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".

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.

Click here to learn about my Master Class!

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

Readers may have noticed that my productivity on my blog has decreased in recent months.

Over the past couple of years, the community mental health program where I have worked for seventeen and a half years has undergone change. This has been a significant source of grief for me as the community has lost six full-time therapists and half of its community members over that last couple of years.

I have had the need to write my way through some of these work challenges. I tend to write about what I am going through and have done so in two unpublished blogs. In these blogs I have sorted through my feelings and experiences at work. Until I sort through my professional plans and see what is going to happen at my job, I think it is best to keep these thoughts and reflections to myself.

About a year ago, I cut my hours at the job and opened up a part time private practice. I currently have no shortage of referrals and feel guilty about the long list of potential clients that sit on my wait-list. However, I am very bonded and committed to the relationships I have that remain in the community mental health program.

Last week I finally learned of a change in management. The new management wants to rebuild the program and is far more transparent about their intentions. However, changing horses in midstream will not be easy and I am fearful about what will transpire. Already top-down decisions are being implemented that may not be well received by those on the bottom.

I anticipate that my heart will continue to break in new and accelerated manners as new changes start to unfurl. Rebooting the program may change relationships and require new procedures. If it fails to work, our jobs could get cut. I hope things get better, not worse.

The Future:

Operating a private practice and being my own boss has never been my end game. A part of me wants to stay connected to community mental health. It has taken me a long time to learn how to really work with people and provide quality mutual services. I am a healer and I want to see reforms that enable me to improve recovery and justice for people. I constantly am learning about things like politics that bog down the process and do not work.

I wrote this on the fourth of July. I sit today a week later rewriting and lamenting about what I am meant to do.

Preparing to Put More Time into my Training:

I also am in the process of negotiating a deal with a local peer agency that would help me provide my training in ten session increments as a new source of income.

I will likely be turning away from publishing blogs and turning toward fixing up my six-hour PowerPoint. I hope to make the slides a bit prettier and add some interactive exercises that can be completed in a zoom format that will reinforce skills.

I am praying for optimal negotiations and a healthy experience.

The post Writer’s Block? appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

Fawning, saying yes sir, or shining it on is such an important skill in enduring life, especially during a break from reality. It is a skill I struggled with during times of mental health crisis prior to my break. Indeed, I have had to get pretty good at this fawning skill to survive.

Prior to the break I was prone to tangential rage and resentments against people who rejected, humiliated or abandoned me. It felt like everyone I knew, would eventually betray me.

In fact, this is a repeated pattern in my social relationships. Other people would see me alone and bullied and take some interest in me and I would reciprocate. Eventually I would disappoint them or they would get what they needed from me and there would be a falling out. At times of mental breakdown this pattern would become evident to me. And I would get down on myself and the world.

It is my understanding that fawning is a symptom of complex trauma. People learn to fawn due to childhood neglect or abuse. They don’t feel safe so they fawn and fail to confront people who are abusing them. In their reality there is no point in asserting themselves. There is no use.

As a therapist I am learning to encourage people to stop fawning with me and trust me with their true process. Being able to know a person’s authentic process and feelings toward me is indeed a privilege that I am eager to promote.

But in many ways, I am not ready to throw the act of fawning under the bus. Indeed, I went through a lot to learn how to fawn.

It depends on your station in life whether it is not safe to let people know exactly where you are coming from. I believe much of the world is oppressed by privileged people. When you are supposed to be oppressed, I’ve come to feel it is wise and honorable to fawn a little.

Becoming a Targeted Individual:

In the years leading up to my two-year break from reality, I shared my realities of being targeted and undermined with a therapist in my twenties. She taught me I was paranoid. There was no concept such as complex trauma or Asperger’s at play. It was an extensive cocktail of medications. I trusted the psychology degree behind the cocktails and worked my way through a Master’s Degree in Counseling Psychology.

The mentality of blame the victim in psychology is such a powerful force. When I tried to ignore the patterns of abuse and built relationships anyway, it was far easier for the one person who had the ability to see what was going on for me, to blame it on an illness. She would one day tell my parents that I would be in and out of institutions for the rest of my life. For a long while, this did direct their support of me.

Deference to this power of psychology was the skill that made me a successful social worker prior to my break. Prior to my Master’s degree, I often respected my superiors and turned to them for direction. But along with education came the responsibility to think about what I was doing and to help rather than just cover my ass.

I moved out west where I didn’t know anyone and started work in a Section 8 Housing project in Seattle Washington. I started to resist standard business practice of blaming the victim and making the money. Indeed, I started going the extra mile.

As people were being hurt and even killed, I started talking to reporters. I worked extra hours and I made good relationships. It’s true I felt more appreciated by the people with whom I worked. When the company offered me free tickets to a concert so I would stop my vigilante patterns, I turned around and invited all the residents to the music festival. Unfortunately, this led to into a state of consciousness in which I became a real targeted individual.

I had a friend with a nefarious past who threatened me. It proved to be a very credible threat. When I admitted I was scared for my life and told him what I was doing. I tried to run to Canada and got stopped and manhandled by police. I got a three-month, hospitalization rather than a promotion for work that challenged the system to be better.

Learning to Fawn:

Earlier in my journey the therapist who had taught me I was paranoid, had already tried to institutionalize me. She’d told my parents that even though I had a 3.9 GPA I was not really college material. She urged them to put me on social security. They never told me this and I resisted her efforts to institutionalize me by working customer service jobs where I had to practice my fawning abilities. It was either that, or a repressive social program. It was embarrassing because I was really depressed, but some people cared enough to support me. Then I got back at it graduated, and went to graduate school.

Ten years later, learning to fawn again as an inmate in a state hospital was a new low. I believe the purpose of the incarceration was to teach me there was no use in even trying to take care of myself. I documented clear signs of abuse and requested to meet with my psychiatrist. It took the psychiatrist two months to actually meet with me. She said one time they had a patient who was being investigated by the FBI. When he was hospitalized for believing he was being followed he really was being investigated. Then, she told me everyone who observed me said I was an entitled person. I agreed to take my medication again.

First, I was locked on a unit for two weeks. When I finally gained grounds, I did everything I could to be industrious and work to feel better. They let me work in an automotive shop and I started to heal. Just as I was getting stable, exercising and strengthening my injured back, they moved me to the chronic unit. It is true I didn’t exactly conceal my distain for my family and the mafia. Those elements were revealed to me chronically throughout the hospital. The chronic unit was old and barely heated during the Montana winter. Massive icicles grew from the crack in the window above my cot. We dressed for the forty-degree temperature inside the dingy barracks.

Self-advocacy was pointless. When I finally took medication and surrendered to them, I did get released.

Fawning to Return to Professional Work:

However, I did not believe that outside the institution that self-advocacy was pointless. I took a greyhound bus to Fresno California with the small nest egg I had saved for myself. First, I got a job. Then I got an apartment.

This would have worked but I ran out of medication and experienced many signs of government/mafia surveillance. The day I got hired, my nefarious friend called me and let me know he knew I got the job. It wasn’t until I withdrew off my medication that I couldn’t control my rage about this.

I tried to find work anywhere. Finally, I got a job at a foster care agency, but did not have the funds for a car. My family only agreed to help if I move into a very challenging situation that my aunt set up for me in the bay area. My nefarious friend agreed that this was what I needed to do.

So, I had a two-hour bike commute and a job at an upscale Italian Delicatessen arranged for me. My grand delusion was that my family was an Irish Mafia family that had set me up for the situation I encountered in Seattle.

At the Italian Deli, I learned the learned helplessness toward the government/mafia that I needed to survive. Eventually I was able to break back into the land of social work and psychotherapy. This included a great deal of fawning towards customers, my family, employers, and mafia triggers.

This fawning skill seemed like an answer to many of my problems and I was able to suppress my experiences with being a targeted individual

Fawning to Survive Psychosis:

When a person experiences a break from reality they must learn not to react as if their tactical reality is really happening. This takes some doing and work. Especially for someone who ends up being a targeted individual, emotional triggers must be controlled.

Thus, even when the person who is in a break is right about the fact that corruption is rampant in our society, they must learn to act as if there is no such thing here in America. We don’t have indentured servants or enslaved people anymore. No, we are the land o the free.

So, on my daily ten-mile bike ride I would see signs of being followed and harassed. Once I encountered a resident who I knew from the section 8 housing complex in Seattle. He walked around with a pair of handcuffs at the train station. He sat across from me on the train. I pretended that I noticed nothing. In front of the demanding customers all that mattered was that I fawn exceptional customer service.

Targeted individuals know their apartment is broken into and their employment mail is violated. They know the people standing outside their apartment with gang tattoos on their shoulders are gang members.

They must learn to fawn for the sake of people who live in consensus reality. In spite of where they have been and what they know, they must act as if they fit in. I think it is imperative to be able to do so to survive at any job or any social setting. One must avoid any action that is triggered by one’s history of being targeted.

One time the police entered my apartment and trashed it, spreading kitty litter over my rug. The apartment complex management told me that my uncle had done this. Nobody cared or believed me that this happened. It was excellent customer service that was required to get rehired into professional work.

It is like code-switching in the African American community, one must fully understand that there is no understanding of your culture and speak as if the culture of the oppressor is the only culture out there at the workplace.

Fawning is a great skill that can help you fake it until you make it.

Fawning for Trauma Experts:

In training to work with trauma, I have attended workshops of Bessel Van der Kirk, Dawson Church and Laura Pernell. In each of these workshops I learned important things, but I did not feel particularly safe and had to do a lot of fawning with people. EMDR and EFT particularly didn’t work for me because I was to dissociated in those settings to work through my issues. I was not sipping the tea.

Bessel van de Kirk made several jokes about psychotic people in his workshop. Dawson Church was clearly angry at people like me who were reversed and for whom tapping did not help. It is very hard to be at ease when the training turns into such a hostile environment and the assumption is made that all the healers in the room are above their traumas.

Let me tell you, after being rejected endlessly for not fawning, it is a real trip to have a group of therapists in a trauma training notice that you are dissociated and fawning and dismiss you as being damaged goods. Suddenly your survival skill is a sign that something is gravely wrong with you. Suddenly if you don’t stop fawning, you will not be successful at fitting in with the clique that surrounds you. I fawned, but I withdrew and didn’t try to deal with anyone,

Teaching the Fawning Skill:

I have actively taught the fawning skill to participants in profession group therapy that accepts and explores psychosis. It is a much-needed skill that is imposed on others in institutional circumstances. But learning when to use it and when not to is a challenge.

Indeed, as a young social worker with a private high school education, the affects of which I learned to hide, I was accustomed to see others fawn at me. In the system, the power differential between the staff and the client often encourages this kind of behavior.

When I was a young social worker, I didn’t know I needed to undermine the fawning responses and make deeper connections with people. So, as I have openly taught this skill, there is always a sense of irony that has historically has made the patrons of my groups chuckle.

This is why I often argue that it can be imperative for providers who work with psychosis to work with the symptoms and normalize them without judging or reacting to them. This creates more of a level playing field so that the person in a break can have their ways respected. Then, it becomes easier to ask them code-switch back into chronically normal mainstream culture. This can give someone the social support they need to fawn for a living.

The alternative for many is to accept institutional neglect and poverty.

Overcoming the Fawning Skill?

Indeed, many people judge and take advantage of those who fawn in certain environments. People who vie for power will test another person in power. If the person in power submits and does not challenge their bully they will be demoted. I have experienced this professionally a number of times.

Indeed, this reality has cost me professionally. I have lost jobs and respect and have dealt with slander campaigns when I have tolerated bullying. It is really hard for me to know when its time to put up my dukes verses when it is time to simply survive in a humble manner. I have chosen to work in contexts in which I am not in power.

Indeed, teaching psychologists not to blame the victim and send people to an institution is not a safe thing to do. Fawning and undermining is indeed the only way to provide freedom to inmates of the institutions.

As I have started a private practice and work with a few people in the tech field, I have learned that fawning is not appreciated and does not lead to success in the corridors of power. It has made me aware that it sure is hard to know when it’s truly safe and necessary to forego fawning.

While in therapeutic service to another person, I feel safe to forgo this kind of skill. Many find me authentic and appreciate my help. I usually reflect on things when I write notes and in my off hours before I take action.

But dealing with people who do not understand their role in institutionalizing others it is not appropriate to forego fawning! I constantly have to watch my back and follow rules and pray that I don’t get made and sacrificed.

The sense that you are going to get in trouble for what you do constantly lives withing the survivors of our societies impoverished institutions. I am not really sure I want to give up this skill amid the waters in which I tread. Indeed, I consider it an emotional regulation skill in many contexts, acting opposite to the behavior you feel.

In another sense, a great deal of emotional intelligence goes with the fawning response. Taking medication has helped me enormously with my EQ and ability to fawn and reconnect with consensus reality in a meaningful way.

Sure, I want to go from surviving to thriving. Sure, when I work with others as a helper, I am able to be authentic and I do not fawn. But until the mental health system shifts from a social control model, to an integrated healing and wellness one, I may well have to keep resorting to those fawning skills. So, when I am training in a room full of therapist whom I perceive as trauma sharks, I will not feel denigrated for having to be alert and fawn.

The post The Neurodivergence of Fawning for Mental Health appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

It’s been nearly twenty years since I came out of a two-year break from reality. I am no longer faced with the prospect of homeless and unable to find work. I have a career, a marriage and a sense of stability. But in other ways I am just starting to realize how fragmented and dissociated I remain.

It’s taken a lot of work to learn to be successful and mad in a mad world. But there are still some things to heal that have been around for a long time for me. Things like feeling joy and relaxations have always alluded me. I am still developing self-compassion given the issues with which I have dealt.

Join me today as I use internal family systems theory to help me have more compassion for myself. I will examine the interplay between my manager parts and the exile parts who need to work together with better collaboration.

Preoccupied with Slander Campaigns:

I still struggle with the sense that other people have engaged in slander campaigns against me and my work. Since the release of my memoir five years ago, my efforts to promote the book and the rest of my work redefining psychosis, have failed to create the impact for which I yearn.

It’s true my book never had a release party. Turns out local people with big names on the national stage, took the free copy of the book and did not write reviews. In fact, a few started treating me with micro aggression, leading me to believe there might be a wider slander conspiracy much like what I have witnessed at work. One person did write me a review but left a shaming comment in the middle of it.

Likewise, although I am very committed to my work, I repeatedly get passed up for promotions. I have a different perspective and expertise than my colleagues and I am often undermined.

It’s true my book won awards. It’s also true that mostly the reviews I got from workshop trainings I have conducted have suggested I did well with most opportunities I have been given. Still, I have not become a sought-out speaker. And my writing platform remains relatively small.

In quiet moments, I often have the idea of a slander campaign come up. Perhaps it is a younger part of me that has been hungry and desperate in the face of financial challenges during my break. But ideas of a slander campaign go back a lot farther, back to grade school bullying and alienation from my peers that started in fourth grade. I weigh these thoughts with the fear that my presentation skills might be a bit lacking.

Presentation Skills:

It’s true when I was in high school, my classmates used to count the number of ums that I made during my speeches. Even though I am passionate about what I am saying, my success often depends on the energy in the room that lifts me above the anxiety.

For example, I recently had a zoom interview about my book. My interviewer, Peg Morrison, actually took the time to read my book and ask me thoughtful questions in front of her NAMI network. She wrote, “If you’ve ever wondered how Holden Caulfield turned out, you’ll want to meet our guest Timothy Dreby (pen name Clyde Dee). I was given the questions ahead of time to reflect on and prepare my responses

To prepare for the interview, I took two hours off work so I could come home and ground myself in the questions. About twenty minutes from home, I found myself in a traffic standstill. The stand still took a great deal of time and I wasn’t even sure if I would make it home on time for the interview. My wife called me and read me the interview questions over the phone.

Since the interview is on YouTube, I have been able to view it and assess the extent to which my own performance might be part of the problem.

Critical Eyes:

One aspect of enduring a break from reality is learning to live with vigilant eyes. When I was in psychosis, I picked up a great deal from serendipitous occurrences. Discharged from a state hospital, I took a Greyhound to a different state. Not only was I jobless and in need of survival funds, I was convinced I was enduring a black list conspiracy after I outed covered up murder in a section 8 housing authority.

One aspect of these observations were my interpersonal interactions with others. It seemed like I had the ability to discern their subconscious intentions so as that I knew their personal thoughts. I was always vigilantly assessing for safety, sincerity, and intentions.

I was especially vigilant to sense a persons’ connection to secret societies that may be involved in persecuting me. Maybe the secret society was my family conspiring with the treatment team at the State Hospital. Or maybe it was a black-market organization conspiring with a law enforcement agency. Or at times it was the management at the only job I could find, a job at an Italian Delicatessen that my auntie arranged for me, conspiring with my young co-workers who delighted in taunting the mad thirty-year-old with vigilant eyes.

For the last thirteen years, I have engaged in redefining psychosis. I started by doing this in professional groups. I did so in a manner I could justify interventions that are radically different. In doing so I have suggested that interpersonal perceptions of others are a source of special messages for a person in a break from reality. (Of course there are other sources like dreams, intuition, hearing voices, media, visons etcetera get added into the mix.)

It’s clearly arguable that many of those acute perceptions may come from a scientific assessment of energy waves that come off a body. For example, as I have learned through learning emotional freedom techniques, a host of energy waves that reflect a person’s spirit may be more readable with a set of vigilant eyes. There are also many other non-verbal cues that are hard to explain when someone is intensely vigilant. Voice tone, emphasis, body gestures, and posture are all intensely notable when a person has vigilant eyes.

When I was eventually able to use medication and come out of my crisis, I was able to withstand having vigilant eyes without involuntarily reacting to what I experienced. It enabled me to fake it and improve my working income and come back from a choppy year of underemployment in which I only earned thirteen thousand dollars.

As I started to feel safer and perceive less danger, people stopped responding to me with ridicule and threats and I eventually returned to being able to utilize my Master’s training and maintain positions in social work and psychotherapy. But I am not sure I ever lost my vigilant eyes.

Viewing my Performance:

I have intensely critical managers in my head who take one look at my performance in this interview and think that I should not be the one up on the podium leading the discussion. This is part of me thinks it is smart, entitled to judge, and doesn’t acknowledges that it internalizes social Darwinism. It still says that that a kid with my set of disabilities should not be allowed to bring home straight A’s even if he was up all night doing his homework. This was a remark I internalized from my father. While he might have meant it as a compliment, it was an example of a patronizing attitude that has really impacted me.

One might think this manager part of me has enough life experience to know social Darwinism and eugenic concepts are false. It has seen me locked up for three months in abject State Hospital poverty with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. It has seen me in the streets in yet another strange land trying to work my way up from nothing. It saw me fail to get jobs at McDonalds and hundreds of other franchises. It’s seen me struggling to ride my bike to sixty-hour weeks of physical labor for thirteen thousand dollars a year. It has seen upstanding citizens on the streets run the other way because of the rage in my eyes. It endured the support that criticized and cut me every step of the way. I kept trying and things did get better so one would think the manager knows better.

But when I watch the video of my interview, the manager also can see that I have just sat in traffic and am tired, slow, internal, and stressed. It views the slowness of my responses with distain. The manager in me tells me I am full of myself and not giving the host enough pleasantries. It continues to be embarrassed and ashamed to be me.

How this Manager-Part Developed:

I think an aspect of this managing part of me mistrusts other people with power but also distains and internalizes their views. I have a rich history of being vigilant when I assess teachers, therapists, trauma experts, or others in power.

Both of my parents were teachers who knew that I was struggling even though I was always one of the better students in my class. I got left back in kindergarten and I was almost not admitted because of the way I used scissors in the interview.

Early writing efforts often went unnoticed and did not result in top grades. The teacher who graded my poetry notebook told my mother my work was too depressing and only gave me a B.

When I took to writing and wrote my college essay, my parents were called into school and I was nearly sent back to the hospital because the school psychologist suggested I might be suicidal. I wrote about running a half marathon at Outward Bound and was very proud of my work. It’s true that I was, as I always have been, very self-disclosing in my writing. This particular essay I had rewrote incessantly. In fact, I continued to rewrite it. I sent it out to colleges anyway.

Even though I was shamed in front of my whole class who gossiped as I was called before the school tribunal, I sent that essay out and then I didn’t go to the schools that accepted me. Shortly thereafter I got so angry at the school, I let my weight drop and I was put back in the hospital for a second time for anorexia.

I felt intensely betrayed by anyone who had tried to teach me when the school erroneously published that I was headed off to an upper crust college. Really, I was moving in with my twenty-five-year-old girlfriend to attend a commuter college in Camden New Jersey. I raged at the whole community of teachers who failed to see any value in my writing when it came time for awards.

In college I continued to be vigilant of teachers who graded my performance. When a professor finally gave me a hundred on a take-home-exam and said he hadn’t done so in ten years, I was outraged. My other efforts were just as good as this one. On this particular essay I was just regurgitating his opinion after talking with him. My other efforts were better and more heart felt. When an English Professor wanted to put my essay up for an award, I again was outraged and never got back to him. I didn’t care about a stupid reward!

In graduate school I was working full-time and, hitting classes after a full work day. My relationship with most professors remained on a similar trajectory. I thought most of my teachers knew nothing about the things I was working through during my day job. Several made fun of me for asking too many questions.

After I graduated with my masters, I moved to the west coast without knowing anyone. I met a really nice Thai Buddhist girlfriend. We attended political speeches with regard to the WTO protests together. Later she told me that when she heard how hard I criticized the speakers and author’s we talked about she felt self-conscious and wondered what I thought of her. She was right, everybody I heard speak about a political issue I was way too hard on.

I guess the manager-part feels justified because of the way it was rejected. It is still internalizing the authorities who never reached out and helped it. Many of my teachers were managed by my father. Perhaps they looked at my dyslexic spelling, disliked my father, and downgraded my work.

Compassion:

I do feel bad for the little boy who used the scissors in an unconventional manner. He never deserved to be managed and criticized by a judgmental, prep school community. I do want to protect him from the managers who are now a select few of his peers in the recovery movement.

Indeed, while others were learning to socialize in college while they built skills, I was the anorectic-white-boy working at a mom-and-pop deli mart in Camden New Jersey with a Glock under the grill and a shotgun over the trash can. I think leaders in the recovery movement may not understand why I don’t have college social skills.

But to a larger extent, managers who guard public opinion rest in cliques and decide what and who they are going to support. Yet, I need to respect their role in creating community is also important. They are smart and better than me at some things. They too need to be acknowledged. It really is important for me not to bite back at them.

My father, who was often driven to rage by my slow pace, did need to help me work faster at some points. He committed his life to leading the prep school environment trying to make it a fair and just place to get a superior education. It was not his fault that I was dissociated and depressed. I believe I had some childhood trauma that made me that way. He wasn’t used to dealing with kids who failed to thrive.

His father dumped all the family assets onto him to manage in the summers. There was no rest for the wicked for my father. He worked and worked and all he had to show for it was a modest private school salary and a slow dissociated kid. All he had was control over those family resources and relationships. They would go to the kids who respected him and didn’t bite back and bring the inner-city manners up in family gatherings.

Indeed, for every manager that I have worked with there is a similar story of someone who wasn’t seen and their work not acknowledged who just has to bite back a little. So, as I work with that kid that I want to protect, I need to teach him to understand the manager and use this understanding to assert and advocate. I need to show the managers that they need to look at what the neurodivergent mind has to say even if the associated behavior is a little different.

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Up Coming Interview with NAMI!

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I am writing to alert my community and tell them to WAKE UP. I am coming out of hibernation!

I have always been grateful to my community of readers and want to thank you for supporting me. But I admit my emails have been personal amblings and links to my blogs. First, they were monthly updates, then they were quarterly reflections. Lately they have become even more infrequent.

I am very much a person who learns by doing. I wrote my award-winning memoir without going to school for writing. If you saw my early blog sites you will notice that I have been developing not only my blog writing but also my website skills as I do. Editing the web pages has become an obsession and I am currently undergoing improvements. First impressions have never been my strong suit, but I am getting there, Now, it’s time to work on my social web skills so I can finally put my spider senses into action.

That’s right, I will be using this email list with a great deal more frequency. I have decided that instead of writing a book, I want to develop an on-line training.

This will not happen immediately. At this point I am launching a project to put a redefining psychosis workgroup together. This work groups will be free for those with lived experience. It will include material developed over twelve years with a need to develop my PowerPoint skills to make them look animated and pretty on zoom.

Not only will I be writing narratives of the processes I am going through to make this vision a reality, I will be using resources and affiliations I have to expand my email list and keep you all posted. I may be knocking at your door and asking for you to join me.

If you may be reading this on Facebook and are not on my email list, it is a great time to take the plunge so you can be part of this ground breaking work. When you do sign my email list you get a free pdf of my award-winning memoir. You can sample my work and see what you think.

No more ambling and skill development. It is time for me to WAKE UP. In fact, that is the first three words of my memoir: “I wake up!” Don’t believe me, check it out here.

My decision to focus on further development of my training is simple. It may well be an easier way to express my learning and make an impact. And because I like to write, I will be writing updates and narratives about the hurdles I have to go through.

If you know someone who would be interested in my training, please forward the email and join my list here.

The post WAKE UP, I’m Coming Out of Hibernation! appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here you see the way I have connected them since.

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

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

The Challenges of Researching Invisibility:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Man Who Warned Me Not to Go:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Witnessing Confabulation of Tabulation in A Real Government Experiment:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back in the Community with The Man Who Warned Me:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the end the story seems pretty clear:

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

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

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

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

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

Our CEO gets removed over this.

There is a presidential election.

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

The Impact of Social Change:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When a person has a break from reality, others often feel a sense of urgency. Most people think that if this does not get treated with antipsychotic medication immediately, grave and progressive brain damage will ensue. Friends and loved ones may fear that this is the beginning of degenerative process that will leave the person shuffling between institutions and poverty for the rest of their life.

This article is written for the loving supporter or social worker. It invites you to learn about the world of your loved one. My hope is that it will help you gain strategies for how to handle the relationship with someone experiencing psychosis.

The State’s Social Control Model

When you think about the public mental health system, images of crowded psychiatric emergency rooms, violent police restraints, rapid tranquilization needle sticks, jail time, or substandard warehousing barracks may come to mind.

These are all realities of the system. They are mechanisms of the state. These realities either neglect the person in the break or set them up to be forced back into consensus reality. It can become a punitive and damaging process.

Ultimately, I view the goal of the state as enforcing social control, not healing and recovery. It can become about saving money or making the afflicted impotent. It can become about endless submission, silence, and the perpetuation of lies.

There are times when the social control model does help a person improve their behavior. Improving one’s behavior can help a person minimize their risk of escalations of trauma via social punishment. It can be better than nothing. Sometimes, people can learn lessons from abuse, improve their circumstances, and even heal.

Efficacy of the State’s Social Control Model

Still, in America, state social control that guides behavioral change has a low efficacy in terms of promoting recovery. It’s more a part of the problem than the solution. Even of the people who receive early intervention treatment for psychosis, only 42% have a response classified as “good.” And studies in developing countries show higher recovery rates than developed countries! Could it be that state social control is still part of the picture?

Social myths and stereotypes leave many people thinking that degenerative decline is to be expected if schizophrenia is left untreated—when actually it can be the result of treatment. When such social myths are maintained, it can seem like social control is the only option to prevent a horrible outcome.

Still, as I suggested above, stints of incarceration can result in an increase in compliance with consensus reality. However, they also reinforce the idea that it is unsafe to talk about what is happening. In many cases, the follow-up homelessness or warehousing can be so hard that incarceration starts to look better. Throughout all such “treatment,” exhibitions of psychosis are systematically shut down rather than explored. Many go through this process and give up hope of ever working through their experiences with other people.

In this culture, when incarceration and trauma happen, all is not lost. As someone who went through a three-month incarceration that left me outraged, I believe we can learn healing alternatives instead of nurse-ratcheting up social control. Ultimately the fear of returning to dilapidated and neglectful situations did help me conform. I eventually found that with medication I could get better jobs and more quickly restore my social standing. However, it was a two-year process, and I feel like I barely got through. And the night terrors were bad!

And so, I believe that “healing” is not the most likely result of forcible social control.

Few Approach Psychosis in a Curious Manner

To promote healing instead of social control, I believe it is important to understand, normalize, and navigate the break. This doesn’t happen often enough in the system because most people are too afraid to be curious about psychosis.

Society doesn’t understand, and so neither do our psychologists and social workers! Mental health professionals are forced to do the work with little guidance. I was once one of them. Many are untrained interns/workers, and their managers may not be curious about psychosis.

Who is trained to be curious? None of my supervisors ever were. Many I work with question my tactics. There are few organized trainings for being curious about psychosis. Even if professionals are trained to work with psychosis, they may not be able to listen in a validating matter. Invalidating body language can trigger their loved one and they can conclude it is not worth it.

It is very hard to offer treatment when a person is incarcerated against their will and feels betrayed by the people who put them there. Curiosity about psychosis is imperative to initiating voluntary treatment. People who learn alternative ways and grow like flowers through the concrete cracks are so often marginalized.

Meanwhile, the basic myths are maintained. Most are trained not to reinforce the delusions. Others fear they will catch the disease if they listen. Still others fear retraumatizing the respondent and making them angry. Then they do because their fear is apparent.

There are ways around that—by validating the experience of psychosis, so keep reading.

Why Do We Choose Social Control over Healing?

There are several reasons that “treatment” via social control is so vastly promoted in the United States.

There is a very poor, medicalized understanding of what psychosis is. Unproven theories about the biomedical basis of psychosis—like the chemical imbalance myth, studies that find a tiny, clinically insignificant connection with genetics, and dubious, poorly conducted twin studies from 50 years ago—are all represented in the media as if they somehow explain psychosis as a medical condition.

If someone starts talking openly about hearing voices or referencing beliefs about being targeted or enlightened, the average person will flee or mock them. This translates into ridicule, social rejection, and pain—and couple that with the state’s aggressive treatments.

Too many people in the state and the public invalidate the trauma that ensues when social control measures occur. So many people feel it is justified. The state’s goal is simple: spend as little money on the victim as possible, tranquilize or imprison them, get them to fill unskilled labor markets, and don’t let them speak out against our cultural delusions. At least, that’s what I must conclude after a three-month hospitalization in a state hospital.

It can feel like there is not much left for loved ones and good social workers to do besides support the effort to socially control the person they love and wait and see if they will recover.

Some Basic Alternatives to Social Control

In order to promote healing from psychosis, it becomes very important to become uniquely adept at listening, validating, and contributing without getting confused, combative, or dissociated. Asking the right kinds of questions—being curious about any conspiracies the person expresses, rather than trying to argue against them—helps the person realize they are not alone. Trust building is very important.

It’s also important to assist your loved one in adhering to the requirements of work or making it possible for them to continue to socially network and have a social life. As L.A. psychiatrist Mark Ragins suggested in a CASRA keynote speech, work, or building relationships (to which I’d include studying spiritual traditions) are ways to teach us social skills, not incarceration.

Indeed, research in the United States behind Dartmouth’s IPS (Individualized Placement Services) model of vocational rehab suggests that a self-directed effort to conform to work with support is a real way to achieve behavioral benchmarks.

In the IPS model, a job is provided until the subject fails, and then another job is found and maintained until it is lost. Keeping the person moving through the job situation and adhering to social dictates until they can master the needed behaviors to keep a job has been shown by research to be the way to go. It’s in the research! Everyone loves research.

Perhaps we can add this mentality to social and spiritual connectivity and enhance outcomes even further.

The majority of persons with psychosis want to work, have friends, and believe in god. They want to avoid a life of poverty, imprisonment, and isolation. Work is a good motivator, and a good way for many to learn to comply with rules. But it requires emotional support which can be hard for people with psychosis to find.

Avoiding Pitfalls

Sure, some social workers and perhaps some families may form secret societies that monitor their loved ones. These secret societies (like treatment teams in the hospital or family discussions/gossip) can easily be abused and defame the person with psychosis. I think family members and social workers must realize that when they do this, they mirror the oppression of other organizations that may be real and may have something to do with their loved one’s awareness and ire—the police, the FBI, prison gangs, corporations, fraternities, the military, religious cults, and others.

Thus, when family or social workers recognize that they can function as agents of the state, they can be open, communicative, and transparent about the secret societies in which they participate. This can greatly enhance trust.

This might include taking responsibility to learn about things the person has experienced that pertain to you that you don’t feel are accurate. Consider asking about the things your voice has expressed to your loved one (as auditory hallucinations). Then try to see the reality of what they are saying so you can confirm ways the communication is and isn’t valid. Always lead with the way it is valid. Instead of denying everything the person experiences, consider how the hallucinations may express their feelings of persecution or danger. How might their hallucinations help you understand your loved one?

Focus on What Healing Interactions Look Like

Consider the opportunity that you have when the person enduring a break from reality gets mad and confronts you, their loved one, with something of which you are sure you’re not guilty.

I’d strongly recommend that before you confront that person with the reality check of your innocence, that you consider whether you want to avoid falling into the role of social control.

If you find yourself determined to prove your innocence, and confront your loved ones with your facts, I want to suggest they may see this as just another social control effort. It is a lot of the same kind of stuff they get in the state amidst the jails, hospitals, and shelters. It might not be appreciated

In other words, I am saying that defending yourself is a power play. It may gain you some compliance with consensus reality, but it also puts you at risk of diminishing trust between you and your loved one.

In contrast, I suggest you take this intensely emotional situation, a potentially false accusation, and keep the goal of healing in mind. Instead of asserting the power play, let the loved one explore all the experiences that the person who is in a break has had that indicate your guilt. Then, communicate and clarify without invalidating.

When This Does Not Go as Planned

I know this is an exceedingly simple suggestion! Let us not forget that asking the above question is a real test of the amount of trust that exists between the two of you.

For example, when I don’t trust the person who asks me to prove what I am saying with examples, I find I am often rendered speechless. It can be hard to put words to those experiences when you know they will be shot down.

In other words, unless I trust you and feel safe to speak about a misperception or two, words that define my experiences elude me.

Thus, if you are a social worker or a loved one and you don’t get any information, it is likely that you have rejected your loved one’s reality so much over the years that they are afraid to communicate with you. It is likely that they have no hope you would ever understand.

I believe working towards a healing relationship involves cultural curiosity into your loved one’s experience. If you can get yourself to be trusted to the point where you can explore all of your loved one’s associated experiences, then I think you are on the road towards healing them.

If you don’t have that kind of relationship with your loved one, focus on trying to get there and forget about the false accusation. Explore with curiosity other kinds of experience they have had.

Understanding the culture of your loved one’s psychosis to the point where you can admit the ways they are right about you is far more likely to reality check them in a more healing manner and really move your relationship forward.

Adapting Your Strategies

Also, it’s worth noting that people who experience psychosis often come from distinctive cultures, have different needs, and approach a break with different moods and core beliefs. In my experience, I believed I was being persecuted by secret, illegal societies overseen by the government. Other people can have vastly different experiences with secret societies.

For example, some may believe they are being spiritually aided by secret cabals like elite police and/or politicians on their mission. Perhaps not all people experience social control in their family of origin the way I did. Still, you can inquire about euphoric experiences that your loved one may have had. Just remember, you don’t want to come down forcefully on the side of your loved one’s punitive state administrators.

Consider the ways that some positive spiritual experiences really don’t need to be healed. Explore enough to identify those positive experiences that have consequences that might be curbed. Consider what happens, for example, if you make the person descend from heaven back into a living hell on earth. Staying on earth can be a challenge.

This may involve envisioning a world in which they do not have to endure social control to force them to come back down. Helping them takes communication and rational, healthy choices. It becomes more about reviewing the consequences that the state will impose if they go down that road. It becomes about mitigating those realities while maintaining your collaborative standing.

Either way, delineating yourself from the mechanisms of control that may have led to trauma or got in the way of healing is an important thing to do! As a parent or as a social worker, this may involve changing the historical role you’ve taken with your loved one.

This means, instead of telling them what to do, you should consider exploring their experiences.

Takeaways

Do not forget that psychosis, special messages, or a break from reality is a collection of experiences. When you force your loved ones to defy their experiences and accept your reality via reality check, it is really about you imposing consensus reality on them and it puts you on the side of social control. They may know better.

I feel this becomes about your power. Ultimately it puts them down. When you do this, they will recognize this and it may trigger trauma from their run-ins with the state. Thus, differentiating yourself from the state becomes an important strategy.

Helping your loved one heal is about using your relationship to help them to navigate consensus reality so that they can achieve their hopes and dreams. If you care about them and their relationship with you, adopt a collaborative approach to their experiences. This is far more important than them respecting consensus reality, which might be full of ignorance and propaganda.

Supporting their autonomy and freedom is needed. Learning about the mistakes you made can also be important. Give them transparent information about what you have said and done on their behalf. Ask them how they would like you to assist, then communicate.

It’s true, doing what they say and working on their behalf does require boundaries. Even if you are a lawyer, you can’t help them beat the state, only evade it.

But most importantly, differentiate yourself from the organizations that impose social control and discriminatory laws on your loved one. You really don’t want to be on the side of marginalizing them!

The post Support Healing from Psychosis Versus Imposing Social Control! appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

A Definition of Psychosis that Includes Internal Processes:

I believe there are fundamental ways that the inaccurate social definition of psychosis and schizophrenia lead to mistreatment in mental health institutions. The historical definition of psychosis in all the Diagnostic Statistical Manuals is: hallucinations, delusions, and disorganized thinking. In master’s level training I never got more information than that when it came to working with psychosis. I did not understand psychosis. With that limited framework, I was paid to work with schizophrenia for seven years. Oh, how it limited my view of the potential for recovery.

Now, decades later, I think calling it a thought disorder is a fundamental misunderstanding of what is happening. I believe there are processes going on internally to create the external behavioral descriptors of the mainstream definition. I think its high time mental health workers get trained to pay attention to the internal processes that create these anomalous behaviors. Instead metal health workers team up to madly try to correct behavior through incarceration, medication, and behavioral health treatment like case management.

I believe it is important that people we call psychotic or schizophrenic be more self-aware of what they are doing as they are playing truth detective. In the process, it is important for supporters to be aware of those processes and to support, learn about and eventually collaboratively guide those internal processes.

I believe that people like me who experience them need them to be so aware of their internal processes that they can willingly let go of them and chose to behave in accordance with consensus reality. I call this ability to let go and comply with social dictates, message mindfulness.

Applying Mindfulness to Psychosis:

Six years after I was able to suppress my experiences to the point where I could resume my career, I got my Marriage and Family Therapy License. I began my quest to define those internal processes. I wrote a curriculum for groups. I ran them, and I revised and sharpened my views. I have developed eight components of which to be mindful and eight resulting solution strategies that can help a person create a social rehabilitation. I am writing today to present the first concept in my list of eight solution concepts, message mindfulness.

Mindfulness is currently a popularized concept in mental health that involves going toward your feelings and getting close enough that you can fully experience them enough to process and let go of them so they don’t linger in your body and overwhelm you. Marsha Linehan has done a good job identifying six skills associated with mindfulness, which is based on Buddhist Philosophy.

According to Linehan’s training, one can achieve mindfulness by noticing your feeling, putting words to it, and taking the time to fully participate with it. It is also important not to judge the feeling, only do one thing at a time, and focus on trying to do what works in the situation. All this allows the feeling to be released and forgotten about. Those who live mindfully stay present and engaged in the moment.

With mindfulness, we balance our thought processes and our emotional processes so we can let go of painful emotions and the occurrences that cause them. Instead of changing our thoughts, we experience our emotions.

When I talk about message mindfulness though, I am not talking about emotions, I am talking about experiences that trigger the sleuthing process that lead to thoughts that diverge from consensus reality.

Indeed, in that short sentence I have introduced the first three internal processes of psychosis. These are my first three components and are essential to understanding message mindfulness. Thus, it is important to help the person with psychosis pay more attention to what they are doing. This actually entitles them to talk about their experiences without getting shut down, rejected or controlled.

Suppressing triggers to psychosis is a fundamentally different process. Often the person who is trying to suppress their experiences does so because they have been punished for having them. The person may end up at war with those experiences and tormented, they only increase the frequency and intensity with which they experience them. They start to trust them more and to trust people with cultural delusions less.

I am arguing that suppression conversely makes those experiences stronger.

Hence, if someone is traumatized and rages in defeat without trying to function through it, their quality of life and social functioning, declines into a stew and everyone rolls their eyes and calls them a bump on a log. If they fight for survival, the world will see them as a royal pain in the ass and torment them because they are different. Both are recipes for ongoing trauma and suffering.

In contrast, message mindfulness suggests we not judge these experiences, we experience them fully and we move through them staying focused only on the present. It becomes important for supporters and the person experiencing them to learn this lesson. The outcome can be some interesting metaphysical philosophies. With the right kind of balanced conclusions, social life can resume and persist.

Hence, I will officially pause to abolish the words psychotic and schizophrenic because they are profoundly judgmental words to those of us who have experienced them. Instead I will call the person who experiences these phenomena message receivers who will benefit from gaining awareness of message mindfulness

 The First Component of Message Mindfulness: Special Messages.

Message receivers deal with special messages. These are experiences that trigger awareness of an alternate way of making sense of things that others may or may not understand. The definition is very broad because there are a lot of types of things that can be special messages.

Special messages may involve things that everyone can relate to: a sense of intuition; a dream; or the nonverbal sense of another person we get that is based on body language. In a state of hypervigilance, people can be very attuned an sensitive to these experiences. These experiences alone can lead to pondering conspiracies, positive or negative.

Special messages can also be more peculiar voices or visions, tactile, taste, or olfactory hallucination that are unique to the individual but that others probably do not experience in the same way.

These special messages get complicated and mix with other special messages.

For example, a voice says, “I am the devil and you smell like shit!” Perhaps the person figures that the devil is criticizing them for lack of cleanliness. But there is still so much to consider like the race sex and age of the voice. Is the devil really coming from telepathy with the message receiver’s German Sheppard who is just talking wuff talk?

When there is a stabbing pain in the back when the message receiver is not able to get to the shower, one might feel tortured by the devil. It might help to engage with the devil and assert oneself and try to compassionately stave of the stabbing.

Maybe we’ve studied the devil’s voice over time and learn the right ways to heal it so we can prevent the stabbing.

These kinds of messages need to be drawn out and interacted with to help people heal. There is a growing body of literature on this: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-rUvtCwt_cvc5_yqWQX7uA?fbclid=IwAR0clCSfZOWp3u8tCUmFb3OOehLvzWO5IVivdmiTIBV7hSTqUZNy4UQCY3I

Extra sensory perception is also an example of a special message, as are de ja vu experiences, serendipitous coincidences, or mindreading telepathic abilities. Many of us may have these abilities/occurrences. At the same time, it can be hard to know when we have access to them. Thus, we successfully mindread on three occasions, and then we think we are doing it on a fourth but are incorrect. Also, we may assess that others can read our minds when they can only do so fifty percent of the time.

Coded words, double meanings and numeric associations can also lead to special message experiences. For example, pigs in a blanket for a dollar means a hot dog on a bun; not police in a sleeping bag by a campfire, or raw pork chops rolled up in a newspaper. Or does it? Also consider the meaning of the name of my favorite rapper: KRS-ONE, Knowledge Reigns Supreme Over Nearly Everyone. Or consider the name of another rapper: fifty cent, 50 cent or 5-0-scent. Playing the game of punny coincidences can get very complicated especially when spies are involved. Just watch Austin Power’s, The Spy that Shagged Me!

Additionally, the written word may lack a clear emphasis or have an unintended emphasis to make significant conspiracy inferences that may or may not be true. Finally, words can be metaphors with entirely different meanings, like children’s song, puff the magic dragon means a bone of cannabis getting smoked. Or Captain Jack will get you high tonight mean booting heroin into your veins.

The world and reality become full of symbolic occurrences. So does TV and movies. There may be more learned about reality in art than there is on the local news.

These may be guided by corrupt powers in the government, by a wide variety of secret societies, or by righteous spiritual processes. Perhaps time travel has influenced covert futuristic codes. Then, these coded coincidences may mix with the actions of people around them that are acting in similar manners or using TV or movie references to make a point.

Welcome to the work of divergent views, causation theories/frameworks, and spiritual trickster and self-fulfilling prophesies. All of these are other components of psychosis that we gain with mindfulness. There still are others.

To get a better sense of special messages, you can sign up for my mailing list and more extensive list of examples: https://timdreby.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=875d1a8dc62c7e575c8572fc9&id=d384b7dd74

Mix all the special messages up in a bag and it can lead to some very troubling or wonderful interpretations of reality. Each interpretation might need to be experienced and understood mindfully without letting the emotions get negatively impacted and affecting the message receiver’s behavior. That’s a lot to ask. As a result, to achieve message mindfulness, there may be massive conflicts that need to be worked out or metaphysical beauty to be distracted from. Often it is a mixture of both once you really start to explore a message receivers experience.

The Second Concept of Message Mindfulness: Sleuthing

When a person gets a special message, they may need to get busy in their mind to figure out what the message means. Behind the sleuthing process is an intense emotional alarm that results from the special message. As a result, the message receiver may be on high alert for other details or messages that may add to their plot/journey. Once they are convinced a conspiracy is present or alternative ideas of what is going on are at play, they may end up on the lookout for more clues. Suddenly with a heightened awareness, clues and messages become more frequent and support the concept of the conspiracy. Figuring out what is going on, can be like a twenty-four hour a day job that is rarely interrupted by activities or tasks.

I call this state sleuthing. It is also called making meaning in the hearing voices movement. In a sense, all these special message experiences become highlighted and are often received as they are traumatic or enlightened. Thus, making meaning becomes a coping strategy that helps the message receiver endure. Tell them to stop doing it and distract themselves from these dilemmas and the intensity of the sleuthing is likely to increase. They may sleuth while they are trying to accomplish something making them slow in accomplishing it. They may not get reinforced for their efforts and may feel discouraged in comparison to chronically-normal accomplishment.

I believe that effective therapy becomes sleuthing alongside the message receiver. It means helping them be more aware of the special messages they are receiving that lead them to formulate their thoughts or conclusions. That in a nutshell is message mindfulness. But it also means learning more about and normalizing the next component of psychosis, divergent views.

Additionally, as mentioned above, there are still other parts of psychosis, like studying causation theories or frameworks, or studying negative/positive self-fulfilling prophesies can cause errors, oppression and persecution, Thus, later concepts exist and can also can assist with working with divergent views to change the trauma or elation they may cause.

The Third Concept: Divergent Views

Many message receivers are trained not to share their divergent views. Divergent views can be spot on accurate and they can lead to errors. Usually, reality is a mix. If a divergent view is expressed others are likely to call them crazy, psychotic, or schizophrenic. Many of us have lost many friends and supports this way. Some people get consequences that bite them back within the system in which they are embedded.

The funny thing about divergent views is that so many of the divergent views we have, as I mentioned above, are true.

For example, if we say our phones are tapped it is a major admission that make people call us schizophrenic, but, in reality, the phones are really tapped. Thanks to international fugitive, Edward Snowden, we now know this to be true. But when it comes down to it, people don’t want to hear about intelligence secrets. Message receivers need to learn not to talk about those elements of reality when they experience evidence of them. However, there also needs to be safe havens where they can discuss like therapy and support groups.

With the sleuthing stoked by divergent views, the message receiver wants to talk about it. However, if they share their concerns, they get identified as a schizophrenic. That may intensify the secrecy and privacy of the sleuthing process. They are constantly tempted to behave as if their divergent views are accurate, behavior that could lead to incarceration. Thus, they make an effort to bury that information.

In their swirls of special message experiences, message receiver’s emotions get peaked. They learn that some of their divergent views are accurate and it is a strong positive reinforcer. Intermittent punishment makes no sense. What I am arguing is that divergent views need to be normalized instead of punished.

However, a good way to start discussions about special message experiences is to talk about conspiracy theories associated with governmental abuse or social control. There are many of them out there in the media from the secret knowledge of alien involvement in the evolution of civilization to the history of the Templar Knights in the crusades. Conspiracies theories about all the assassinations in the sixties are another good way to discuss conspiracy. Once you have identified the conspiracy, it is possible to try to identify the special message evidence that reveals the conspiracy to the message receiver.

Message Mindfulness:

Ultimately message mindfulness is the ability to accept the special message experience with no emotional charge and with complete acceptance. It is the ability to let go of the divergent view and divert your attention from sleuthing. It means staying engaged in an activity that will help you survive. This may mean setting limits with sleuthing and doing it after the fact.

Message mindfulness is the ability to act as if consensus reality is all that matters when that isn’t true. It is a willingness to engage with lies and flawed paradigms of the modern world and constructively work to better them.

In another sense message mindfulness is the ability to be aware of the experience, detach from the meaning that is made from the experience, and make peace with the resulting conspiracies in a way that they can be released from the thinking mind. Staying busy and focused on a task can help accelerate the mindfulness phenomena

There is more to message mindfulness than we have reviewed in this blog. Remember there are still five other components of psychosis in my definition. I have alluded to only two others on a few occasions.

The awareness of all those concepts makes it easier to accept things the way they are and resolve the conflicts with society that usually get highlighted by special message experiences. Once the issues are addressed mindfulness becomes easier.

It only takes a bit of faking your way through and projecting the cultural delusions that modern society depends on to survive. That is how you can achieve message mindfulness.

The Madness with Which We Are Treated in the Mental Health System:

In behavioral health treatment they tend to believe that psychotics and schizophrenics of the world are better when they give up on their pursuit of the truth, and behave in concert with the millions of social myths that make up consensus reality. When they can do so they can take care of themselves. If this is the goal, there are good and bad ways to achieve it.

Though its arguable that it can work to criminalize and incarcerate schizophrenia and psychosis, there is also carnage in the process. There ends up being many people who get permanently warehoused or stuck in crisis states. Incarceration and homelessness happened to me and I managed to make it back. I could have been trapped a lot longer if I had not used family support.

I just think it can be done more gently with far less institutional damage and punishment.

I am arguing that this starts by understanding how our internal processes are different. Once we understand we can join with people who are trained to understand and form trusting relationships. We can find people who are supports rather than adversaries and controllers. In doing so, we can learn to be mindful of our internal processes, let them go and act in accordance with the cultural delusions we all agree upon in order to function in nation states.

Message mindfulness, just does not happen in hospitals and treatment facilities on a regular basis. Instead, for everyone’s safety, we get locked up a one size fits all system that forces us to behave in accordance with behavioral norms. If we comply, we may end up living in warehousing conditions, dependent on social security, and perhaps feel like cash cows. Something is foul in the state of Denmark!

Indeed, in the hospital we find ourselves locked up, stripped of our rights, and not even allowed to talk about what we are thinking about and going through. We must suppress what we are going through and act as if it doesn’t matter without becoming violent. Then we can get set free. It isn’t a great deal of help.

We get released unto a world where we must suppress our experiences enough to make a living and, in many cases, pull ourselves out of poverty. Maybe the family takes care of us and becomes responsible for figuring it out all on their own without any guidance. Maybe the family learns the social definition of the problem and the illness mindset and is able to control the situation utilizing warehousing or providing sanctuary. Ultimately this may lead to satisfying relationships, but it often does not.

The question becomes can we train people with the message mindfulness mindset and insert them into our institutions to improve the outcomes? Can we build this into our punitive system via changing the definition of psychosis one mind at a time?

The post How Message Mindfulness Can Help Change the Madness Within Our System! appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".