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".

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How It Works

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

Here’s what we’ll go over:

Week 1

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

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

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

Week 2

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

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

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

Week 3

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

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

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

Week 4

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

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

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

Hi, I’m Tim 

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

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

Click to Schedule Interview with Tim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Illuminati Invitation

Based on the membership criterion of the illuminati,

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

manual dexterity and academic proficiency. With this,

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

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

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

recommend that you join us in the illuminati.

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

Do you accept the offer?

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

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

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

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

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It has been a long time since I have written a blog post. I turned my efforts away from creative essays and introspective exploration. Instead, I focused on creating a 12-16 hour Master Class entitled: Redefining “Psychosis:” A Cultural Approach to Working with Madness, A Roadmap to the Rabbit Hole.

Time away from weekly writing has been important for me as I was not gaining an audience or selling many books. I’ll admit a sense of frustration was entering into my work. It’s not a good look writing about how jaded you feel. In working on the Masterclass, I had plans to present it, but those plans fell through when I couldn’t agree on a contract with the agency with which I was working. I decided to complete the project and apply to present the class through PESI. I am aware this is a long shot, but completion made sense. This way I am prepared if any opportunity arises.

I have been finding my Facebook feed is full of advertisements about creating online courses. I have started to explore and research what would be needed to convert my knowledge and skills into something that is concise and that could offer me a return on investment. I figure I could market through the infrastructure I have built up on my website.

I think my greatest challenge is to tilt my perspective towards providers who work with people who are in special message crisis.

I remember starting out in social work while I was in graduate school. I didn’t sign up for the job because I wanted to do harm, I just listened to my supervisors and tried to make it. I just didn’t fully understand what the people I was trying to help were going through. I didn’t want to know that I was doing everything wrong, but I did want to have good relationships with the people with whom I was working.

Some preliminary web searches has connected me with the work of Ron Unger out of Oregon and I see he has sold a number of online courses in my field.

I also have been interviewed by Charles Shaw over the course of a few years. It is my understanding that in his new book there will be a chapter about me. Working with Charles was interesting. I had the opportunity review his work and to see myself through Charles’ eyes. Charles is a writer who has been able to gain an audience. My hope is that I too can build an audience that can help change the public’s perception of “psychosis” if I can adjust what I am doing and learn how to teach online.

I am currently on transit from a visit back east to see my parents. I am in the Denver Airport and am sitting in a crowd of people who are waiting to go on a plane to Wichita, Kansas. During the visit with my father, we commiserated a little. He has also struggled for years to have his voice influence public policy with regards to ecology and economics. He eighty-one years old and grieving that he doesn’t have the influence he would like. I have listened to him talk for years and he has good ideas about save lives and the planet and address the economic income gap. He has struggled to be satisfied with his gains and to accept the fact that his ideas aren’t popular in the mainstream.

I am working on having more compassion for both of us much as I need to build compassion for the people who don’t want to listen to us. None of us are perfect. Fighting against mainstream views takes compassion and patience even when you feel like your efforts are going nowhere. I had a great time writing my memoir and it won awards for being well written. I haven’t been able to attract a large audience as a blogger or writer but am still working to find that voice that people want to hear. I love writing, but also recognize that currently YouTube and videos attract a larger audience. If people want to learn something it is important to meet them where they are at. If people like my courses, maybe they will also purchase my book.

At this point, I have a meeting with an online course guru to see if I can get help marketing and producing a digital product. I am not sure what it will bring, but I will keep readers posted.

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The post Transforming my Energy Toward Course Creation appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

I am a white male from families that mostly owned property or had social power. I have to say one of the most meaningful projects of my life has been to overcome my narcissistic background.

I once had a shrink that told me that my “paranoia” was like reverse narcissism. I really wasn’t as bad as I thought I was.

At the time, I was working twelve-hour days of physical labor, (four hours of it was a sweaty bike commute.)  I was bringing home 900$ a month and paying $955 dollars a month in rent. I was coming back from a psychiatric hospitalization and battling housing insecurity with some financial help. I had many internalized parts that judged myself in narcissistic manners. These parts were reinforced by the attitudes of the few people I was in contact with at the time including the shrink.

The problem was that just about everyone I knew actually judged me worse than I judged myself. Within five minutes of talking to me they presumed I was delusional. To me that meant I was schizophrenic and that I would spend the rest of my life in hospitals. To many it meant I was no longer friend material.

Now over twenty years later, I feel like I am fighting narcissism and slander in most communities with which I come into contact. The only community that I don’t feel that way about is the community that subjects themselves to psychiatric treatment in the hospital where I work. In other communities I feel ostracized.

One might think a person like me could find social comfort via affiliating with communities that stand in resistance to narcissistic abuse. What I find is that the power structure of some of these communities often excludes me. Sometimes I feel excluded for good reasons, and sometimes I feel excluded for bad ones.

I tend to view power in society as narcissistic and unjust. Ultimately, I choose to think all these styles of narcissism I have endured are here to help me overcome my own sense of narcissism. I have learned to lean on a higher power to ease my desperate moments. I remember that the privilege I was raised in was the result of abuse of others. I choose to continue to learn ways that narcissism is wrong.

Today I intend to identify seven styles of narcissism that have tended to lead to abuse in my journey. In many people’s eyes, these styles vanish with the use of a label that explains all that I have gone through as being a schizophrenic medical condition.

I write imagining that the styles of narcissism I identify are such that others might relate to in a variety of ways. Each style is something that can turn chronically normal caring people into judgmental and exploitive narcissists.

I come from a culture that has used genocide and slavery to advance its power so it is number one. It’s arguable that this gives our citizens a natural tendency to think they are better than others. We always hear about American casualties in armed conflicts.

It strikes me that this is important now that narcistic abuse and gaslighting is starting to be a focus of psychotherapy practice. I hope to use aspects of my personal journey to help challenge narcissistic judgements and decrease the things that divide us.

Style Number 1:  Exploitation Resulting from Unrealized Sexual Abuse:

Somehow, I developed a tendency to be hypervigilant regarding sexual intentions of others and to dissociate when things get uncomfortable. Since an early age, I remember having distressing feelings that I do not understand. I believe that in my case this has resulted in complex trauma or interpersonal struggles with others.

My teacher in kindergarten observed that I didn’t do well socially.

Back when I took baths with my sister I would play with my penis and ignore my mom’s nagging that I needed to stop. One time, exasperated that I would not listen to her, she sketched me with my hand in my crotch.  This was effective in getting me to stop but also resulted in shame.

I shunned all things associated with masturbation at an early age. I used to explain this to other kids on the playground, unaware that there was anything unusual about this.

Latency was a very serious thing. I remember vowing to my best friend in second grade that I would never to have a girlfriend.

In the next year or so I was coerced into taking a bath with a family friend’s daughter and when I was groped. I dissociated and ended up eating a moth ball necessitating poison control to be called. This was a detail I never remembered until I was writing my memoir in my mid-forties. I showered in my shorts for a year after the incident with the family friend without ever understanding why.

During my first year at sleep away camp at age eleven, I was terrified by the expectation that we would be okay with skinny dipping.

In sixth grade I refused to dance with girls and repeated things my mother told me about sixth graders not being old enough to dance with each other.

Being different in this way led to a lot of teasing and shame. Not only is the act of sexual abuse narcissistic, but the social response to people who are easily shamed is also.

I now believe that I was sexually abused by a family friend at age three. Not remembering this made latency and the trouble I got into with my mother a very serious thing.

My father had an affair and eventually divorced my mother when I was fifteen. My mother was very hurt and rebelled by having polyamorous relations with other men. Thus, when I was sixteen and reaching a late puberty, I had a hard time forgiving my mother for this and developed lasting resentments. My failure to have empathy for my mother was rather extreme.

As Pete Walker suggests in his book Complex Trauma: from Surviving to Thriving, with early abuse “the superego morphs into a totalitarian critic that trumps the development of a healthy ego.” (26). In my experience, having a strong sense of conscientiousness can result in bullying or the failure to thrive as a social being.

I repeatedly struggled to have empathy for others when they engage in corruption.

Also, one summer during my teens, I believe I witnessed a brother rape his sister. I remember that they were skinny dipping. I have other vague and foggy memories of the deed. They are not attached to my other memories of the evening. I do know that the sister ended up having dissociative identity disorder. I remember running in absolute terror and feeling like a terrible coward.

In short, child sexual abuse may lead to complex trauma in relationships with others. Other kids always seemed to target and believe they were better than me and this reinforced my shame. This happened in a host of settings. I later developed mental health symptoms and food addictions.

Style Number 2: Being Underestimated and Misunderstood with A Neurodevelopmental “Disorder”

Diagnoses such as autism, dyslexia, attention deficit or obsessive compulsive are now being considered to be developmental trauma. I was not diagnosed with attention deficit and dyslexia until I was in graduate school. While it is possible for many with the right interventions to maintain their school performance, I never received extra support or understood why I struggled so much.

In simple terms, these kinds of learning challenges mean that some areas of the IQ may be high, while others are low. Or perhaps its easier to understand that some areas are more utilized and higher while others remain less utilized and fail to develop. Fluctuations in abilities as such make learning more challenging.

In contrast, people tend to associate neurodevelopmental struggles with a resource room, or ultimately segregated special education classes. In its most extreme form, segregated severely emotionally disturbed schools, with point systems may seem to prep smart students more for prison than it preps them for acquiring job related skills. These kinds of consequences and associations to these consequences can make a neurodivergent child be treated like they are less than.

Indicators of these kinds or struggles that I experienced were speech impediments, anxiety related to school attendance, getting teased, tendency to befriend only older or young playmates, and poor spelling. I nearly wasn’t allowed entrance into the school where my parents taught because I didn’t use the scissors like everyone else.

Some teachers or parents who see these emerging patterns of behavior may become critical and fail to connect with the neurodivergent student. Or they may not understand the struggle and set unfair expectations rife with microaggressions and high expectations. Thus, being misunderstood or not properly trained by the teacher may set up the sense that other kids are better.

In my case, I was extremely slow in accomplishing tasks, but I worked to compensate and brought home good grades. My father presumed my slowness was laziness and tried to force me to work harder. When I couldn’t sleep at night for a year, he intervened by taking a working vacation in which we worked physically for sixteen-hour days. I did sleep. It was a solution.

When you get older, people do intellectual assessments of you based on the college you attend, interpersonal skills, the company you keep and your job. As the reader will see, I haven’t lived my life to pass these intellectual assessment tests. Many people narcissistically judge misfits, underestimate, or ostracize them.

In high school, I spent dozens of hours perfecting a fifteen-page story and got a B. My college essay that I incessantly rewrote nearly got me kicked out of the school convincing the school psychologist that I really was suicidal. I poured my heart into my Poetry notebook which only earned me a B because it was too depressing. I wrote a twenty-five-page essay on Tibetan Buddhism with 60 references that went unrecognized.

For a variety of reasons that will become clearer, I chose not to go to a college in which the same thing would happen to me all over again. I did the work without being in community. It is arguable that this further amplified my neurodevelopmental differences.

Style Number 3: Facing Class Superiority with a Complicated Class Identity

My first experience of class came from comparing things like toys, houses, violence and vacations to those of my peers. I developed awareness of the stark contrast between rich and poor in the early years of my life. I noticed many who are well-to-do develop notions that they are better than other people and they fail to realize that other people may be smarter or stronger than them.

When I was a child, I seemed to have a raw deal. My parents had private school teacher salaries which are not all that impressive and they could not afford to keep up with the Joneses. Though they bought a house in one of the wealthiest Philadelphia suburbs, I did not understand it was a wealthy district. The house we lived in was old and taken care of by my father who was a do-it-yourselfer. Therefore, I grew up with a sense of depravity when I compared myself to my private school friends.

In contrast, in the summer we went into an impoverished rural community where we owned cottages and property. I compared what I had to what the other kids had and I found myself embarrassingly lucky.

I would notice that local kids would act very virtuous in front of me when my family hired their parents. That part of my family had been lumbar barons and the town had been built around the lumbar company. Thus, we were on remnants of a very unjust system.

One time, I challenged this fake niceness I was noticing and I found my virtuous friend to be capable of atrocious behavior that went beyond that which I was comfortable. Thus, I realized that many of my peers in that rural town had to fake it in front of me because their lives depended on this.

Of course, there was always an occasional kid who would urinate on me when I was three or try to fight me when I was thirteen. I was not embittered by these experiences. I could always understand how these acting out kids felt because I knew what it was like to have a raw deal in comparison to the suburban kids with whom I grew up.

At one point in my preadolescence, we rented out a property to a welfare family. The kids had fancy dirt bikes. For me, dirt bikes were a no-no. They were just too expensive for me to have one allotted to me. It was confusing. My father explained that in his experience growing up, scholarship students often had better things than he had. It was confusing but it was reality.

The welfare kids would give you the shirts off their backs because they liked giving. I could use their dirt bikes as much as I wanted. Then, my father exclaimed that they worked a lot harder than me. It was hard not to feel they were better than me at all turns. Plus, they knew how to have wild and unruly fun, unfettered by adult intervention. I liked them a lot and wanted to be like them.

Meanwhile, back in junior high, my cohorts were having a field day on me perhaps in part because I was not allowed to wear name brand clothes. I didn’t like being teased by spoiled kids and I fought back by acting out in odd manners. That was a problem for the teachers who witnessed this. I was sent to a shrink.

When the shrink met with my parents because I said they would not buy me name brand clothes, I learned that it was my fault I was not wearing the name brand clothes. The only good part about being blamed for something that was not in my control was that was I got to go shopping. The thing was I still learned that I was better off when I bought cheaper imitation brands. I stopped fighting and tried to get along for a spell.

The issue of income disparities and the superiority of the fortunate is complicated. The norms of rich people exclude people who don’t fit in. The norms of poor people seemed to me to be more open, even though in my case, the rural poor were forced to deal with me. I did not understand the violence that often comes with poverty due to the reality of the U.S. black market.

Ultimately, disparities in income have a tendency to make some people think they are better than you. The haves hate the have-nots is how many people understand this. False notions of superiority get spread throughout the culture based on this.

And yet the realities of crime are a great equalizer. Crime may have been what afforded those welfare kids with fancy dirt bikes. When crime, drugs, and corruption enter into the picture, things get a wee bit complicated.

Style Number 4: Judging those who Fail to Regulate Addictions

Around the time I was exposed to the reality of substance abuse, I refused to be influenced by peer pressure like everyone else. I did not feel ready to use and I didn’t like the way I felt drinking alcohol. My father drank in a way that often made me uncomfortable and I didn’t want to be like him when I was drunk. The result was that my social struggles were exacerbated. I did not associate my need to relax with socializing and with alcohol like everyone else did. I secretly became obsessed with eating.

It was the summer of 1988 and I was in a work camp in Orangewalk, Belize. My peers did notice my obsession with getting enough food and often made fun of me about how much I ate. Unlike them I was working many physical jobs all day under the Caribbean sun. They were sleeping after drinking ten or twelve beers the night before. I would go out with them but retire as soon as I could so I could work. Thus, when they saw me craving food, they made fun of me.

The next year I did not fight the temptation to drink and socialize when I was buried in school work, I fought the temptation to eat. I did this twice a day for lunch and dinner. Meanwhile with my undiagnosed learning disabilities I worked late into each and every evening trying to keep up and perform at the level I was capable of performing.

I lost my position as a starter for the varsity soccer team because my speed went down. I just didn’t have the gumption to chase the ball the way I used to. I still felt that I had to get a control of my appetite. I planned and organized social service events for the school community during the lunch hour. I started lifting weights and running long distances after soccer was over. I continued to sleep four hours a night to complete all my homework. And I started counting calories. By the summer I was admitted to the psychiatric hospital at 6’1”, 103 lbs.

The following year I was in and out of the psychiatric hospital and barely completed the year to earn my high school diploma. I moved in with a friend to get away from my parents. All the service work I had done the year before was credited to my colleague. I took to writing, but my best efforts failed to deliver the results I wanted in terms of grades or awards. I became invisible and my classmates shunned me. I skipped graduation night for a lifeguard course so I could move to a Summer Camp. I left the suburbs and my life at a private school and never looked back.

My peers thought I was bulimic because they always saw me eating cookies for lunch. In my opinion they were so wrong about me because they believed the gossip that emerged from my parents. I resisted their efforts to fatten me up in the first hospitalization they sent me to by vomiting in the hospital trash cans.

As I mentioned earlier, I increased my writing efforts as an outlet for my pain and my grades decreased.

I would want nothing to do with the school or my peers by the time I graduated. I followed a twenty-five-year-old old girlfriend to a local commuter college to rebel. I blamed the school and my peers just like they appeared to blame me.

What I failed to realize was that I became addicted to hunger, like many addicts get addicted to their substance of choice. It is expected that people my age start using substances and regulating themselves so they can still perform. I failed to do this. I know what they all concluded about me. It is what they conclude about addicts who fail to keep up their school work. I was weak. I was not worth their time.

It is not until I have lived many years and looked back that I realized the sense of narcissism in the private school community got expounded by my public display of addiction.

Style Number 5: Impact of Racial Abuse

As a white person, I cannot do justice to the narcissism associated with race in this country. I have not lived it the way people of color do.

I leave inner-city communities of color and can still look like I belong in the suburbs. I do not face micro-aggressive eyeballs everywhere I turn and people who fear that I will become violent.  In fact, I know the white world pretty well having grown up in it. I may experience a pinch of imposter’s syndrome when I try to connect in suburban contexts, but it does not take away the fact that I grew up there.

I immersed myself in a black and brown inner-city community in college. I worked at a summer camp at the Camden New Jersey YMCA in which I was the only white person. I contrasted the facilities with those in which I grew up. A lot of those kids at the YMCA had middle class families that could afford the tuition and yet they had to accept the roach filled facilities.

As middle-class white kids we were taken out to nature and had other activities to enjoy.

Then, I worked at a Korean run deli with neighborhood coworkers for three years including two summers. Since that time, I have maintained ties with communities of color through years of working in social work. I have worked my current job for twenty years at a majority African American community.

My first apartment was roach infested and I had to carefully and respectfully connect with neighborhood people to get it. I used to make the managers dinner at the Deli to even be considered for the apartment. I needed to let my coworker con me into driving him to his connects house to cop. I needed to be friendly with the owners of the drug complex across the street from my complex. Then, when I proved to others that I was a safe resource, I saw how exploitive the police were.

Especially, I learned about how the vice squad were the real bad guys. I never went to a single college party with drugs in it and yet the vice squad harassed me on one occasion telling me, “You can’t hustle a hustler.”

Yes, you can when you have no hustle.

When the university career office suggested for me a career in law enforcement, it made me cackle and feel my intelligence was being insulted.

Bearing witness to the decisions that the youth who lived on the block were faced with also had an impact. They had to work to help their family out as opposed to me who was only worried about myself. My perspective on white America did change and I was angry with people who weren’t dealing with roach infestation. Seeing one of my younger coworkers leave the job to sell crack made me really sad because I knew the danger and the challenges that he would be facing. One day I would face the same danger.

Thirty years later, I still learns lessons about the impact of race on a regular basis and I still am aware that I am racist and am liable to offend others from time to time with my cultural manners.

Europeans invaded this country and brought with them three centuries of slavery and genocide. The concept of manifest destiny caused native Americans to be killed and segregated on reservations. Three centuries of slavery was horrifically narcissistic and degrading. Then, Jim Crow laws were historically so tilted against black and brown communities, it kept them segregated and lynched for a century. And still with zoning, gerrymandering, employment bias, immigration and drug laws definitely in effect, there is a disproportionate representation of black and brown people in jails and the prison system. Skin color is often associated with stereotypes and incarceration and fills many people overtly narcissistic with implicit bias

When I came in off the streets to a mental institute and was observed on an evaluation unit, they determined that I was schizotypal personality for making the same kinds of interpretations of power in the Rorschach that I am making in this blog post. I was not influenced by the cultures I had been exposed to: the rural poor, the suburban mainstream and urban people of color; I was clinically odd. I was started on antipsychotic medication.

Style Number 6: Extending Unequal Pay for Unskilled Labor

I grew up in the throes of the postindustrial revolution when the service economy started to set up very high degree of income disparity via making many jobs so low pay that people who worked them could no longer afford the American dream.

Service work makes sense if it is carried out by young, housed individuals who are looking for a little income as they move through school. It may teach people a work ethic and may motivate them to get skills in school that will enable them to get better salaried work.

As I grew up, there were some people from wealthy families who never had to learn how challenging service work can be. I had witnessed a lot of people take it for granted. There are people who start work negotiating good salaries that can sustain families without understanding how hard it is for people in that sector of the economy.

Working these jobs, a student can also meet and get to know people who work in this sector of the economy who don’t have it so good. Many may learn and accept that such people fall into the temptation to make fast money, yet do they see the consequences of doing this? Or perhaps they opt to use their parents’ money to get around this kind of work altogether. Some may think the work is easy and for people who aren’t as smart as they.

When I reached an independent age in which I had to balance rent with the rest of my needs, I really stared to learn how little that kind of work is respected. Additionally, when I befriended people who are in those situations I started to understand and respect the injustice.

I began service work in high school and college and it was always a means to get extra income that helped sustain me. In college I used it to pay my expenses, but I did not depend on it to sustain my rent or tuition. I had parental support for that.

When I started living independently, I always worked an extra service job to make sure my expenses were covered.

It wasn’t until I was forced back into the service economy due to my mental condition, when I really understood how difficult it was to sustain rent and independent living on so low of a salary.

Not being able to afford a car for help with transit and working forty hours a week earned me nine hundred dollars a month when my rent was nine hundred and fifty dollars a month.

I had to transport myself from an affordable location into my low paying job in a wealthy district which took four hours a day. I was doing everything in my power to survive and I couldn’t do it until I found a better salary back in social work ten months later. I never worked so hard in my life.

I found doing unskilled service work for such low pay was far more demanding than working two jobs and going to grad school which I did for almost three years. At least back then, I could afford to drive. Everyday I see people work these jobs and I do not know how they can afford to survive without family support.

I feel that people who do not understand how challenging unskilled work can be can be can easily undervalue it and treat people who struggle with it in narcissistic manners.

The shrink who made 125$ an hour presumed that because I was only making 9$ an hour that I really wasn’t working that hard. Certainly not as hard as she. She denied any level of financial exploitation from her business.

Style Number 7: Challenges that Await the Formerly Incarcerated

I was a ward of the state for three months in a state hospital where I obtained a diagnosis of schizophrenia. After the law could hold me no longer, I was streeted at a Greyhound bus depot with the remaining three thousand dollars I had in a bank account and a months-worth of medication.

I was afraid of again being followed by police and possibly by other people as I was when I was trying to cross the Canadian boarder to break a story of corruption.

My best friend had threatened me that he had the power to do me much harm if I ever betrayed him. I had been setting up services in a notorious section 8 housing authority project. There were many newspaper articles written about the project in the paper. Nobody knew that I was the off-the-record source responsible for a few of them.

My psychiatrist in the hospital refused to meet with me in spite of my requests. She moved me to the chronic unit which was a cold and dank facility. When I got very sick the staff refused to give me aspirin because she had failed to order it for me. When I was finally getting better after a severe fever, she came to see me.

“Once we had someone come here who said the FBI was following him,” she said, “and they really were following him. He hadn’t done very much but it was true they were following him.”

I did not trust her enough to ascertain that she was talking about me even though that’s what I still figure. I did trust her enough to return to taking medication because she didn’t believe the aids report that I had been sexually inappropriate the night I had begged for aspirin.

The first night I arrived in the state hospital, my roommate told me that the mafia was following me.

The girl on the unit who had a crush on me told me her father was the head of the Mexican Mafia in Montana.

Even though I should have known better, I often yelled at my parents accusing them of being mafia.

I only got beat up once. It was only by staff. They told my parents I had gotten violent when I had only tried to support another inmate who I believed to be an FBI undercover agent. He had wanted to play his guitar and I stood with him and suggested he should be allowed to do so.

I only got recruited to join one gang and I was able to refuse without any repercussions.

But nobody told me what would happen to me on the streets when I had this much exposure and knowledge about the underworld.

I did not have a parole or probation officer to drug test me or require me to get a job.

When I arrived in Fresno CA and bought a bike and paid for the rest of the month at an extended stay studio, I didn’t realize that I would be able to find a job while medicated. When I got a job, I got an apartment. It just so happened that when my meds ran out, I was unexpectedly cut from the low wage job and unable to find work. The only job I could find was a professional job as a social worker. But I was afraid that I could ruin my career. I was experiencing a great deal of harassment. I believed I was being followed again. When my bike was stolen, I believed I was being targeted.

Finally, I turned to family support. My father told me there was nothing he could do for me. But my aunt arranged for me to move close to her and she could get me a job at an Italian Delicatessen. Then she arranged family support as long as I kept that job.

I tried so hard to find work outside that Italian Deli for ten months until I was successful. The bike/train commute was really challenging.

Not everyone understands what it is like to work with young rich kids when you are in this kind of situation. I considered myself formerly incarcerated and it was hard to cool out. I finally got a car and started back on medication once I qualified for benefits.

On the bike ride to work, I would come across a man I knew from the section 8 housing complex where I worked in Seattle WA. One day he had come up to me and told me that he killed someone. I had looked at him like I was really not impressed at the time.

On the train platform he had a homemade sign that said CIA and he carried with him handcuffs.

I ignored him and worked my day.

Most days I experienced similar things that were equally bizarre and distressing. I still believe that these are tests that formerly incarcerated people are given. These kinds of oppressions are hard to measure as they are different depending on the situation.

When I finally did get a car, the police tailed me all the way to my shrink’s office which was a forty-five-minute drive. There was nobody to tell. No one who cared about anything I shared. I had to shut up and serve rich folk. I think these are examples of tests that formerly incarcerated people must endure to survive.

And everybody just presumed I was a spoiled loser who was a tax on my parents. Most of their friends, my mother told me, said they were just enabling me and I belonged in a hospital. Some of my friends just said I got into drugs.

That is the kind of narcissism formerly incarcerated people must face, I think. Many are presumed to be guilty regardless of whether they were set up or not.

False Medicalized Notions of “Psychosis”

The word schizophrenia which is based on Kraeplinian ideas about brain damage and an unfounded genetic mental illness concept, covers up lifetimes of narcissistic abuse. Quite often this concept tends to justify warehousing people and depriving them meaningful lives.

I have identified seven styles of narcissistic abuse that have been part of my life. Some of these styles are abuse I endured personally and some have been things I have seen afflict myself and others. I am aware there can be quite a variety of narcissistic behavior including physical violence of which I have not endured all that much.

Many of the styles of narcissistic abuse I have talked about are spread throughout the culture and can be quite normalized. For some, it can be easier to throw a person overboard than it is to acknowledge your own superior sense of narcissism. I do believe that often times people with privilege make the mistake of not acknowledging it.

I am aware that my view of power being a corruption of the human spirit is impacted by some of the trauma I have experienced. But I think an awful lot of people undermine the value of other people. When labels like schizophrenia or bipolar are involved, it is easier to presume that a person cannot get better than it is to give them a chance to do so. I believe that if given chances, that many more people could break through their challenges and fill their lives with meaning. But many people who endure these challenges are deemed untouchable.

Many articles I have read about how to deal with narcissism suggest setting boundaries with the narcissist, exposing the abuse by extending the concept of gaslighting that accompanies it, and halting the internalization of the messages made. Many ultimately suggest cutting off the narcissist because their methods will not change.

I think the schizophrenic who does this often is seem as having low insight into their illness. There is even a fancy word for this called agnosia. Agnosia provokes the ire of many a loved one who wants to help. Agnosia was not something I was able to overcome until I had reestablished safety and economic security. I had to work as a therapist for 6 years until I overcame it.

Unfortunately, a schizophrenic like me cannot necessarily escape from narcissistic abuse. It is hard to interact with others without seeing narcissism that can threaten my sense of self.  The best I can do is expose aspects of it in order to avoid internalizing the abuse and thinking ill of myself.

Ultimately, I feel very burdened about the amount of narcissism I view in the world that doesn’t accept me or make space for my contributions. Not all of us get to have our contributions highlighted or honored. We can continue observing and undermining narcissism so that it stops with us. Maybe that truly is as good as it gets.

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According our country’s cultural delusions, social institutions take care of people and deliver social justice based on a persons’ merits. Institutions for education, law, health, religion, athletic achievement, arts, recreation, work, transportation, housing, and social entitlements are often thought to be entities that people can trust to learn from and get the support they need to thrive in society.

Yet, there violence in the streets. Many come out of jail worse than they were when they went in. Help proffered in our involuntary psychiatric units leads to a revolving door and distain for therapy.  Board and care homes and halfway houses may subject individuals to a sense of poverty. Many of our institutions become the source of pain and trauma. Some institutions work for some people. Some people get targeted, punished and hurt and become marginalized.

Intersecting generalizations about race, socioeconomic status, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, citizenship, mental and physical health interfere with a person’s capability to self- actualize. Some people are raised to fight and fend for themselves by any means necessary and there are institutions built for them; while others are insulated from these challenges and have wealth and sometimes luxuries to lean on; and there are institutions built for them.

Cliques and societies are formed in every institution that push out people who don’t belong. Some peoples’ skills are celebrated while others are ignored and undermined. Sometimes based on a stigma, a slander or a gossip, skills or abilities get lost.

While often abuse is thought to start in the family system, much of our lives are spent outside the family in institutions that are supposed to guide us in the right direction. How, then, can some of us become mired in mental anguish? Institutional abuse is important to consider when people are suffering.

The Importance of Doing an Institutional Analysis: 

Assessing a persons’ attitude towards the institution is important towards knowing if that institution has functioned to abuse the person. Institutions can do harm in many different kinds of ways. It doesn’t only depend on what the institution is meant to do.

Consider people who thrive in an institution. If they have dealt with an institution that is positive about them like earning a spot on a travel sports team, has it led to better performance and has the selection turned out to be a good outlet for their skills and esteem?

There is a lot that can go wrong on a sports team. When a person doesn’t thrive and optimize their skill it is important to know what happened. Perhaps they went elsewhere and found another outlet or discipline to perform. This happens when we assess people’s passions and interests.

Many clinicians tend to do an institutional analysis in this manner without thinking about it. When dealing with institutional trauma, it becomes important to help a person utilize contexts and times they have thrived in institutions in order to look at the times when they haven’t.

When there is a positive experience, it is important to extract resources from those institutions. If they have a negative outlook on an institution, it is important to learn about the institutions that they did feel good about. If they did have some good experiences in which they thrived, it is important to understand what went wrong.

Often, one doesn’t get this kind of information on the first psychosocial experience. A clinician needs to remember institutional issues and return to them and excavate them later in session.

It is also important to consider resources that often aren’t addressed. Have they had success with a peer group? Have they any attachment to counterculture? In some contexts, it is important to consider institutions that are not given legitimacy like jobs working for black market industries. It is important not to judge the institution, but rather to explore it for resources.

Mental Health Institutions:

Not always do institutions with negative stigmas do people a disservice. Even when the purpose of the institution appears to be to ruin the person’s life, there are often opportunities for good learning experiences that help a person avoid complete defeat.

Thus, if they have come to contact with an institution that is thought to be negative such as a county jail or a county mental health facility, the question becomes what have they learned about themselves from the experience? In the case of mental health institutions labeling a person with a diagnosis with a poor prognosis: do they agree with the negative prediction? What happens to their social performance when they leave?

In my experience with public mental health institutions, compliance may result in a worse outcome. In twenty-five years of working in them, I have tended to see that many programs are built for social control and to maximize financial gains.

Often the way things are set up is so top down that the individual’s needs get lost in the process. Cookie cutter concepts of evidence-based practice often fail to promoting health and healing and personal growth. Some people just get worse and worse over time so that labels like schizophrenia get to be thought of as illnesses of progressive decline.

It is clearly arguable that understanding any person involves understanding how they fit in to the institutions in which they associate. It is not enough to simply learn about the list of institutions that have impacted them. It is important to learn about how they dealt with socialization in the facility in order to learn what they learned from their experience.

Thus, a clinician needs to be patient and not make too many generalizations. After all the secret stories and heaps of bullshit that might need to be excavated. A great question to ask is about people who worked in those contexts that didn’t fit the mold. Part of my reason for writing this is to encourage more people to work in these contexts who learn to counter the negative missions of many institutions.

Assessing the Impact of Abuse Within the Institution:

Often, institutional abuse is covered up and needs to be drawn out to even get seen. The victim may not even have the power to have anyone believe a word they say and that is frustrating!

To help a person heal from institutional trauma, a clinician must learn to see the person they support in a different manner than the institution that damages them sees them. That means acknowledging than an injustice is happening becomes a first step. Too many clinicians working in an institution aren’t inclined to do that. Many workers accept the status quo and impose increased trauma on an individual especially when the person is negative about the institution as they are going through it.

Acknowledging the harm is the first step. Often this is simply a listening skill that needs to develop and a sense of justice is necessary. Sometimes a clinician can suspect this is going on and ask questions that can draw out stories and abuse.

Then, a clinician can develop an alternative narrative for how things might be if the institution was being fair to them. It’s true a clinician can’t change the institution, but they can articulate and advocate for what is needed for a particular client without being able to deliver it. This is essential to building an alliance and mitigating the damage being done. It is a direct route to healing.

It becomes essential to look at what is happening through the client’s eyes.

Understanding Your Institution’s True Mission:

Each institution has a mission and people it is trying to serve. For example, if the county mental hospital is there to prevent homeless people from committing suicide it can be important to acknowledge that that is what the institution is trying to do. This might help the person who has been damaged by the institution realize why they did not fit in and get the help that they needed.

Puzzling through a county’s mentality in treating people also involves considering the bottom line which is the way the institution makes money and survives. This involves understanding the counties finances and the need of the contracting agencies to make money.

In a federal prob the county where I work has been deemed to be criminal in its services. A lot of money goes to emergency hospitalization services and not a lot is set up for treatment outside the hospital.

Abuse might involve more than just suspension of a persons’ bill of rights. It might be an institution is built to control violence and impose involuntary medication and this might have nothing to do with a person’s needs.

It might involve exposure to substandard facility hygiene and this might or might not be what the person is used to. Some might see an unhygienic unit as an insult while others may recognize it as like many other unkept situations they are exposed to.

A therapist is keen to understand the mission of their institution. Believe me it is not in the institutions mission statement! It is more likely to be seen in the metamessages that the institution puts out. It requires real-life interpretation and perhaps some Marxist financial analysis.

What was wounding about the true mission of the institution when it didn’t suit the person you are seeing in the therapy room?

Examples of Differing Institutional Missions:

In my life I have had a lot of conflict with the missions of the institutions that most powerfully affected me. I share them now to demonstrate the kind of race and class bias inherent in institutions. Indeed, if I were your patient, understanding how the mission of three of the institutions I have been subjected to is important to understanding my trauma.

When I was admitted to a state hospital during a break, it seemed like the institution was there to prepare me for living in permanent poverty. The presumption was that I would not be able to work and that I would therefore have to adjust to board and care poverty. It was built into the institution as a mechanism to fill the local businesses, according to my observation.

Enduring that mission, being treated like a piece of cattle in the field, was very hurtful to me when I transitioned back into professional work. It is important to understand the impact that being treated in such a manner has on a person.

In contrast when I attended a private prep school, ten years prior, I was taught that my classmates and I could be anything we wanted to be if we just did what they said and got transferred to an elite university. What mattered was the prestige of the university.

When I decided that I didn’t trust that institution and figured that prestige was some bullshit, four years later I graduated from a local commuter campus in the inner city. The message I got as a freshman, that most people I went to school with weren’t going to graduate, demonstrates that the mission of that particular institution was very different than the mission than my private prep school.

The help I got from the career center suggested I should be a cop. I don’t think many of my prep school graduates became cops. Believe me, it’s not the only time I was invited to join a gang that may exacerbate social violence. I received several offer in the state mental hospital.

In my case, I could see the contrast in the different institutional missions and I always knew that I didn’t fit the mold. I didn’t trust the mission of the prestige prep college. That is something you would definitely want to explore.

Luckily when I was discharged to the streets from the State hospital, I had three thousand dollars to start my life over and prove that I could work in spite of my “break.” There is a lot to explore and many stories to be told. I am in favor of letting the stories be told while assessing the re-traumatization factor. Too many clinicians are afraid to know or counter the mission of their appointed institution. We need more therapists who stand against the mold in the institutions. They do matter and can help.

The Importance of Having Faith and Extracting Resources:

It is true work on institutional trauma takes time and is best done when the clinician has a strong sense of the persons resources. There are times when the person needs to rant and rail against the way they are or have been treated. A clinician who does not believe the resources that might exist or who starts to extoll the virtues of the institution really can set the person into a traumatic response.

Thus, I think clinicians need to have faith in a person’s inner resources. I can be hard to teach this especially when the clinician is not native to the persons culture or contexts. It takes a long time to learn these multicultural skills. Setting up systems in which students and young workers are responsible for knowing things they just don’t get is not a good way to train or heal institutional trauma.

Keeping pay at entry-level salaries, hiring people who don’t have a background outside a degree, and having young managers who are eager to advance and lack cultural understanding is not a good way for organizations to address institutional trauma.

I believe clinicians who have humanistic views of various kinds of people who don’t judge people about external behaviors have a better chance of extracting a person’s resources and helping them love themselves again. Conversely being fearful and condemning of a person who has behaved in problematic manners is a good way to have the person clam up about their resources. When a clinician maintains that kind of stance, it can become a self-fulfilling prophesy that exacerbates institutional trauma

The post Why Clinicians Need to Address Institutional Trauma: appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

Guest post written by Samantha Jane

From Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho to M.Night Shymalan’s Split, the media has long been guilty of using psychosis as a scapegoat for fantastical criminality.

Even among newsrooms and journalists, crimes attached to any iota of mental illness are sensationalized with splashy headlines. This macabre fascination has only worsened the existing stigma towards mental health. With over 70% of the American public getting their mental health information from TVs, newspapers, and magazines, it’s not surprising that these inaccurate depictions have had negative effects:

Cases of criminal malingering have increased

A prevalent effect of misrepresented criminality within psychosis is the proliferation of malingering. Described as the act of feigning insanity to evade a heavier punishment, malingering occurs in about 17.5% of convicted criminals.

One infamous case of malingering involves one-half of The Hillside Stranglers Kenneth Bianchi. After terrorizing most of California in the 70s, Bianchi pretended to have an alternate personality (Steve) when he was captured. And he argued that Steve was the actual perpetrator. Bianchi was ultimately found guilty after his ruse was debunked. But at this point, his act had lengthened proceedings and cost the state more money. Since then, both criminal defense lawyers and convicted criminals alike have tried malingering, with many simply mirroring the signs of psychosis they see on film or TV.

Law enforcement has had to pivot their approach

As a direct consequence of the previous points, law enforcement officials have had to further their own understanding with regards to mental health. To prevent malingering and to justly identify defendants who were—or are—suffering from psychosis, many local and federal officers implement forensic psychology into their investigations. Officers who have completed either in-person or online forensic psychology degrees have been trained in abnormal psychology, criminal behavior, and social sciences. This enables them to make educated preliminary assessments of persons of interest.

Alongside this, a growing number of cities are implementing crisis intervention team training. These programs teach officers de-escalation techniques and the appropriate way to divert individuals to mental health services, when available. While these efforts have shown significant dips in unwarranted arrests or violent altercations, many states have yet to mandate these initiatives.

Vulnerable communities are further alienated from society

One of the most dangerous consequences of misrepresentation and sensationalization is the picture that it paints of those with mental illnesses. Under the guise of “informing” the public about red flags that indicate criminality, people who consume this media are influenced to fear those with mental health conditions. For instance, data suggests that 40% of all police calls are mental health-related events. This is despite the fact that only 5% of all violent crimes are committed by individuals with pre-existing mental health disorders. A study even shows that those with mental illnesses are more likely to be a victim of a violent crime, rather than the perpetrator. But even in more “white collar” circles, people are conditioned to perceive those with mental illness as untrustworthy or subversive.

Such was the case with Tim Dreby when he shared his own workplace experiences as someone with diagnosed schizophrenia. Despite the fact that Tim worked in the field of mental health, his diagnosis and survival story was used almost as blackmail. Unfortunately, a similar story is echoed across the nation as surveys show those with mental illness are up to seven times more likely to be unemployed.

Will Media Be Changing Anytime Soon?

True crime shows and horror movies are some of the most well-received media today. So, unfortunately psychosis will probably continue to get associated with criminality. Of course, this isn’t to say that some changes aren’t on the way. Organizations like the United States’ National Mental Health Association (NMHA) and Australia’s Mindframe program have begun to suggest guidelines that more fairly and safely depict mental illness. Whether these guidelines are to be widely used and accepted, though, remains to be seen. For now, criminality and psychosis are still part of an industry that seems to have little care for the widespread consequences they encourage in the name of “entertainment.”

Article written for timdreby.com

By Samantha Jane

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