FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE     

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

Fighting for Freedom in America by Clyde Dee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Genre: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs

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

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

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

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

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

The post Initial Press Release appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“Wow, I just took a shit and it was this big!” John Bulushi

I feel sorry for my English professor who wanted to put my essay up for an award! The glare I gave him and the lack of response: it was, at its best, very rude.

The fact is, I only learned it bothered him because my best friend who was fifteen years older than me got an invite to the professor’s house for dinner. My friend who had a lifetime of experience using and dealing drugs reported that the professor had called his cute, sleeping hound a beast repeatedly throughout the night and talked about how alcohol was his drug of choice while toasting his guest’s sobriety. However, my friend reported, when it came to me, the professor admitted that he just didn’t know what to say.

“I think I know what that kid’s problem is,” the professor had conceded.

I gave my favorite sociology professor the same look when he announced that my paper was one of the few 100% papers he’d ever given out.

Okay, so I am the sort who spends a lot of time trying to understand my own warped behavior. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I have taken to writing in the first place.

Ready to Break into the Social Media Market?

But, oh-me, oh-my, the sudden dilemmas of a writer like me who has squandered away his life, sitting on his work without sending it out to be published. What does it mean to suddenly be exposed to a social media market when you are just poking your head out after all these years?

Sure, I have a life-sustaining professional guise, but I have no kids, make no friends and tolerate no dinner parties. I have always worked more than full-time to stay out of the mental hospital and off the streets. I write to survive instead of dealing with my domestic responsibilities!

And suddenly I am looking out on a landscape that requires a blog and a brand. There is the implied presumption on the web that you have friends and loved ones who will become fans. Suddenly, I must make friends—lots of them—in order to sell them a book that took me seven years to write. Now I must write blogs that people want to read or there is no point. I wonder if write-to-live authors I love, like Salinger or Bukowski, would even be welcome anymore!

Voices Who Only Live-to-Write?

Maybe you’ve heard what I have: “most writers are voracious readers!” To me that sets up the expectation that writers are supposed to live to write! That’s what many of the publishing outlets want us to do. “Get to know our audience and then write for them,” they imply. Sometimes I wonder if the whole idea of journalism operates in this way. Outsiders go and learn about the lives of others, write, and so the public who has privilege can have their little tyrannical judgments validated.

My question: is when we live to write in this manner and then write to publish, what happens to the reality of the rest of us? How does the masses of stories that I hear at the urban psychiatric ward where I work become so invisible? How do the shootings in the inner-city pass on without being mourned by the mobs of traffic that siphon into the city to work?

I want to write-to-live. I want to extend my truth. I am a psychotherapist who works in the inner-city. Why can’t I write about that? In eeking out an existence, I want to strengthen what I experience and live a truer life.

Does the social media era support the practice of just telling people more of what they want to hear? Is it all only about reading the kinds of facts that make us feel good about ourselves?

Writing-to-Live:

When I think about how I discovered writing in high school. it was not about loving books and reading. I loved music, not books. I had no rhythm on the guitar, loved the words I was singing, and had to write a lot a lot of papers to graduate. Somehow, I tired of grading on people’s ears and found the art of word expression satisfying.

I particularly started to work on writing once I suspected that my mother who was on the faculty of our private school, outed all my inpatient antics to her faculty friends. When I finally got discharged from hospitals for male anorexia, it had seemed that news had spread like wildfire straight back to my bully peers. Now the truth about me was distorted, potentially distorted by my parents. Since this was my reality, I wrote creatively to own my life.

Writing became a reason to keep on living. I was at the word processor an awful lot.

I returned to school living at a friend’s house and now my greatest efforts did not even bring me the grades I wanted let alone the awards that I fantasized about. In fact my best essay was turned into the school psychologist and I was formally confronted. I saw it as them threatening to kick me out of school. I still sent the essay out to colleges. I got into some decent ones, but I didn’t want to enter more phony life where grapevines were lies. Instead, I would get together with an older woman and enter a commuter college in the inner-city.

It’s true, due to unrecognized ADD and dyslexia, teachers always found my spelling mistakes menacing. Perhaps they just presumed I wasn’t putting in the effort. Perhaps with my father as their manager and my mother as their reading specialist, no teacher ever knew what to do with me.

I did graduate cum laude, but I graduated believing the concept of grades was more political than based on merit. Research shows this to be a true presumption, but students aren’t supposed to think like that.

You to Go Fuck Yourself!

So clearly my biggest concern in attending college was to send almost all the people I knew the biggest, “fuck you,” I could muster. And, so, the fuck-the-awards, creative writer was born.

There I was three-years later at the kind of school that was not the type that drew out future academics or writers. The career development computer program I took recommended a career in law enforcement. I had too many neighborhood friends at the Korean Deli where I worked insulting the vice squad behind their backs to take the consideration very seriously. As per other students, most couldn’t relate to a clearly anorectic male who would go to no parties and drink no beer.

I’d lived in the library where I diligently outlined everything I read so I could pay attention to it.

I logged so many hours, reading just wasn’t something I was going to keep up with for fun. So much for being the voracious reader and writing about writings of others!

Supporting myself through a master’s program did not give me much time to read for pleasure either. I was faking my way through master’s level work on the social work job and remember looking at the full-time students who even had time to read the paper and thinking they were entitled. The locks to my car were broken and because I had no money or time to fix them, I just entered my car through the back and crawled my way up to the driver seat. I didn’t care what the full-time students said when they laughed and tried to insult me.

While I was, by no means the only one who worked my way through at the school I went to, I was the only one who entered my car in this manner. I missed graduation because I never did get the paperwork in on time.

So, when school was out, I was done with books. I returned to a creative poetry habit and kept my internal buzz alive; but couldn’t find anyone else’s work that I appreciated. I did occasionally frequent poetry readings; but couldn’t read my poetry without quivering.

“I think writing is good for you,” said my shrink of seven years when I brought up the issue, “but that’s it! You are always so disappointed when you share your work, I think there is no need for that.”

I often found my obsessive re-writing hard to stop.

Consider the Reader?

I know people are supposed to be humble about themselves and not bore the reader with irrelevant info. But I write to live. I write to share the truth about other people who are condemned and lied on. I started with an award-winning memoir; but blogging to get recognized in social media markets is a different pickle.

So, I am faced with the same questions we all face. Do I join writer’s groups and start sharing my work and getting feedback, so I can swap likes on Facebook to look popular and loved? Do I spend hours playing with social media, so others will read your posts? Do I start making friends with people who went to school at elite universities and have large twitter following so you can access their readers? Is this even possible when the very reason I write is because people have always rejected me! Is there really time for any of this when you work and commit to ten hours of writing a week.

So, here I am writing another essay for an audience of people who I don’t even know to be out there for sure on social media.

I’ll keep giving myself assignments to try to get published somewhere besides just my blog. I think an audience of working people exists out there, who might respond to my efforts to relate the things I observe. I spend my time living and that’s what I write about. But I guess I can keep going with my write-to-live attitude on social media till I find people who can relate. Nobody’s stopping me.

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