What was emerging now was different than anything I had experienced prior.

I had just gotten support from relationships I had built over the past year at the Quaker meeting-for-worship.

Maybe my situation at work had been getting whispered about among my friends. Maybe my spirit was exuding a sense of desperation. Either way, I’d felt safer under the spell of the service, the last bit of community support I would experience for years.

When the service was over I’d checked in. A year-long friend gave me a deep hug with just a little more boob than I was comfortable with.

“I guess I am learning that it’s not safe to talk about what’s going on at the Morrison to anyone,” I told my slightly newer friend.

The Morrison was the notorious Section 8 housing project where I worked setting up social services for disabled residents. The deal was, homeless and disabled could get off the streets and into affordable housing, but they had to live in crime ridden contexts. Many good Seattle folk were concerned this just wasn’t good enough. As a result, there were frequent news articles written about the project.

“Well, I guess you know I will be holding you in the light,” said my newer friend who was so genuine I knew he was not an informer. He could be a life-long friend, I thought as I fingered the phone-number-paper-scrap in my pocket. I had obtained the number from a female just before the service.

But alas, I was ready to lay down my life to rectify injustice of what I’d seen at the Morrison. I was directly responsible for three recent news articles articulating the neglect. Maybe it was just a matter of time until they figured out it was me.

Now, here in this adjacent coffee house, it was as if I had just walked into a sting operation.

Having just gotten barked at by this addict with bulging veins when I had tried to use the bathroom he was occupying. I sat waiting with urgent need to pee, watching this father with his son.

The father was hefty and awkward, and his son was this with-it Seattle youth who looked adoring.

In fact, this father looked like a hometown acquaintance. I had just last night heard that this acquaintance had been found with a bullet in his head in his shed. Just last night, my oldest friend had told me the story when I contacted him. I had contacted him in hopes for his assessment of the level of danger I was experiencing.

“Just don’t let that happen to you!” my friend had said concerned.

Now it occurred to me that my oldest friend and I were basically saying this “suicide” sounded like a mob hit. Was it possible that the FBI sent a look-alike because they were tapping my phone?

Now this familiar looking man goes to the bathroom and pounds on the door. I see the addict emerge and fire an insult at him just as he had done to me. But the man, unlike me, was waiting for him. He barked right back. It was as if he were punching the addict in the gut. Still, no one was going to get in that bathroom! But the father walked away and was respected by his son.

Was this scene really staged by an arm of the government that trying to get me to change my Quaker values? I had a sense that I was meant to see this interaction! Was I being brainwashed into taking people out?

I did want justice; but violently taking people out and putting the wrong people in jail was more the work of the local law enforcement! It wasn’t what I was about.

My mind skipped. The night before I’d asked my mother if I had ever been sexually abused. I’d brought up some memories and had suspicions with a menacing tone.

I was believing that I was traumatized, not a mental case like my therapist had been telling me for the past seven years.

It was true, I once suffered from an eating disorder that almost killed me. It was also true I was extremely shy and had some disassociated memories. But still I had nothing direct to prove I was experiencing PTSD. Instead I carried the diagnosis of a schizotypal personality disorder. That meant when people picked on me I was paranoid.

When I finally left the coffee house, I drove north past my apartment, to the discount theater where I caught the afternoon showing of Me, Myself, and Irene. As the movie progressed, I remained astonished by the coincidences. Jim Carey had to suppress a secreted abuse. He had to raise his wife’s kids alone. Everyone around him mocked him. It was like that for me too. That was what my life had been like.

Now, as I watched the film for the second day in a row, I wondered about the role of the FBI following him. It was ironic that they were using his psychiatric profile to pin blame. Meanwhile to protect Rene Zellweger from the abusive ex-boyfriend who is controlling the FBI, Jim Carey has got to go through a caper to cure himself. I sensed that this is what I was getting ready to go through!

I knew there was alarming abuse going on at the Morrison. There were the secret files the management company held. There was a world of undercover informers and intelligence. These were the real muddy waters that infect those corridors of housing for the disabled, the backwards, the board and care homes, the jails, the prisons, and the inner-cities. I wasn’t accepting those: “now, that sounds like your paranoia!”— words my therapist frequently sang at me.

Since I stopped taking my medication a few weeks ago, I was starting to better see through the limited lies of the mental health establishment.

Back when this movie first came out, I choose not to see it because of the criticisms of the AMA! Now, I was meant to see this film when I did. I concentrated hard on the details guided by a higher power. More and more, the film seemed to be about me!

Earlier that week while at the Morrison, a resident had given me a great compliment about my work. “But I just want to say,” he added, “one time we had a worker like you who came and fought for the clients, but then he lost his job. He had to come down here and live as a resident himself. I just don’t want that to happen to you!”

As the movie finished, I felt at risk. I felt compelled to figure out the truth!

Later that night I made more phone calls in the bunker of my room just as I had done the night previous. Eventually, I called by best college friend who was fifteen years older than me and whose first career was that of a drug dealer. I called him believing that I was selected for this high-profile job by people who knew I would take it. People who knew me so well they knew what I’d do before I did it.

Indeed, it had been a strange shock to all involved that the power-brokers had selected the contract proposed by our agency. Now that I was getting wise, maybe I was becoming a threat.

My best friend always had delusions of grandeur that were associated with his bipolar disorder. He had this thing when he got manic. He sounded like he was connected to the mafia. He had shown me so many great mobster movies and was always seemed to use them to teach.

But now he replies in blunt tone “If you ever betray me, Tim, you need to know that I do have the power to harm you and I will use it if I have to.”

My mind sped through all the coincidences that had caused me to form this strong connection with my college friend. Was it true that it was all as it seemed? He often called himself a dry drunk. Maybe that meant he was still in the mafia.

Within twenty minutes I packed my car with the fundamentals and I took off. I would not live under this threat the rest of my life!

When I left Seattle that evening, I stayed in this state of emergency for two years. It wouldn’t be until many months after I returned to taking medication that the crisis dissipated.

On my way to Canada, I got stopped by police separated from my car. I was tracked for three days until I was remanded into a three-month psychiatric hospitalization in Montana State Hospital.

Once discharged, I got off the streets by getting a job but ran out of my discharge supply of medication. When I was told not to return to my job, I still had to pay rent! Despite intensive local efforts, the only job I could get was an arranged job at an Italian Delicatessen. To get the job, I had to move to the bay area.

To this day I still believe the job involved a mob connection. I know this sounds unlikely to many. It’s true that half of my evidence was faulty. But still a lot of it turns out to add up.

I also think I was correct about trauma and the mental health system during those tense days I was going through spiritual emergence almost eighteen years ago. I still work in the mental health system amidst great trauma and exploitation. I cannot maintain living in the murky waters of this modern-day fiasco we call the mental health system without using the medication I was started on twenty-five years ago.

I now pay mortgage on my own house, but still have no desire to do what it takes to be included in the false sense of community support I had back in Seattle. I wash my hands in the muddy waters of the mental health system.

It may be true I work hard; but I make money while my brothers and sisters remain warehoused and in dire circumstances. I sometimes think my ability to see all the angles and oppression is not really a disability. But I take my medication despite all the side effects to tolerate the abuse I see.

The post Spiritual Emergence in the Muddy Waters of the Mental Health System appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

A Need for Providers who Specialize in “Psychosis.”

I was hired straight out of college into work in the counseling field. I started to work with an adult mental health population at my second professional job at the age of twenty-three. Since that time I have been increasingly focused on how to make therapeutic engagement meaningful when working with people in “psychosis.” In the field there are many who will say or imply this is not possible. They may argue that the mental health system is the best we can do. This story is for the providers who think more can be done to help individuals who have anomalous experiences.

***

Working my way through graduate school, I can still remember struggling to get my dumb-ass footings as a professional counselor. I remember thinking about how ironic it is that they start you out with the most sophisticated of problems.

“Oh, you’re good,” said this vagabond homeless man who sticks out in my memory.

“What do you mean?” I asked perplexed by how he could affirm me with such confidence.

“Well, I can tell because you just asked me what was going on with my schizophrenia, like you really wanted to understand it.”

I did a little double take on this man standing before me. I couldn’t understand how when he lived such a deprived, sunburned, and sweaty existence that he could respond to this young, privileged and nervous person in front of him by being supportive. I didn’t sense that he was doing this to butter me up.

I recall making an internal commitment to him on that day. Hence started my desire to learn about and heal schizophrenia. I felt I owed that man something for his kindness.

***

By the time I got my degree so that I was promoted to a case management position, I found it a wonderful opportunity to get a picture of what life was like for the schizophrenic clients on the streets, in the boarding homes, away from the clinic. It was not a pretty picture, but I reasoned that now I could provide a service to earn their rapport. Then, I could use my little theoretically informed counseling skills to get at their truth. In many ways, I did not actually know what to say other than, “Did you take your medication?” However, I was happy with the arrangement.

Meanwhile, in my personal life, I got tired of being in and around my hometown. Sure, I went to school in a ghetto and had built up the rental history to take up a lease on a suburban flophouse with some acquaintances. Sure I fled that shelled-out place into a pad in the city. But, somehow this plus getting dumped in all the female relationships that I barely managed to make wasn’t enough for me.

***

I switched coasts and accepted underemployment in a new city where I could pick up where I left off at understanding schizophrenia. Here, I really wasn’t expected to do therapy as I monitored well-tended housing for clusters of mentally ill adults, but I did anyway. My supervisor, whose standard care I often challenged, found me difficult. My better than average handwriting was targeted as being a problem.

It’s true the clients seemed to have it pretty good in the west coast city. The facilities I monitored were much nicer than the ghetto ones back east. But within six months, after another heartache, I took a promotion in a pilot program setting up services in a notorious section eight housing authority complex.

I must admit as a kid who grew up in a private school, the streets and the ghetto, much like schizophrenia, had always been a lure for me. I love other cultures. I set up shop in the notorious section 8 housing project. I got some real exposure to what people who end up homeless and destitute due to schizophrenia deal with. Let me tell you, it wasn’t a very safe holding environment.

Six months in, I was talking with a resident I trusted very dearly. He had once told me who the for-real drug kingpin was about the complex. He paused a minute and said, “You know, one time we had a person like you work for us before, someone who really cared and fought for the residents. That person, ended up losing his job and having to come and live with the residents. I just don’t want that to happen to you.

I looked at this schizophrenic resident who worked a minimum wage job. It was true that since I had leaked stories to the media about some of the suspicious violence and fear that the residents were subjected to, that I had been picking up on random threats and feeling very unsafe.

***

Within a week, things escalated into my personal life. I got threated by someone who really did have a nefarious past. I started getting interesting takes on mainstream movies.

I tried to get to the Canadian border to seek asylum and ended up getting separated from my car. Eventually I surrendered to police in a ditch while ascending a mountain pass. They took me to State Hospital where I resided in barracks three months. Just when I was starting to come to terms with this ridiculous black market sea of poverty I was cast into, I was transferred to the most chronic ward where the overcrowded conditions were comparable to the worst of what I’d ever seen.

I spent two years after that trying to overcome homelessness and underemployment in a full-blown psychotic episode.

***

What I had learned about schizophrenia at that point was that most people had absolutely no interest in it. As a mental health patient, I found that no one was any longer interested in my story or what I had to say. The five-word phrase, I had been trained to use, “Tell me more about that!” was replaced with a famous five-word question: “Did you take your medication?” Nobody believed a word I said no matter how real I was being. And no longer did anyone care what I was subjected to.

For example, during my “psychosis” I believed the mob or the government was following me. The only job I could find despite hundreds of applications and two relocations was at an Italian Delicatessen, I had needed to bike twenty miles and catch a two-hour long train ride, daily. Nobody had cared that I was in back pain through the all of it. I was still the last to go on break. I was blamed and framed for anything that went wrong. There were constant threats against my job. There had been no acknowledgment for my efforts, only complaints about my service from upper-class people, and punk-ass ridicule from my teenage co-workers. Finally, I agreed to take medication.

How was I to transition from being treated like that—from being locked outside the ward mental patient in sub-zero temperatures freezing like the cow patties in the field while the staff returned late from their lazy lunch break—to being a fully entitled therapist? Finally, I could understand why someone who was even a little bit interested in what it meant to be a schizophrenic was a good worker.

***

To be honest I knew I was not a good worker for a little while. I was just barely-making-it, overworked, highly insecure, and protecting myself as I worked two jobs and an internship with a half a day off every other week. When I earned my way back to working with people individually, I was a little better at getting rapport and experimenting with helping out with schizophrenia. I heard a lot of, “Oh you’re good,” comments. At least I knew enough not to approve of the word schizophrenia. It took me six years and a number of side jobs to get my license and be fully grounded in a staff position.

Throughout the training for my license, I had not disclosed to anyone what I had been through. Always too busy to make friends, most colleagues tended to think I was younger than my stated age, and perhaps a little over-anxious about making rent.

I soon found among licensed marriage and family therapists that most presumed that there was not much value in treating individuals who had schizophrenia. Some individuals forced into working with them characterized them as just lazy and unresponsive to instructions. Those who picked up on my insecurity said maybe there was a future for me in providing “just” case management services. I often heard it said, that it was debatable whether there was effective treatment. Sitting in licensure lectures, we were taught that in coming across a person with “psychosis,” the standard of care was to hospitalize and refer to programs.

When I passed those sucker licensure tests in spite of my learning disabilities, I was tired of leading groups full of good people who had experienced “psychosis,” and not talking about what was really going on. I decided to get to work creating my own treatment strategies for schizophrenia. I had heard about the hearing voices network movement in Europe and decided to create a curriculum that deconstructed “psychosis,” and emphasized recovery skills. I took WRAP training, and finally started to experiment using my own story with all its minute details.

***

Learning how to navigate the profession as an identified schizophrenic has been full of challenges. A co-worker found a copy of my curriculum, and turned it over to the manager with grave concerns. Another left insulting cartoons on my desk. I had occasion to hear myself being referred to as, “Crazy Tim!” I ignored these and persisted. Eventually, I took a job where I was identified for two years, advocating for change in the county. My name and unhealable condition spread like wild fire throughout the county. In team meetings, I was accused of being against medications. One person who defended me end up getting written up and eventually fired. When I returned to my hospital job, my primary boss, who, thank god, has been supportive of me throughout, once let me know that when I went over to the county’s ward to run groups, that I had little red dots following me on my forehead.

My groups, my popularity among people who I help, and my own little paranoid vigilance has helped me survive the past nine years and thoroughly develop my own eclectic theoretical approach towards helping who I prefer to call message receivers in group and individual settings.

Things have gotten a lot less hostile for me at work. I now know what to do to help out that vagabond homeless man I met two decades ago. Additionally, I wrote a grant a proved that message receivers could be paid as outreach workers, tell their story to providers, and transition to being group leaders, and mental health professionals while they attracted and motivated individuals who might not have otherwise been motivated. I serve on the board of the local hearing voices network.

I believe uniquely talented specialists are needed. We need outreach specialists with lived experience who can meet sufferers wherever they are: at home, on the streets, in the board and care homes. They can deliver messages of hope and referrals to bolster a system of self-support, like the hearing voices network. And still for others who need it, referrals to therapy specialists, who might have the training that hasn’t yet penetrated academia programs. Perhaps, one day, other interested parties can learn to become a specialist in work with “psychosis” without having to face quite as much pain. It is a very sorely needed specialty!

The post A Need for Providers who Specialize in “Psychosis.” appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".