https://www.blogtalkradio.com/bmorerealtalk/2019/10/18/baltimore-is-talking-live-with-clyde-dee

“Got to Keep the Devil Way Down in the Hole!”

Every week, Rev. Dr. Q and co-host, Aaron Green broadcast from the city of the hit TV series, The Wire. I was honored this week to be invited to discuss my book, story, and mental health. Click on the picture to visit their broadcast and hear our discussion.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE     

Outskirts Press Releases New Memoir About Surviving a Diagnosis of Schizophrenia:

Fighting for Freedom in America by Clyde Dee

In the frontiers of America’s mental health institutions, fighting for freedom can become very personal.

September 24, 2015 – Denver, CO and Oakland, CA – In Fighting for Freedom in America, released by Outskirts Press, mental health counselor and author Clyde Dee asks, “Have you ever wondered if something is wrong with you? Have you ever wondered what it is like to find yourself driven into madness; and whether you will ever come back from catastrophic loss?”

Six years into a protected clinical career as a mental health counselor, Clyde Dee moves to Seattle and takes a job in a Section 8 housing project—a complex notorious for drug dealing and a site where no one else is willing to go. As Clyde works to empower and protect the people, he finds himself embroiled in the politics of the local drug war, and a fractured social system is revealed. Uncanny threats and coincidences drive him into madness when he decides to go off a low dose of antipsychotic medication.

Clyde is stopped by police when he tries to exit the country and is incarcerated in a psychiatric ward for three months. In the years that follow after he is released to the streets, he moves through American disparities and cultural delusions, facing some of his worst fears and striving to regain what he has lost.

Fighting for Freedom in America pulls back the curtain to let us see what it would be like to lose our rights and be imprisoned in a state hospital. But while Clyde’s story is shocking, it is also a beacon of hope. Despite homelessness, underemployment, and harassment, he discovers that with family support, it is possible to heal and make his dreams come true. He is able to make peace with the forces that are following him around and morph into someone who is grateful for life—and a person who loves the journey.

At 328 pages, Fighting for Freedom in America is available online through Outskirts Press at www.outskirtspress.com/bookstore. The book is sold through Amazon and Barnes and Noble for a maximum trade discount in quantities of 10 or more, and is being aggressively promoted to appropriate markets with a focus on the memoir category.

ISBN: 978-1-4787-5992-8                  Format: 6 x 9 paperback cream                       Retail: $20.95  eBook: $5.00

Genre: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs

For more information, visit the author’s webpage at www.outskirtspress.com/fightingforfreedominamerica.

About the Author: Now with over twenty years of paid experience in the mental health arena, Clyde Dee works in Richmond, California, in an outpatient program. He additionally works to help train individuals who have lived with “psychosis” to reach those still marginalized by stigma, institutionalization, and isolation.

About Outskirts Press, Inc.: Outskirts Press offers full-service, custom self-publishing and book marketing services for authors seeking a cost-effective, fast, and flexible way to publish and distribute their books worldwide while retaining all their rights and full creative control. Available for authors globally at www.outskirtspress.com and located on the outskirts of Denver, Colorado, Outskirts Press, Inc. represents the future of book publishing, today.

# # #

Outskirts Press, Inc., 10940 S. Parker Rd – 515, Parker, Colorado 80134

http://outskirtspress.com 1-888-OP-BOOKS

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Having returned from an east coast trip to attend the memorial of my stepfather, I am a little late with my monthly update. The trip back east was hard as my mother is currently suffering from her loss. I tried to spend time with her to offer her support, but may need to stay busy and our vastly differing interests made the week challenging for both of us.

Those who may have visited my blog may notice that I have only published one post this month. I have been working extensively on one essay that I am trying to prepare to get published. It is frustrating because I feel unproductive, but I have a need to master the essay and prove that I can publish.

When I wrote my memoir, I wrote extensively and edited the work down to make it more likeable. It was a learning process which I used to heal, and I really liked it. Now I am trying to learn to do the same thing with the essay—pack it all in for the short attention span. Make sure I get the title right.

But I am finding myself challenged when it comes to the process of getting published.  I usually write to live, not write to publish. I have read some blogs about the need to research publications and write specifically for them.

This puts me in a bit of a dilemma. It makes me realize that finding a place to publish my brand and mental health niche is a crap shoot. And suddenly I am getting pulled away from the reason I write in the first place, to be myself use my experience to grow wiser and heal and redeem myself.

The essay which I am sharing a sneak peek of in my newsletter is something that I am fretting over. It started as a 5000-word essay and I have cut and learned extensively. I find myself extremely frustrated that I must wait so long to even learn if I will get accepted. But I know I need to get my name out there to draw attention to my work.

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Humans inhabit the court room

Where right gets discerned from wrong

Investing all their damn money

Into the justice they long.

Anger bounces savagely

In tossed and yanked slinky veins

That domino amassment

Of hate in buzzing refrain.

These are the veins that disregard

Every glimpse of opposition,

Destroying truth in perspectives

That also yearn for fruition.

Such is any claim to truth

That harnesses the violence

Of obscure reaction,

Squawking with its insistence.

In court these truths are resolved

By the massive collection

Of endlessly abstracted,

Legally teased erections

Of verdicts gleaming brightly

Bearing a fiscal complexion

For conveyor and authors

Of soul-seizing infection.

Power pumps potent pulse

That occupies peaceful bones

Static crackling distraction

That tones out the doubts that drone.

Curse the evaluation

That sets inequality wild!

Curse the rules and regulations

That echo in the tiled

Order of institutional

Imprisonment! Curse the demise

Of esteem, punched contusions

By city’s violent sunrise!

People think that justice is concrete

When the whole concept is a cheat!

Profiteers are proud of their feats

Feasting on justice with deceit.

But what goddamn logic is it

That worships greed, and closets

Empathy? Here we elicit

Internal arrogant deposits

Of monetary tuition

That torques lawyer’s ambition

To create superstition

That breeds social recognition

And so I ask:

Why do legal collisions

Make right and wrong decisions

On god’s creative visions,

When they lack truth’s mission?

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Through a sea of tissues and a hacking cough, I scan Netflix pressing that stubborn button on my Roku remote multiple times. I read the summations of shows for several minutes until I come across a documentary called, the 13^th. Finally, I settle in. Resting is not an easy thing to do with that constant sense of urgency I live with.

I don’t know what’s worse these days: dragging through a pre-holiday week on the outpatient psychiatric unit on Dayquil; or listening to the radio talk about impending loss as the new cabinet of Trump supporters get selected.

A cross town slog into East Oakland after work on the unit one night last week revealed once again that the streets are ever-burgeoning with homeless, some of whom I know intimately. In each car encampment, I saw a distinctive cultural story that needs to be heard.

Living with “Schizophrenia” is not all that hard of a thing to do when you have a warm bed and a Roku machine. Sure there are memories of your brothers and sisters you left behind in the barracks of State Hospitals. Sure, there are people you work with who are still in such grave poverty. But when you have a happy marriage, gainful employment, and a meaningful pastime, it isn’t really all that difficult. Isn’t difficult, that is, except for the fact that you have to stay silent about a world unobserved by most; except for the guilt you have for having survived atrocity when others still haven’t gotten to the other side yet.

Out walking with my wife, earlier in the day we discussed the value of protest, from the North Dakota Pipeline to Black Lives Matter. It is really uncanny these days how afraid I am to join something that I once felt was part of my democratic rights. It is not so much the teargas or the rubber bullets or the pepper spray in my eyes that hold me back. It is my job, my trauma history, my fear of sending the county that employs me the wrong message.

State surveillance is something that kept able-bodied me remarkably underemployed for several years. For those Americans who think this is not possible in our democracy, I have written a book for you. Perhaps, if I had known that I was wearing an ankle bracelet, it may have helped me accept the fact that I had only one job opportunity in spite of hundreds of resumes and applications. The irony that the job entailed work at an Italian Delicatessen when I believed the mob was following me just didn’t occur to anyone. It wasn’t the fact that with bike commute, I had to work twelve hours a day for nine thousand dollars a year that made it difficult. It was the cutting personal harassment and the fact that everyone thought I was just a schizophrenic and not worth seeing.

And to this day, it is striking what can be accomplished and just get swept under the rug. Since my recovery, my memoir has won awards in three contests. I have written and directed a program that brought specialized group treatment into hospitals, local agencies, and homeless shelters that was very successful. I maintained tenure at my job with my psychotherapy license during this time. All this and the county still does not interface with me as it strives to implement my program. Very few people have endeavored to read my book. I still battle with that same sense of invisibility.

But as the documentary the 13^th proceeds in my weakened state, I see aspects of my experience unfold. I know what I went through and continue to fight doesn’t just happen to mad people who get subjected to the medical model. The realities of mass incarceration, which afflicts every person of color and immigrant person as well gives me new angles on accepting the shit that I went through. The fact is that what I went through seemed so unique, when it hits close to home for the broad majority.

Bigoted laws disproportionately target the majority. I have always known this, especially when I was in my altered state; but the documentary helps validate the effects of incarceration. Additionally seeing the visualizations of the numbers afflicted helps me feel glad that I have been targeted too.

Seeing the young African American man in the documentary get targeted for refusing to accept a guilty plea was something that I particularly related to. For a long time I refused to accept that I am “a schizophrenic” in a similar manner. I took me such a long time to accept that I could have three months taken from me and be reduced to the most ridiculous poverty and subsequent homelessness over nothing that would ever be explained to me. But though that refusal to accept injustice that I relate to so intimately, hurt me personally, it did not result in the death of me. The fact that I survived and the young African American man died, it just speaks to my own ongoing white privilege that exists with my bed and my Roku and my snot rags.

Of all the movies that touched me during the two and a half years I lived in an altered state, none did so as strongly as Chris Rock’s routine in the movie, Down to Earth. Watching Chris Rock fret about being caught with the rich, dead man tickled me to no end. There sat the murderous wife cool as a cucumber without a care in the world. It was exactly what it is like working at an Italian Deli when you think the mob (and the Feds) are following you. I laughed inappropriately for hours. It was about mass incarceration.

But what I find so hopeful watching this documentary, the 13^th, is that against all the lies of power and stigma, the truth can be represented and told. I am grateful that the mainstream who endeavor to give it a chance might come to understand the effects of mass incarceration and how it too could happen to them.

These days perhaps I am not the only person lying sick in my bed waiting for things to get much worse. If there are others there with me, I would highly recommend watching this documentary. It is oh so good to know that ultimately the truth can prevail in our minds. It makes me proud that I broke my book contract because they wanted to edit away my commentary on racial disparity. It makes me proud that the county does not interface with me about my efforts. It makes me proud that I protested in the WTO protest and that I now can support protests which make 13^th possible in a variety of meaningful ways. Simply put, the documentary, the 13th gives me a ray of hope that I am not all alone with “Schizophrenia” and suffering without purpose. It helps me prepare for what is to come for the multitudes in the bay area in the immediate future.

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And so I’m hanging with my main man, Dan

Who can’t afford rent, dignity now inept,

Cause federal subsidy is a damn scam!

And we imagine shelterless street sultans

Rooting through boarding home shanties, stench swept

And so I’m hanging with my main man, Dan

And he curses disability program,

Cursing the fate that he must accept

Cause federal subsidy is a damn scam.

I offer him choices. He rejects every plan.

Costly mansions adorn our cross town schlep.

And so I am hanging with my main man, Dan

My flesh freezes, colors mannequin clam:

Cause he just cursed at me; cause he just wept;

Cause federal subsidy is a damn scam!

The radio talks, bombing just began.

Foreigners die in same insane power concept

And so I’m hanging with my main man, Dan

Cause federal subsidy is a damn scam.

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Jargonizing the Trickster Concept:

The symbol of the trickster in Native American Navajo culture is the coyote. The coyote is a revered as a con, a sign of witchcraft, or a type of bad omen that will lead you into trouble and is very powerful. A trickster, as I am using it, is a predictive message that attaches to unconscious and conscious divergent views that are not proven to be true but that can become a powerful truth if it is trusted. Tricksters can become true via the mechanism of negative self-fulfilling prophesy.  Becoming aware of this spiritual reality is very important to understanding trauma that gets experienced in a message crisis. Indeed, unless a message receiver can see a way out of very stark circumstances they may get sucked into a meat grinding machine that can make them disappear; they may end up lacking a social role and living in unhealthy circumstances. Understanding the trickster involves understanding how to overcome this social prediction.

Thus, thinking that others are going to exclude or institutionalize you will lead you to put negative energy out there that may help your fears come true.  If helpers learn and believe in the power of this trickster spiritual trap, they may learn to practice techniques that trick the tricksters!  Instead of receiving a double bind experience, let helpers trap message receivers into no way out but to win situations.  This can help jostle a message receiver out of the trickster trap. This might need to be achieved repeatedly for a while before the message receiver learns to trust the helper. If a message receiver has been victim to trickster realities for ten years, one would not expect them to be healed from one intervention.

Awareness of tricksters can help motivate people to consider the merits of utilizing functional flexible theory styles and help increase mindfulness of their process.  I have to admit that from my vantage point tricksters involve spiritually giving up on reality and using magical thinking to alter the course of the experience. In both cases it is like using a double negative, (applying magical thinking to magical thinking) to move forward in a positive, rational, rehabilitative direction.

In Contrast to the “Reality-Check” Standard of Care:

For many, awareness of the trickster process has not been operative or reinforced during crisis because it is not recognized as being part of the treatment discussion. Instead there is the concept of the “reality-check.”  While some message receivers can accept some “reality-checks,” clinicians often note that others do not take any of them seriously. Indeed, it is arguable that the common failure of the “reality check” that leads to the definition of a “delusion” or, “a refusal to believe in spite of a preponderance of the evidence.” When I was in crisis, many times I was checked about realities that were true. In fact, my reality just didn’t sound true because it was not a part of the discourse of the reality-checker who was totally ignorant of the reality I was experiencing.

I feel it is very important for helpers to realize that many messages receivers get given “reality-checks” in which they are assured something is not true, and then because of trickster reality, they learn that those assurances are empty. The inaccurate “reality-check” is such a radical betrayal, subservient silence is likely to result. When the roofing nails aren’t long enough to reach the wood, thumbs are likely to get smacked and turn black in spite of hard hammering work. As such collective power that imposes reality only further isolates the message receiver. Too often the promise of the positive thought or the reality promise blows up in the face down the road when other associated messages turn out to have credence.

Currently, in the standard of care, falsely believing that all messages are delusions, a helper mindlessly drops a reality test and then wonders in upcoming weeks why the message receiver starts to have inexplicable vindictive, antagonistic feelings toward them.  The message receiver may get seen as stubborn, a character defect, and this then gets blamed on the power of the disease. Even worse, the message receiver gets extorted into seeing themselves as symptomatic and the issue of the false reality-test never gets brought up.

Recovery takes years or doesn’t happen in part because of the need to overcome the preponderance of reality checks. It means learning the reality of the trickster internally and falsely yessing the reality checking community when you know you don’t mean it.

In the institution, the right to be self-determined and deal with the consequences of your own decisions, gets stripped. It is a structural and punitive reality check that is very traumatic and can lead to years of decline. Even if it is not internalized and the message receiver stays industrious and believes in themselves, having a false reality imposed on you gets in the way.

I feel that even skilled workers who acknowledge that there is an element of truth to delusions and can occasionally have a good experience with a reality check; can set themselves up for resentment or the message receiver up with long term distress and catch-22 binds. While sometimes institutionalized people will welcome a helper to have confirmation that the messages aren’t real, I’d argue that it is wiser not to benevolently determine that the messages aren’t real for them because of the trickster reality. I have fallen for this myself and hurt message receivers.

If this seems to be an overblown discussion of semantics, I ask the reader to consider what happens when a helper benevolently reassures the message receiver that there is no need for fear only to have an element of the reality checked fear come true. Not only might this discourage the message receiver, the benevolence reinforces a self-stigma that the message receiver is weak and the reality-check undermines the wider need for mindfulness. Thus, for years the message receiver believes even more in their special message reality and less in the support from their material world helper.

Even if one reality check pans out, the fact that so many others didn’t means the value of an accurate “reality-check” might be made innocuous. Instead, I propose that the concept of the reality-check be replaced by the culturally sensitive practice of acknowledging the potential of the trickster.

Example of a “Reality Check” Gone Wrong:

I want to warn the reader that this is going to be a complex example that reveals the innards of the way trickster realities can come true on the streets of an inner-city community. I am going to include multiple elements to demonstrate how trickster realities become true when they don’t have to.

Consider, for example, the message—a fatherly voice—that tells the message receiver that they have no worth if they don’t believe in Jesus. The divergent view, that the socially respected voice is godly and accurate, coupled with the theory that the deceased father, aligned with the church, represents the heavenly ghost, causes significant trickster hurt and pain. In fact, one day the message receiver reacts to the voice by staying in bed all day and not taking care of her or himself. To make matters worse, when the message receiver in fact stays in bed all day the message receiver’s board and care operator, a friend of the family, comments among the staff about how worthless the message receiver is in contrast to the father as a result of staying in bed all day. The message receiver senses the whispering and negative energy then tests out this reality and gets facial messages from the board and care staff that reinforces the message receivers’ voice, that the voice that the message receiver has no worth if they don’t believe in Jesus.  In trickster fashion the voice proved itself right throughout the message receiver’s community.

But to make matters worse, the culturally encapsulated psychoanalytic therapist/helper who just last week had reality checked the message receiver and proposed that this fatherly voice was only inside the message receiver’s head, their inner anxiety. Now not only does the message receiver feel spiritually condemned, they have a helper who has provided a reality check that offers an alternative stab, that the message receiver is to blame for their worthlessness.  When the message receiver returns angry the following week and tests the therapist/helper out by saying she had been in bed the whole week, the therapist winces and now offers the message receiver the same feedback as the voice and the community at the board and care; suddenly the whole deal has become not a double, but a triple whammy. If the helper then defends themselves and challenges them over inappropriate anger, we have a quadruple whammy.

Example of Culturally Sensitive Use of Trickster Concept:

In addressing this complicated example, I am going to suggest that a helper who fully understands the ramifications of the trickster concept can help. Such a helper has to believe that negative realities are more likely to come true if they are believed. I seek to demonstrate ways they might better know how effectively confront someone about reality in a way that does no damage.

Helpers who understand and teach the trickster concept can transition the message receiver to a rational conversation about crisis emotions. They can do so by being culturally sensitive to the message receiving experience. Doing so enables a supporter to boost message mindfulness of all message constructs. In essence, this culturally sensitive reality-check that can result might increase the level of trust between helper and the message receiver regardless of the reality of the message receivers struggles.

Using the trickster concept, helpers essentially sidle up to the message receiver’s process and playing a non-domineering role. It can help the message receiver apply the next chapter’s magical positive self-fulfilling prophesy skill thereby, (through prayer or mantra) radically change potentially tragic outcomes.  My belief is that in crisis it can help motivate a message receiver to magically reduce the sense of external conflict with the material social world and pave the way for the important role that social relationships play in recovery.

Contrast this to the passive suggestion that the helper hopes the message is a trickster. The culturally sensitive helper, not firmly psychoanalytic, can help tilt the message receiver away from the message process and towards the potential of effectively circumventing the stabs of the board and care staff.  With one quick validating swoosh, the helper can get to the heart of the matter, the fact that the voice might play the role of a trickster.

“A trickster, what do you mean?” says the message receiver.

“I mean is it possible that the voice, if you choose to listen to it, could turn around and make itself come true in some way?  I don’t think you’re worthless but maybe the voice may make others say that you are, maybe even yourself, but I don’t know if I am making any sense to you at all when I talk like this.”

“Oh yeah, that’s already happened, that happens all the time,” says the message receiver.

Not only are there no whammies in the above interaction, but there are also opportunities to explore the voice and figure out a potential alternative theory styles associated with the trickster that might lead to healing Consider how a supporter might list some alternative ways to make meaning of the voice:

Alternative Meanings

• “Maybe on this occasion that fatherly voice is really a demon disguising its voice as your father to do you harm. Maybe there are other times when your father’s voices is very supportive and maybe that is an occasion when an angel is sending you the truth!

• “Maybe you are picking up on the reality of stigma that might exist within your community which may even have included your father. Did you know there are local efforts to help decrease stigma that sometimes exists in some spiritual communities; maybe you want to be part of that!

• “Maybe that fatherly voice doesn’t always understand everything about you. Let’s say, a church lady baby-sitter molested you when you were younger and made you feel worthless and question Jesus. I don’t know if that’s true and I don’t know what relationship you want to have with Jesus or your spirituality. But let’s say something like that were true. It might really hurt that your father and the rest of the world always takes up for your abusers!

Perhaps a list of such options leads the message receiver to open up and reflect on their life in some new ways. This can lead the message receiver to better define the potential of a healing explanation. This, I’d argue requires a lot of study of the theory and creative application of different styles of theory. It helps confront the message receiver without imposing reality and challenges. It also might meet this extremely smart and sophisticated pretend message receiver where they are at and make a different.

Then the message receiver might feel inspired to use a positive self-fulfilling prophesy to get out of bed and spend the day walking. At the end of the day the community and the spirit understands the message receiver better and the fatherly voice apologizes and compliments the message receiver for his efforts.

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