Description

Understand Psychosis So That You Can Help People Heal

The Journey Through Madness Sunday Recording Sessions: Date of Next Training to be Announced

Learn how to Explore Psychosis Without Becoming Anxious, Power-Struggling, Or Referring Anyone To A Hospital

 

How It Works

This training is designed to integrate into your life so you can slowly build your skills and explore new practices. This is a twenty-hour  community oriented training aimed to help you approach psychosis with curiosity as if it is a culture that once empowered, has value that can help the world. I will be hosting two-hour sessions on the first Sunday of every month at a date to be announced. 

I will teach you a new model for understanding psychosis that will help participants learn how to relate with a person in madness in a manner that helps them heal. Training involves recorded two-hour sessions that you can review on your own over the course of the month. If you miss a month, you will be able to view what you missed on YouTube so you can be prepared for the next month.

Participants may be professionals (including peer counselors) looking to hone their skills, family members seeking better relationships with their loved ones, or people with lived experience who want to share their perspective and contribute to a new model. Scholarships are available to motivated participants.

 Come bring your stories and perspectives to the discussion, ask questions, and we will all learn.

Here’s what we’ll go over:

Month 1

• The impact of poor prognosis myths asserted by academia and the political pressure facing someone who is experiencing psychosis.
• How listening to stories and reflecting on commonalities helped me deconstruct experiences into solvable problems and formulate the structure of  the presentation
• Reasons the medical model definitions lead to limited solutions and ultimately to the poor outcomes, stereotypes and the dehumanization we see. 

Month 2

• The impact of stereotypes, labels and the unilateral effort to suppress symptoms leading to anosognosia
• The way the thirty differential diagnoses that include psychotic experiences in them may have kept us from creating a counter culture and focusing on solutions.
• Learn to approach extraordinary experiences as an oppressed culture, and how advances in neuroscience, and the hearing voices movement support this view. 

Month 3

• Increasing our understanding of and ability to detect extraordinary experiences or special messages.
• Thorough review of the Message profile to get an impression of the experiences that trigger psychosis.
• How special messages trigger a necessary process of sleuthing or making meaning and how that can dominate the day for people in crisis.

Month 4

• How to support a persons’ recovery and reality tasks instead of to discourage them as a means of decreasing the impact of sleuthing.
• Why it is often important to research and know about real government conspiracies or factual fringe material to gain a message receiver’s trust and learn about what they think.
• How to support a message receiver in being mindful and accept their experiences so that they don’t go down the rabbit-hole and how to help articulate special message experiences.

Month 5

• Summary of  part one, joining concepts, and how to create questions that open up discussion topics that support joining.
• Explore how theories/frameworks arise and function to create a diversity of causation explanations.
• Complete review of diverse theory/framework explanations about why special messages happen: political, spiritual, trauma informed, psychological, scientific, or artistic causation theories. 

Month 6

• How giving up on reality and expanding the ways message receivers think about what causes their experiences adds to flexibility and can have a positive impact on functioning.
• When and how to increase a message receivers awareness of  ways that extraordinary experiences might habitually trick them and lead to loss in social power.
• Examples of negative and positive tricksters that can sabotage ones wellness.

Month 7

• Use of positive psychology to initiate acting opposite to the way one feels, to increase emotional intelligence, and to return one to control of their social destiny.
• Summary of part two, flexing concepts, and questions that can open up discussion topics that support flexing.
• Importance of processing past behavior and negative outcomes: reatliation reactions and social sanction

Month 8

• More practice processing past behavior and negative outcomes to help the message receiver learn lessons about why they lost social power.
• How safe sanctuaries can help a message receiver accept limits of others and develop social rehabilitation goals.
• Developing unique sets of social skills that can be used to potentially dig message receivers out of a hole.

Month 9

• Summary of part three, behavioral skills and questions that can open up discussion topics that support behavioral skills
• How social, institutional, and internalized stigma are linked to a message receiver’s irrational thinking.
• The importance of doing a strengths inventory to reintroduce the use of rational thinking as a tool the message receiver can use.

Month 10

• How reframing special messages can  make them into a part of an individual’s effort to discern reality without leading to a crisis or an emergency.
• Summary of part four, thinking skills and questions that can open up discussion topics that support the right kind of thinking.
• Ethics and guidelines for optimal facilitation in group; and reflections and feedback on the course.

 

Hi, I’m Tim 

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

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

 

Click to Schedule Scholarship Interview with Tim

There will a limited number of scholarship participants so set up your interview today