When the IFS trainer suggested that that we all may have been in training spaces that weren’t safe, I needed to hear that. And then, she also extended a welcome to neurodivergent people in this work. This too was important for me to hear, as I have attracted three neurodevelopmental labels in my lifetime. On day one of this sixteen-week course, I hoped that this popular methodology, Internal Family Systems, might be the answer to addressing my own complex trauma. Being in a safe place that is open to neurodivergent people seemed like an important place to start.

I have found other trauma-focused psychotherapies, like eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) and emotional freedom techniques (EFT) very hard to use. I struggled to feel enough to successfully work with either modality. EFT, or tapping on energy meridians, didn’t help me feel any better when I was numb and not feeling anything at all. Likewise, EMDR or using dual attention stimulus while reviewing my own early traumatic events, rendered me in a void at first, and as I worked with it more it started to feel like being inside my head during a hike. Because I don’t experience special healing from either of these modalities it is hard to use these practices on other people with promise and optimism.

I had already taken several PESI courses on IFS and thought I had a pretty good idea of IFS jargon and concepts.

IFS, created by Dick Schwartz, is an approach to understanding the human psyche that reasons that one individual has multiple parts. The impact of trauma is that it drives us away from having the unifying principle of Self that can lead our parts with the wisdom of all our experiences to heal and work together in a healthy existence. When traumatic events (known in IFS as “burdens”) exist in our past, younger “protector” parts come out and dominate our consciousness, taking on extreme roles and fighting with each other to cover up what happened. Being led by the principle of Self enables us to heal our burdens and let our protector parts to live in harmony with each other within our awareness.

The appeal of parts work for me is that it views problems as rooted in things that happen to us instead of some unfounded brain pathology that can only be reversed by adjusting neurotransmitters. Thus, instead of talking about clinical depression we talk more specifically about the part that is struggling. In IFS we get curious about not only what is wrong with a part or problem, but also how it works for us. Thus, when a part shows up that is struggling with motivation and feels negative, we curiously explore the part and as we describe it and explore its history, we find that we stop “blending” with it. In effect our Self, along with the Self-energy of the therapist, comes out and helps us understand it.

In IFS, there are three types of parts: managers; firefighters; and exiles. Managers are socially conscious and try to operate in acceptable ways to hide the effects of our pains and shame. Firefighters are more reactionary and do things that aren’t socially acceptable to ward off the pain and keep the exiles from coming out. Exiles hold the pain and the memory of distressing events. Understanding the nature of these parts becomes very important to get to the point where we can unburden the pain of exiles so that the Self can lead our parts in a healthy manner.

My Experience with The Course:

As I began this latest IFSCA course, I could sense that my experience of doing IFS was different than that of my cohorts. They were more loyal to the model. When they began using IFS, they seemed to have visual or auditory experiences that I didn’t have, which seemingly allowed them connect to their parts. Indeed, having to practice being a vulnerable client—as is often the case in these training courses—quickly became so uncomfortable that I reached out to an IFS therapist who my insurance would cover to work with on my own.

In the past, I was punished by the state for purportedly hearing voices, when I didn’t realize I might be hearing very infrequent auditory illusions. How ironic it now felt in the group to be feeling outcasted for not being able to hear the voices of my parts. I learned that I had to use thinking parts to provide the answers to the questions because my parts didn’t speak directly for me.

With more practice coupled with individual therapy, I learned that with IFS one has to be in a trance-like state that I just wasn’t able to get into. This became very frustrating and I felt myself ruminating over the fact that I was different from the others in the group. It was a familiar rabbit hole that left me spinning and affected my mood and functioning.  I became concerned that the reason I was unable to hear from my parts was because I take antipsychotic medication. I continued to try to do the best I could, but the group was not proving to be a safe place for me. It was a place where I did not fit.

Repeatedly, I was directed to wait and hear from my parts and not let my thinking parts get in the way. One trainer suggested that I showed signs of having very big trauma in my background and that I couldn’t trust myself or my peers. While a part of me felt seen, another part of me felt uncomfortable with this. I have tended to be okay with trusting myself, it is other people I simply cannot trust. Where was this trainer getting this understanding of me from?

I noticed that after being consulted this way, my functioning in the course went down. Every four weeks we had sessions devoted to asking the trainer questions. During one of these sessions, I found myself less able to be attentive to her jargonized explanations. This left me in a tailspin. I found myself feeling bad about myself. This reminded me of being diagnosed with schizophrenia and feeling pathologized to function less and less.

I remembered how I kept the faith and kept working to overcome this. Thus, I went back and watched the recordings of the sessions, did the readings, and got a better understanding of the materials. I got a grip and unblended from the part of me that was convinced that there was something wrong with me because I was incarcerated in a state hospital for three months.

Eventually, approximately two-thirds of the way through the course, I started coaching my cohorts that they had to deal with my thinking parts. Work with my therapist went a bit better because she let me use my thinking parts. Still, as I listened to the complex descriptions of IFS concepts in the training sessions, I couldn’t understand what it felt like to experience the world in this way.

For example, updating the parts was never something I could do because my parts didn’t communicate with me. I found the technique to work for others to enhance self-energy and help protector parts trust and build rapport with the Self. But when others tried to use the technique on me, I wanted to say please don’t ask me those questions because I don’t know the answers. Likewise, in a trance with the pressure on to provide answers, I could not tell if I was blended or unblended so it was hard to know what worked at un-blending from a negative state or part. Mostly I was just blank. I dissociated which is a common firefighter response. I saw others update and unblend from their parts, but I couldn’t.

Meanwhile, I could go and tell my stories about traumatic things that happened to me anytime. I don’t need permission from my protector parts to do so. See, I have practiced telling stories as a keynote speaker. More frequently I have practiced sharing my stories in supportive groups I offer to others who experience psychosis. Furthermore, I have written a memoir to try to undo the sting of all the stigma I experience. I have faced a lot of rejection and weird energies from people who hear about my mental health; and I also wish they would open their ears and listen to the stories I uncover because there are so many valuable lessons to learn from them.

Lessons Learned and Moving Forward:

One thing that I have learned from working with people who experience psychosis or what I prefer to call special messages is that therapy works best when you meet the person where they are regardless of their disabilities or differences. And because of that, I struggle as a therapist to push people into a trance-like state when I can’t deal with going there myself. I found that being in this training made me afraid of trying to go inside because so often when I do, I block and come up empty. This aversion gets in the way of me understanding my parts and how to heal the exile parts that hold the pain.

Now that the course is over, I am going to continue learning IFS with my therapist and see if I can get to the point where I can get in contact with my exile parts and relieve burdens. As a therapist, I want to be able to work with other people’s parts and use the skills I learned, but feel I still have some personal learning to do before I alter my day-to-day practice.

For me feeling different or not up to snuff has a long history. I recognize that trying to do IFS work in the course caused me to blend with this part. The lead trainer named her parts, like her anxiety, and was able to stay in Self. I, unlike her, name my parts but they linger and stick around. In the training sessions, not only did they stick around; they got reinforced and that did not feel safe.

At the end of the training, I took what I consider to be a courageous step to publicly ask if the fact that I take antipsychotic medications may deflate my ability to be in a trance like state. It is also possible that my lack of trust for professionals is so profound that I just can’t do the work in front of them. When the question stumped the trainer, I went through another tailspin feeling insecure about the fact that I had let people know that I had a history of madness.

The course suggested that we keep in contact with our cohorts and, somehow, I highly doubted anyone would want to keep in contact with me. Stumping the trainer felt very awkward to me and reinforced that it is not safe to deal with madness in public spaces.

Even though the trainer had bent over backwards to include neurodivergence and taught us to meet people where they are at, she was unable to deliver safety when there are mechanisms of oppression that are beyond her control. As is often the case, we therapists often think we are safe, when a lot of times we need to take the time to prove it. And sometimes it is impossible to make someone safe in certain contexts depending on what they’ve been through.

I do believe I can benefit from the non-pathologizing approach to healing that IFS promotes and that I can teach others like me who have been institutionalized and take medicine to unblend from warring protective parts. Even if I do not get clear communication from my parts, I know they my parts are there and that I can learn to understand them.

I think I may be able to benefit even if my parts never answer. Nonetheless, my struggles to feel safe lead to an interesting set of questions in my mind:

• Do medications make it harder to heal from trauma within these new modalities?
• Do episodes of institutionalization mixed with ongoing stigma make it that much harder to develop trust so that trauma work cannot be done?
• Does the IFS community need to do more outreach to include the mad community?

Indeed, in learning the answer to these questions I will have to practice and see what I can learn. I doubt there will be books that will give me an answer to them. Much as it was for me coming back from the schizophrenia diagnosis, I will have to push my limits and defy what doubters say to get answers to these questions.

I do believe the course was a good starting point to enable me to work on my complex trauma. However, I felt extremely comforted when I told a recovery friend about stumping the trainer with my question about madness. He complimented me for my self-advocacy and said maybe my question would help the trainers be more prepared in the future. Viewing my efforts in the positive manner that they were intended helped me recapture my dignity and respect. Indeed, my manager parts—the protector parts that are concerned about being socially accepted—felt they would be interpreted as social-suicide.

The post A Mad Perspective on IFS Training appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

I knew in my bones that the state-wide California Proposition 1 initiative would pass on March 6^th kind of like I knew that the Iraq War would start as a reaction against Osama Bin Ladden and the 9-11 tragedy. Perhaps my sense of this is something that I should keep to myself. Now, mismanaging the feelings I get in my bones, and stating that I believe my own ability to have premonitions could result in grave consequences.

This new proposition is set to mandate treatment to people with schizophrenia related forms of mental illness (not bipolar.) This proposition establishing “care courts” is matched by a similar policy starting in New York City called Kendra’s Law, or Assisted Outpatient Treatment. It is a policy that very well may spread throughout the states. What I fear is that this new power purportedly to help address the problem of homelessness becomes the law of the land. Many of us fear a return to institutionalization.

Now thanks to California Proposition 1, a person with my history could be mandated to attend treatment for two years by a judge. I could go from working in the program where I have held a twenty-year tenure as a psychotherapist to being forced to submit to treatment there despite the economic consequences. If this sounds like I am being drastic perhaps you haven’t read the details I have read or had the experiences with law enforcement and family and friends that I have had. Perhaps you haven’t had the dissociated experience of looking down upon yourself as you make your case in front of a judge’s condemning eyes just to realize that no one in the court room, not your family, not anyone, is listening to you.

Indeed, I might need to be more drastic because a lot of people don’t understand what is involved with such a catastrophic loss of status. For me personally, Proposition 1 could mean a return to a long-term dilapidated state hospital stay and years of being trafficked as an indentured servant. Perhaps you don’t believe that human trafficking is real or that it can happen to a white man from a middle-class background in the United Sates of America. But if what I am saying sounds drastic, I urge you to read further because I will provide details that at least will help you see where I am coming from. Indeed, it can and does happen and there are many more people like me than you likely realize.

My Fight to Create Safe Spaces:

In my current position on an outpatient psychiatric unit, I’ve been in a battle for sixteen years to make it safe for people like me to process experiences associated with what I call special messages in confidential group therapy. This isn’t easy to get people to do in our setting because the system teaches us that if we show signs of madness, we will endure punishment. To help others know it is safe to do so with me, I have grown accustomed to sharing my own experience.

I do work with some good colleagues, and I have also endured colleagues who have called me crazy Tim. They are good people too. One even left offensive cartoons on my desk. One has spoken to my manager about my work with the clients with grave concerns. Others have given me dirty looks its been clear to me that they have then talked amongst themselves about me. Still others ignore me and make me repeat myself because they refuse to acknowledge my words for unstated reasons. When I am treated like this, the good people I work with might end up needing to distance themselves from me just a little. Or they may need to turn their heads the other way a little. I don’t blame them. We all survive amid an unreal state of disparity on the psychiatric unit. Such is the nature of psychiatric units.

Now, with Proposition 1 out there, I fear that I might have to dig myself out of the same hole I was in twenty-four years ago.

Why Target Us?

Part of the reason mandatory treatment is a huge risk to those of us with my targeted diagnostic make-up because the public still doesn’t believe recovery is possible for us. The stated goal is to get us off the streets and into housing. Never mind the fact that in Oakland California, the city where I work, only twenty-five percent of the homeless are “mentally ill.” Also, of the people housed in Santa Rita Jail in the county 20-25% have a mental illness. It may be true that a few of us challenge the mainstream paradigm by letting others take everything away from us and choosing to live in tents rather than endure corruption in programs or low-income housing. Others of us, like me, find other ways to challenge mainstream norms. Some do come in for treatment to manage their living conditions, which, I might add, can be quite hard. I have more to say about that!

My Sensing of Violence in a Low-Income Housing Project:

Twenty-four years ago, I worked in such a setting in Seattle. The site was a Section 8 Housing Authority facility called the Morrison Hotel that was dubbed the hotel of horrors by the Seattle Weekly. I witnessed a lot of violence and graphic details of the underworld there. When a resident died of a heroin overdose, I saw enough strange and suspicious behavior to have a similar feeling in my bones that there was foul play associated with the death. I was tormented to the extent that gave the story to a reporter I met a poetry reading. I wasn’t given access to the files Seattle Housing Authority had on the residents and it never occurred to me that I was doing anything other than trying to support the residents who confided in me that they were also scared and suspicious about the death.

Now, with the benefit of reflection and couple of years of experience being unemployed and underemployed, I sense in my bones that that resident might have been an undercover agent of some sort and that outing him may have shined a light on some operations that were covert. There was a change in management that resulted and that affected Seattle politics and drug trade significantly.

Several months later I received a personal threat from a friend when I admitted to him that I had given the story to the press. He seemed a little grandiose about his power when he told me he could do me great harm. Another friend warned me not to flee. I chose to challenge this threat and flee. I ended up getting harassed by State Troopers and hospitalized in a State Hospital in Warm Springs Montana with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. It wasn’t until I was released three months later and had moved to Fresno California that I learned that I was right about the suspicious death and that it helped lead to the housing project getting managed by a different company.

The Sense that Things Are Wrong:

I now have fifty-three years of dealing with premonitions/intuitions like this. Yes, I know it is possible that I can be wrong just like I wonder if only 73.3% of the votes have been tallied at the time I am writing this, why the Washington Post has determined that the California measure has passed when there is only 50.3% yes votes. Perhaps there is math out there that enables the Wahington Post to call the election in this way, but it just doesn’t seem likely at first glance. Often, many of us in America take articles like this for granted as being truthful. The Washington Post is reputable, as is our voting system.

Details About What It Was Like Being Blacklisted and Indentured:

By the time the world trade towers were attacked, I had moved to Antioch CA and was hired at an Italian Deli food chain in the bay area for nine dollars an hour. I had a four-hour commute to get to the Deli on an old beat-up bicycle and BART. I could not find any other work, though this was not through lack of effort. I tried to work at professional jobs in social work. I tried many local minimum wage positions like Subway or Dennys or Walmart to no avail. On days off I would attract homeless looking white individuals who would follow me as I rode my bike dropping off applications at seven eleven, a hardware store, a restaurant. No job ever called me back. I had to put up with a job that I believed was corrupt and had several worker coworkers who were harassing me with mafia ties.

I was off medication and under the impression that I was being monitored during my bike/BART commute to my job at the Deli where I was often tormented by seventeen-year-old rich kids who mocked, or worse tried to mentor me. Most days I could identify a person on the train who I believed was there because of me. Once, I saw a resident I knew from Seattle sit across from me on the BART on my commute. Back in Seattle he had confided in me in a non-confidential circumstance that he had killed a man. He wore handcuffs and wore a label on his jean jacket that read, CIA officer. I was inundated with these kinds of coincidences or experiences I have since learned to ignore and call special messages.

I maintained this commute and schedule for ten months before I was able to get hired back into social services. Finally, I returned to taking medication and was able to improve my relationships with the less menacing of the rich kids to keep my temper at bay. The mafia kids who seemed to be in the know mostly quit and moved on.

Using These Experiences for the Positive:

Now in an Outpatient Psychiatric Unit, I share my story and encourage others to process theirs. I convince them that there can be safe places where they can share what they’ve been through. And over sixteen years of doing this, I have heard a lot of stories that may seem hard for many to believe. We have also shared laughs and good times. Once traumatic material is told, processed, and validated, it becomes easier for participants to compartmentalize their trauma and engage in other types of activities.

I also offer training for providers, family members and survivors who want to help others tell their stories and get relief. There is a lot that can be learned so that people will want to talk and relate what they have gone through as targeted individuals, spiritualists, people with voices, alien communicators, dissociative identities, scuttlebutt spies, and somatic sensors and other manifestations.

Ongoing Senses About War and Genocides:

When the towers fell twenty-three years ago, I knew right away that the United States would start wars in the middle east to avenge the approximately 3000 dead in the tragedy.

By the time of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, I was aware that there had been a lot of preparations for war. I had heard that a pipeline had been constructed to make the war possible. George W Bush’s dramatic threats toward Sadam Hussein seemed like theater to me and I presumed the war was inevitable. Indeed, by 2007 there was an ORB (Opinion Research Business) survey that estimated that 1,033,000 died in the war. This doesn’t include all the losses of life endured during the Afghanistan War which were worse.

It’s true my sense that Proposition 1 was going to pass has been propped up by a great deal of data. As I work in social services, I often see the pipelines going up and the preparations being made. I could pretend I was a rich white liberal instead of a progressive one and read the material, the messaging—treatment, not tents—the propaganda. I could figure how someone who is majority white, liberal, Californian, and uniformed might respond to the issue. For years I have interacted with the public and seen eyes go glass with the belief that schizophrenia is a medical illness rather than a spiritual journey. It is a dominant narrative in our culture.

At a time when both American parties are supporting what many believe to be a genocide in Gaza, the rationale just may be that we did this in Iraq and Afghanistan, so Israel has the right to follow suit. In this manner a race is killed beneath our very eyes in a manner so as that we don’t blink. The issue seems to me to be about power and entitlement, so that the well-to-do do not have to share in the tears and blood going on in the city corners. Yes, all so some kids can be cool and safely sample a taste of the nightlife in college just as they did, there is death an mayhem in the inner cities. Meanwhile the mainstream can go on excommunicating those who dabbled too hard or too soft. It’s all about fitting in and going along to get along.

Thankful that I had a Choice:

In a like manner, now I am officially able to be stripped of my American rights as someone with a schizophrenic history. Regardless of what I do, now the fact that good people can treat me with cold, glass wickedness is supported by the law. I choose to accept this and keep the ball rolling. The content of my character becomes invisible as are my rights to privacy.

If I had been forced to attend program instead of work, I could not have afforded housing with family support. I would have had to accept a board and care or a SRO for two years. By the time I endured all that, I doubt I would have healed at all. I likely would have given up and accepted my place. I wouldn’t be married and working.

Working at the Deli enabled me to work through my issues without falling into the corruption of low-income housing and programs. At least it was the choice I preferred. I equate being subjected to such treatment as being incarcerated or being sent to war—you just don’t know if you can come back from that. Working at an Italian Deli with the belief that the mafia was harassing me was hard enough, but it was better than the state hospital for sure. At least I had a choice as limited as it seemed at the time.

The Issue of Family Support:

I have a great aunt who I learned about once I restored my role as a social worker. She was lobotomized and institutionalized for refusing to leave her bed when her mother wouldn’t let her marry her high school sweetheart. Just as it seems like it is important for my relatives to believe they come from a good family and a good background; it felt like they then had to recapitulate this historical trauma onto me because I was different and didn’t live up to their standards. I did know of my great aunt, but I just couldn’t get the complete story.

On occasions I have met with extended family, I am met with microaggressions, or signs of excommunication. I have spent decades healing my relationships with my mother and father who are finally transitioning their perspectives after twenty years of recovery and the potential of their declining health. I have an aunt or two who have been supportive, but the attitudes of my remaining relatives, like the attitudes my parents started with, scare me. Institutionalization happened before and despite my toil and labor, I fear it could happen again.

Luckily in my work, I meet with families who display sides that want more for their children. They may not always know what to do, but they would be happy to support a recovery instead of endlessly recapitulate institutionalization. Sometimes I still feel shame that I made it hard for my family because I didn’t just accept institutionalization. That seems to be what was expected of me. But now twenty years later, the blessing of working with these families reminds me not to feel that way.

One thing I am privileged to know is that different American cultural groups handle madness differently. My story and my scenario are just a single grain of sand in a big box of good old American diversity. There are families who have gone to great lengths to shield their loved ones from homelessness and the system, who endure violence and outbursts without help from the state. Others use the state intermittently to shape and guide their loved ones in their learning process. Some utilize tough love and hospitals and decide that they are mistakes and need to handle repair and a process of mutual learning. There is tragedy and hurt that abound in all directions. There is so much needed for healing.

Proposition 1 and the Losses Dealt to Peer-Run Communities:

As I brace for the changes Proposition 1 will bring, I see coworkers who seem to be open to the plight of people who are neurodivergent, mad, or have histories of trauma and wonder if they can handle the upcoming changes. Very few people out there understand the behavior of the homeless on the streets, behavior that I have engaged in in the state hospital when I was beaten, confined, ignored, rejected, slandered and denied access to meaningful activity. I worry if outpatient therapists without lived experience really will be able to understand and work with people who have endured homelessness.

With the social sin of homelessness now firmly planted like a target on a minority group, the schizophrenics, society can all ignore the other issues present. I saw a post on Facebook that all we need to do is invest 20 billion to end homelessness, a small portion of what we spend against Gaza and in support of Ukraine. I don’t know if that makes any sense, but still I ask: how are families to learn how to relate to their loved ones now that resources are taken away from recovery-oriented, peer-run communities and allocated for an increase in hospital beds, housing, and the oppression of care courts? Indeed, funding will be cut for recovery services to build more housing and impose more treatment.

The Value of the Vote:

In my eyes, my last vote against Proposition 1 may have been my last choice against the genocide and oppression that so impacts my life, work, and worldview. I wonder if my voice really matters. I wonder if voting matters in general in this exploding political system. But maybe these wonderings should just be my little secret. Oops.

The post My Last Vote Against California Proposition 1: appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

The studio rests six stories high. On top of an old steam heater a fan drones in an open window. Clyde sleeps on a black futon that sits on the floor. He sleeps under a thick Central American bed cover his ex-girlfriend gave him.

It took a semester in the dorms, but he’d finally he managed to break up with her. It’s been a whole year now and he has established his own space. On the floor to his left there is a cup with olive oil in it.

Suddenly radio from the clock fills the room. Clyde tosses around. Time passes. He gets up and walks into his closet past kitty litter which is full with land mines of shit.

He moves through the closet and into the bathroom past the sink, which he calls the throat. He gets into the shower and cleans the shlock off his Irish wee-wee. Somehow, Clyde has no idea he is predominantly Irish.

It’s the summer. His fifty-four-hour work week is nearing an end. Today is one of his three eight- hour days. His high school friend John Randy is going to pick him up after work. They are going to catch a Phish concert at some theater in Delaware.

This morning, Clyde hits the tape deck and jams to Big Audio Dynamite in the apartment. He likes Mick Jones from the Clash and how he veers toward R+B and diversity in this music.

He attacks fruit out of his refrigerator drawers. The roaches dash over his kitchen table. He puts some water on the stove and prepares sugar-free hot chocolate. The roaches are crazy busy and of various sizes this morning.

Clyde used to have to spray one roach at a time. He’d spray for minutes and finally the roach would roll over on its back and die in the pool of chemicals left behind. A neighbor had suggested this particular black jack spray. Clyde bought it from the Sikh man’s convenience store.

As Clyde uses the spray on the table and around the kitchen area the roaches quickly die. He notices that his cat is watching him. Then he fills his hot chocolate takes a sip and spits out a roach. Once again, he has forgotten to check the clump of chocolate at the top of the cocoa before he sips.

When ready for the day, Clyde takes the stair well two stairs at a time. It takes some dexterity. Rarely does he encounter any one who comments about the noise his descending of the stairs in this manner makes.

Once out the glass doors of the decay of Pierre Apartments, he crosses Cooper Street shaking his head.

Gwendolyn is at the corner by the pay phone. This past winter every time they encountered each other they would both be underdressed for the cold. Now, in the summer, she sips beer from a bagged can. and comes at him with a masculine handshake. “What’s wrong today kid.”

Clyde loves the way Gwendolyn always inserts herself and commands respect even though he never remembers to use her name. He doesn’t suspect that she used to be a nurse. Nor does he get that she too had been put out of her house at an early age. Gwendolyn lives in the complex across the street that always has people coming in and out of it at all hours of the day.

“The roaches are bad this morning, I think the neighbors bombed their room. Does that ever happen to you?”

“Oh, we wouldn’t let there be roaches on our building.”

Clyde lives in the drug free complex and doesn’t understand. He presumes all complexes in the area have roaches.

Sure. he has studied social welfare from a suburban adjunct professor but there is still a lot about his surroundings that he doesn’t understand.

Hi professor had educated the class about what it’s like to be on welfare through assigning offensive books. Many of the students announced that they had been on welfare themselves and challenged his perspective and his choice of books. A few white women would concur with him.

One time the professor had asked the students if they gave money to the pan handlers down town.

“Why not?” he exclaimed, just in love with his power.

As clueless as his professor proved to be, Clyde doesn’t yet understand the concept of cash money even though he gets paid in it. He doesn’t imagine that when there is traffic coming in and out of a complex there is probably heaps of cash money changing hands, unlaundered money that can, with the right neighborhood connections, be used to control the roach problem. All he understands is that he gets angry when the people coming in and out of Gwendolyn’s complex call him Where’s Waldo.

Clyde crosses the parking lot for the dorms and passes a gleaming glass building before arriving at the small minimart. He is opening this morning and his coworker is closing. His boss arrives and unlocks the shutters so Clyde throws them up.

Before he turns the radio on to the local R+B radio station, he hears his boss muttering “Docy, Docy, Docy.” as he carries out his routines. Some might think he was muttering in Korean, but Clyde knows that he is remembering his mentors on the grill Doc and Ray. His boss admired Doc even though Doc cursed him to everyone he knew for taking advantage of Docs connects.

Doc had educated Clyde about how his mother had to lock him out of the house so he would learn how to fight and face the neighborhood beat down without running. Doc would smile at Clyde when he listened and lectured about exploitation. Doc had mentored his current coworker and friend, Craig G not to use the needle.

Doc knew he wasn’t getting paid enough for his long hours and left the job. Clyde had heard that when he stopped working, he went on a crack binge.

Clyde had really ended up liking Doc’s friend Ray who had been very direct with him upon first meeting. “Don’t worry Clyde, you can’t help it if you are an asshole, you were just raised that way.”

On one of Clyde’s first evenings closing the store, Ray had manipulated him to drive him to a friend’s house where he could cop. He’d only done it once. He also tested Clyde out by telling him about his sexual exploits with white women. When Clyde had continued to be cool with Ray, he would accept the role of being Clyde’s mentor on the grill. “Clyde, you have to work smarter not harder,” Ray would exclaim. Ray also gave Clyde the nickname, “Nervous Norton.”

Clyde admired Ray’s fifty-four hour a week work ethic, his wit, and how he had his weight under control. He treated Ray as a surrogate father until Ray left the job with Doc.

His boss used to build airplanes for a Korean Army, but came to America for a better life. Nobody except Clyde likes the boss because he has an educated air. Clyde likes that he is reliable and fair with his work routines. Clyde believes a part of his boss feels bad for the way he’d treated Doc and thus the muttering.

Sometimes his boss grabs his thin arms and crunches the bones and biceps. Then he says, “Clyde, don’t hesitate!” Clyde thinks he knows perfectly well what the boss is trying to communicate and accepts what his boss is getting at and yet somehow fails to give a fuck.

Clyde likes his boss a lot better than the owner. Craig G and all the neighborhood kids like the Korean owner. The owner is big, muscular, and shares his hunting hobby with all who will listen. He used to be gangster until he got married. In Asian gangs Clyde will one day learn, it is customary to leave the gang when you get married.

At first meeting, the owner had let Clyde know that he was easy to pick on. However, the owner stopped when Clyde showed sharp attitude about his compliance with handling the store Glock. All he had to do was let the owner know he wasn’t about to shoot anyone for four dollars per hour and the owner left him alone.

Clyde makes it a habit to pack those sandwiches with extra meat especially the tuna and chicken salad. The owner’s wife makes the salads and gets really angry. Clyde just ignores all the feedback.

Clyde knows that it is because of his attitude that the boss always tells him that Craig G is a better worker than him as if Clyde would care. The boss thinks such comments will curb Clyde’s behavior.

Clyde resents the fact that the stale cereal is sold for seven dollars a box. Clyde thinks the owner is leeching money out of the poor black and brown neighborhood. The deli sandwiches are the only affordable way to eat, and it is an expensive way to live. Clyde has seen the movie “Do the Right Thing!” by Spike Lee.

He contrasts the suburban houses that he imagines the owner lives in with the studio where he and other neighborhood people live. He thinks how there are no grocery stores for any of the kids who live in Camden. They have to drive thirty minutes out of the city to even get to a supermarket. He knows most of the mom-and-pop stores have high prices. Many of the kids in the city had to survive off of Ramin Pride.

As Clyde prepares the condiments for the afternoon rush, he thinks of the first kid he trained to work at the deli. This kid took him to the movies and taught him how to sneak into different theaters. When the kid finally found something that he liked, they’d settled in. The kid only lasted a few months and then went off to the crack trade. That kid was very socially skilled and knew how to connect congenially with Clyde like no other.

Still, Clyde hopes that he will make stronger connections with kids he knows from the neighborhood when they work here. He prays that they will like working with him and Craig G more than the lure of ready rock.

And yet when he hears about the white kids that commute into the city to take classes, talk poor, and boast how they steal from his boss, it somehow pisses him off worse.

Once he heard a frat brother who he’d taken a writing class with calling him out of his name, “Hey do you ever wonder how much change the panhandlers get out of Clyde Dee?”

Clyde thinks about how in reality no one asks him for change. He carries his cash in his sock with a dollar or two in his wallet. The very few occasions he’s been threatened he has donated a dollar or two to avoid a beat down.

In the store the customers treat him like he is family. One told him he was down with the brown. Another told customer told him of a local mechanic who was flaco like him. Flaco means thin in Spanish, but it’s also known as a cool nickname amongst players. The customers had a lot of love for Clyde and the community made him feel much less alone.

When commuting students like the frat boy comes down here and judge the locals according to stereotypes, it becomes hard for Clyde to befriend them.

Clyde has only made one close friend. He is ten years older and is in recovery from polysubstance abuse.

Clyde thinks his friend gets a little manic when he talks. His friend’s best friend is on the Philadelphia police force. He calls his friend a bad lieutenant in the police force. This bad lieutenant funds his friend’s education and expenses in return for under the table surveillance work. Clyde’s friend is also a writer. Some of his work, when he isn’t using vocabulary that makes him sound like Henry James, carries the tone of a mafia flick. He has introduced Clyde to many mafia flicks, but Clyde still doesn’t understand.

Even Clyde’s friend can misunderstand the neighborhood. For example, he accuses Clyde Dee and Craig G of listening to “gangster rap” in the deli. And he made a big deal once about the fact that his co-worker took care of him when he ordered a sandwich. Clyde thinks he misunderstands Craig G.

Craig G shows up after an hour once the grill and kitchen are set up. Clyde and Craig give each other the neighborhood hand shake and Craig straps on the apron the same way Clyde wears it. Craig G developed this style of wearing the apron and everyone follows suit.

Craig disappears into the bathroom and when he comes out Clyde is in the back getting a clean tub to fill with mayonnaise.  Craig chuckles, “You ever notice when its your own shit, it never stinks!”

Clyde who has never had to take a crap on that can retorts, “Oh your lucky it wasn’t me in there.”

Craig pulls out the tape Clyde loaned him and says, “You’ve got a hold of some slamming new jams on this one.”

Once last summer Craig came out of the can at closing time and showed Clyde a bone. Clyde figured he was offering to share it with Clyde.

Clyde shrugged, and expressed no interest with his face.

It was the only time Craig offered.

Craig never seemed to judge Clyde for his refusal.

Clyde went ahead and loaned him his backpack and ID so he could sneak into the University Gym. Last summer when he had acquiesced to get back with his girlfriend, Craig had given him a condom and said it’d be good if he finally got lucky. They had gone to an amusement park together, an event that made Clyde’s girlfriend exceedingly jealous.

Craig puts the BDP Sex and Violence tape in the deck and hit play. Clyde listens to the bass and familiar beat. Customers start to come in in waves and Craig and Clyde take and fill orders. Clyde ponders and learns intermittently from the lyrics . . .

Black drug dealer, you have to rise up and organize your business so that we can rise up

If you are gonna sell crack than don’t be a fool, organize your business and open up a school . . .

Or invest in a Prison, therefore you can be put in it. Everyone else did this and now they chillin

Above the law while you are under the law and still killin

Wake up my African brother, my Hispanic brother. America ain’t your mother or your father so don’t bother with right or wrong

Just check out the logic in the song . . .

In the thirties and forties the drug dealer wasn’t black; they were Jewish, Irish, Polish Italian ectcetera ectcetera, and they were making their lives a lot better . . . 

Organize, legalize, legitimize your business, remember everybody else did this

Clyde had first heard about KRS-One, the rapper, in sociology class. The black professor had said that KRS-One and Cool Moe Dee had been homeless and been able to create this music with almost no resources. Then, Craig had played his first album, Criminal Minded, at work.

Oddly, this latest album came from John Randy. KRS-One had played a concert at his white liberal college from which he dropped out. John had passed on the tape to Clyde earlier that summer. Clyde thinks it is a hell of a lot better than that Phish music John Randy is so crazy about.

This summer, Craig had borrowed his car and returned it with the gas full and invited Clyde into North Camden to ball with him and his boys. Clyde felt good about the real friendship and it was important to him.

One morning Craig G came in traumatized after hiding out all night in an abandoned building. He had been at a doughnut shop with his boys and there was some kind of confrontation. He’d had to run and hide out in an abandoned building.

Another time Craig had cut himself on the slicer and Clyde has taken him to emergency.

Clyde liked being there for Craig and it had helped them bond.

In a few years Clyde will be visiting John Randy at his parent’s shore house one night when John will get lit. Clyde will feel like John will be a bit racist, exclaiming to his father in front of his proper friends about getting picked up by a black man from Camden. Then Clyde will discover the black man is Craig G who will clearly be drubbling high on heroin.

Craig will be dating a white-women from Camden who had a scholarship to attend John and Clyde’s private school in Moorestown New Jersey.

The white girl will exclaim she can now learn all about her new boyfriend from Clyde.

She will only get the seal of his smiling lips.

It will be funny how much Clyde will realize that he’s changed

In about three years, Craig’s mentor, someone Clyde will presume to be his NA sponsor, will recognize Clyde when he will work in a Pennsauken video store and organize a reunion. Craig will have a union job and Clyde will presume he has beaten back smack. He will be so happy for him.

Craig G has a smile and general look like Tupac. He attracts a lot of women. At the amusement park they went to the year before, women kept giving him their number like he was a celebrity.

Craig is always hooking up with girls in the dorm. Even though Clyde is too shy to even think about a date, Craig always treats him respectfully. He has introduced Clyde to his main girlfriend and his best friend too. Clyde hooked them up with some real generous sandwiches.

The boss often polls the female customers about which worker in the store is most attractive and Craig always wins. One time the boss said he talked to a woman who had put Clyde first. He had grabbed Clyde arms squeezing his bones and muscles together: “Don’t hesitate!” he had repeated.

Craig G is not the only local of Clyde’s generation who educates Clyde about the lives that locals live. One day, Julio’s brother has come to meet Clyde and told him about the graphic violence he’d gotten caught up in at a club one night. Julio’s married sister was one of Clyde’s neighbors in Pierre Apartments. She has invited Clyde into her apartment and been really friendly.

Julio, one of the kids who works here, always comes at Clyde with a lot of aggression calling him a “Geiser” (or crack addict.) Also, he calls Clyde a “pus.” Julio makes it a habit to punch him while he is working on the grill.

One evening later on that Fall, Clyde will get fed up with Julio’s behavior and will agree to a fight after work. The boss will officiate and Clyde will wrestle Julio to the ground enough to demonstrate his physical dominance. Then, one fairly beaten, Julio will get up and give Clyde a unfettered knee in the balls.

Unable to speak for five minutes Clyde eventually will manage to call Julio a punk and a coward. The boss will look startled by this and clearly will not know what to do. Julio will just laugh and talk trash like Muhammad Ali.

Soon thereafter, Julio will show up at Clyde’s door step with his cousin and older brother. They will take him to the YMCA pool for a swim.

Clyde will go home after the swim and write a paper that his teacher will want to put up for a prize. Of course, Clyde will decline. He will only use the opportunity to try to make the teacher feel stupid. He hates teachers,

Clyde and Craig work the grill, the sandwich bar, and the pizza oven as the work starts to pick up. At noon the kid Angelo comes in and gives them each the neighborhood hand shake.

Angelo lives with his grandmother and is the oldest child to a woman who appears to be Developmentally Delayed. Clyde’s ex-girlfriend used to dote on him while she gave the neighborhood kids candy. She thought he was a cute and well-behaved boy. He had given his ex-girlfriend the biggest smiles and most sincere looks.

But currently, working with Angelo is a different story. Clyde sees another side of Angelo. Without having the benefit of a father figure, Angelo tends to get mad and bite back when told to do something. There are times he gets the job done and at times he goofs off.

Craig has just a little more patience with Angelo’s willful defiance yet rarely engages him. Clyde gets more frustrated. Thus, with Angelo, Clyde tries to step back and model Craig G’s tone.

Clyde used to work with this kid named Jose and had a much easier time. It’s true that Clyde already had a relationship with Jose having traveled with him to Pyne Point Park to help coach his baseball team. Clyde had known that Jose’s stepfather favored his younger brother and that Jose needed a little extra support.

When Jose had worked with Clyde, he had done everything right and there had been no disrespect. Since he quit, the neighborhood kids had all gossiped about him. Apparently, his step-father had sent him away to some mental health facility.

Today, Angelo directs himself to the walk in and stocks the shelves without comment. He also does the dishes in the back sink and takes the trash out. The lunch rush comes steadily for a few hours. When it thins Clyde and Craig take turns making deliveries. Then Craig leaves at two to return at four to close the store

At this point Angelo announces that he’s going to take his lunch. He walks to the front of the store and picks up a pornographic magazine and sits near Clyde. As Clyde slices meats, he flips through the pages sucking on his teeth and making a lot of delighted noises.

“Hey Angelo, you’re a little young to be checking out those magazines in front of customer,” says Clyde.

Angelo ignores Clyde with provocative expressions of delight.

The boss hears this and puts down his own pornographic magazine which is hidden inside a Korean Newspaper. He strides over from his perch at the cash register with his bullet proof vest on and looks at Angelo.

“No, that is bad,” he says, “You have to put that away right now!”

The Campus and City police come in frequently to fill their coffee or soda for free. All the neighbors point and whisper when the vice squad comes in. “They are the true bad guys,” a customer had once told Clyde. It will take Clyde decades of living to make sense of and understand these dynamics.

The only day Clyde didn’t see police abusing their power was the time the boss got held up at gun point and the owner showed up drunk with an arsenal of hardware. They were too afraid to come get free coffee that night.

Clyde can’t help but feel some judgement towards Angelo, the boss, and the police. What a fucked-up world they are all living in.

When Julio comes in for his shift and punches him and called him a Geiser, Clyde feels relief. Somehow, he stresses about Angelo’s morals and ability to survive the streets. He doesn’t know what to do.

The one-time Clyde will get his car window shattered, Angelo will come and tell him that Jose did it. Clyde will talk to Jose and easily discern that it was likely Angelo who broke the window. Whoever smelt it delt it. Sometime, Clyde fears, Angelo is going to get in trouble for pulling a stunt like that on the streets.

It will not occur to Clyde until many years later that he will have missed an opportunity to help Angelo out.

Clyde listens to the patter of the rain against the tarp above him. It’s an exceedingly gray day and he is sitting on the cement table and chair outside the mini mart. A mini-van rolls up along the narrow street.

When Clyde realizes it’s John Randy, he wonders how John ended up with a mini-van. The door slides open and Clyde recognizes a kid he used to know from grade school and a girl from his graduating class along with two other non-descript white twenty-year-old males.

Clyde’s hair is slicked back with gel. He is wearing a black Marlboro work-tee-shirt, his two- toned florescent green shorts, and his old-school white and black Converses. He doesn’t even think about the fact he smells like the deli.

The front seat is open and Clyde demurs a moment. Then, against his better judgement he opens the front door and climbs in.

His old grade school acquaintance is extremely friendly and catches up with Clyde in a graceful manner. Clyde has heard he is in construction, not school.

Clyde remembers sitting at the table in the grade school library with this guy and talking about war. “Better to kill them than have them kill you,” this guy had exclaimed.

Those were the days when Clyde had clout and confidence, back when he was formulating his pacifist philosophy.

Junior high had turned this kid into a metalhead and a part of the crowd that excluded Clyde. The kid’s favorite band had been Judas Priest.

Clyde tries to be friendly right back at him; however, he notices he is self-conscious. He does not feel grounded and in-the-zone the way he does when he is working with Craig G.

John Randy drives and the van is quickly over the bridge and on the interstate.

One of the nondescript males keeps talking about the dangers of Delaware cops. It seems very important to him that he is going to do something to break the law.

Yeah, yeah, thinks Clyde, Delaware cops are strict big whoop. This asshole needs to get over himself.

Before long John Randy pulls over on the interstate. John runs over to some bush in a wet green pasture and starts taking a leak. Clyde climbs over to the driver’s seat. Clyde learns they are driving the family van of a school associate. The family is on vacation and Clyde doubts they would approve of this expedition.

John Randy is still out urinating on the bush. Clyde feels he has unwittingly been had again. Now he is the designated driver of a stolen vehicle. The crew talks in the back and John is still urinating. They had all been fools to let John drive at all. No one else seems the least bit concerned about the danger that this posed! And the urination continues.

When John finally gets back into the van, Clyde focuses on his role as a designated driver. The crew is blazing weed and drinking in the back. Through the rearview mirror, Clyde spies the girl who graduated High School with him inhale.

Clyde still can’t help but get anxious when he thinks about the blaze of weed. He decided early on that he was not going to be pressured into doing any such thing, ever. Still, the fact that he has to stand out pumps up his anxiety.

He often thinks about how people have died smuggling her that weed she is inhaling! He knows how well these cohorts were treated in the insulated private school they attended. His father and mother were teachers at the school they attended. His father was a top administrator.

Clyde feels all the students at his school had it so easy. He feels this way especially since he has moved to Camden. Every time he sees his cohorts from that school all he sees is that they always want more.

Clyde doesn’t think about how this girl who inhaled had a mother who was a secretary at the school and how she was also (like Clyde) a scholarship kid. She may well have problems like he has! No, Clyde just thinks and thinks about how greedy it is to partake in what is essentially a slave business.

People like the kids will go to jail so the likes of he and his cohorts can be enthralled with no consequences.

As Clyde fumes, his cohorts coincidentally start to criticize his driving. Perhaps they can sense his judgments. Clyde remembers John Randy taking him to a house party back when he lived with him during his senior year. When Clyde started to fulfill his role as a designated driver, John Randy exclaimed that he was driving like an asshole. Clyde really didn’t know what this meant. Is this how all sober people get treated, or just him?

Now Clyde has to get off at an exit to fill the tank. The problem is that everyone has pitched negative energy his way. Some start directing him toward different exits to get off the interstate. Clyde can’t think. When he finally gets off there is no gas station to be found.

He gets on a road that heads the wrong direction and decides he’ll save time and make a k turn. The problem is that he is used to driving a stick. He instinctively reaches down to put the car into reverse and gropes at the air. Car headlights head towards him while he searches for the transmission lever to put the car in reverse. He jams on the gas and the van peals out backwards. Now everybody is laughing and criticizing his driving. Clyde is very distressed.

Drunken John, somehow realizes he has to calm Clyde. He steps up and directs him to a gas station.

When Clyde finally arrives at the stadium, the dark clouds are moving into dusk. The parking lot is full of tailgating hippies. Clyde is entertained with odd sights of funk. There are a ton of white kids his own age from sleep away colleges that he is not used to seeing.

He follows along while his eyes drink in the scene. There are no sport teams that he knows of in Delaware but the stadium is sizable. He is afraid he will be seen as just another damn hippie amongst the crowd without any awareness that he stands out like he is Where’s Waldo different.

Inside the stadium they find seats.

Looking out the stadium through the cemented exit walls, he can see hippies who must be jumping on trampolines. They are silhouetted against the dusky skyline. Clyde watches as every time they bounce up, they strike a different pose. There is water spray that is just barely visible surrounding them though he cannot see where it is coming from.

He can’t help thinking of the parents of these lost souls and wondering what they think of their kid’s lifestyles. This fills Clyde with a sense of sadness.

It will be eight years later when Clyde will learn that hippies use spray like that to get people on trips. LSD is something he should know more about. His grandfather was the head of the Harvard psychology department that hired Timothy Leary.

Many decades later Clyde will learn that his grandfather presided over the same department that conducted mind-control experiments on the likes of Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber,) Whitey Bulger (South Bostin’s Irish Kingpin) Ken Keasy (musician in the Grateful Dead) and Robert Hunter, (Author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.) This clandestine program was entitled MKULTRA.

All his mother had told him that his grandfather had done some work for the CIA.

Clyde has learned that Phish formed at the University of Vermont. He can’t help but like the look of the lead singer and guitarist as he is clearly talented. However, as the night wears on the music gets stranger, more intoxicated and psychedelic. At one point John Randy leaves his seat and joins the crowd that is standing close to the stage. Clyde hears one of the others say that John is on an acid trip.

Toward the end of the show as Clyde is getting tired. He has found the long riffs self-indulgent and the psychedelic screech of a violin bow on a steel guitar just sound just plain stupid.

Clyde often looks out the exits as the hippies trampolining in the mist. They are now harder to see against the dark sky. They remain silhouetted by the exit lights. He finds himself looking at his watch frequently. He can’t wait to get going.

Back at the minivan, Clyde continues to think about how stupid everything is.

If he were a cop, he would just perch himself outside the stadium and pull over these badly behaving white kids and cart them of to jail. He starts to imagine the amount of DUIs and drug busts that could quash hippy glory.

All these white kids are allowed to come out and talk tough about evading Delaware cops and risk marks on their permanent record, but it’s all so fake.

Clyde reasons that the police are not allowed to target them. The promoters probably pay the cops off. Clyde thinks if it was found that the band was causing arrests to happen there would be less money to be made and it would be bad for business. He thinks of the neighborhood kids back in Camden and how the lure of the crack trade results in death and imprisonment. The whole scene just makes Clyde so angry.

As he drives out the parking lot John Randy is in the back getting a lot of love and support from the crew. Clyde is tense. He watches the stadium fade out of his side window as he follows signs back to the interstate.

As Clyde drives, he thinks of his ex-girlfriend who would agree with him about the stupidity of this summer evening. It is the only thing he really misses about her.

His mind flashes to the time she got mad at him and threw a milkshake against his windshield. It hit the windshield like the thud of all her attacks.

The attacks would start when she would get mad at him for leaving her Christmas morning to celebrate with his family. Months and months of the silence treatment would ensue. Clyde had found it very hard to be treated in that manner. Clyde remembered how he would often end up in tears after sex. She would be on top and he wouldn’t understand his own reaction. She would yell at him like he was her drunken father. It wasn’t until he needed to leave that shit got really bad.

Leaving her has been so hard. Everyone she knows hounds him about her resulting depression and sadness. It has been ongoing for over a year. The neighborhood was definitely on her side. Meanwhile, she stalked him and sat beneath his apartment window many nights.

Clyde listens to the crowd mingle midst the smell of alcohol and reefer. As the party starts to die down John Randy makes his way up to the passenger seat and keeps Clyde company.

Clyde thinks of the way John shamed him describing his father’s devastated look when Clyde was in the hospital. He remembered how John came at him for no reason and tackled him and held him down during the year they lived together. He remembered most recently how John had shamed him for leaving his ex-girlfriend.

“What’s on your mind John Randy?” says Clyde

“Not much Clyde Ryan!”

It’s been a long time since Clyde’s heard his real last name.

John looks out at the refinery lights and talks about them in a peaceful manner.

Clyde is reminded his favorite Bruce Springsteen music. A song from the Nebraska album starts to ring in his ear:

Mister state trooper, please don’t stop me, please don’t stop me, please don’t stop me . . .

New Jersey Turnpike, driving on a wet night, neath the refinery’s glow, where the deep dark river flows . . .

License registration, I ain’t got none. But I have a clear conscience about the things that I done.

Clyde remembers that John is tripping on acid. He reflects back what John is saying and comments. There is a long pause.

John has an artistic side and can be very creative. Plus, he knows what Clyde likes.

Then, somehow in unison they exclaim to each other: “Who is your Daddy!”

This loosens the tension in Clyde’s shoulders. He and John have known each other since they were three years old.

Once in kindergarten John had found a flat piece of balsam wood and wondered what it was. Clyde remembered a show on Sesame Street where they showed the making of bubble gum in the factory. John and he had used the Mr. Sketch Markers that smelled like mint. Together they had colored the balsam wood. Then they cut it into gun size pieces and chewed. They were both perfectly happy with the results until the teacher discovered their green tongues.

As Clyde listens to John peacefully interact with him, he is reminded of his older friend and fellow faculty brat, Chester. His first impression of sleep away college came from Chester.

When Clyde reflects about reasons that drugs just aren’t his jam, he thinks of Chester who will one day be his step-brother.

Clyde had suspected Chester might be gay. There had been some squeezes that had made Clyde uncomfortable. But Clyde had just ignored them and moved away. He really cared about Chester.

Then, there was the day Chester had come home from the dorms at Wesleyan College.

Clyde’s parents had just split. There was no one to talk to about his despair. Other friends hadn’t talked or seemed to care about it. Clyde had wished they would. He didn’t understand why no one cared about him. There was just so much despair.

So, Clyde welcomed Chester home and hoped to have a meaningful talk about his parents’ divorce.

They had been in the basement and got distracted from their ping pong game. Chester started telling him about college and interacted with Clyde in the same way John Randy is now communicating, using metaphors and making observations.

Chester had boasted that his college was one of the best pot smoking colleges there was. He’d reported that he’d done acid and that he had a crush on a guy who was in the jungle breaking trails with a machete. This was puzzling to Clyde.

Clyde had ignored the sense he was falling into a trap. Yet he continued to hide his distress and deny what was happening to the friendship. Finally, he learned that the jungle man Chester had a crush on was himself. At that point they had made their way up in his room and Chester tried to kiss his hand.

When Clyde had come to and he was hiding behind a sofa in the family room and Chester was in the kitchen talking to Clyde’s mother about gay marriage.

Now Clyde not only hadn’t had anyone he could talk to about the divorce, he didn’t have anyone to talk to about Chester. His Mom hadn’t proved useful.

In fact, his mom will silently judge him for years about being so sensitive about the incident. She will use this as evidence that Clyde is mentally ill. One time she had a girlfriend kiss her and she just said no and it wasn’t a big deal.

Clyde now thinks that Chester was likely tripping on acid. Somehow it helps explain why he was so freaked out as a teen.

Clyde was not proud of cutting off Chester. His resulting homophobic feelings, and the series of men who would later hit on him would be very painful for him to experience.

Clyde looked over at John Randy who was now sleeping and remembered an incident that happened a few years later with his mother.

Clyde had been noticing the way his mother was clearly acting very different with him when he came home from his summer work camp. She had been more permissive than she had ever been previously. When they went backpacking together, she had needed him and he had a sense of being idolized. Hypervigilance made him feel like it was a trap.

Then, the night he got his driver’s permit, his mom got really lit. Clyde didn’t think it was only wine she had been sipping. He had never seen her like this. She began begging him to go out and break the rules with her. She told him about all the men that were hitting on her but they weren’t as good as he. She begged and pleaded. She seemed flirtatious.

After that incident his mother seemed to cut him off. She was out partying most nights while he was up late working into the morning hours, completing school papers. The only contact she had with Clyde it had seemed was to yell at him for not eating. She didn’t show up on his prom night.  He was in the process of losing all trust he ever had in her.

That’s right, drugs may not be Clyde’s jam, but eating irresponsibly certainly was.

The following summer Clyde had landed in the hospital for the first time.

It will be many decades later but Clyde will remember being fondled in a bathtub by Chester’s sister when he was in third grade. Was it possible that this had started his hypervigilance and antagonistic feelings about sexual activity?

Not long after, Clyde will remember witnessing rape and incest among family friends. He had joined the family at a vacation cabin on the Rancocas River. He will only recapture fragments of memories. The graphic memories will feel dream-like and surreal. All he will know for sure is that he had run and been a complete coward. He is a runner not a fighter.

Once Clyde will realize he has a thing about blacking out these memories, it will bring up the question about other forgotten memories and his ongoing hypervigilance and inability to trust, forgive, or accept loved ones. Not trusting his poor mother will be a real problem whether or not it is justified.

Suddenly Clyde recognizes he is in Philadelphia nearing John Randy’s apartment. One of the non-descript male passengers is making a big deal that a cop is tailing them.

Jolted back into reality, Clyde is at a red light and accidentally jams his foot on the gas petal. The light is red and the minivan lurches forward through the light. He is so upset at himself.

“Wow, I love it! Fuck the cops,” said one of the nondescript passengers.

Clyde remembers how John Randy had invited himself to move in with Clyde when he first dropped out of his fancy college.

Clyde found he had mixed feelings about giving up his studio. When the bugs did not prove to scare John away, Clyde had relied on his therapist to help him tell John Randy, no.

Clyde didn’t want to wake up to the smell of reefer or get that reputation amongst his clean and sober neighbors.

So, John rented a place in West Philadelphia out by the colleges. It will take some years but eventually Clyde will realize that Johns father somehow owns the apartment complex.

The minivan finally arrives at John’s apartment. The crew disperses into their various vehicles. John stumbles inside and the lights go out. Then, Clyde goes home.

Luckily, for Clyde, it is a short walk to the Frankfort “L” line. Then it is just one transfer to the high speed-line.

Though Clyde has done this trip many times before, it is already past midnight which means that the stop by Camden’s Market-Street—the one close to his apartment—will be closed. He will have to get off at the downtown Camden exit. Clyde doesn’t care, he knows how to handle himself.

He finds himself thinking more about his choice to move to Camden. He remembers how his classmates had thrown him a party when he came back from the first of his hospital stays. He has to admit it was a nice thing to do, but John hadn’t really bought into the niceness of it. His heart towards his schoolmates had turned sour in the hospital. He no longer openly trusted anyone.

Kids from the streets had seemed to care more about him than his cohorts at private school. At least they saw and supported him while all the issues he had with his parents were stirred up. At school he was usually invisible.

Then, when the treatment failed and he got switched to an all-female unit, Clyde had continued to suffer stuffing his belly. His classmates just couldn’t understand the hell he’d been through.

Instead of accepting their good wishes and gift certificate graciously, he had been visibly embarrassed if not angry. He had thought about the fact classmates were the kids who had always teased him for being out of fashion and who tended to exclude him.

If not for the hospitalization, Clyde may have considered that he’d overcome these issues his junior year. He planned and organized the student body to get active in social services.

But being the identified and abused patient has a way of changing one’s perspective. Plus, John Randy had let him know that his partner had, behind his back, taken all the credit for all of his work. Many of his cohorts believed her.

Perhaps many classmates had observed his embarrassment and opposition. They would tend to take opportunities to cut into Clyde his senior year in high school when he was living with John Randy. After graduation he just wanted to get away from them as quick as he could.

When he had lost weight and had returned to the hospital for a second stay, he had invited this twenty-five-year-old photojournalist he had met at a school event to an event with his class.

“They all said you were bulimic not anorexic! And they were not very positive about you,” the photojournalist, soon to be his twenty-five-year-old girlfriend had said during their courting. Now at twenty-seven, she was the ex-girlfriend.

This had confirmed to Clyde that he had been right not to trust them.

Clyde’s mother had already let him know she was gossiping about him in the family sessions. She glorified the concerns and condolences she got from the popular kids in Clyde’s class regarding his bad behavior. Clyde couldn’t believe the therapist allowed his mother to taunt him in this manner. But the therapist had started punishing him by not letting him speak due to his non-compliant behavior.

Thus, his girlfriend’s words had confirmed that the gossip was slander and that it was controlled via his parents talking to their friends, his teachers. Clyde felt the whole school was unified against him and it only fed his self-destructive streak.

He had never started throwing up until they forced him to eat in the hospital.

In reality, Clyde’s accurate intuition often made things worse for him as it prevented him from faking his way into better relationships with others. Indeed, Clyde’s accurate intuition will get him in all sorts of trouble later in life until he learns this lesson.

Indeed, in the train it is hard for Clyde not to feel tragically flawed.

As he comes up the escalator out of the speed-line stop, he exits the tinted glass doors to witness a knife fight between two men surrounded by a sprawling crowd. One of the men stands upright with his fisticuffs up while the other positions himself horizontally swinging his knife widely. Clyde thinks about how everyone is out testing their nerves and wonders what the fight is about as he motors through the crowd.

By the time he is approaching Federal Street a black man takes a look at him and gives him support for his look perhaps or for just being out at this hour of the night. This helps Clyde feel safe. He is grateful to all the angels he’s met in this city who support him in this way. They far outweigh the stereotypes.

When Clyde hits Cooper Street, his pace quickens. He cannot wait to get back to his apartment. He takes the elevator up to the sixth floor and as soon as he enters his piping hot apartment the poor cat showers him with love.

But Clyde doesn’t waste much time with the cat. He skips over the carrots and the fruit and immediately attacks the graham crackers. Then he hits the ice cream. He isn’t even trying to restrain himself. He goes after some Pathmark muffins and makes sure to hit some of his ice, cold Crystal light drink. He eats the rest of his yogurt covered pretzels and is back at the ice cream.

After a while he goes through the closet, into the bathroom and braces himself on the sink (the throat.) He let’s go of all the disgust he feels from the night out with his so-called friends. The food blurts out of his mouth in clumps. He uses his hands to detach the clumps from the sink and wash them down. Sometimes he gets impatient and just jams the clumps into the throat. When he is empty, he returns to eating.

Clyde focuses his mind on Gwendolyn and Ray and the few people he can trust at the deli. Still, he cannot stop until he has made a dent into his hundred dollar a week food supply. In the hospital he had gone to AA meetings. He doesn’t need to turn to drugs to help him cope with the meanness in this world. He already has his jam. He pukes until he is exhausted. Then, he goes to sleep.

The post Jam on Rye in the X Generation appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

I have come to believe that one can learn more about on the ground social realities from personal stories than the news media or researched academic books. In fact, one could take this argument farther and suggest sometimes true reality may be more hidden in fiction or comedic insights than it is in the cultural delusions of propagandized consensus realities.

This is partly an expose the cultural delusions that persist in spite of research and media; and partly, stories about the way politics, egos, and notions of progress distort policy and research to harm the vulnerable.

It will shed light on the way cultural delusions associated with race, mental illness and the prison industry conspire to put many invisible individuals out on the streets. But, also, it is a story about how I have witnessed a political machine.

Many of us trust the news media, reporters, and academic researchers to understand what is going on in the world. They are supposed to be properly educated and conduct reliable research with integrity. However, one could read them all day and not realize how delusional one is becoming. And so, in the later part, I share story.

It’s true aspects of my career as a social worker has been about demystifying my own cultural delusions about myself. I wrote a memoir about surviving a schizophrenia diagnosis in which I learned not to let cultural delusions turn me into a statistic.

This one is eventually the story of how despite my vision and best efforts, I am watching cultural delusions harm the community that sustained me in my recovery.

How Knowledge About Cultural Delusions Becomes Part of Recovery from Psychosis:

Once Bruce Springsteen wrote, “Man, the poets out here don’t write anything at all, they just stand back and let it all be.” I pose that he was depicting a reality that afflicts many people, the reality of black-market America that just isn’t supposed to exist. People don’t typically write about it because if they out people, they will be killed, or blacklisted. Hence public figures like the rapper, Tupac, the investigative journalist, Gary Webb, and the author/pimp, Iceburg Slim, do not survive.

Cultural delusions aren’t supposed to exist. And yet I’d argue that recovery from mental health challenges, in particular recovery from psychosis and trauma, often involve insights into aspects of black-market, covert intelligence, abusive systems, and gaining psychological and spiritual (multidimensional) insight into reality.

Learning when and where to talk about these realities versus when to keep silent is a lot of what mental health survivors must learn. Getting these things right is kind of what parents and their family’s go through trying to maintain the secret of Santa Claus for a six-year-old-child. You’ve got to keep the mainstream sheltered like you have to shield the child.

So, many of us are left to investigate: what came first, the doobie, or Scooby-Doobie-Doo? We wake up at some point and realize that the Dodge Ram brand on our American automobiles is really a picture of fallopian tubes!

I must admit I often feel like I am the last one to get these jokes. I am the kind of guy (brought up to respect the banjo) who never realized that the Mummer’s parade can function thematically as a clan rally. It took me forty-seven years, the comments of a co-worker, and a quick look-see on Wikipedia to put that one together.

Not only must people in mental health warehousing learn to observe and make sense of these realities, they must learn to accept all that they have perceived isn’t safe to talk about. Instead, they must learn to manage their behavior in entry-level jobs where they may earn slave wages. Building social skills in such settings is so hard that many give up.

I know because I went through it. I imagine it is a lot like what people who get out of a prison gang go through. I was a piece of human traffic working in an Italian Delicatessen under mafia surveillance. I had to learn to mix with adolescent kids who disrespected and targeted me. Until I adjusted, I could not move on to bigger and better things.

Reflections on How the Marriage Between the Black-Market and Law Enforcement Works:

Many can learn about how powerful black marketeers operate by studying the trial of South Boston’s Whitey Bulger. The simultaneous cooperation of FBI agents and black marketeers is necessary for information and crime reduction. So many Netflix series are about this very conceivable reality. And yet the idea that this need for information marries law enforcement to criminal enterprise is reserved for conspiracy theorists. Still, way back in the 60’s, in an attempt to kill Fidel Castro, JFK turned to Chicago mafia hit men to do the job. This wasn’t declassified until 2007. Imagine what is going on now!

I also believe this happens with prison gangs. I believe prison gangs are a means of surveillance that help control the black market and reduce killing. Though lifetime members must comply or have their families killed, though many must endure lock up and slavery, it is functional as long as the mainstream remains deluded and doesn’t understand.

So, the government works the black-market trade. Hence, it’s conceivable that a great deal of our nation’s surveillance and control is wrangled that way. Like rapper KRS-One suggests in the early nineties, “with all this technology above and under, humanity still hunts down one another.”

Getting out of a prison gang means you have to give up your connection to power and money and go protective custody. This means you run the risk of getting hurt once you are freed. You must passively see and understand what could happen to you and have faith that you will not be killed. You have to be strong enough to be called a snitch or a pedophile and get no respect to get out of the machine. You will be isolated and suffer and when you get out all you have in the world is family support. Many who get out of prison end up homeless once free.

One of the “delusions” I had at the Italian Deli was that people thought I was a pedophile. Then one day I learned that that very rumor was being spread about me far and wide. One day a police man tailed me all the way to my psychotherapy appointment. This continued for several years. Not everyone in the Italian Delicatessen was in the know, but to this day, I believe that some were. I was left to connect the dots.

Here you see the way I have connected them since.

I eventually resigned to take medication to calm my emotions so that I could cope. Until I did calm down and make friends with my bullies, I was unable to find other work.

So often, those of us who must share housing and jobs with people who are connected to black market realities, need to understand how to integrate their cultural experience with cultural delusions. There still are Eurocentric notions of a fair and just society that must be maintained.

The Challenges of Researching Invisibility:

As I’ve already inferred, there are the challenges that come up when people try to research black market realities. Before we delve into stories of political corruption in statistics and in social programs, I am going to shed light onto an aspect of this challenge that might sound paranoid.

Secret government testing can become a legitimate concern in an invisible community. It is not just the Tuskegee covert syphilis experiments on innocent African Americans! Consider more intelligence released about the sixties, that under JFK secret syphilis tests were given to Honduran prisoners. This not only means that other countries may use our social institutions for testing it means that black markets and government surveillance can too. These are things many Americans would think sounds paranoid. But I want to point out that it’s easy to say these concerns are paranoid until you get incarcerated into them with your habeas corpus suspended.

Consider the Rosenburg experiments. Volunteers without psychosis lied and said that they heard innocuous voices. They got admitted and came out with real schizophrenic delusions. Then, consider how the famous study has been discredited. The research, we later find out was created to amplify Rosenburg’s personal experience in the mental health system.

It’s amazing the things we believe when they come from research. Meanwhile, real experiences on involuntary units paint a different picture of institutional authority and justice.

I believe people who are buried as such wouldn’t chance to answer a questionnaire for an ivy league research project. They wouldn’t trust the study enough to fill out the questionnaire. I sure wouldn’t have when I was incarcerated in Montana State Hospital.

When I was in Montana State Hospital, I would have said anything that would have led to my release. For example, I told staff that I would never toque refer but that I would sniff heroin and smoke crack. I was so turned around with the cast of characters I was surrounded by, I thought that the admission might get me released.

Eleven years later I would try to conduct such research on a shoe-string budget from an Innovations Grant I wrote, during a side gig. The majority of the program participants—many were people in psychosis on the streets and in board and care homes. The majority also refused to complete the paper work. I found this to be most noteworthy though admittedly not statistically significant.

I point this out before I tell my stories of politics and corruption in research. Remember, research and media is the stuff we trust in lieu of the black market. Distorted and warped studies from academia seem to drive all the funding.

How Legal and Illegal Crimes of Humanity Conspire to Put the Invisible Out on the Streets:

When I suggest cultural delusions conspire to put people on the streets, I am not only talking about black market crime. There is so much more to crime than the pipeline to prison. There are many different kinds of money for nothing enterprises

Many privileged-folk get to lead “productive” lives in which they take in more than they give. Many grow up and realize there is the whole phenomenon of easy money and class entitlement is ruled by stock brokers and family inheritance.

I have learned to accept that people who turn to fast street cash are making a very similar ethical decision than people who accept family money from capital gains. However, fast street money leads to violence, death, jail, stigma, and slavery rather than delusions of superiority and entitlement.

Let us not forget that there are a lot of businesses illegal and legal that deal with issues of human bondage, arms, crime cleaning, and sex, and drug trafficking etcetera.

I believe that the mental health industry is just one of those machines that deals with bondage because of the false medicalization of its illnesses and the trauma that it imposes. Consider the salary of top administrators who decide how to disperse funds with academic statistical research. Through layers of bureaucracy, each well-to-do layer of management ends up wrangling the person below them. If you don’t think this sounds realistic, read on and you will get a feel for how cultural delusions, slander, and politics distort statistics.

At the bottom, the often poorly paid entry-level master level social worker takes home the majority of the funds that trickle down. The poor are left homeless or in board and care homes. They are the ones who are the most nickel and dimed.

At the top sit educated people with six-digit salaries. They may be there because they endure mental health struggles. They also may not have experienced the same playing field as those they nickel and dime. At the bottom, many want to work but many are too intimidated by the amount of paperwork and organization it takes to maximize the income. They often are taught they can’t do it by people who profit off them. They hate the machine and find other ways to make ends meet.

Zoning creates culturized class, race, and sex wars. Those who live by stocks and bonds instead of violence get the ability to protect and insulate themselves with very different kinds of compassionate police forces. Then, there is this ridiculous notion of a work ethic that persists. Those who work hard are supposed to get more? Is that a joke? Those who aren’t so fortunate must live within task force zones that are less entitled and lawful.

Personal Stories that Speak to the Power of Corruption in Research and Policy:

So now I shift from expose to personal stories about politics, bureaucracy and corruption in community mental health.

The Outpatient Unit where I work is one of those places about which the poets don’t write about. Academic books, and the news media just don’t capture the level of oppression that I see on a daily basis. These stories end up being among our national secrets. Many people would just presume they are delusional.

Many of the people I work with have been homeless and are now housed in substandard circumstances. Many use the program to deal with how things improved from times they were on the streets. Others endure these realities with the support of their peers who they call their family. Still some others stay stuck in those dilemmas and endlessly “yes” the staff just to keep us off their backs. All are accepted and given a chance to socialize. Some do it by sharing shorts (cigarette butts) on the sidewalks. It is illegal to smoke on the campus.

These are the stories I’ve studied over eighteen years. And, yes, I do believe all of them to be real to a certain extent. Indeed, there has been a shift in my understanding of the world.

I am working with all the people we all agree shouldn’t have guns: the whistleblowers, the scapegoats, the burned mafia spies, the substance abusers, the bullied and abused, the saints, the orphans and the prophets. Most are just plain broke and stranded.

Twelve years ago, once properly credentialed, I started using my own story of “psychosis” in my work. I started to notice a shift in the way I serviced people on the unit. I went from providing services that seemed to be going nowhere, to introducing the concept of recovery to participants. I went from boring and flat interactions to live and industrious ones.

As time wore on, I started to develop a different vision for what it should mean to participate in mental health services. For those participants really buried in institutionalized circumstances, participating in mental health services needs to also lead to opportunities for a better life. It needs to lead to money and purpose.

The Man Who Warned Me Not to Go:

It may sound sorry, but I’ve always felt extremely guilty with the salary I make. Although I initially had to work seven days a week with side gigs to get out of my homeless financial hole and get my license, I did get my weekends back within four short years.

Once I started to get away from work, I found myself struck with guilt. I was able to backpack and meet my wife and have a social hiking hobby while the people I worked for remained confined in their board and care homes in the inner city.

My conflict escalated to the point where I decided to take a new job at a lower salary.

I still remember one of the men who particularly benefitted from the groups I entitled Special Messages. These were groups that collectively explored the content and varieties of experiences that lead to psychosis. He would tell his story weekly in the crowded room and always said my adding and reframes were helpful. He pleaded with me not to leave.

You’ve got a good thing going here,” he said “Why leave?”

I felt he didn’t understand the way he was getting sold short. The facility I would be moving into was beautiful and clean. No more urine stains from the urinal to the bathroom drain to step over for those of us with mental health challenges. No, we can work and bring each other along to the point where we can get back off the streets.

But even though the owner of the new company that would be underpaying me brought her Doberman in to the interview with me, I really didn’t understand the bee hive I was stepping into.

Witnessing Confabulation of Tabulation in A Real Government Experiment:

A year-and-a-half later, I would return to the old backward publicly disgraced and outed as a schizophrenic. Previous to this, I really didn’t understand that politics, ego trips, and personal vendettas result in cooked-book-research.

Politics too will distort any effort to research what the poets can’t even dare to write about. I will also demonstrate how little research matters when it comes to policy towards our society’s vulnerable.

The job for was an expensive government study involving all county agencies. My efforts to examine the result have been fruitless. I suspect the info got classified. At least, it’s not available online. This government experiment used three evidence-based practices to transform the county into the recovery model.

We all agree it didn’t work. I personally felt there were a lot of stubborn non recovery attitudes to disrupt recovery. There were also a great deal of politics and people fighting to keep their jobs.

Sure, the clients answered the questionnaires, provided by peer counselors. They had to because they gained housing subsidies. They were gently coaxed into it, but it is not clear they felt safe to tell the truth.

I wasn’t interviewed about the lies and corruption I witnessed.

I worked sixty-hour weeks and believe the lady with the Doberman had my head on the chopping block from the get go because we didn’t agree about race. I refused to side with her and say that race doesn’t matter.

Despite what I believe to be high level of productivity in the statistics, my role in the project was targeted.

The lady with the Doberman was supposedly removed from the scene by her husband, the CEO; but she clearly kept the program director in her pocket. The program manager let me know that she was doing this with a crooked smile. “Jeez you’re running this whole department for so long, why don’t they just hire you into the position,” she once snidely suggested.

I was hired as a second administrator but shortly after I started the top administrator stopped coming into work. It’s true I never ceased to lobby that our workers should get paid more due to the cost of housing in the area. The company was a corporate model, aimed to extract money, not bring justice to any locale.

Meanwhile, the director had repeatedly gone after me. She appeared to judge many of my experiences. One day she called me Stuart Smalley. I didn’t know who he was yet. Everyone laughed. There were signs of this bullying all along, but I pressed forward.

One day I was called away for a supervision meeting and I heard her exclaimed in multidisciplinary training that the learning center was not safe under my leadership.

I failed to hospitalize a client. At a certain point I did call the cops, but he split. I pressed on with the supervision meeting feeling things were rotten in the state of Denmark.

In the meantime, she was setting me up behind the scenes with Ph.D. workers. I had challenged them that taking psychiatric medication was more complicated than insulin for diabetes. I guess they found that to anti-science. They conspired and cooked up the false accusations that I was antipsychiatry without knowing that I in fact take medication.

Not long after, a whole table of providers conspired and confronted me. It wasn’t the first time I was confronted in a terrifically irrational manner under the director’s leadership. Before, she suggested that I let myself be bullied. But this time the one worker who disagreed with how I was being scapegoated got written up and eventually fired.

The program director would eventually suggest that I wasn’t well enough to work with the public. It was more appropriate for me to work just auditing charts.

But before I knew this, my power was taken away by a new supervisor, a company hack. She started challenging all things I said in front of the frontline workers. She micromanaged, but wouldn’t respond to phone calls. I couldn’t even send a sick person home.

The peer workers stopped being productive and the stats tanked. Then, they could justify demoting me.

Back in the Community with The Man Who Warned Me:

When I returned to the unit, my proud friend would refuse to return to my group. I just hadn’t realized how much I broke his heart with my effort to lead a more just and equitable existence. I think I just hadn’t understood that I was telling him that he didn’t matter by leaving.

His primary belief about himself was that he was a safe vigilante who went to great lengths to use his premonitions to bring safety and prevent crimes. He was the most beautiful singer. All I did for him in the end was tell him he didn’t matter.

Maybe in a sense, he had just been trying to save me.

Years later the man ran away from his board and care. He stopped taking his medication and returned to the streets. It was the Trump presidency. There was a massive increase in Oakland homelessness. Tech-company-tent-encampments dominated the meridians throughout the city.

One morning, I found him posturing out in front of the hospital on my way to work. I stayed with him for over a half an hour hoping he would crack and acknowledge me. But I had broken his heart and he would never forget it.

The Ongoing Saga: How Clandestine Academic Power Then Trumped Our Community:

Eight years after I returned to work at this community that nurtured me back from my own challenges, it is on the chopping block. Participants are not only losing their community because of COVID, though it clearly has helped leadership.

One day it was announced a year ago that our programs were no longer profitable. This claim was clearly cooked up with a confabulation of tabulation. We fought with the support of our manager.

Management then announced that the programs were going to consolidate. Thus, the majority of our program which is African American, was going to have to integrate with the majority Caucasian program or lose their services.

This announcement caused counselors of color and one of our managers to leave. Though this announcement got retracted, all the therapists who left were not replaced.

Eventually we were taught a new word, “Population Health.”

Instead of serving the more chronically ailing permanently disabled population, “population health” ensures everyone gets equitable health care options. This meant the more chronic population has to lose services, so more chronically normal people can get them.

But the way they got me was that management also wanted to staff the unit with peer counselors instead of clinical therapists

I advocated for years to get peer counselors accepted into the community. For two years I had peer counseling interns and proved to my colleagues the value that working peers could bring. Still the concept of peer counselors was introduced like it was a new idea.

Then, all the upper management had to do was replace the rock-solid manager and they had things their way.

A union battle has been mounted by our sister program, the one that doesn’t serve the inner-city clientele.

Meanwhile the news came that the company manager over behavioral health was hired in the top position over at the county.

Now we hear from our manager that the county is promising to pay for a new population health recovery program.

In the end the story seems pretty clear:

We workers are unionized and the management had to get around the union. It appears all moves were basically are set up to break the union and justify the consolidation of programs.

In the process, the remaining therapists left are white, except for the interim manager. Thus, the African American majority might become replaced.

Throughout, the new decision makers are doctors in ambulatory care, who know nothing about mental health and don’t seem to have consideration for our vulnerable community. They think that they are doing what is best for society.

Was there some other force in the county who set up the take down our program? The confabulation of the tabulation is so clearly delusional yet extremely powerful.

Meanwhile there is a company-wide strike over the union contract.

Our CEO gets removed over this.

There is a presidential election.

Now we are all waiting to see if American Democracy is legitimate anymore or if Trump will incite a coup.

The Impact of Social Change:

The changes in the community with the loss of so many therapists of color caused a great deal of destabilization and many clients quit.

Let’s say they were right! I was making to much money in the old model. Couldn’t they find a way to do this that didn’t harm the community for whom we care? It becomes about political policy and agenda.

I know many people don’t care about the vulnerable. Even though all of thirty percent of the county voted for Trump, cultural delusions are strong!

Where is the media to alert the public on this matter?

Our union representative has depicted our workers as sitting idle while I am to busy working my ass off to engage in politics. They were going to let us talk to the press and I agreed. But then they wanted to coach us. Then, they changed their minds.

The confabulation of tabulation means the city goes to population heath and gentrification.

I sit stupefied, torn and hating myself as I watch this happen. I am a believer in peer services and have been so busy working as a buffer for the clients that I serve, that some may accuse me of looking the other way.

No longer do I get to do my special group. Perhaps it is fitting that all my work gets buried so “progress” can happen. Eight years ago, I taught my client that he didn’t matter and now I am treated like I don’t matter.

Maybe I won’t get fired and rehired at a low wage and without benefits, as I fear. Maybe a majority of our remaining community members will be able to make adjustments after COVID and there will be a smooth transition.

Our managers hold the research and statistically based evidence-based practice information. They might as well own history! When you control history, you can create any policy you want. And the news media is not active or just listening to our union.

Will there be anyone to pay attention to the stories and lives of my clients and the thousands of new invisible faces of people on the streets?  The plan for years has been to ship them down to south county.

Oh, how much better the modern world would be if it just listened and learned from the heroic journey of the vulnerable.

The status quo appears to be pouring salt in the wound of the vulnerable until they die. That is what happens when we all fall for the cultural delusions of race, mental illness and the prison industry!

The post The Cultural Delusions that Put Vulnerable Communities Out on the Streets! appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

Maintaining a sense of community support is precious when you struggle a history of exile. In my life words like “schizophrenia” and “anorexia” mixed with periods of institutional incarceration have resulted in alienation, trauma, and exile. It’s been twenty years since my most recent incarceration for “schizophrenia” and it remains very hard to find community support. I find the pattern of being othered replicates itself.

Healing from my most extreme experience of exile, “schizophrenia,” has involved outreach into many communities. I’d like to recommend community outreach because it’s been full of great experiences and rewards. But to be honest, although it is needed, it often results in repeated triggers that bring on emotional distress and familiar thinking patterns. Persisting has been very important as has finding ways to process those negative experiences and finding primary support.

Ultimately, I have learned to honor the communities where I have sensed safety and support that have enabled me to thrive and be authentic. These communities have enabled me to persist when I get triggered and feel othered. I am writing to share my perceptions about persisting through exile and to honor those places that have assisted in healing and soothing that sense of exile.

Starting with the Origins of Feeling Targeted:

This sense of exile I recently traced back in memory during an EMDR training. I remember being at a family friend’s farm and finding horns that fell off baby cattle. I remember being told that’s what happens to baby cattle as they grow, they lose their horns. It must have been Halloween, after my birthday at age of two or three. I remember the melancholy of feeling like one of those horns. The gray misty rain, the green pastures, the mud, the need to hold onto the horn that I identified with, those images have come back to me during periods of exile.

The family story is that the farm owner hid with me during hide and seek. No one could find us Otherwise I remember only traipses of what I presume to be the day. A glimpse into a crowded, festive room, the visual of a costumed witch, and the contrast, the grey, billowing fog, the misty rain.

I remember the owner asking me at a later point if I remember the day. I remember his sense of intensity. I remember feeling revolted when he touched my ass as I rode on his back. I remember feeling perplexed seeing him interact with his children who were far older than me.  I remain only suspicion about what may have happened.

The main reason I am suspicious is that I have recaptured other dissociated memories about other sex abuse events that went along with family stories. Those stories help explain behavior and actions that were always frowned upon. Clothing myself in the shower and refusing to let anyone see me in the buff, not sleeping for a year on end, starving, sacrificing myself for people I love, these actions would result in incarceration and labels.

Ultimately, I only have a sense that the intensity of my reactions against sex abuse goes back further. For example, I just can’t imagine that I would dissociate so easily fondled in a tub at the age of nine and later, to behave so cowardly at the age of seventeen in the face of an atrocity that I am not even sure is real.

Sense of Exile:

Because I was “so sensitive” and perhaps because I frowned in all the pictures taken of me, I was exiled from my family and the school community in which I was raised. Male anorexia ultimately had a lot to do with this. Who starves themselves like that? It diminished a great deal of constructive work! I stopped being seen.

However, when I trace my history back at the school there was always a sense of rejection. Always a good student, I was nearly not admitted because I cut paper in an unusual manner. Luckily my parents worked there and were willing to have me repeat a year. There were early reports of how I failed to connect with other kids. There was the year I spent a lot of time home and sick. There was the fact that the kids picked on and bullied me. When I rebelled against the other kids, I got sent to counseling. I got psychological testing.

My sense of exile was clear in my decision to thumb my nose at the private school expectations of an expensive collegiate utopia. They published that I was going to a good school in the yearbook, regardless. However, I chose a local inner-city commuter college campus where I could afford to divorce myself from my parent’s influence. I would end up creating the space to hide daily binging and purging. I studied and worked the whole time. I never wasted time to go to a single college party. I graduated with a 3.9 GPA.

I fought a sense of exile among my graduate school affiliates, but I fought for acceptance. I was exiled at most jobs and among my twenty-something associates. I moved west where I knew very few people.

Extracting Pockets of Support:

I write to highlight the importance of finding the places where I did find a sense of acceptance. I owe them gratitude and vie to give back. I have developed and survived in spite of exile. I am more fortunate than many in that I have a career and have developed a sense of primary support.

I was first hospitalized at Child Guidance Center with whom Salvador Minuchin termed “kids from the slums.” I am relieved to say that in the face of what I consider to be significant institutional abuse, I did find streetwise kids had more compassion and acceptance for me than cohorts at private school.

Likewise, in college, working under the table at an inner-city Korean owned deli fifty hours a week through the spank of summer, I was profoundly touched by the fact that the community accepted me. They didn’t care if I was skinny and afraid of food. Meanwhile support and acceptance from cohorts continued to elude me as I entered professional positions.

For the last eighteen years I have found support working for psychiatric patients in a psychiatric unit. It’s true I have been less likely to feel supported by colleagues who called the clients, “crazies” or have took action to have me removed. But once again in the face of institutional abuse, I found community members heard my stories once I grew secure enough to tell them. It was with the clientele community that my mindful spontaneity and facilitation skills developed. I may have been a disrespected droid at family reunions and mainstream events, but I found myself again in the hospital back ward.

Support in the community gives you that sense of being known, respected and belonging. It is an important part of healing and human development. And yet to promote safety, the nature of many communities is that they set standards of behavior or social discourse that govern that sense of belonging. I have found that being fond of and accepted in one context can preclude one from fitting into another.

The road to rediscovering that sense of belonging can certainly be a long and winding one!

The Exile that Resulted from Battling Institutional Hypocrisy:

When I moved to the west coast, I decided that the mainstream needed to know how homeless and disabled people suffer. I was setting up services in a notorious section 8 housing complex. I alerted the newspapers. While it’s arguable I had the experience and capacity to understand the consequences of this prior, I had been taught by a mainstream therapist that if I thought corruption was real, I was paranoid.

It was the era of the psychopharmacology professional and the psychotherapy establishment that monitored me fronted kindness, yet predicted that I would be in and out of the hospital the rest of my life to any semblance of family support system that remained.

My coping strategy was to ignore corruption and work hard in the face of it. Housing Authority officials tried to bribe me by offering me as many tickets as I wanted to a music festival. I didn’t want to be paranoid and think it was a bribe, so I turned around and invited the whole community of residents that they serviced. I requested over a hundred tickets for the residents and was given twenty-four.

I have since accepted that the uninvestigated killing that alarmed me go with the territory in housing authorities, inner-city, and poor-community realities. It’s taken me a long time to accept. I had to go homeless and be an indentured servant for some time.

In my view, we are all a part of perpetuating those realities and decisions. The lure of fast money and soldiering results in a steady stream of death that is not often noted. Many people understand the injustice that happens, but they also know it isn’t safe to shine a light on it. Those that do end up in prison, dead, or unable to find work.

With unobserved rage from getting beat up in the WTO Protest and feeling ashamed for having run away from an incestuous rape, I was one bad ass who didn’t care. I was like Serpico! When I was threatened and told that curiosity killed the cat, I retorted, “Yes, but the cat has nine lives!”

As I started to believe I was being followed, I stopped taking medication and started to understand corruption better. I reached out to my one remaining college friend with a nefarious history and he made a credible threat. Still, I didn’t believe him. I tried to escape to Canada and was intercepted by police.

In fact, they were following me. It’s just that no one believed me.

Understanding the Reality of How American Society Maintains Control:

Being kicked out of the circle or rejected by the majority of the group often gets perpetuated by group leaders who either volunteer or get paid to manage. They vie to control the business and stay in power via controlling behavior and negotiating norms.

Whether done by the FBI, social service employers, educators, unions, lawyers or heads of the family fortunes, crime ring bosses, managers will go to great lengths to control and shape your behavior regardless of laws and justice. I have come to believe that much of it is about maintaining cultural delusions about wealth and privilege.

Thus, people who refuse to conform are pushed out and exiled. This can happen easily if you are not corrupt and are targeted by the community. It can also happen if you are too corrupt and targeted.

People have ways of sniffing out your history of belonging or failure to do so. They may look at the color of your skin or your gender or manners, or friends and presume the culture and experiences you have be subjected to and decide if they want you around.

For example, I believe that as a social services worker, being a productive and effective healer and promoting justice is a good way to get targeted. Clinics are there to make money and control costs, and arguably to control people. Input a little healing, and you become a threat to some people with six figure salaries.

It seems a good way to frame this is that you must agree to toque reefer, but must agree not to toque too much of it. Toque too much and you become a burner or addict. No toque, and one becomes an exiled joke. I feel its arguable that this was the quintessential dilemma that governed acceptance in American culture during the X generation. When Bill Clinton said, “but I didn’t inhale,” it clarified a lot. He promoted the very large Housing Authority company, with whom I was contracted to work, as a model of urban development. I knew that but I still alerted the press.

I must admit that I presume the toque, no toque dilemma happens at many sleep-away colleges and other developmental institutions like the military. I avoided this stage of life by living in a roach infested apartment and working under the table. This way I could live skinny and heal without being further targeted and shamed for being a thin man.

Some Historical Context:

Maybe in other generations it was different. In American history at one point it was more about accepting slavery or genocide. To fit in, one must sip the tea. One must go corrupt, just not too much so. Thus, Thomas Jefferson was cool, but hid his pedophilia exploits so as not to go too far. That’s a real American hero, yeah! He got to coauthor the American Constitution.

Makes you wonder what the history books will say about this era? When law and order is about preserving the Jeffery Epstein way of life via the execution of black men in the inner city, you’ve got to wonder! Perhaps this is what America First is all about. Donald Trump did say he could kill someone down on some avenue in broad daylight and his supporters would still vote for him. I have to say, I think he knew what he was talking about.

On the other hand, I would suggest that Donald Trump is transparent about the realities of social control and the feudal oligarchy we have all stupidly called American democracy. All the defenders of the dumb shit authored by Thomas Jefferson and other feudal pimps really believe in the law and constitutional democracy. I work hard to expose lies and cultural delusions, but I sure hope they can protect us from the mind state of a fascist xenophobe.

Perhaps it all boils back to the quintessential American dilemma, do I toque reefer!

“Take it easy, but take it!” This odd quote extracted from one of the bizarre cinematographic dissociative sequences in the movie, Midnight Cowboy still eludes me all these years later. I still say, no.

People like me who repeatedly get exiled and cannot find community might struggle with a sense of shame, trauma and the ongoing exile of pain.

The Science of Trauma and Surviving Exile

Indeed, when we turn to advances in neuroscience to understand what heals trauma: we end up with several different sects about how to create safety and resources. Some proponents identify community support as being important. Thus, in my local EMDR sect, people or things that have served as wise, protective, or nurturing support emerge as necessary resources to address the unthinkable.

The basic concept is to take inventory of good relationships that have existed and create community that you can bring with you to revisit victimization and help you through can be very transformative. Of course, some of these relationships can be with mythical fictional characters or public figures like artists, tv personalities. Or (gulp) politicians who are admirable (if that is possible.) For example, I have realized that Midnight Cowboy’s character Joe Buck is a personal resource for me. “Well, I am not a for-real Cowboy, but I sure am one hell of a stud.”

Taking a deeper dive into resourcing, I am learning that there are many ways to create a safe environment. Indeed, sometimes using mindfulness techniques and meditations can help create safety between the therapist and client. Thus, creating safety can form the basis for community support.

Taking the risk to listen and reflect on what the person experiences might be and help them feel safe and in the window of tolerance when they revisit traumatic images like the gray billows of misty rain, the green pastures, the mud and the cow horns.

Using mindfulness exercises is another way to build resources and keep the person in the window of tolerance. Then, using desensitization or bilateral stimulation and encouraging the person to reprocess that trauma or sense of exile can give people the tools to broaden their sense of safety and sense of support.

The result is that the sense of exile does not get triggered and new community support becomes attainable. Thus, people who attack you politically don’t trigger you into that sense of exile. Thus, you remember the community that accepts you and you avoid the tendency to dissociate and withdraw.

Keep Persisting!

I believe powerful community managers of many sorts will continue to exile you if your experience does not fit the mold they want to see or the realities that they have championed and the power of their salaries. Hacienda owners will attack you with all the power they have when you have done nothing wrong. Maybe it all boils down to the fact that you just don’t want to toque reefer for them, I don’t know.

Ultimately being exiled from their community doesn’t mean you should give up. The more you persist and utilize those communities that do support you, even if they are just in spirit, the less power those community managers have to exile you.

Furthermore, as they treat you like you don’t matter, are invisible, are inferior or are deficient, it gives you the opportunity to practice healing in the face of your original form of exile. You persist and reprocess and perhaps continue to champion the communities of support that have in fact been there for you.

The past year and a half as the community of support that I have worked for has been under assault. Managers say the county wants to create a new system. I tend to see it as another gentrification, race and class war cloaked in mental health reform.

Managers threatened closure and there was a massive exodus of many of the competent counselors of color with lesser tenure. Additionally, the one manager who supported me, was removed from power. Many of the clients gave up their treatment.

Indeed, I have witnessed yet again top down change imposed on the community has been very devastating for community members. I have seen this happen repeatedly in the hacienda system.

I have tended to view many layers of mismanagement. Ultimately, I believe plans have shifted towards blaming the unit’s failings it on the workers and layoffs. The inequity of work is stunning. The atmosphere is: keep one’s productivity high, and get targeted. My theory is that it will make it harder to fire us if we are productive. I have persisted and prayed, but have started up a private practice to protect myself if the cuts in fact prevail.

This week there has been a strike and the power that has mismanaged and harmed the community is reportedly going to be replaced. I still don’t know what this is going to mean for the community.

I have kept my memory of inner-city support in my heart and fought to maintain my productivity. Perhaps I am only clinging on to a baby cow horn in the misty rain. I have documented the work of the community. I worked with them for twelve years to create my redefining “psychosis” therapy platform. They are its architects and they have always deserved better.

I could write about ways I feel blacklisted and betrayed, but I am persisting to maintain community with love in my heart. I feel so touched as to encourage the reader to keep reaching for new community! Things may change.

I believe in peer support and not in involuntary medication. I have fought for these changes for our community for years. I have brought in peer counselors and they worked well. But when change is imposed in a top down manner, communities dwindle and the point is missed. Let change happen regardless of which top down political fool got in the latest punch.

I have heard that my boss of many years who supported hard work and good client care, says, keep fighting. He seems to have come around on the issue of peer support in his years of knowing me.

Me, I am just persisting as I always have done. Perhaps one day all those communities that have seemed to be turned against me will change. Maybe I will recapture a memory and realize that I am truly delusional. Until then, I will continue to persist and call out our cultural delusions.

The post The Challenges of Finding Community Support When You Have A History of Exile appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

I unlock the door to the institution’s finest office. A doctor’s name is inscribed on a linoleum slide that changes every few years. I press the darkened door smudge on the off-white paint job that dominates the unit. The door swings open. I invite Eugene’s cousin in.

Eugene’s cousin sits in the cushioned seat that matched the last dirty rug. The soot spattered on the outside of the window blocks the sun’s stream. She missed my eulogy. She depicts her challenges in finding the right freeway.

I had been up In the ER waiting room anxiously reviewing what I had to say about Eugene in front of the community. When I finally gave up on her, I had to rush back and make the memorial service happen. Somehow, I doubt it was an honest mistake to have missed the community event.

Eugene’s cousin announces has brought pictures and starts positioning them on the wobbly table.

I know that if I do my job, she will leave feeling just a bit of the guilt that I feel.

Eugene could have been given treatment that could have saved him. People do rehab and come back from strokes. The nursing home had reached out to the cousin repeatedly, I had been reassured. There had been no response.

“As usual,” I explain, scanning the pictures on the table, “many community members had listened to my eulogy understanding well the importance of acknowledging the passing.”

In reality many had strained to get a facial recognition of Eugene.

“As you know, Eugene is very quiet. Many were surprised and lifted to hear the complex details of his life and his miraculous turn around . . .

Eugene had spent years amidst the chronic, room 2, crowd. He’d talk to the therapist and answer stupid questions, but he was hard to really get to know.

As I continue to speak, I feel the strongest sense of grief. There has been staff turnaround due to the threat of closure amid the Trump era financial crisis that’s hit urban cities. The sense of sprawling tent encampments that surround us overwhelms me. It feels like Eugene and his legacy will close and be so easily forgotten.

***

When I first started on the unit, it was hard to reach anyone in room 2. The prescribed topics of illness management and functional skills were the only direction and support I was given to solve the complex phenomena of schizophrenia.

Company managers used to say that our clients would never get any better. I vehemently objected to that mentality, and I also was very worried about job security. As long as I wrote meaningful notes, I could survive.

The first time I went in there, one of Eugene’s peers had screamed, “BUZZARDS.” There was wild laughter, and some moaning. Amidst the lonely groaning and drool going on, I had a list of questions about recovery with which to work. I just didn’t know what to do except persist.

Over time, conversing with the three or four loud personalities in the group putting out disjointed content, I’d learn that the one who yelled, “BUZZARDS” thought he was an aristocrat. The aristocrat was light skinned African American man in a porkpie hat with gums instead of dentures.

Eugene would just sit in silence next to him while he talked throwing his head and his eyes back in repetitive manner. He called this “play acting” or “just acting crazy.” He would tell me he did it because he had nothing to lose. He wasn’t really crazy.

Meanwhile, loud personalities would have creative moments of clarity. For example, I once made sure one of the aristocrat’s quotes made it into the community magazine I put together: “Some days I feel like I am somewhere between a giblet and a human being,”

As per the “BUZZARDS!” comment I always knew there was meaning to it, but it’d take time to learn to come out of my shell and really get down with it.

Of course, the buzzard in the room was me. I was feeding off the dead and decrepit. Indeed, with the salary I was making, I would be able to go from nothing to having the down payment for a bay area house.

One day I would have the confidence to start cawing like a crow. I’d caw like a crow and circle the room until I got close to the aristocrat. Then, I’d simulate getting shot straight in the heart. Then, I’d fall until I laid flat on the floor beneath him and abreact a slow and painful death. It was the only appropriate response.

I still remember the aristocrat’s laugh the first time I pulled something like this. The laugh would happen periodically at the oddest of moments, “HA-HA!”

At least when I finally got down with him, the laugh happened at the appropriate moment. Over time I did manage to understand. The aristocrat was an aristocrat. An aristocrat and a philosopher.

Still, Eugene didn’t have time for these kinds of antics. He would just give you straight forward and stale answers.

***

I had a few years to onboard before I officially carried Eugene on my caseload.

Our first meeting, Eugene said, “I want to purchase a book to read with the solution to schizophrenia in it. I had a box filled with haphazardly xeroxed recovery materials I’d gleaned off the internet. I shuffled through it until I found the Patricia Deegan article introducing the hearing voices network in Europe. There was a book recommendation at the bottom I explained.

It took us a while but we sent away for it through snail mail. It was a good effort but it never arrived.

One day we were sitting in doctor’s office. It was the end of the session and Eugene exclaimed, “I see alien green!” They were the last words I’d hear from him for years.

Unlike a few of the colleagues who have come and gone over the years, I insisted in keeping weekly appointments with muted Eugene. Instead of talking we walked.

He was an extremely fast and aggressive walker. I ran ten miles on Saturday and hiked twenty miles every Sunday vying to meet a soul mate; yet, I could barely keep up.

As the muted walks continued, I would try one-way comments to connect with him. I would ask if he saw any objects as we walked that were signs of alien surveillance. I would point out things I saw that could be signs of surveillance. I let him lead.

It took me a while to develop these kinds of connection techniques. We did a lot of silent walks.

When Eugene had a housing crisis, I did some research and found an odd doctor named Bassard who had a board and care that was off in the Hayward foothills. There was reportedly a lot of space out there to walk.

His dutiful case worker in West Oakland had told me he used to lead Sierra Club backpacking trips in his younger years. She sometimes talked to his aunt who would pick him up and take him Christmas shopping for his nieces and nephews who lived in undisclosed location. The aunt might be how she found out about his secret life as a backpacker.

***

Doctor Bassard’s board and care seemed to be a good fit for a while.

One day after our walk Eugene sat with me and explained that he used to work in a print shop, the hardest kind of physical labor there was. He reported that he was the hardest worker and would often demonstrate his superiority to the other workers. He didn’t give a fuck!

The next thing I heard from Eugene was that he was thinking about going to the Alameda County Fair. Then I’d hear about Christmas shopping with his aunt.

I’d learn that he had been a drug and alcohol counselor early on. When he’d gotten married and had his son, he switched to the print shop to increase his income.

His mom had been, “nuts.” The daughter of a famous Irish protestant radio preacher and artist. In fitful rages she would accuse Eugene of being a spy for the Irish Republican Army and beat him. His father was a roofer and (according to Eugene) a bit of a slacker. He supported the mother and later Eugene through the years of madness

Growing up, Eugene’s peers would tease him because his Mom was “nuts.” He learned to hang out with the druggies even though he refused to use. Thus, the drug and alcohol job.

I learned much of this far later in my tenure when Eugene returned to treatment.

We took a walk before he got taken to jail on assault charges. It had been a return to the mute days. He littered. Sensing his ire, I hadn’t corrected him. There was a can on the hospital grounds and he smashed it with his foot. I hadn’t done anything . . .

His roommates had been constantly stealing his food at Bassard’s. They were largely unmonitored. Eugene’s efforts to fix this were not supported by the strange doctor.

***

Throughout I was volunteering after work for my child and family hours. Finally, I passed the exams. I managed to meet my soul mate and collect enough for down payment on a house.

I heard about an expensive group curriculum for psychosis developed by Patricia Deegan. Me being the arrogant cheapskate that I am I decided to develop my own. Thus, I started running psychoses focus groups for years developing a curriculum.

By the time Eugene was referred back to our program, I had left my job for a year and a half, but been permitted to return when the new job hadn’t worked out.

***

This time Eugene was staying at McClure’s board and care home, one of the best licensed board and care in town. His trusty case manager advocated for him.

Eugene was mandated to complete our five day a week PHP program by the board a care facility. Turns out all he had done was gotten angry about taking his medication on day and slammed a door. Now, the hospital could make a lot of money off him.

The hospital had erected world class facilities but left its historic psych ward with bubbled windows (our unit) alone. No longer could we go out and sit by the trash compacter and watch the men work. Walks were no longer easily accessible.

Eugene and his peers had to weave through the historic backwards, passing the freshly built shower facilities for doctors, the hole-in-the-wall medical records department, down a flight of stairs and down and then around the substance abuse ward to find the sunlight. Then they had to walk down a sizeable hill all the way down to the sidewalk to smoke.

Everyday in community meeting they would be reminded that tickets for smoking were eight hundred dollars, the same price as their monthly SSDI checks.

Eugene was one of the few remaining room 2 clients who obeyed these daily threats. He’d be known to skip the last group and stay down on the sidewalk smoking.

By the time he had sat through two days of PHP which was four groups with the same small group of people who were just out of the hospital, he was fuming. When I sat down with him for the second time, I knew I had to do something.

Board and care homes have no legal right to mandate treatment, but they can kick Eugene out for misconduct. When he half way expressed the reason he was fuming, I could see how right he was.

Luckily the clinical manager who hated me was out for the day. I went straight to the director who had been around as long as I had. I made the appeal. I kept it simple, but was compelling enough.

I reported to Eugene that he could come just two days a week as he’d requested.

***

“See, what happened to me was that I leaked a suspicious death to the newspapers. I was afraid thuging residents I knew at the section 8 complex where I worked would find out.

“I sought consult from my best college friend back east, an ex-drug addict. He warned me not to leave town, he had the power to find me.

“Had he set me up to take a fall? That’s what I started thinking.

“I tried to escape to Canada and they put me in a State Hospital for three months. I was discharged to the streets and I took a Trailways to California.

“Turns out the only job I could get was arranged by my family at an Italian Delicatessen. I had to move to the outskirts of the bay area, bike ten miles and take the rails an hour to get to the job. Everyday I was followed on my way to and from the job and no one believed me.

I had told my story as such a million times in the psychoses focus group. If I hadn’t done so repeatedly, I would not have been able to even articulate secrets so raw. But I had a lot of practice and gotten a lot of support from participants who loved and advocated for my group.

“I don’t think your family is really an Irish mafia family!” exclaimed Eugene. Sure, enough he had tracked the details. His words gutted me as brutally as possible. “I don’t think you were really followed on your way to the Italian Delicatessen. I think those are paranoid delusions!”

I remained cool as a cucumber in hot sauce. Experience had prepared me for this moment. I spoke softly and peacefully . . .

“One day at the BART station, a man I knew well from the section 8 housing authority in Seattle Washington walked past me with handcuffs and a shirt that read “CIA.” He sat across from me and stared at me the whole ride. He had told me he killed people.

I answered a few questions: “yes, I knew for a fact he had been busted for impersonating a CIA officer in the past;”  “yes, I knew that for a fact because I had read his file as a social worker;” yes, I ignored him;” “yes, it was just another day for me.”

Eugene’s questions were intelligent ones!

“Then there was the day I came home and my apartment was trashed. My kitty litter had been slashed and emptied over the carpeted floor; my belongings had been taken out of my closet; and the labels of my clothes had been slashed with a knife. When I went to the managers office to complain, this woman I had met before was there. She had flashed her official secret service badge at me. She told me that my uncle had entered my apartment and had the right to do so because he had co-signed on the apartment.

I paused. I was afraid Eugene wouldn’t follow the very real details I shared with him.

“Yeah, I had the secret service follow me once as well,” admitted Eugene. “One time I tried to escape to Canada myself.”

***

“Yes, Eugene started talking,” said his case manager. “I think he did so because he finally met someone to whom he could relate.” I could feel the social worker smiling as she acknowledged me. “I think now he has hope for recovery.”

Eugene and I had a lot of good years of talking and relating. I used to go down and have sessions with him on the sidewalk. Eventually, he started coming to see me in the office during the third group.

***

When I finally get to the place where I tell the cousin about how I had cracked Eugene’s case, to her credit she shifts to trying to help me grieve smoothly.

Listening to her stories is nice. She tells me about cheerful parts of Eugene: his generosity to his family and to his fellow peers at the board and care. I choose to keep a picture of Eugene with her husband, a stout Irish musician, as they shared a cigar with a smile.

Her stories help me see that when he started to tell me about cooperating and sharing TV with his roommates that we really had accomplished something. Previously he’d just talked about walking up to Berkeley to go to a doughnut shop.

The cousin tells me about how they used to visit him at the board and care home in the inner-city with gifts and that by the time they had left they would see those gifts getting sold in a garage sale at the neighbors’ yard. It must have filled them with so much guilt to see what he was going through in contrast to them.

When I was in the State Hospital, the few belongings I had to my name were constantly stolen. For Eugene, living like that was a life sentence.

Eugene had learned more about the mental illness of schizophrenia, than he’d learned about the hidden world of recovery.

In our treatment, I’d finally gave him a book with the solution to schizophrenia. I wrote it. It was my memoir.

***

When my mother told family acquaintances what had happened to me on my way to Canada, everybody we knew, she was sure to tell me, cursed the closings of the institutions in the eighties. They were trying to sooth her. They didn’t want her to have to enable-me any longer.

My life ended in the folklore of the Christmas Card.

Sure, I have had some mainstream accomplishments that could be cited. Sure, the community of people I once knew could stand to learn about the reality of mental illness in the U.S.

But alas, my achievements only become embarrassing reminders of the word that defines me to everyone with whom I grew up, schizophrenia. Some days it feels like that word defines me to almost every one I once knew.

Once, when I credited my Mom that investing three thousand dollars in a car for me, I was trying to honor her support. I said that it was the main thing that enabled me to recover.

Her words were, “I shouldn’t have purchased you that car!”

When I published my award-winning memoir, my grandmother’s dying words to me (who she couldn’t recognize) was that the book made the family look bad.

A relative wrote a bad review. Another made a salty, veiled-in-a-compliment criticism. The whole Clan ignored me at the family reunion.

Eugene in contrast sacrificed himself for his family. That is somehow more admirable in our shared cultural heritage.

***

Sure, Eugene and I talked openly about aliens. He’d explain that he could feel implants obsessively on his brain. I think they were caused by ongoing voices about which he never did get to the point where he’d share.

Sure, he’d talk about the very common experience of being able to transition into different dimensions of reality. He could tell because the board and care rats he’s seen skittering across the floor suddenly disappear into thin air. Finally, he told me about his relative with Top Sec clearance for NASA.

Neither of us suffered for the sharing of these details. We didn’t become worse or traumatize each other. No, we formed a valuable allegiance that enabled him to have relationships with others.

True, this only happened because I broke all the rules and shared with him what many would consider to be delusions about my brush with the underworld and Italian Mafia.

Sure, he died before he could start up his business or take the stained-glass, art class he wanted to take. I almost got him to pay for an art class at one point.

It’s true I wasn’t so committed to him that I would quit my day job and help him come back from his stroke.

***

So, when the cousin leaves the hospital, I think she feels some of the guilt I felt when I drove across town with cards and letters after work only to learn that he expired. As she leaves the hospital, she expresses a little upset that I only accepted one picture of Eugene that she had collected. I sure hadn’t realized she would feel that way.

But as I say goodbye, I still hope for the best for the cousin and Eugene’s family who accepted his gifts at Christmas and never reached back. I call his son with the phone number the cousin gave me, but never hear back. I still call my mother weekly and vie for a less hurtful relationship.

Still. I hope and pray that the fact that Eugene and I were finally able to work together gave him a sense of peace and that he may rest from the torment of that damned word we use to bill for services, schizophrenia.

The post Eulogy On Irish Schizophrenia appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

Many of us who face a sense of ostracism from our family and community of origin end up feeling like aliens. In the United States there are many divided people who might have this sense of alienation. Now while I see sprinklings of Black Lives Matter signs throughout my neighborhood, you might think I feel a sense of reckoning, of unity, or of a homecoming. While it does make me feel happy to see the signs, I’m still just not so sure I trust all white people who use them.

Finding Community in Black and Brown Communities:

Early in my life I learned to fight my sense of alienation by playing with kids who were younger, older, or profoundly different than me. In high school, I may have seemed to grow out of this on the outside, but inside the sense of alienation burned. When things went bad at the private school in which I was raised, I survived by moving into the inner city where a commuter college was located.

In communities of color, many neighborhood kids were curious welcoming and open. Sure, there were some adults with whom I had to persist, but once I earned acceptance, I found the sense of community to be less judgement and more righteous. I will never forget the intelligent outreach that individuals from the community did to help me feel included. They were there for me and accepted me, regardless.

The white world streamed in during the day and frequented under-the-table business to which I attached myself. Then, they were gone. One person, during my fifty-hour-a-week summer shifts, told me I was “down with the brown.” Another said they knew a local mechanic who was “flaco,” like me. To hear that I wasn’t alone and that I was okay, it is something for which I have been eternally grateful. Community doesn’t come easy for a young, male anorexic.

Balance through Medication And Professional Social Work:

When it came time to move on from this community and into the professional field of social work, I faced another crisis and started taking medication. When I responded to a Rorschach picture with a detailed Marxian analysis of power in society, they started me on a small dose of an anti-psychotic. Sure, I was binging and purging in fitful rages, but that was no longer what concerned them.

With that medication, I learned to suppress my sense of neighborhood justice and do what my supervisors said for years until I got my Masters Degree. I used that same sense of suppression to engage in the community of graduate students. I tried to make friends with other professionals.

When I graduated, I left it all behind and moved to the west coast to use my skills where no one had to know about my past. I worked only eight hours a day for the first time in my life.

I was doing it. I was building a community for myself.

I transferred into a pilot project at work that involved setting up services in a housing project that was dubbed the hotel of horrors, in the local media. That way I could give back to black and brown communities that supported me.

Things heated up that summer. There ended up being a political battle over management of the housing project. There was human and drug trafficking involved. I went off my antipsychotic medication. I was needing my sense of intuition back to protect me.

I Never Saw White Privilege Until I Lost It:

Years of surviving an extreme state of psychosis can also be an alienating experience. I did not believe aliens were real until I went through it. And I thought I had already been through a lot! But I really didn’t get it through my thick skull how much privilege I held until I came out of psychosis. Being without has a way of helping you see your privilege. In the end, I recognize that I did little but run back to my whiteness.

When I finally got it together to get hired back in social services, I was just returning to consensus reality. Back on medication, I could pretend I wasn’t being gangstalked by the mob. I could behave my way out of the persecution.

Paula a manager at the upscale Italian Deli where I had worked through my psychosis for almost a year, had a few words to say to me.

Paula had always been a professional and had never had an abusive word to say to me. It was true that she once had nearly got me fired via attesting for my nineteen-year-old supervisor that I looked stark raving mad and scary. Still, I kind of respected Paula.

Sure, she saw the young rich kids from Danville (a wealthy town) taunt, tease, and disrespect me. Sure, she acted like it was nothing. But she was a few years older than me and her non abusive, professional air had helped me survive the year of underemployment.

“Yeah I just feel bad for the ones who can’t go back to an opportunity to work a job like this,” she said.

These few words cut at me. It’s right what they say, you have to watch out for the quiet ones.

But Paula was right: if I acted the way I did and had black skin, I wouldn’t have made it at the Deli. I probably would have been killed for leaking information to the press. Years later with the strings of killings unveiled via I Phones, and plenty of abusive stories revealed to me as I conduct therapy in the inner city, it becomes clear to me how lucky I was to survive.

Living without my privilege was harder than I could ever have imagined. Being locked up as a vigilante mental health professional was profoundly traumatic. I had devoted my career to fighting mental health warehousing. I had ignored warnings this might happen to me if I persisted. I didn’t want to be paranoid. Now everyone treated me as though I was paranoid when I wasn’t.

I got confined to some neglected, dilapidated, and frigid wards at Montana State Hospital. Knowing about mental health warehousing the way I did, kept me from trusting the institution. I avoided institutional behavior and I knew what they were saying about me in the team meetings. I was entitled and protested it. I wrote complaints about my psychiatrist and social worker who refused to meet with me. I refused to take medication.

“One time we had a client come in here saying the FBI was after him and the FBI was really after him,” said the doctor when she finally met with me. “He hadn’t really done anything too bad, but the FBI was following him.” I had gone through a fever that felt like it was going to kill me and been unable to get aspirin the whole weekend because she hadn’t written the orders. I hadn’t trusted the old hag. My fellow inmates had all told me the mafia was after me.

Because my parents had called a missing-persons on me and supported the hospitalization, I had concluded that they were an Irish Mafia family and had concealed this from me growing up.

Once discharged, I really struggled to find work. I took a greyhound to California. I did finally get hired at a foster care agency. My family agreed to help only if I turned down the job and took a job at an Italian deli near my aunt in the bay area.

My uncle cosigned on an apartment in affordable Antioch California which was on the outskirts of the bay area. I could get to work with a mere ten-mile bike ride and hour-long BART commute. I had to keep my job and see a therapist and my family sent me monthly money so that I could afford to eat. At nine dollars an hour, I barely made the cost of my rent.

It took six months to get a car, nine months to agree to go back on medication and ten months to get a job back in social services. If that sounds easy, I assure you it wasn’t. I didn’t think things would ever get better for me for that short amount of time. I was learning what it felt like to be a label. It meant no references and no work.

While this did not feel like privilege while I was going through it, Paula was right, white privilege gave me the opportunity. There was no greater fear through any of the life-threatening things I endured, than the fear that I would return to an institutional life. I was disrespected and treated terribly because I looked like a deer trapped in a headlight. At least that was something I could overcome.

Alien View on White Privilege:

Losing privilege really helps one see how oppressive and hateful it is. I am constantly reminded of my loss of privilege every which hoop through which I jump.

For example, I believe the loneliest walk I ever had was the one I had before I got married eight years later.

My wife and I had wanted to elope but we decided to give my parents, especially my Mom, the celebration they wanted.

It was true my wife had done the majority of the planning. I worked longer hours and tended not to be able to slow down enough to take the lead. But I did participate in creating two parties, one for family and one for more public friends.

My mom arrived at the house I had just purchased with eight years of savings for the first time. I had worked for four years without a day off or vacation. I had wanted to show her around but she was in a tizzy and showed no interest. This hurt. We had needed to show the borrower that I had financial support, and my Mom had balked and protested about her role. My wives’ parents paid her back immediately, but somehow it really didn’t seem to be about the money.

When my father arrived, he insisted that I drop everything and plan a separate party for his family. He was clearly angry. I ended up being able to arrange it at a local pizza joint with informal seating. But I suppose I failed to read his mind. Of course, my wife couldn’t come as she had planned to connect with her friends. My oldest friend came out from back east along. He crashed his rental against my neighbors’ car as we rode to the pizza joint.

When the young child of my step sister was led forth with adult approval, she told me off for not bringing my wife. And, so, I wondered what the adults had been saying about me before I arrived. I really wasn’t sure this was true. Maybe I was just being paranoid. If I was right, I have to say it didn’t surprise me. It always seemed if my Dad was angry at me so was the rest of his kin.

I responded by trying to talk to an uncle. I had last talked to him in my days of madness, when I reached out to him. The only thing he said me back then was that my father was right about everything. He interviewed me for a few minutes and declared, “my god you actually seem to be better!”

And then my Dad insisted that I arrange for my mother and he to visit with my wife’s parents before the wedding the next day.  So, I couldn’t enjoy the party, I had to call my wife and set that up. But clearly the party wasn’t set up for me.

The next day after meeting with my wife’s parents, everyone left and I was left alone to fume for two hours before the wedding.

I took the walk with my dog who I rescued during my homelessness.

I hadn’t yet experienced smiling at my cousin to thank her for making the wedding and having her give me the dirtiest most disapproving face I couldn’t imagine. I hadn’t yet got yelled at by another uncle because I wore Chuck Taylor shoes with my suit. I hadn’t had my stepfather get drunk and talk about what a wealthy family he comes from; or my father and aunt get into a cat fight and curse each other out in front of the party. I hadn’t yet been interrupted the next morning by my aunt demanding that I allow her to do her skit at the public gathering.

I already felt so utterly alone and invisible to the world. I regretted that I couldn’t bring just bring my dog to the ceremony. She was my sense of community.

I have found that my reputation in the family has just gotten worse as time has worn on, particularly after I wrote my memoir. At one point, even my father acknowledged this. He said I had to be responsible to turn things around.

Sure, during that lonely walk I was replaying the experience of madness over in my head. Sure, that was part of my utter alienation. Sure, it went deep into my childhood when I didn’t seem to measure up to the person I was expected to be. But stigma and discrimination make it feel like nothing you do will ever be seen. It feels like they eternally expect the worst from you.

Privilege Seems to Replicate and Repeat its Hatred:

My efforts to find support in the white community have continued to fall flat outside the community of color from which I take my money. Oh, how I longed and prayed for an organized community of aliens like me. I believed if we schizophrenics could just work together, I could find my true community.

I finally came out as a mental health worker with lived experience at a conference. I told the county consumer manager about my history with psychosis. He said, “it’s too bad you never have experienced psychosis yourself!”

So went my introduction to the community consumer movement. I have heard many people of color say the consumer movement is an overwhelmingly white movement. Indeed, the conferences I have gone to replicate a sense of college that I never had. They make me feel very awkward and out of place.

I tried to gain the managers approval repeatedly. He left my emails unreturned and said to me, “Usually I try to be a good person, but I cannot always be.”

Later, in the work place, I faced discrimination. A group of powerful county employees suggested I was being a bad influence on a client who refused to take medication. They presumed that I am against medication. They suggested that because I was out with my own history, he was not taking his medication. It was irrational, but the whole table was there confronting me. There was nothing I could do. The one person who objected to what was happening, ended up getting written up for doing so. There was no one I could talk to. Shortly thereafter, my career was threatened. I got demoted.

The county consumer manager explained, “It’s just something interpersonal that doesn’t work between us.”

When I persisted, I got invited to join a group of which he was part. It was only then I learned that he and his gang was sharply against medication. I found myself repeatedly marginalized.

Years later after I barely managed to land on my feet, I joined a conversation with the consumer manager a fellow peer counselor at a conference. They admitted they were talking about me. I had just presented and neither had come to see me. “The thing about you, Tim, is that you can keep on going. You don’t need support.”

I realize that the manager is a UC Berkeley graduate and that some of the things I say come from the way I developed in the inner-city. I also realize that I am a psychotherapist and he may see me as part of the establishment. I really don’t otherwise understand why it’s been such a hurtful relationship to me. It’s really not his fault, but I continue to feel alienated.

Sometimes I feel like, for baby boomers like he and my parents, it all boils down to the fact that I went to school at a non-prestigious commuter school. Suddenly, I am automatically undervalued even though I achieved high honors.

I went from being told I could be anything I wanted to at private school to being told that the majority of us wouldn’t graduate. The career counseling office suggested I become a cop, not anything I wanted to be. Sometimes it feels like all I needed to do was have these experiences and I am permanently demoted in the eyes of others.

Indeed, other efforts to get support in the community are fraught with these kinds of barriers. Race, gender, prestige, socioeconomic status and so many other privilege isms are so woven into the fabric of the way we think about things, it leaves some of us to be hopeless aliens.

So often I have been rejected or judged by people I observe to have a sense of privilege.

I often feel like I lost privilege because I am not worthy. It often feels like other people pick up on this and replicate the procedure. I can keep going and persist, but I can hide this loss of privilege.

Oh, how I resent privilege. Each time I am undervalued, it opens up wounds.

It makes me forever wonder how a black person feels.

Being Aware of the Privilege and Racism that Lurks Within:

When I first moved into my neighborhood twelve years ago there was a campaign to save a local park and not build an integrated school. I decided then I wanted nothing to do with the underlying racist nimbyism. A Caucazoid neighbor tried to put a sign up on my property and I took it down. The whole neighborhood seemed to stand united. It seemed that no property didn’t have the sign up.

Now as I walk my dog through the neighborhood, I see a sprinkling of Black Lives Matter signs. There is an occasional sign that says End White Silence. Unfortunately, this does little to change my feelings of alienation. I still am not sure I want to be part of this insular suburban community.

One could argue at least my neighbors are waking up. Also, they are not all white. One could argue, I don’t have the signage up on my property.

I feel happy when I see the signs. However, to be honest I don’t necessarily trust white people who bare them. I question whether they are really doing the work they need to do.

I make the daily commute from my suburban neighborhood to Oakland where I work in the historical backward of the modern hospital. Most of the old widows are still bubbled and old. They were put up that way so onlookers couldn’t see the violence that happened therein. The clear windows are dusted with soot from the constructions of the new building. On the widow above my desk, there is such a spattering of soot you can barely see any California sun stream through.

I am proud of the work I do on this urban ward in which the majority culture is African American. I think a great deal of exposure to cultures of color have helped challenge the racism that lurks within. Every day I work on this. I believe the more aware I am of my privilege and racism, the better job I can do.

The community on this backward is the only community I have known. It’s what got me the money for a house. And now with COVID pandemic, the looming depression and the administrative restructuring, I cannot help but know that its days are numbered. It’s true, I may need to find new community very soon.

It does not change the feelings I have about my neighborhood and the liberal communities I was raised in that denounce racism.

The fact of the matter is I might have found myself to be, “down with the brown,” a few summers during my youth, I may know what it is like to be treated with suspicious looks for two years, and to be financially exploited by poverty, but black people face that kind of threat their whole lives. In fact, I have to watch out that I check my own racism. I vigilantly watch myself all the time.

Just as happens at the end of a long work day when I am feeling vulnerable and tired the thoughts from the generations of privilege that I come from enter my head. They tell me: I am no good; I am not smart enough; I work too slow; I am alienated from others; and I don’t deserve friends because I am weird. The sense of alienation comes back and I am like a different person.

Just as easy as that I can look the wrong way at a black person and trigger them. I have had so many black people nurture and give me a chance, and still I can do this to them.

I am tired of acting like I am not part of the problem. When I see a Black Lives Matter sign I feel happy. But I don’t feel I deserve to put one up on my property. I wonder if white people who bare them are really doing the work they need to do to end racism. It’s easy to hold up a sign and it is oh so much harder to lose privilege.

Protest, Privilege, Hypocrisy, And Waiting for the Great Alien Reckoning:

I can’t understand how anyone who has ever faced institutional abuse could ever feel free to go back into a protest. I remember the gangstalking police searches that destroy property, my employment mail violated, and my endless strings of failed job interviews, and I feel a need to protect myself.

I once told this to my step-mom, a private school teacher at the school I attended and a lifelong protester, that people who were locked up in institutions truly did not have the privilege to protest and how most of us know better.

Of course, she had only gotten mad and told dismissive stories about the good she was doing. However, she has also honored me enough to ask for advice with how to help her granddaughter who experienced psychosis and sexual abuse as a youth.

I once told her: “you know, what is really a shame about a schizophrenia diagnosis is that it denies people like us the opportunity to have a culture and community with each other. That is ultimately what we need, the chance to be there to support each other.

Oh, how my stepmother had fumed. Years later she told me her mother was a schizophrenic and attacked her with a knife.

Every effort I made to be there for her granddaughter never got anywhere.

A person I work with told me that she saw a group of white protesters out in East Oakland and one of her neighbors was yelling at them because there were no black people in the protest. We talked about how we both wanted to be out in the protests but didn’t want to be triggered back into the gangstalking days.

I sure am glad that we support each other. I sure wish she got paid for it the way I do. I think being a good social worker means owning your privilege and ending it!

I am preparing to lose my job and lose my privilege with love in my heart. Do white people baring the signage even understand what that means? Maybe some do.

I know change is around the corner. I am grateful to have been taken care of by black and brown people. That does give me hope. And there are times I successfully give back in spite of my privilege. Humanity sits on the edge of a massive reckoning. With the sense of impending doom, I pray for the sense of balance and community that social work has granted me.

And still I work, fight and pray that there might be a little alien community as well!

The post Why I’m Not Sure I Trust All White People Who Bare Black Lives Matter Signs: appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

The peer movement and Wellness Recovery Action Planning helped revolutionize my approach to therapy and being a real person. In some ways I am grateful but still there are ways I am dissatisfied with the way too many peers perpetuate neocolonialism in the system.

I always struggled with the way the peer movement’s best practice, WRAP, attempts to define consumer values and ethics. It started out as a small sense of internal discomfort. But somehow the, “you cannot practice WRAP unless you uphold its values and ethics,” has become more a bone of contention for me twelve years after the concept was first introduced to me.

Values and ethics—it’s something you hear a great deal about in the consumer movement. ‘It’s important to understand our values, ethics and history,” you may hear a leader say. The more I stop letting myself feel victimized and alienated by these voices who have seemed to treat me just like my family of origin did, the more I start to see this as socially violent stance.

As I have grown as a therapist and built my own private counseling theory, I have reflected on my experiences studying different counseling theories and crossing cultural divides. I have found myself equating the imposition of values, ethics, and fidelity measures more and more with neo-colonialism, greed, manifest destiny, best practice, rather than with liberation and justice.

If you want to avoid the potential of inflicting generalizations on multitudes of people, don’t overreach. Don’t say it is a universally researched practice. Most certainly don’t say it’s an international movement with these values and ethics. Think about defining who you are and who you represent before you spread out with megalomania and glee.

I believe when you start imposing values and ethics, you bear the risk of invading other regions, extracting local resources for your benefit, and starting political feuds. Sure, we all want to affect sorely needed change, but there is a way to go about that so that you don’t create more of the same insanity.

Remember as you spread out into different regions, there is a lot to learn. It is not wise to suggest that because you have research that your way will work in a different geopolitical landscape.

Recognize that as you spread out your ideas, you become at risk of spreading gossip, gaslighting, and bullying people. Remember in any region there will be winners and losers in the system. The winners will be more likely to befriend you and move up by spreading venom and dominating others. Is it really worth it to sacrifice your ideals, just to have things your way in a foreign context?

If you want to promote change in the way you believe is best based on your experience in your region, marginalized cultures from other regions will find white, patriarchal, wealthy, prestigious, and exploitive. (For some reason people of color don’t tend to write and own these practices as far as I can tell.) Many may smile and honor you to your face, but they also may sense another layer of oppression added to their burden.

What Might Happen When You Overextend Your Perspective:

I don’t think these kinds of unintended consequences need to exist. I think it is possible to avoid them.

However, I do know for sure ways that I have been treated when values and ethics clash with portions of my experience that are real, idiosyncratic and rebellious. It burns me. It preoccupies my mind. Parts of me who have been most abused and hurt emerge. And, no, I won’t just give in and sip the tea!

It’s not hard to define who you are and what you’ve done and consider the geopolitical circumstances that have enabled you to be successful. Defining the limits of your approach is just as important as making a social change. If you’ve been successful, let go of your work and let others interpret and learn from it. Indeed, this approach seems to me to be the way to go.

In WRAP, for example, Mary Ellen Copeland does a good job defining her culture and her story. When she does this, she defines who she is and what her landscape is like. However instead of telling us the limits of her vantage point, we get values and ethics that we must maintain whether we are operating in an urban shelter, a county jail, or a New England Community Center.

Don’t get me wrong, there are aspects of the WRAP program that can travel into different contexts and do extraordinary things. But I do want to consider that what is needed to avoid institutionalization can be different in different areas.

For example, in my WRAP training, which happened twelve years ago, there was a participant who wanted to bring up the fact that he killed a person. I recognize there were vulnerable people in the group who might not have felt comfortable with that reality. Indeed, at times in my madness journey that would have been challenging for me. Indeed, it is arguable that it was a murder that I uncovered that set me into madness in the first place.

But because I was well, I was curious about what the participant was getting at and felt the participant was further shamed. When that participant was shut down and told not to do that in a WRAP group, I couldn’t help contrasting it to other challenges that were brought to light by other people. I ended up thinking that we lost an opportunity to learn something real.

I don’t mean to challenge the leader who was really powerful and helped me a lot, but I think that issue depends on the context. There were some participants who were high up in the county power structure who were participating in the training. I imagine they could have negatively judged the program if those boundaries weren’t set.

At the same time there are some places where that issue needs to be addressed. In fact, back in state hospital where there were lifers, I needed to have that issue addressed. Maybe my concerns and feelings couldn’t be addressed in a warehouse setting. I lived among whispers among us clients about those among us who had killed. I was far too invisible to have concerns addressed. And I was too branded as the entitled, out-of-state, political-prisoner who deserved to be ignored.

In short, how might it feel in a jail where every person is facing those fears and concerns to have that issue remain invisible. And so I ask: does the best practice become institutional by denying those realities? Does the need for funding and mainstream acceptance dilute the practice?

How to Know When You Are Engaging in Neo-Colonialism

To be honest, my experience with WRAP has very little to do with my motivation for writing this blog. I make these observations based on more personal experiences with other peer movements. It has been my frustration with things I’ve seen along the way that makes me challenge the way social change happens in the industry at large.

It’s true that everybody needs money to survive. When movements sweep into town based on research and try to change the way we understand trauma, change substance abuse patterns or motivate people to get back to work, they need money to survive. However, in these times the streets are jammed up with homeless encampments. It seems like things just get worse and worse. In spite of lots of innovation, recovery seems to rarely trickle down to the homeless and institutionalized.

Part of mental health is about the exponentially increasing disparities between the haves and the have-nots. When administrators import ideas that worked elsewhere without looking to their own region for people who know the local economy and realities shit storms will arise.

In the industry we have people who are so removed from the ground making the decisions that affect recovery movements it gets ridiculous. They may move from state to state in insular administrative jobs and fail to connect with the people in the trenches who need to be trained and who need to likewise contribute from their own views and notions of justice.

When I consider stories that sparked movements like the one that Marious Romme, Sandra Escher, and Betsy Kline tell, I get excited about the potential for much needed change. But when my work and contribution is overlooked because it failed to follow a charter of ethics that is written in a different country for people of totally different social realities, I get upset. When large payments go out to international travelers from people who won’t even consider supporting my efforts, indeed, I get frustrated.

I understand that some really great people made them up, but I also see that I am surrounded by really great people who are coming back from homelessness and need to be empowered to discover what works best for them. They deserve to be heard more than me. If you come to town and they speak up, honor them. No need to overwhelm them with your superiority.

Hell, I mad similar mistakes and even been suckered by a story of how a few mental health consumers built a recovery empire out of the Southwestern dust. Yes, I allowed myself to be hired by them and be deeply wounded by them. I am lucky I survived that fiasco.

But when any best practice comes to town with their fidelity measures and fails to acknowledge local socioeconomic issues like housing challenges, generations of poverty and slavery and how those issues impact their workers, I start to think about neocolonial transfer of money and resources away from our county. When you start formulating ethics and values or fidelity measures from the geopolitical contexts out of which you arise that you start to create hypocrisy and neo-colonialism.

Moreover, when you find yourself having to gaslight, gossip, bully, slander or politically marginalize people to justify your own position and salary, you are probably engaging in neocolonialism. I just thought some leaders might like to know in case it applies to them.

Conclusion:

Peer movements are not responsible for the vast amount of disparity that exists between top administrator salaries (and between a therapy salary or a peer administrator salary for that matter) and the abysmal resources available to subjects confined in squalor in board and care homes.

It is not my intention to diminish the achievements of the peer movement either. The peer movement has helped change the language used in public policy. It has vastly improved the system by allowing peer workers in the work force. It has inspired many people to improve their wellness.

I wouldn’t dare say what I have to say about values and ethics to researched best practices. Okay maybe that’s not entirely true. I am an entitled paranoid loud mouth! Maybe that’s why I felt sanctioned in my HVN training.

But I tend to see the peer movement as being far better able to consider my comments than I would other best practices with high level academic platforms surrounded by elite university Ph.D. titles. It’s true though that in these days of disparity even peer movements also have educated platforms behind them.

I think everyone of us in the peer movement can do a little better with avoiding neo-colonialism. I think that questioning the need to impose values and ethics is a great place to start. I think that each peer services worker needs to tend to the gardens it their own backyard, without trying to incorporate themselves into the mechanisms of agribusiness.

When the way you do things becomes the only way to go. When you have to gossip and slander others to make a name for yourself and, then, gaslight upon confrontation, you are wearing a neocolonial wig.

I think the peer movement is doing a good job in many ways, why sell out and try to join a false best practice bandwagon. Why not try to be just a little bit better.

The post Ways the Peer Movement Could Be Just a Little Bit Better About Avoiding Neocolonialism: appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

It will be my first EMDR training with a master trainer. I receive a message on my Facebook Messenger account. Someone I friended from Los Gatos California asks if I want to be rich and famous? I can join the illuminati, there are twenty available slots. Do I want to apply?

I have heard many people denounce the illuminati. I mostly know about the organization from a Tupac lyric. Still, it takes me a minute to figure that the post is probably a hoax. I get my ass off the commode and prepare to depart.

If I can trust this EMDR trainer, I may choose to pay to join her network and attend her trainings. I have found the other two famous experts I have taken workshops from to personally wound me.

I have already tried EMDR with my therapist. I am in therapy because of my history of bad experiences with therapists and my inability to get along with my head-shrinking colleagues. One time my therapist got frustrated with me and said he thought I wasn’t a good candidate for EMDR, but I hadn’t allowed him to give up on me.

Taking time for the sake of learning is a challenge at this time. At work we are switching to computerized records. It is not clear if we are going to survive this transition. Our unit has been targeted by administrators who call our service a dinosaur.

***

On my way across San Francisco traffic I listen to a podcast I’ve agreed to appear on in a few days. This podcast is: Baltimore is Talking Live; with hosts Reverend Dr. Q and Aaron Green. I am a little old school. Podcasts are generally not a part of my world unless I am going to appear on one.

In this era, reality is NPR and MSNBC verses Fox News. The impeachment inquiry is on the table and Dr. Q bounces from the bullets in his neighborhood to slavery to the hypocrisy of the left.

I think about the propaganda of each side so often I have a tendency to tune out; but I kind of like Dr. Q.

I work primarily for people who live in board and care homes amid the buzz of bullets in the inner-city. I feel their stories of oppression are not even part of the debate.

If I believed the text books I’d read in college, I would not believe the things they tell me about oppression in the inner city. It seems like books and education the fact program participants can’t write notes on themselves as a justification to take money that should be going to them.

Alas, I don’t trust books written by psychotherapists all that well.

On the podcast, the guest is an author about porn addiction who seems to talk like the hosts weren’t there. His own porn addiction put him in jail for a year and he clearly was far more down to earth than he would have been otherwise. I am impressed that he speaks from a place of lived experienced.

For my clients with porn addiction, the short discussion really helps.

***

I race through the last lanes of traffic and break a few laws. I follow google and park in a lot under the Hilton and get to the bathroom before the conference starts.

As introductory comments are being made a woman who is my age slips into the seat next to me. She whispers at me some introductions and asks if I had read the book that the training is based on. I lift my hand to flash my wedding ring and tell her no just a bit bluntly.

I think back the dating years and think about how blatantly rude I had been. Others might think it was as if someone had lobbed a big fat softball at me and I whiffed horribly. I make some other friendly comments to compensate.

At the first break, I am feeling pretty good about the training.

The woman next to me explains her behavior by exclaiming she’s got poison oak. This genuinely interests me and I inquire and learn that she’s been in Ventana Wilderness which I know well.

I met my wife on an event like that and recall how hard it is being single.

I am quick in and out of the restroom because there are almost no males in the conference. Scanning the room of hundreds, one might see maybe three or four.

As if he read my mind, a man walks up and starts a conversation. He looks very dapper wearing an earthy necklace with a stone in it. He works in a group practice in Palo Alto primarily with adolescents. Clearly ten year older that me, he approaches me like he is interviewing me for a position and wants to know what I’ve read about my specialty, psychosis.

I explain that I am an award-winning author who writes about my experience running professional groups for psychosis. I am not afraid to tell him I have not read many authors who write about my specialty.

He suggests John Weir Perry. Of course, I recognize the name. He was mentor to a psychotherapist I know. I have heard this psychotherapist call me out my name with a bitter voice. Meanwhile, other cohorts he would call, dear.

I acknowledge that I have heard of this deceased writer who was in favor of medication free clinics in the seventies. I mention Soteria House, I-Ward, and Diabasis. The man correctly acknowledges that Perry started Diabasis . It figures, Diabasis was clearly the expensive version of the three! I am less motivated to read the academic ghoul now.

The man, really suggests that I read Perry. “He really did some deep work, and it is very assessible.”

***

The illuminating woman with poison oak invites me to lunch. As if she knows it will interest me, she talks about living in Nicaragua and how most Americans don’t even understand how lucky they are.

She agrees with me when I talk about the facility I work at and the disparities in mental health treatment verses physical health. She says in the nonprofit she works at the quality of facility is an afterthought.

My attention lapses. I remember the trainer’s rehearsed voice, “and then, you start bilateral stimulation and let the person process . . .”

I think about the urinal I am most used to using. I think about the leak that has colored the underneath floor on its way to the drain. Seven years ago, I put in a work order to fix the urinal and years later the drip did get fixed. Still the glistening yellow stain remains. Stradling the stain daily, my eyes are likely to notice the psychotropic shit smears on the textured wall. Psychotropic shit is particularly rich in odor! I think of the soot on the screen outside the bubbled window. The soot built up the years they demolished the old wing next to us the clang and buzz sounding above our voices in the group rooms.

And when I am ready, I submerge from my trance. I figure maybe three seconds have lapsed.

Somehow, I doubt the we are talking about the same level of neglect!

I continue listening to the poison oak woman who has talked about her South Bay family in a scenic suburb. Sure enough, they were personal friends with the trainer. She intends to say “Hi” to the trainer from her sister.

My first supervisor comes from the same town and it conjures up images.

“You know mental health is a very small community,” said that old supervisor the last time I saw her, “If you do something to piss someone off, word definitely gets around.”

I think about how I believe I have been black balled from the county panel that would enable me to open a practice.

***

In the next hour I listen to the trainer’s current concern about the rise of homelessness that is overwhelming the Bay Area. I think about the Great Depression and the presence of Hoover towns often when I see the sprawling encampments.

She launches a story about a kid from Danville who ran away and lived on the streets. Years later a newspaper found the hardened street person and reconnected them to their wealthy brother and got him therapy. He was doing well and getting treatment for his trauma, but then ran away again and overdosed in an encampment. It’s a story that sounds like the movie, Paris Texas.

The trainer says, “I think when people live on the streets, they get a sense of community in the encampments. I mean why else would someone return and choose to live there?”

As the whole room bobs its head, I fume.

I think of the old flick Paris Texas and I know there can be a lot of reasons people choose to run away. Why can’t a trauma specialist think of other reasons? When I saw Paris Texas, I remember the clear sense of an affair that happened between the homeless man and the brother’s wife who hadn’t wanted him to return home. It was a reality one had to sense. My whole life I have wondered how it is that other people don’t all run to join the streets!

One can feel very guilty for coming back from leading a life outdoors and feel rageful! And there can be so many millions of reasons to run! Some of us are born to run, baby!

At lunch I get a Messenger spot on my phone. The person who invited me to join the illuminati has actually contacted me again and is demanding a response. This time the face on the little circle is one that I recognize. I put the phone down before I am sure of this.

I remember collaborating with the face on the little circle picture. She’d sent me a flyer with the silhouette of a cannabis leaf to announce our mutual event at the hospital.

I recall how I played dumb and asked a patient who was once affiliated with a famous drug dealer before legalization. Publicly he says his family business is in “manure” so some of us may not understand. He comes to program so he has a public excuse not to behave violently and works to avoid smoking.

When I’d taken the time to assess his feelings about the cannabis symbol, he’d sighed and confirmed it was a leaf. I think he appreciated my effort to console him. We’ve always liked shooting the shit with each other.

I think that as a psychotherapist on a psychiatric unit, I am already a member of too many secret treatment team societies.

I pick up the phone and respond: “No, thank you for asking.”

I am not going to sell my soul any more than I already have.

***

I bump into a colleague who used to work at the unit I work in and we decide to lunch.

She got caught in a cross-fire of bullets one evening outside the hospital on the way to her car. This caused her to ask for a transfer to the more suburban outpatient psychiatric unit.

She is an attractive married woman with a slender physique. She says she’s on a gluten-free diet and we discuss this a bit.

I want to tell her that she can’t con a con.

We had never been super close. I’d shied away from her because I’d sensed she was still a partier. But we’d had a few good experiences together.

She was a basketball star in college, comes from Texas, and likes Whole Foods. She has recently seen my presentation on psychosis and was nice about it.

I am surprised to learn that she comes from El Paso as she also is part Italian. She talks about how distressed she is about the mass shooting that happened in the WalMart. She has a private practice two days a week and that is what I want so I pick her brain a little. She talks about her history of receiving EMDR and what she’s gone through to become a specialist.

I think about how I felt hearing about homelessness and lie. I say how much I am enjoying the conference. She really supports me in my wish to open up a private practice for my niche.

“People at Fairmont don’t understand how well they have it. Things were really tough at Highland,” she says. “I have a friend in the county, I will follow up with him and see if I can find out if you are really on a blacklist for the county panel. I heard they are currently looking for providers”

***

The rest of the training is a review of the basic tenets of EMDR mixed with four videos that demonstrate them in action. I am pretty able to follow. Participants are asked to visit very dark places and use images and memory of personal resources they have developed in their life to now support them in imagining different outcomes.

The fist two videos are done with therapists who are in training. They are clearly very trusting and articulate. They really demonstrate how this treatment can transform lives. The discussion and review of the points of training are very helpful.

However, as we all know, people who are used to therapy have an easier time processing traumatic events and moving on with their lives.

When I worked with my therapist on resourcing, I realized that all the people I identified as resources had also seriously hurt and betrayed me. Outside my wife and my dogs, it was hard to identify sources of comfort. When I was finally able to think of the writer Charles Bukowski as a resource, I got somewhere. I love his writing and never felt bruised by him.

Indeed, when I will try EMDR post workshop, I will find that bilateral stimulation with the paddles to sound artists like Tupac and Bruce Springsteen help me significantly as well.

***

The rest of the day is a video on her effort to do EMDR on a difficult community person. He is a porn and meth addict who got busted for having some child pornography mixed in with his volumes of pornography.

He did a year in jail and got connected to a church and is now clean, but denies that he has much of a problem and expresses no remorse or emotions when you ask him.

“And,” says the trainer a little playfully, “You might notice that this man is not very intelligent.”

As the video starts the hulking man is wearing a Yankees cap. He is clearly not a hat wearer as the hat is unworn and does not come close to looking good on him. The hat reminds me of Omar from The Wire wearing a tie in the courtroom. His demeaner is like Kevin Spacy in Unusual Suspects.

I instantly think of the Yankees cap as a gang symbol. I know some local gang signs from Oakland, but this man appears to be of Italian Heritage and I think of the New York five families.

He comes across like he’s not going to trust this snobby goof and does deny all his feelings as promised. And who would? The good doctor’s demeaning opinion of the man comes across clear in my eyes.

Sure enough, the man is married with children to whom he had stopped paying attention because of his addiction. He admits that he used the porn to seduce porn stars who stayed late at the strip clubs to film after hours. There is no mention or concern for how he got money for the copious amount of meth he used. In high school, he regrets he was more of a bully than a student.

I rage at the trainer’s clear lack of understanding.

The man has the respect of authority of a soldier. In the conference, the expert doctor makes fun of him for having it. At the end he pretends to want to make her happy.

I have been trafficked by people like him. And now I work in a public sector job that is being choked by one of his buddies.

Once again, bovine heads bob. Now I am almost certain I do not want to learn EMDR from this person who speaks before me.

I have been too hurt by people who have failed to understand me in therapy!

That said, the man did get to the point where he could cry before her and access those pent-up gangster emotions.

Who knows what masterminded violence he was processing by taking that meth and porn! I think about drugs women, or guns, the commodities of the black-market America. I think of how smart and twisted the courts were to use the child pornography charge to force him away from gangsterism. He likely would have had to go protective custody in the pen with a sex offence.

I am grateful he is healing and living more in love, though. He’s got to live in mind-dumbing fear of retaliation through, no doubt.

***

On my way home at the end of the conference, I say goodbye to the male adolescent therapist. The illuminating poison oak woman has distanced herself since I stood her up at lunch. Oops!

I check my phone and clearly the option to join the illuminati has passed as the two messages have been erased off my messenger account.

My ex-coworker comes over to say goodbye and I lie again and say I really liked the conference. I really can’t say anything bad about our talk other than the fact that I lied.

I know that I have gotten a lot of learning from the conference. I am impressed with how EMDR enables a person to work through trauma without taking the therapist there with them. Like the last scenes of the TV series the Sopranos, I feel surrounded by shrinks who are sipping wine and being asses all around me.

I remain unmotivated to read therapy books or join therapy associations.

Alas, I am not internally moved past my stubbornness. I am not vying to become a fucking liar like the rest of them!

The post Modern Day Healers and Tupac’s Illuminati appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

When I took the job at the Housing Authority facility dubbed the “Hotel of Horrors” in the local media, I thought I was on a mission from god. 

The weekend before I started the job, I took a spiritual retreat with the Quaker community I frequented. Out on an island on the Puget Sound, in a quaint room, I told a small group of my cohorts that I was following a spiritual calling by taking this job. Maybe that’s just how I dealt with my nerves.

Everybody at the community mental health center where I worked was far too afraid to take a job there. 

I was a master’s level professional. I was able-bodied and good at helping others. I knew that trying to “save” a community was risky. But I did not imagine what I was about to endure.

***

Years earlier, in college, I’d moved to the inner-city in Camden, New Jersey to hide a history of male anorexia.

In the beginning of my senior year, I had to take a semester off because of a mental health crisis. An observant resident of my apartment complex introduced herself to me upon my return from the hospital as if she knew what was going on with me. Her name was Cece. 

Like me, Cece was a fish out of water in the inner-city, entirely alone, surviving amid the roaches. She admitted to a history of shooting heroin in her toes. She knew a lot about psychiatric meds and liked to recommend different medications to me often second guessing my doctors. She had been on all of them!  Now she was on social security, clean, and was seeking employment. 

At the same time I started to get invited out with a group of my fellow students who all commuted in from the suburbs. The leader of this clique was an English student who wanted to help me out in spite of my hospitalization. He would go to law school and use my rental history to establish a bachelor pad for four of us. I was invited to go out with the group, but they made it clear, I was not to bring Cece. 

A year later I was living with the suburban clique and I received a call from Cece. She found a job at a photography store and had managed to get off social security. I had just landed a job in a mental health clinic and was starting my master’s program. Somehow, Cece found out my work number and called me. 

“You are getting ready to do things that are really wrong, but that’s okay, I forgive you.”

What a wise intervention that was! Indeed, I felt bad about leaving her behind. At my new job I’d have to follow the lead of my supervisor who seemed to demean the clients. Cece was right: I’d surely done wrong, and I was fixing to do a lot more that I didn’t feel was right. 

It was the psychopharmacology craze of the nineties and I learned to see schizophrenia as a medical problem that just required medication. I distracted myself from feelings of guilt by chasing connections with fellow students in my master’s program and holding on to the bachelor pad clique. Maybe curing my loneliness, and tendency to get scapegoated by suburbanites, really was as simple as a complex cocktail of four medications. 

To my credit, I worked hard and went the extra mile to help the people coming to the clinic where I worked. And as I got credentials, I took more risks and made more effort to do the right thing. 

Once I successfully graduated, I left it all behind and moved to the west coast. 

***

So, as I was on my mission from god and entering the “Hotel of Horrors,” I pledged to only do what I felt was right. 

In six months there I saw doors torn off of hinges by thugs in broad daylight. I saw addicts get stabbed and nothing done about it. I saw vulnerable residents get hauled off to jail when they were bullied into using their apartments for drug deals. Mostly, the police only came around to take a barricaded paranoid resident off to the hospital because he refused to pay rent.

I did a lot to support vulnerable clients. I met with local advocates. I leaked stories to the media. My job was threatened. When a resident without an addiction ended up dead from a heroin overdose I was suspicious. I arranged for a young newspaper reporter to investigate. I stopped taking my medication.

“One time we had a social worker come down here like you and try to straighten out this mess,” a resident told me. “They told him to stop but he wouldn’t. He ended up having to move down here with us. I just don’t want that to happen to you!”

I started to get a sense of connection. All parts of my life were in play. Had I heard those words for a reason? Were they a threat! I was getting scared. 

I tried to escape to Canada, but I was followed and harassed by police. My parents had put out a missing-persons report so the police were initially violent with me. I believed that they were trying to trap me in a hospital and went to great lengths to resist.  Finally, I surrendered.

Being confined to Montana State Hospital for three months was a lot to go through. Two months in, I was transferred to the chronic unit which was barely heated above freezing and over-crowded. When I finally got discharged to the streets, I purchased a Greyhound bus pass to Fresno California.

***

When I ran out of medication, I lost my low-wage job. I couldn’t seem to find another job and, with my money dwindling, my family arranged a job for me if I moved to the Bay Area. If I didn’t take the job, I was on my own. 

It was quite a coincidence because I had decided that my family was a mafia family, and the job they arranged for me was at an Italian deli. I kept the deli job for close to a year before I agreed to go back on medication and try to return to working in mental health.

Returning to my former career wasn’t easy though. I had to bike twenty miles plus take the rails for two hours just to get to my job at the deli and back. Customers and co-workers targeted and humiliated me; they seemed to know things about me they shouldn’t. I ran into residents I recognized from Seattle on my way to work who sat next to me on the train. Every day there were signs I was being followed. Sometimes it seemed that I would be the only person who could recognize the signs, but they were always there. One day the police tailed me in the car I managed to acquire.

When I started back on medication the following continued, but I was better able to ignore it.  Eventually, I was able to get hired away from the deli and back into a mental health position.

For me, it took being diagnosed a schizophrenic to finally realize that just because I am an educated rich kid who knows how to write billable notes, I am not any better. I never fit in with the graduate students that went on to populate suburbia, I was a better fit with my inner-city neighbor, Cece.

Now, I am grateful for all I went through. 

I have found so much meaning in my work in the seventeen years since I returned to working in mental health. It took me six years to start to disclose my history. Then, I started psychosis focus groups and looking for a systematic way of redefining psychosis. I have really appreciated my privilege of working and being innovative to get results that might not have happened if I didn’t know that recovery was real.

I still take medication, but I would never do something like leaving Cece behind again. Instead, I am opening up a practice that aims to help people like her rise above a hopeless mental health system.

I feel for people who work in mental health and believe schizophrenia is just a medical disease that entitles mental health workers to their salary and power. I would be so burnt out and uncaring if I still believed that to be true. I am grateful that I have learned to be a different kind of worker.

This was published in the Better Because Project!

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The post A Different Kind of Worker appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".