Twenty years ago, I experienced what might be termed a break from reality while I was working as a mental health worker. I worked in a last resort section 8 housing project that was rife with crime. It was called “The Hotel of Horrors” in an article in the local media.

For six months, I dedicated myself to acting as a safe resource to residents facing significant violence. I had the sense that my conduct which included alerting the press and working with local activists, was putting me and the project at risk. I kept doing what seemed to be the right thing and thinking, “I would be paranoid if I thought this action would be problematic!”

Still, my job was threatened by a supervisor who had a substance abuse problem. The pressure increased from the management company and a small segment of the residents. I decided to withdraw off the three medications I took for my hard-to-treat depression.

***

My own mental health struggles started with anorexia in high school and led to a rather impoverished and isolated collegiate experience. My best and only friend was an older recovering addict. I lived in a roach-infested apartment complex and made more friends with local people than I did with other students. However, when I graduated, I thrived as a social worker and was promoted once I put myself through graduate studies.

I was aware that I had a personality disorder that was often linked to schizophrenia. However, when I withdrew off my medication I found that I had enhanced intuition and that I experienced facts that were suggestive of corruption more intensely.

***

I called my old college friend and asked for advice and he threatened me. I bolted. I withdrew all my money from the bank, shaved my head and headed for the Canadian Border.

Sure enough, it was just as I feared! I was forced to stop to fill the tank at a gas station. Police had posted themselves at the station. “Did Mommy and Daddy say your brain chemicals are out of whack?” mocked an officer as they approached me.

I had my peaceful-ass taken in taken into custody with unnecessary pain tactics and bruised wrists. I was driven eighty miles from my car to the state capital where they turned me over to a psychiatrist to put me into a state hospital.

I first got confirmation that the mafia was in fact following me five days later after I finally surrendered to the police on a mountain pass late one night. My roommate identified himself as a Native American “hillbilly” with 130 IQ and told me the mafia was following me.

I had already met with my parents who had flown out to support the incarceration, so I told the “hillbilly” that I thought my family was the mafia.

***

I was only physically hurt once in the hospital. The beat down was by staff. My best guess was that I was outing an undercover FBI agent. I was confused. My parents were told I had become violent.

Indeed, I resisted invitations to run away with a Mexican mafia connected female who persisted in wooing me. I refused to join a white gang for protection against her. You see, I was hospitalized for three months in the State hospital. There would be icicles frozen on the inside of the window that was located above my bed.

***

When I got released, I packed the few belongings I had left that weren’t stolen, sold my car, and took a greyhound.

I tried to make it on my own. I got a job working in a daycare; but lost it when I ran out of medication. Then, I couldn’t find any work anywhere!

I had an aunt who found me a job at an upscale Italian deli in the bay area if I relocated. I moved to the outskirts boon town where housing was more affordable. I had a long bike and BART commute. I was able to use the service economy job with some help from my parents, to get back on my feet. It wasn’t easy because I had a bone to pick with the mafia and I was working at an Italian Deli with some substance-abusing rich kids, but I survived.

***

When I found myself incarcerated into a small day room for two weeks, I was traumatized. At least I knew not to accept the hospital social workers housing arrangements. Those kinds of resources are offered with the presumption of ongoing disability. Not only would I have had to deal with loss and ongoing psychosis, I would have had to languish behind the iron curtain of the mental health system. Many of my cohorts do so and end up on the streets. Many get put in jail or otherwise incarcerated and this dehumanizing treatment so often exacerbates the crisis.

For those readers who haven’t heard voices, try going through the traumatic treatment in our incarceration institutions, our public housing authority projects, or many of our board and care homes. See if you don’t come out hearing voices! I finally did hear voices after I escaped the Deli. I heard a demonic voice calling my name.

Now I am employed as a Marriage and Family Therapist and work with people in an inner-city mental health facility in Oakland CA. More and more as people are displaced in the city where I work, they end up in sprawling encampments, hard-to-get-into homeless shelters, board and care homes, bucket automobiles, and if they are lucky in a few years they may make it into an apartment in a housing project like the one I worked in. Many people who live in shelters work low wage service jobs like I did. Nowadays, it is easier for someone who has mental health struggles to fall and not be able to come back like I did.

The post A Glimpse Behind the Iron Curtain of the Mental Health System appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

For the past ten years I have used the words special messages to bring people together behind a better-defined notion of psychosis. I hope in this article will help better define what I mean by special messages and why I think that messages are part of a process that includes seven other components that I defined in my last article.

Many people who have worked with me presume that when I say special messages I mean voices. It’s true that the words hearing voices ring true as music to my ears. Indeed, the hearing voices movement has vastly improved the social understanding of what is happening to message receivers. Less dominant are the memes associated with all the “psycho” stigma that gets equated with the psychosis word. However, I still argue that just saying hearing voices fails to unite all people under the umbrella of the word psychosis.

I have come to feel that saying hearing voices is like saying the letter “a” instead of the word alphabet. It’s true that voices offer real and valuable experiences that society tries to suppress. But, I think that there are at least twenty-five types of experiences in addition to voices that can be relevant in creating psychosis. Put those experiences together in different ways and a person can create a vast masterpiece of meaningful reality that functions as an alternative to mainstream thought.

Not everyone who experiences psychosis uses all twenty-six types of experience, but some individuals may use far more than I can depict in this article. I believe each message receiver has a profile of messages: some that they can and cannot relate to.

I contend that no message is sicker than another. Indeed, problems associated with special messages need to be measured by the level of distress they cause, not by their existence. In fact, someone who hears voices is not necessarily sicker than someone who has more “normal” message experiences like getting an intuition or having a dream. In fact, one person may hear a voice and experience little distress, but have an interpersonal interaction that troubles them drastically. Others don’t get upset about their intuitions or interpersonal interactions, but are harassed to no-end by the fact they hear controlling voices. Sometimes it is the convergence of many different types of messages that cause the distress.

An experience becomes a special message because not everyone else has experienced it and because its meaning is not always clearly defined. Indeed, special messages take an element of speculation to thoroughly understand. Ultimately, sometime message receivers are spot on accurate about reality based on their special messages, but mistake happen.

I have found that encouraging people to tell stories about message crisis or “psychosis,” over the years helps uncover a variety of types of special messages that fit different profiles. It also helps a person feel validated, heal and connect to others. Though it can take some time, I have seen many people realize they are not alone for the first time in treatment hearing stories that others tell.

I also believe healing involves being able to pay more attention to message processes instead of just suppressing them and pretending to be a normal droid. Thus, emotions associated with special messages can be felt without burning their way permanently into a person’s life.

Many of us who suffer may have become preoccupied with real issues of war, genocide, torture, apocalyptic fatalities, spirit discernment, metaphysics, social control, truth, mind control, propaganda, good and evil and healing from these dilemmas may help us become very wise and valuable social contributors.

Additionally, people in message crisis need people who are aware of what they are going through to be with them while they are going through it. Message crisis can be an extremely alienating experience in which everyone wants to correct, rather than support the message receiver.

Although some message experiences in a person’s profile may seem normal or “real,” in crisis, they can dominate the day particularly because they fit together with others that no one would believe. The following are questions that I have developed to help the reader identify experiences that have influenced message receivers into what I believe become cultural thoughts that get defined as psychosis:

• Do other people hint at things that profoundly relate to your life as though they know everything about you as though they have been listening to wire taps or are clued in through word of mouth, or other intuitive skills?

• Do you get special intuitions based on body language or voice inflection or reading peoples’ minds that often turn out to be correct?

• Do you get uncanny premonitions from gut feelings, or intuitions that might be considered ESP?

• Can you pick up on people’s energy so that you can tell how they’re feeling when they pass by?

• Do gestures or specific behaviors of others help you to most definitely know their unconscious thoughts?

• Are things that bear symbolic meaning being left around for you to find that might be there to re-program you as if they are counter intelligence?

• Do you have odd strings of “coincidence” that link together in ways that suggest or confirm things (serendipity?)

• Do people follow you on the bus or train bear objects that identify them to you as people who are following you for better or worse?

• Are you able to instantly tell if people are either for or against you

• Are people sent to represent other people you know for a significant reason (impostors, look-a-likes, doppelgangers, agents)

• Are you profoundly affected by dreams might be prophesies or reveal truths about yourself or the universe?

• Do you experience de ja vu occurrences during which something happens that feels like it is happening to you again for the second time?

• Do you find yourself reviewing vivid memories, sentences or words for hidden meanings?

• Do people use codes to communicate secret info like numbers or words; do you break words into syllables and look for punny linguistic coincidences?

• Do people have clear telepathic communication with you intentionally

• Do movies, songs or shows on the radio or TV come to take on new meanings when you read between the lines. Might they even be special broadcasts that only you get?

• Does certain forms Media contain secret coded truths that only you can understand?

• Are you touched by the truth when you read in between the lines of certain situations?

• Does it seem like people are putting on skits around you to teach you a lesson?

• Is history full of conspiracies that god reveals the truth to you about because of discernment of spirit?

• Are people slipping things in your food that are taking over your bodily processes?

• Do you have bizarre visual experiences that make you think you are in a different dimension or on a different planet?

• Do you see ghosts or entities that communicate with you in ways that other people may or may not be clued into?

• Do you hear your own thoughts as distinguishable words that give personal insights into your being?

• Do you hear people you know talking to you as though you are engaging in in telepathy?

• Do your voices become familiar characters to you that you keep track of and take on personalities that you name and react to?

• Do you get physically tortured through tactile pain or sensations that function in conjunction with your voices?

• Have you ever been taught about the “I” word—illusions—which are sounds, visual experiences, sensations, smells or tastes that mix with reality, that really are there but that may become distorted to give you uncommon experiences?

• Do people make uncanny comments about your private thoughts or experience when you pass by them talking in the community.

• Has a character on the TV starts talking directly at you referencing you by name?

• Has the hiss of a steam heater started turning into voices?

• Have clouds in the sky turn into visual shapes?

• Have you experienced things that are so strange it seems impossible that beliefs you hold are not true?

• Do you have an uncanny awareness of or evidence of who you were in a past life?

• Do you see projected images that show you secret images or entertaining stories that give you secrets about your ancestry or aliens or the mysteries of the universe?

• Can you communicate with spirits, aliens or ghosts?

• Do you sense when reincarnated spirits, aliens, or robot-machines have entered modern bodies as clones by looking at a person’s glistening eyeballs?

The post Why I Say Special Messages Instead of Psychosis appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".