behaviour of message receivers, or retaliation reactions, and the external behaviour of society, or social sanctions.

Ultimately, I will argue that by studying behavior openly in group in this manner, we can learn to reinforce the message receiver’s learned behavior of suppressing evidence of messages to the public. Crediting the message receiver for things they already do helps build trust and safety that can ultimately aid in developing strategic social skills that can help message receivers make relationships with tormenters. The development of these social skills I jargonize as nine social skills. To teach nine social skills a supporter needs to conspire with the message receiver and learn what those unique skills might be.

For recovery to happen, message receiver will need this nine-social-skill concept to promote social rehabilitation relationships with people who would otherwise torment them. I will argue that what is most needed for a behavioral recovery is supportive places where message receivers can strategize developing nine social skills. I will share the nine skills I have selected for myself.

It is my contention that if treatment providers and family members learn some of the lessons that come up in group, they would be able to better support healing in individual interactions with message receivers. Thus, I will contend that studying different types of behavior via reading this article is helpful not only for message receivers but also for supporters.

Retaliation Reactions:

I believe that having message receivers identify the actions they have committed that has gotten them punished in the mental health system is very important. However, in most cases the discussion of social sanctions is needed first. Consider that it is easier to complain about the ridiculous treatment that you received than it is to own what you did to bring it about. Message receivers are often used to having responsibility imposed on them. It is wise not to replicate this in creating a safe healing environment. Thus, retaliation reactions and social sanctions often need to be studied in unison.

The definition of retaliation reactions is important to review. Retaliation reactions means acting as if your special messages and especially your divergent view are true. Thus, in a fluid story, using the previously discussed solution of message mindfulness, the articulation of the special message experiences and divergent view thoughts might be necessary. From the story telling process, the leader might have to extract the retaliation reaction behaviors in a normalizing shame-busting manner. Thus, peers can relate telling their stories and consider the actions they did that started the process.

Ideally starting off the topic with a list of examples can help. Consider using the following list of retaliation reactions:

• Glaring with angry eyes
• Not sleeping
• Being overjoyed in a way other people don’t understand
• Looking behind you for the possibility of tails
• Making gestures of prayer
• Talking with voices in public
• Treating others as if they are CIA agents
• Sweating or laughing excessively about spiritual coincidences
• Raging or ranting about an injustice that others would question or call the “D” word (delusion)
• Talking in codes so that the people broadcasting your life on TV won’t be able to understand what you mean.
• Treating someone in a way you wouldn’t otherwise.
• Crossing against the traffic to make a statement.
• Barking at a passing bicycle because you are angry like a dog (which is god spelled backwards)

One can imagine how bringing up these behaviours provokes larger stories. At times, the action on the part of the message receiver can be very minute; but identifying and acknowledging involuntary actions that led up to being punished is healing and fosters responsibility and discernment that can reduce a sense of trauma. Having peers or supporters bare witness to the suffers perception of what they did and how it relates back to special messages and divergent views can be very eye-opening.

What was the message receiver experiencing and thinking at the time and how was their behaviour misunderstood? If they did have violent behaviour, did the punishment fit the crime? How did the fact that they were identified as mentally ill message receivers affect the society’s system of justice towards the deed? What were the positives and negatives of the process? Creating a warm environment where these kinds of questions are weighed, makes for a restorative justice experience. It might be very healing just to have the message receiver’s version of events considered.

I have witnessed that it can be very challenging for some supporters to let the story be told without saying something that will cause the message receiver to be punished again. Thus, I urge facilitators to maintain unconditional positive regard and to normalize reactions by being able to identify times they’ve acted in ways that are less than admirable. Indeed, participants will feel invited to share if the leader shares. Many participants may wait to see if they will be punished for sharing before they take the plunge.

Social Sanctions:

Though some may object to the idea that treatment is punishment, I have observed that most message receivers I work with see it this way. Even when voluntary participants are complicit with treatment and report good outcomes, there might still be an invisible process of institutionalization that influences them. Additionally, compliant clients have observed non-compliant clients and can stand to reflect on that. Even if this doesn’t tip the scale, most message receivers can relate to a sense of being punished that happens in interpersonal relationships in the community. As mentioned in the last section, the sense of punishment needs to be brought up to get the message receiver to identify what they did to bring on punishment.

Again, a personal story from a facilitator is a good way to get the ball rolling. The facilitator might start with something that happened to them and then admit the behaviours they did to bring forth the social sanction. Additionally, the facilitator might consider using a list of potential social sanctions to help the disclosures start to flow:

• involuntary hospitalization,
• seclusion,
• restraint,
• bruising handcuffs,
• physical abuse
• incarceration,
• loss of housing,
• loss of employment,
• loss of social role,
• social rejection,
• public ridicule,
• loss of family financial support,
• anger and resentment,
• loss of respect and validation

The group facilitator is wise to assess for the experience of traumatic recall as the stories are retold. The facilitator might consider strategies such as starting and ending with a grounding exercise, encouraging participants to be aware of the pain in their bodies, and warning participants to use discernment in deciding the full extent of the details to include.

However, I tend to verbally presume that message receivers are tough and can handle these talks. I not only consider this as a way of setting a brave tone for the group, but I have also witnessed that message receivers tend to experience relief and that normal observers or trainees are the ones who get traumatized.

As a result, I start the group, generous with details of my story to set the tone for sharing. I often talk about how I used to struggle with dealing with these details but have learned to share with practice and that I find the process to have significantly helped me. With the story, I bounce between retaliation reactions and social sanctions simultaneously as the details are often fluid in the play by play recount.

When message receivers get to the point where they can review and identify the punishments and the behaviour that led to them, a lot of healing can result. Reviewing the consequences of retaliation reactions seems to help many message receivers gain acceptance of traumatic content.

Starting the Behavioral Solution Process by Proving that the Social Sanction was Unjust!

Message receivers can often be observed experimenting with getting away with retaliation reactions to try to establish safety. When this is observed, know that it is a very important test! I believe if message receivers are provided with safety and support, particularly in a group or a supportive community, they will halt this retaliation reaction behaviour in the community and everyone will be happier. But before this happens, they may need to establish that the punishment of what they went through was unjust by establishing a relationship where their retaliation reaction is accepted, though, perhaps toned down.

Sometimes mirroring the retaliation reaction behaviour and accepting it, may lead message receivers towards a path of disclosure that might one day lead to a sense of safety. However, that is not to say that many message receivers may have a provocative tendency to stay quiet when they are invited to share and to share when it is inappropriate and not safe. In safe treatment this needs to be allowed. It needs to be acknowledged that this is a trust test. I like to celebrate retaliation reaction behaviour with mirroring and humour.

I qualify these comments on managing social sanctions with acknowledging that these stories may be hard for supporters to hear. It is true, in my opinion, that too often they go invisible and the stories of treatment providers or family members rule the day. That’s why I argue that it is a service to get these stories out in a group.

Studying Learned Behaviors to Reinforce them and Prove the Sanction was Unjust:

In preparing to review solution behaviours that involve nine social skills and forming relationships with tormenters, I am learning late in the game that it is valuable to study behaviour that message receivers arrive at to avoid trouble. This may be behaviour that scared participants exhibit at the beginning of a group process. Learned behaviours evade trouble but neglect the need for genuine relationships. In doing this message receivers will also need nine social skills to approach people who are punishing them, gain acceptance and correct the wrong being done.

It is true that message receivers are a diverse group of people and it is hard to generalize. People with positive message experiences or a strong counter-cultural affiliation may vary in their sense of utter alienation and need to connect with perceived punishers. But still, I believe that recovering message receivers must learn to pay lip service to consensus reality and therefore will hesitate to share their genuine selves in a group. They may be particularly challenged with the task of studying behaviour and on being mindful of special messages and divergent views.

Thus, listing learned behaviours that message receivers have can be key to unlocking stories of social sanctions and retaliation reactions. Indeed, listing learned behaviours also may convince participants to be more mindful of their message experience and divergent process in general. The point of highlighting learned behaviours says they are valuable and necessary for survival, but in another sense, it is a way of designating that it is safe here, that we can communicate in a way so that retaliation reactions won’t be dealt with the same way they were before.

In yet another sense, identifying learned behaviours is a way of sharing all the old tricks and highlighting the inherent stupidity of the way message receivers have been treated in the system that has worked to silence them. It is an invitation to share amid a culture of like-minded people and explore forming social relationships with people regardless of the fact the culture has been treated like untouchable outcasts. It is readying the message receiver to enter a slow steady movement of resistance that will enable them to penetrate normal enclaves and operate within them to create a social rehabilitation which can sustain the message receiver in society.

Ideally, the facilitator can start the process of studying learned behaviours by revealing a few tricks message receivers may relate to and encouraging group members to join in the process. To start the process, I will share a list I have started:

• we must lie about our experiences and thoughts to stay free
• we can’t talk about our divergent views without going to the hospital.
• we will be persecuted for our problems and as a result we will be more tempted to focus our attention on our special messages
• we don’t think we have experiences that cause our thoughts, we only have crazy thoughts
• we don’t have people who care about us if we speak up
• we learn to tell Psych ER that the voices or suicidal thoughts are loud when we need to be admitted
• we must learn to say the voices or suicidal thoughts are distant or vague when we want to get released
• we learn that we deserve to be neglected and are second-hand citizens
• we might as well not try, and just accept what we are given to avoid conflict
• we shouldn’t count on being able to depend on recovery and reality tasks to feel better
• we learn that we are better off withdrawing from social engagements
• we can’t trust other people who have message experiences, they are crazy and will burn us or ask for money and cigarettes.
• we must submit to normal people and play dumb, maybe with a little flair/humor
• we must be gamey to build trust with you

Nine Social Skills:

It is my contention that forming social relationships with chronically-normal people who might stigmatize us is necessary for social rehabilitation. Whether this is done through work, a consumer organization, a treatment team, or an activity focused meet-up social group, message receivers need to form relationships with people who can help them avoid the streets. To do this, they may have to practice social skills not only that are specific for message receivers but that are also particular for themselves. These social skills might not be the same as social skills that normals need to get ahead.

When I first started to work through identifying these skills, I tried to make them universal for all message receivers. However, I have been blessed with the opportunity to work in diverse circumstances and have come to see that my efforts are more personal and applying mostly to me and the self-directed life I have chosen. Thus, I suggest that message receivers create their own set of skills that work for them. Some of the nine skills I might utilize might work for some, but not for others. These are skills that can help someone climb up and out of the hole that mental health treatment, poverty, or internalized stigma has dug for them.

Appropriate Skill #1:   Learning lessons from being punished or unjustly victimized

I learned from a great many consequences for the retaliation reactions I committed.  While I had to suppress a lot, I needed to consider the consequences of committing retaliation reaction behaviour, so I didn’t lose the cultural capital gains I had made. This is made easier when it can be established that the punishment is unjust.

Appropriate Skill #2:   Maintaining a public- professional self

I was lucky to learn along the way how to be a professional counsellor. I had to learn to play that role on a regular basis despite a huge amount of ridicule and disrespect.

Appropriate Skill #3:   Killing stigma with kind social skills

I consider these bitter customer service skills that are ways of putting a tormentor on a pedestal no matter how ridiculously unjust the world is. It involves asking each rude customer if they would like a fork and knife (forkin knife) or a free piece of chocolate on you.

Appropriate Skill #4    Hanging in there with some troubled relationships:

I didn’t have any genuine relationships for two years and needed to tolerate a great deal of abuse. So, I extended relationship efforts with many people that I had no use for, just so I wouldn’t be alone.

Appropriate Skill #5:   Skillfully know when it’s time to hold or fold the trauma card to decrease stigma

Once I earned a sense of acceptance, there was always an effective time to come out of the closet with a humble reference to mental health and trauma. Containing emotion behind the disclosure is wise. I consider Patrick Corrigan’s research on stigma when I suggest this 😊

Appropriate Skill #6:   Make multi-cultural efforts to respect the Romans when in Rome.

When my parents divorced I eventually realized there was no way to win: I started to act like my mother in front of Dad; and my father in front of Mom. I learned to have fun with this in multiple contexts. When there is no hope for avoiding persecution, we may learn to do this. But we must learn to vigilantly check this behaviour when we are trying to build social support.

Appropriate Skill #7    Using humor:

Got to!

Appropriate Skill #8    Going towards many different relationships in many different contexts

Penetrate multiple cultural enclaves and participate even if you are persecuted for different reasons. Keep on moving and you will meet people in different contexts.

Appropriate Skill #9:   Presenting a strong front instead of acting as though I need a break

I try to do this because I know I wear my heart on my sleeve and it is a way of killing the normal with kindness.

I like to think supporters who work with specific message receivers and get to know them well enough to understand their learned behaviours to the point where they can help message receivers construct skills that will help them make genuine human relationships with the people who represent psychiatric and other forms oppression to them. Some may need to do this with oppressive voices. They are going to have to do it sometime. Of course, this really depends on the culture that surrounds the person and their experience of being punished and getting treatment.

Summary:

In many ways, the solution of using social skills in recovery from special message crisis requires understanding that retaliation reactions and social sanctions are both wrong ways to behave. Institutionalized message receivers know much better than most that they must submit to normal ideas and expectations. They may not know that recovery is even possible. It is skills that enable message receivers to suppress these experiences, keep them private and create relationships that one day might become of use to them that is necessary. Those skills need to be seen and acknowledged. Then, there needs to be a conspiracy started that can dupe the ignorant majority.

However, the message to supporters, providers and peer counsellors needs to be that social sanctions really damage the important skill of message mindfulness. Treatment needs to find new ways of managing retaliation reactions. Acceptance, mirroring, and perhaps toning it down is so needed. The same old punitive treatment is not going to help. It may control people, but it does not breed safe environments in which messages can be observed and reflected upon.

Treatment needs to conspire with message receivers to teach unique versions of nine social skills. And really, as it stands now, it is up to message receivers to train the supporters how not to punish them. However, it is my belief that message receivers can conspire with each other in support and therapy groups to develop the message mindfulness skills to study the ill behaviour of social sanctions that create institutionalization.

The post Behavioral Solutions that Arise in Psychoses Focus Groups: appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

When a message receiver can identify the fact that some of their messages are tricksters it can go a long way towards improving efforts to fit in, heal trauma and reduce consensus reality confusion. A supporter who is trusted may be able to articulate the concept, spot it when it’s happening, and teach spiritual skills that can help the message receiver mitigate damages.

According to Wikipedia, the concept of a trickster is a cultural archetype. In other words, a trickster is a cultural reality of the collective unconscious that Carl Jung identified. Accordingly, all cultures feature tricksters in their mythology. In Navajo culture, the trickster is a coyote. In Greek mythology, Hermes, patron of thieves, was a trickster character. In the Bible, Jacob was. The trickster as an archetype is a revered spiritual character that cheats or cons people for their own material gain or just to cause mischief. In effect, a trickster is a very real part of reality that must be negotiated.

The idea that special messages veer into the spiritual realm of the collective unconscious may become appealing to many message receivers. Indeed, for me, message crisis or “psychosis” used to be real government and mafia surveillance; now that I know how to navigate, the surveillance reality mixes with the spiritual emergency narrative Stanislav and Stephanie Grof helped articulate. Let us not forget that other causal strategies can be operant. Thus, not only are political and spiritual causation at play. It is also important to consider the interplay between psychology, science, and trauma as we have explored elsewhere.

But without support or resources, trickster messages deceive people into either or causal realities. Often, people become too spiritual or too focused on the fact that they are politically controlled. They may fail to incorporate other causal potentials. As a result, they come into conflict with consensus reality, get burdened by the illness narrative myth, get ineffective treatment, and find that social decline results.

Thus, to navigate through a spiritual emergence effectively in the modern world it becomes important to realize that a significant number of messages function as tricksters. In crisis or emergency, trickster messages get believed very literally when they ought not to be. As examples of negative and positive trickster phenomena will reveal, believing trickster messages reinforce the power that message receiver to give to their message experiences. The more power given to messages, the less the message receiver cares or knows about the ideas that govern consensus reality.

Examples of the Negative Trickster Phenomenon:

 The classic example of a negative trickster that a message receiver may experience is that the message receiver believes they are being followed collecting messages that tell them so. Then, because they believe they are being followed, they act as though they are being followed until the police and psychiatric establishment do follow them and put them in an observation unit. Then, they really are followed and monitored.

The result of such a trickster phenomenon is that all messages that were signs of being followed are believed to be accurate and important when some were, and some may not have been. The message receiver learns to trust all those messages more than mainstream consensus reality concepts.

An associated example of a negative trickster is an intuition based on body language that a person doesn’t like the message receiver.  The result is the message receiver is hurt and angry and behaves as if the message is accurate and the person picks up on social energy and behaviour and then really doesn’t like them. What comes first will never be known but the fact of the matter now becomes accurate.

So, a voice gives a message receiver a command that they must follow to avoid being tortured and the message receiver becomes fearful and vulnerable and when they don’t listen the torture comes. Then, they become victimized by tactile torture and fail to get out of bed for a day and do not seek support because no one will believe them.

Another example of a negative trickster is the blacklisted political refugee who resists the host countries effort to control them.  They may defiantly send out resumes for good jobs, each from a different mailbox. Then, this willful behaviour makes the host country increase surveillance and control.

Ineffective Reality-Test Treatment:

 Often, the reality of the negative trickster foils a supporter’s efforts to reality test. Picture the message receiver who gets told not to trust their messages by a supporter. The well-intended supporter considers the evidence and tells them it’s not true that they are being followed. Then, the message receiver finds out they really were getting followed. Now the reality test turns into betrayal and the value of and trust for the message reality is amplified while trust in supporters and consensus reality decreases. I advocate for trying to teach the trickster phenomena before making a reality test. Then, a supporter can isolate the special message that leads to the divergent view and suggests that maybe it’s a trickster. This becomes much less offensive to a message receiver.

Combatting Negative Tricksters with Positive Self-Fulfilling Prophesies, Mantras or Prayers:

Meanwhile, isolated message receivers get put on an observation unit in the hospital. They must choose to ignore it all the blatant ways they are being followed and pretend that they are not being followed. If the message receiver ignores and exudes confidence in front of all the messages (real and unreal,) the police and psychiatric establishment will either not become involved or eventually will give up and stop the following behaviour. But to interrupt the process, the message receiver needs to put prayerful energy out in the universe that tells everyone they are not being followed repeatedly. When they do get followed, they need to ignore it and move forward.

In the case of feeling followed, the message receiver may not ever know which messages were real and which were tricksters. Perhaps time and investigation will show which ones were true and which weren’t. But ultimately, focusing on overcoming tricksters will slow down the messages. If, for example, a message receiver ignores a message that is intended to torment them, it is very discouraging to the tormenter. Then, the message receiver gets fewer messages that they are being followed and it becomes easier and easier.

With a message receiver intuiting that a person doesn’t like them, the message receiver needs to ignore this negative forecast and approach the person in a friendly way. Thus, the message receiver acts opposite to the way they feel, and they put out energy into the world that may change the person mind. Perhaps they change the observers’ mind and the person who dislikes the message receiver is forced to change their mind via social pressure.

In the case of the commanding voice, the message receiver puts magnets in their shoes, doesn’t listen to the command and takes himself to an HVN meeting and tells his supports that the magnet deactivates the chip in his body that enables him to be tortured and he never does get tortured.

In the case of the political refugee, the message receiver accepts the host countries control and the hierarchy that is abusing him and stops fighting the power.  Instead, the message receiver offers prayers and mantras that he will be employed before he runs out of money and gets hired in the nick of time and continues to behave on the job.

In all these examples prayers, mantras and faith are needed to endure and reduce the negative effects of messages.

Examples of Positive Tricksters:    

 Some message receivers may find that they believe a trickster because it is what they want to hear. Then, later, they find they get socially punished for the belief. This usually involves the message receiver acting out in ways that sabotage their cultural capital or that results in real social sanctions. Numerous message receivers experience special messages that are a positive support and there is nothing wrong with that. However, even people who argue that the world is mostly positive can be dogged by tricksters when they interpret an ominous warning sign in a positive direction.

They may, for example, believe God and country is supporting them with special messages when those messages are not true. If they embark on a creating a business with “grandiose” notions that their government is supporting them and has their back, they may give away money or not fill their water bottle walking down the highway on their way to the post office figuring that the government is good and will have their back. The result is they end up down the road with no money and very thirsty. Instead of arriving at the post office as they had planned to pick up boxes for their business, they find themselves followed by the police, ambulance drivers and eventually by psychiatrists instead of supportive government agents. They may end up in a hospital getting rehydrated and then in an institution that seeks to sustain itself by keeping them incarcerated and the outcome can be negative to their efforts to start up a business.

In the above situation, still, much of the experience can be godly and positive. However, to be successful the positive person still must be on the lookout for tricksters that are, in fact, negative guidance.  Let’s say a friend sets a boundary that the message receiver misinterprets as an invitation to be chummy. The message receiver may be correct about their skills and abilities behind their grand plans, but misinterpreting the few messages that are tricksters can set up major roadblocks. The friend may get upset and call for a mental health consult.

Likewise, a message receiver who believes everyone likes them when others are in fact mocking them collects objects and hands them to people that bear odd meanings. Instead of receiving the object and recognizing the funny or beautiful message of the gesture, a friend mocks and gossips about the message receiver and eventually, someone calls for a mental health consult. The message receiver may then be put on an observation unit while they persist using their skills until they are forcibly shown they have no skills and deserve an impoverished lifestyle.

Though these examples are admittedly random, the result is that positive tricksters get in the way of monumental success.

A Balanced Strategy for Managing Positive Tricksters:

 The all-or-nothing tendency to view all messages as positive may need to be broken. The upbeat message receiver must view the constant energy of their messages with humility. If they don’t, the result can be oppression and institutionalization. Negative alternatives need to be considered as plausible otherwise all the positive energy and ability will be labelled a waste. Ultimately, it always is important to find ways to put positive or negative messages on the back burner and investigate them or let time reveal the truth as the message receiver continues their work towards success.

Positive tricksters need to be managed by the message receiver maintaining a strong grasp of the contents of consensus reality. Playing consensus can be an important strategy. It is also important for those receiving positive tricksters to exude a humble, a nonjudgmental, and an emotionally intelligent mentality. There also needs to be a sceptical act-opposite-from-the-way-one-feels mentality that will slow down the frequency of the positive tricksters. Praying that the positive message is not a trickster is a viable strategy. Additionally, clearly, the message receiver needs to weigh the potential consequences of non-consensus reality behaviour. This will keep positive tricksters from spiralling out of control.

Assessing the Level of Trust or Recovery Before Discussing the Concept:

 Often, a supporter can count on discussing trickster process and having a message receiver acknowledge that this has happened with an, “oh, yeah,” kind of realization. Supporters may spot times this is happening and spell it out to the message receiver. Transforming out of a message crisis takes time and there are significant back and forth debates about consensus reality that may need to be had.

However, a supporter needs to use judgement before they try to educate a message receiver about this spiritual concept. Experienced message receivers who can function in consensus reality may have already figured out the concept and crediting them for their wisdom and reinforcing the practice is good form.

However, if a message receiver seems routinely expresses ideas that are very far away from consensus reality and continues to act on them, the chances are that they are taking information from tricksters very literally. Before a supporter simply educates the impacted message receiver about the trickster concept, they need to establish an ability to identify message phenomena and collaborate. If support can validate divergent views, and sleuth with the message receiver, it is a good sign that trust is building. It may even be necessary to be able to discuss different approaches to the issue of what is causing the message experiences.

 The Importance of Behavior and Fixing the Relationship with Consensus Reality:

 The result of tricksters being intermixed with accurate message material is that the accuracy of all special message phenomena is believed, and the message receiver’s relationship with consensus reality is likely to become progressively less trusting. Ironically, as the trust for consensus reality decreases, the message receiver is likely to get robbed of their power, identity, social roles and eventually their material possessions.

 Despite a lot of errors in consensus reality that often preoccupy the institutionalized message receiver, knowing consensus reality is an important strategy when it comes to managing both negative and positive tricksters.

In fact, we all know that Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK and must act as if it were true in the right contexts. In this manner, message receivers need to learn to put on the façade of consensus reality, to avoid behaviour that will increase the reality of negative or positive tricksters. Message receivers need to let the messages go and let time tell. This is an act of faith.

This does not mean that message receivers can’t be free to live in their messages and share as they want when they are in good company in a group of supporters. Generally, people aren’t always right about reality anyway. But the understanding and acknowledging the trickster phenomenon can help decrease crisis and steer the message receiver toward success in the social rehabilitation realm.

Included in this learning, message receivers need to learn to trust people through their own intuitive communication as much or more than they trust special messages. This takes time and ongoing commitment as it is not an instant change. But knowing that messages have a significant degree of tricksters in them can really help. And communicating about tricksters and re-examining past traumatic occurrences with the associated spiritual skills can really help a message receiver trust the supporter.

The post Identifying the Trickster Phenomena During A Special Message Crisis or Extreme State appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".