Back when I was battling with what a State Hospital labeled as schizophrenia, I had little reason to trust mental health workers. Prior to the catastrophic occurrences that rendered me a ward of the state, I had survived for seven years as a mental health professional. I knew what a lot of mental health workers said behind closed doors and in team meetings. I longed for a day in court where I could rectify everything that happened to me, but the mental health workers at the hospital simply rolled their eyes when I tried to share my story. At key points I was mocked. This is the story of how I’ve lived with mistrust for mental health workers ever since. 

Initially, as a mental health worker, I thought I was doing good work. But once incarcerated in a state hospital I realized how delusional I once had been. I had not realized how much I dehumanized mental health patients until I was one of those dehumanized patients. I saw the way the staff demeaned, mistreated and put themselves on a pedestal in front of me. And they took home good salaries for treating me this way. I initially decided not to return to work in mental health. 

My therapist of seven years had told my parents I would be in and out of hospitals the rest of my life while I was trying to escape to Canada to seek asylum. My parents believed her. Right before I was released from the longest three months of my life, my father begged me to stay in the safe hospital for another nine months rather than allow myself to be released. I had been restrained and punched in the back by staff because I was confused. I was seriously threatened by a veteran with a history of violence. I had received offers to join a gang and I was a person of interest among those connected to the local Mexican mafia. I survived dangerous and deplorable conditions. I didn’t need nine more months of this. I had devoutly followed this therapist for seven years and ignored the part of me that felt she was an ivy league snob who grossly underestimated me. Now I could see her as the mental health worker she really was, one that was there to control and suppress me. 

Control and Suppression:

Streeted to a Greyhound Bus Depot in snowy Montana, I made my way to sunny Fresno California. I did okay. I managed to find a job and establish an apartment until I ran out of meds at the end of the month. Hence my battle started with housing insecurity and underemployment. It would take years and years to return to secure professional employment with weekends off. Somehow on this recovery journey my mistrust for mental health workers never changed.

In Fresno off medication, I believed that the government sewed a tracker in my dog when the pound fixed her. I believed that the men who drove white trucks were in the mafia. I believed that all the oranges in the streets were left there to let me know that the mafia could take my life if I snitched. See, I had this unique knowledge about the reality of the drug war based on recent epiphanies I gained on my last social work assignment in Seattle Washington. I believed that my father was a high-profile crime boss on the east coast working under the umbrella of the society of friends (or the Quakers) and that he was funding this negative attention I was getting throughout Fresno to silence me and protect his fortune.

When my meager savings got low enough my aunt in the bay area offered me an arranged job at an Italian Delicatessen if I move to Antioch CA and endure a ten-mile bike commute and hour-long BART ride to work and back. Only then would my parents help me. And I had to see a shrink for 125$ an hour.

I was making 9$ an hour and the shrink made me see her two hours a week (250$) and she just could never understand why this might anger me. “Why sweat the small stuff,” she said. And she was very critical of me for giving my power away and letting the rich kids who worked at the deli bully me. “I too shop at AG Ferrari,” she said. So, this relationship didn’t exactly heal anything. I did learn to lie to her and compromise and balance my emotions.

Returning to Mental Health Work Without Blowing the Whistle:

Although it’s true I hadn’t wanted to go back into mental health, after ten months of poverty, isolation and deli work with this long commute, I changed my mind. Getting a new education was costly and I was desperate to get back control over my life. 

I returned to taking medication which enabled me to get a job in social services working with developmentally disabled individuals as the manager of satellite housing. After six months of this low wage work, I healed enough to return to mental health. The first job back in mental health I failed to attain because I had a panic attack in front of my clinical supervisor on the first day. They used me for three months and cut my per diem hours. Luckily, I landed on my feet and managed to get another per diem hire at an outpatient psychiatry program. 

I learned to hold my tongue around mental health workers. As I heard them compare the schizophrenic mind to that of a dog, I dealt with this by working harder and longer than them. I felt so afraid of falling into homelessness I blindly followed people I secretly did not like so that I could work. I saw a lot of things go on that I had used to speak out against. Now I had to accept them and prove that I would not again blow the whistle so that I could survive.

In early internships, which I maintained after the clinic hours to get the required five-hundred child and family hours necessary for California Licensure, I kept a low profile and did not disclose my history of madness to anyone. How was I to make healing relationships when I was forced to hide parts of myself that are vital to understanding my mission and purpose in life? 

I worked six years in silence. Half of this time I worked without any time off, seven days a week. In 2008, when I finally got my license, I started running a group called special messages in which I disclosed my history of madness and institutionalization to the clients so we could collaboratively share the contents of psychosis. It was at this point where other professional therapists I had largely ignored started to get my attention again. 

It wasn’t just because I was aware some of my colleagues were calling me, “crazy Tim,” behind closed doors that I left the job three years later. I knew what I was doing was unconventional and for that reason I produced extensive write-ups of my group curriculums to document what the clients and I were creating. Sure, colleagues took those write ups to the manager with concerns trying to get me fired. I really thought that the institutional mentality of the staff was unnecessary and possible to escape. In doing this I stopped facilitating the groups which were wildly popular and beautiful. I left for greener pastures. I took a pay cut and entered a county recovery project where they used recovery language.

Racing into the Arms of Recovery: 

As a Recovery Services Administrator working in the county’s pilot program merging three best practices called CHOICES, my lived experience was to be considered an asset. Even the author of the project admitted that he had once been in a cult. The organization I worked with were all peer counselors. 

But alas, I walked into a political bee’s nest and that the person who was going to get stung would eventually be me. The company that hired me was from Arizona and several people in the multicultural county were having issues with one of the owners and her openly color-blind views on race. Her attitude that race doesn’t matter, only qualifications, was not well received. I also heard enough of what she had to say to be offended and set boundaries with her. I would not promote her racial ideologies that were alienating her staff and the local professionals who worked with us.

But there were other players in the county who weren’t offended and who were willing to partner with the company owner, and they seemed to be giving her bad reports about me and my behavior in the team meeting. I worked against these negative senses of things while I was getting bullied in the team meetings, working towards a brighter outcome. The teams I was working on were often hostile and superior to my workers and I had a need to defend them and often faced a room full of people being unfair. 

It wasn’t long until the professionals in the county became very concerned about what I had to say about psychosis, enough so that one time the project director set up an ambush in which I was the target. All the professional therapists in the room were mad and wanted a client who as a gang member forcefully medicated and I pointed out that it was illegal to do so.  They all knew I was right. 

They accused me of being against medication and dangerous! 

I said, “Why would I be against medication? I take medication. I am for self-determination and choice.” 

One other professional saw this political ambush and pointed out it was unfair, and she got written up by her boss.

I left that job and the sixty-hour work weeks after a year and a half. I got demoted because the owner said it was dangerous to have me working with clients. She agreed with the recommendation of the director of the program that I was better off just reviewing charts.

I saw one of the other directors after I left. He couldn’t believe that I had found a job within Alameda County. 

I had gone back to the hospital where I had a supervisor who believed in my work and where others called me, “crazy Tim.” I didn’t tell this director that they barely let me back in the door as a per diem employee. I didn’t tell this director that they would work me a year-and-a-half before they gave me back my benefits. I just looked at his glaring eyeballs and said yes.   

Going Up the Food Chain: 

On the one hand, my recovery has brought me a life I never believed would be possible when I was incarcerated in the dank, Montana State Chronic Unit that was only heated to just above freezing at 40 degrees Fahrenheit. On the other hand, my ability to heal that original world view that mental health workers were there to control and suppress has not changed. 

As a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist I have been able to go up the food chain and study with experts to renew my license every two years. The focus of the field and my own studies has been understanding how to heal trauma, something that I believe is needed when people have experienced extraordinary experiences associated with psychosis. Indeed, using these training opportunities to help myself and others heal from trauma I hoped that I could change my relationships with my coworkers and thrive.

Fifteen years ago, I went to a twenty-four-hour CEU training in San Francisco with Bessel Van de Kirk, Ph.D. and he made fun of psychotic people three times and presumed that the audience had all been to school in Massachusetts.

A few years later, I went to an EFT Training with Dawson Church, Ph.D. He referred to people who were unable to benefit from EFT as being annoying and reversed. I was unable to benefit from the tapping and had let that fact be known. Others had told me that it was because I was too dissociated. Good Ol’ Dawson got bolder as the training wore on. “What is wrong with them,” he said, “they are unable to know when something is helpful; they should just let themselves be helped.”

In 2016, I was researching trainers from where I wanted to get my forty-hour EMDRIA training. I took a training course with Laurel Pernell Ph.D. She made fun of one of her subjects as not being smart. In fact, she failed to notice all the code-switching that indicated that he had clearly been born and bred as a mobster. As someone who experienced a year and a half of believing I was being harassed by the mob, I was outraged that she depicted him as being non-intelligent. She clearly had no kind of understanding of the lifestyle he lived or what it’s like to survive in those circles. 

A few years ago, I took an online PESI training course with Frank Anderson MD., and he made fun of people who heard voices. Now there may be some context to his comments that I am not capturing here. But by the time I had heard this it was just another microaggression put out by just another elite trainer.

Thus, in training I found elite trainers to exclude people who do not fit their “trauma” culture. This process of othering is passed down through the institutions into the mental health workers. It is passed on to the most vulnerable who must battle with it in their minds. I have found the best way to deal with it publicly is to be humble and submit to those in power even when it isn’t warranted. What becomes most important is to not internalize their sense of superiority so that it affects your own sense of self.

 I Have Survived:

So now that it’s been twenty-five years since I have been hospitalized in a state hospital, I work part-time at the hospital and part-time in private practice. At work in the hospital, I use my tenure and popularity among the clients to challenge the suppression and control of the clients and do my best to promote practices that support healing and recovery. I often feel like I am all alone in my views as I offer the sole dissenting perspective. I try to stay positive and amicable toward my coworkers even when I don’t like their views. 

I have had some coworkers I have connected with over the years particularly when I have functioned in the role of a supervisor. At times I have been able to demonstrate how my dissenting views actually do coincide with the values and ethics of the profession. It’s true that working in the psychiatric system, I must have a sense of willingness to compromise; however, I do my best to honor my sense of recovery first and foremost. It is still easy for me to feel othered in training and via associating with other professionals in networking circumstances. But I am glad to have survived what I have survived even if I haven’t healed my relationships with coworkers or changed my views about psychiatry being about control and suppression.

The post Reflections on My Mistrust for Other Mental Health Workers appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

I knew in my bones that the state-wide California Proposition 1 initiative would pass on March 6^th kind of like I knew that the Iraq War would start as a reaction against Osama Bin Ladden and the 9-11 tragedy. Perhaps my sense of this is something that I should keep to myself. Now, mismanaging the feelings I get in my bones, and stating that I believe my own ability to have premonitions could result in grave consequences.

This new proposition is set to mandate treatment to people with schizophrenia related forms of mental illness (not bipolar.) This proposition establishing “care courts” is matched by a similar policy starting in New York City called Kendra’s Law, or Assisted Outpatient Treatment. It is a policy that very well may spread throughout the states. What I fear is that this new power purportedly to help address the problem of homelessness becomes the law of the land. Many of us fear a return to institutionalization.

Now thanks to California Proposition 1, a person with my history could be mandated to attend treatment for two years by a judge. I could go from working in the program where I have held a twenty-year tenure as a psychotherapist to being forced to submit to treatment there despite the economic consequences. If this sounds like I am being drastic perhaps you haven’t read the details I have read or had the experiences with law enforcement and family and friends that I have had. Perhaps you haven’t had the dissociated experience of looking down upon yourself as you make your case in front of a judge’s condemning eyes just to realize that no one in the court room, not your family, not anyone, is listening to you.

Indeed, I might need to be more drastic because a lot of people don’t understand what is involved with such a catastrophic loss of status. For me personally, Proposition 1 could mean a return to a long-term dilapidated state hospital stay and years of being trafficked as an indentured servant. Perhaps you don’t believe that human trafficking is real or that it can happen to a white man from a middle-class background in the United Sates of America. But if what I am saying sounds drastic, I urge you to read further because I will provide details that at least will help you see where I am coming from. Indeed, it can and does happen and there are many more people like me than you likely realize.

My Fight to Create Safe Spaces:

In my current position on an outpatient psychiatric unit, I’ve been in a battle for sixteen years to make it safe for people like me to process experiences associated with what I call special messages in confidential group therapy. This isn’t easy to get people to do in our setting because the system teaches us that if we show signs of madness, we will endure punishment. To help others know it is safe to do so with me, I have grown accustomed to sharing my own experience.

I do work with some good colleagues, and I have also endured colleagues who have called me crazy Tim. They are good people too. One even left offensive cartoons on my desk. One has spoken to my manager about my work with the clients with grave concerns. Others have given me dirty looks its been clear to me that they have then talked amongst themselves about me. Still others ignore me and make me repeat myself because they refuse to acknowledge my words for unstated reasons. When I am treated like this, the good people I work with might end up needing to distance themselves from me just a little. Or they may need to turn their heads the other way a little. I don’t blame them. We all survive amid an unreal state of disparity on the psychiatric unit. Such is the nature of psychiatric units.

Now, with Proposition 1 out there, I fear that I might have to dig myself out of the same hole I was in twenty-four years ago.

Why Target Us?

Part of the reason mandatory treatment is a huge risk to those of us with my targeted diagnostic make-up because the public still doesn’t believe recovery is possible for us. The stated goal is to get us off the streets and into housing. Never mind the fact that in Oakland California, the city where I work, only twenty-five percent of the homeless are “mentally ill.” Also, of the people housed in Santa Rita Jail in the county 20-25% have a mental illness. It may be true that a few of us challenge the mainstream paradigm by letting others take everything away from us and choosing to live in tents rather than endure corruption in programs or low-income housing. Others of us, like me, find other ways to challenge mainstream norms. Some do come in for treatment to manage their living conditions, which, I might add, can be quite hard. I have more to say about that!

My Sensing of Violence in a Low-Income Housing Project:

Twenty-four years ago, I worked in such a setting in Seattle. The site was a Section 8 Housing Authority facility called the Morrison Hotel that was dubbed the hotel of horrors by the Seattle Weekly. I witnessed a lot of violence and graphic details of the underworld there. When a resident died of a heroin overdose, I saw enough strange and suspicious behavior to have a similar feeling in my bones that there was foul play associated with the death. I was tormented to the extent that gave the story to a reporter I met a poetry reading. I wasn’t given access to the files Seattle Housing Authority had on the residents and it never occurred to me that I was doing anything other than trying to support the residents who confided in me that they were also scared and suspicious about the death.

Now, with the benefit of reflection and couple of years of experience being unemployed and underemployed, I sense in my bones that that resident might have been an undercover agent of some sort and that outing him may have shined a light on some operations that were covert. There was a change in management that resulted and that affected Seattle politics and drug trade significantly.

Several months later I received a personal threat from a friend when I admitted to him that I had given the story to the press. He seemed a little grandiose about his power when he told me he could do me great harm. Another friend warned me not to flee. I chose to challenge this threat and flee. I ended up getting harassed by State Troopers and hospitalized in a State Hospital in Warm Springs Montana with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. It wasn’t until I was released three months later and had moved to Fresno California that I learned that I was right about the suspicious death and that it helped lead to the housing project getting managed by a different company.

The Sense that Things Are Wrong:

I now have fifty-three years of dealing with premonitions/intuitions like this. Yes, I know it is possible that I can be wrong just like I wonder if only 73.3% of the votes have been tallied at the time I am writing this, why the Washington Post has determined that the California measure has passed when there is only 50.3% yes votes. Perhaps there is math out there that enables the Wahington Post to call the election in this way, but it just doesn’t seem likely at first glance. Often, many of us in America take articles like this for granted as being truthful. The Washington Post is reputable, as is our voting system.

Details About What It Was Like Being Blacklisted and Indentured:

By the time the world trade towers were attacked, I had moved to Antioch CA and was hired at an Italian Deli food chain in the bay area for nine dollars an hour. I had a four-hour commute to get to the Deli on an old beat-up bicycle and BART. I could not find any other work, though this was not through lack of effort. I tried to work at professional jobs in social work. I tried many local minimum wage positions like Subway or Dennys or Walmart to no avail. On days off I would attract homeless looking white individuals who would follow me as I rode my bike dropping off applications at seven eleven, a hardware store, a restaurant. No job ever called me back. I had to put up with a job that I believed was corrupt and had several worker coworkers who were harassing me with mafia ties.

I was off medication and under the impression that I was being monitored during my bike/BART commute to my job at the Deli where I was often tormented by seventeen-year-old rich kids who mocked, or worse tried to mentor me. Most days I could identify a person on the train who I believed was there because of me. Once, I saw a resident I knew from Seattle sit across from me on the BART on my commute. Back in Seattle he had confided in me in a non-confidential circumstance that he had killed a man. He wore handcuffs and wore a label on his jean jacket that read, CIA officer. I was inundated with these kinds of coincidences or experiences I have since learned to ignore and call special messages.

I maintained this commute and schedule for ten months before I was able to get hired back into social services. Finally, I returned to taking medication and was able to improve my relationships with the less menacing of the rich kids to keep my temper at bay. The mafia kids who seemed to be in the know mostly quit and moved on.

Using These Experiences for the Positive:

Now in an Outpatient Psychiatric Unit, I share my story and encourage others to process theirs. I convince them that there can be safe places where they can share what they’ve been through. And over sixteen years of doing this, I have heard a lot of stories that may seem hard for many to believe. We have also shared laughs and good times. Once traumatic material is told, processed, and validated, it becomes easier for participants to compartmentalize their trauma and engage in other types of activities.

I also offer training for providers, family members and survivors who want to help others tell their stories and get relief. There is a lot that can be learned so that people will want to talk and relate what they have gone through as targeted individuals, spiritualists, people with voices, alien communicators, dissociative identities, scuttlebutt spies, and somatic sensors and other manifestations.

Ongoing Senses About War and Genocides:

When the towers fell twenty-three years ago, I knew right away that the United States would start wars in the middle east to avenge the approximately 3000 dead in the tragedy.

By the time of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, I was aware that there had been a lot of preparations for war. I had heard that a pipeline had been constructed to make the war possible. George W Bush’s dramatic threats toward Sadam Hussein seemed like theater to me and I presumed the war was inevitable. Indeed, by 2007 there was an ORB (Opinion Research Business) survey that estimated that 1,033,000 died in the war. This doesn’t include all the losses of life endured during the Afghanistan War which were worse.

It’s true my sense that Proposition 1 was going to pass has been propped up by a great deal of data. As I work in social services, I often see the pipelines going up and the preparations being made. I could pretend I was a rich white liberal instead of a progressive one and read the material, the messaging—treatment, not tents—the propaganda. I could figure how someone who is majority white, liberal, Californian, and uniformed might respond to the issue. For years I have interacted with the public and seen eyes go glass with the belief that schizophrenia is a medical illness rather than a spiritual journey. It is a dominant narrative in our culture.

At a time when both American parties are supporting what many believe to be a genocide in Gaza, the rationale just may be that we did this in Iraq and Afghanistan, so Israel has the right to follow suit. In this manner a race is killed beneath our very eyes in a manner so as that we don’t blink. The issue seems to me to be about power and entitlement, so that the well-to-do do not have to share in the tears and blood going on in the city corners. Yes, all so some kids can be cool and safely sample a taste of the nightlife in college just as they did, there is death an mayhem in the inner cities. Meanwhile the mainstream can go on excommunicating those who dabbled too hard or too soft. It’s all about fitting in and going along to get along.

Thankful that I had a Choice:

In a like manner, now I am officially able to be stripped of my American rights as someone with a schizophrenic history. Regardless of what I do, now the fact that good people can treat me with cold, glass wickedness is supported by the law. I choose to accept this and keep the ball rolling. The content of my character becomes invisible as are my rights to privacy.

If I had been forced to attend program instead of work, I could not have afforded housing with family support. I would have had to accept a board and care or a SRO for two years. By the time I endured all that, I doubt I would have healed at all. I likely would have given up and accepted my place. I wouldn’t be married and working.

Working at the Deli enabled me to work through my issues without falling into the corruption of low-income housing and programs. At least it was the choice I preferred. I equate being subjected to such treatment as being incarcerated or being sent to war—you just don’t know if you can come back from that. Working at an Italian Deli with the belief that the mafia was harassing me was hard enough, but it was better than the state hospital for sure. At least I had a choice as limited as it seemed at the time.

The Issue of Family Support:

I have a great aunt who I learned about once I restored my role as a social worker. She was lobotomized and institutionalized for refusing to leave her bed when her mother wouldn’t let her marry her high school sweetheart. Just as it seems like it is important for my relatives to believe they come from a good family and a good background; it felt like they then had to recapitulate this historical trauma onto me because I was different and didn’t live up to their standards. I did know of my great aunt, but I just couldn’t get the complete story.

On occasions I have met with extended family, I am met with microaggressions, or signs of excommunication. I have spent decades healing my relationships with my mother and father who are finally transitioning their perspectives after twenty years of recovery and the potential of their declining health. I have an aunt or two who have been supportive, but the attitudes of my remaining relatives, like the attitudes my parents started with, scare me. Institutionalization happened before and despite my toil and labor, I fear it could happen again.

Luckily in my work, I meet with families who display sides that want more for their children. They may not always know what to do, but they would be happy to support a recovery instead of endlessly recapitulate institutionalization. Sometimes I still feel shame that I made it hard for my family because I didn’t just accept institutionalization. That seems to be what was expected of me. But now twenty years later, the blessing of working with these families reminds me not to feel that way.

One thing I am privileged to know is that different American cultural groups handle madness differently. My story and my scenario are just a single grain of sand in a big box of good old American diversity. There are families who have gone to great lengths to shield their loved ones from homelessness and the system, who endure violence and outbursts without help from the state. Others use the state intermittently to shape and guide their loved ones in their learning process. Some utilize tough love and hospitals and decide that they are mistakes and need to handle repair and a process of mutual learning. There is tragedy and hurt that abound in all directions. There is so much needed for healing.

Proposition 1 and the Losses Dealt to Peer-Run Communities:

As I brace for the changes Proposition 1 will bring, I see coworkers who seem to be open to the plight of people who are neurodivergent, mad, or have histories of trauma and wonder if they can handle the upcoming changes. Very few people out there understand the behavior of the homeless on the streets, behavior that I have engaged in in the state hospital when I was beaten, confined, ignored, rejected, slandered and denied access to meaningful activity. I worry if outpatient therapists without lived experience really will be able to understand and work with people who have endured homelessness.

With the social sin of homelessness now firmly planted like a target on a minority group, the schizophrenics, society can all ignore the other issues present. I saw a post on Facebook that all we need to do is invest 20 billion to end homelessness, a small portion of what we spend against Gaza and in support of Ukraine. I don’t know if that makes any sense, but still I ask: how are families to learn how to relate to their loved ones now that resources are taken away from recovery-oriented, peer-run communities and allocated for an increase in hospital beds, housing, and the oppression of care courts? Indeed, funding will be cut for recovery services to build more housing and impose more treatment.

The Value of the Vote:

In my eyes, my last vote against Proposition 1 may have been my last choice against the genocide and oppression that so impacts my life, work, and worldview. I wonder if my voice really matters. I wonder if voting matters in general in this exploding political system. But maybe these wonderings should just be my little secret. Oops.

The post My Last Vote Against California Proposition 1: appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

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".

Watching Buzzards Swirl:

It has been my honor and privilege to work for fifteen years on an urban inner-city psychiatric unit that is currently being targeted for closure by a hospital system that is facing a budget crisis. There is a proposal on the table to merge our program with its suburban counterpart, taking away the specialized care we provide to the urban, primarily African American, community that we serve.

This week I went in front of the board to argue against the closing of this clinic. In preparing to do this, I found myself recollecting things I had learned at commuter college I attended in Camden New Jersey. I developed a grand plan to tell a story that would change the board’s mind.

I sat in front of the board for three hours before I was able to break the spell of the story. Listening to the board belabor many points, I realized it wasn’t the place for my personal perspective. I ended up barely getting my head together and saying some words that fit in with the wider efforts of my professional peers.

Our team said what it had to say and did a good job. Now I must wait two months and see what will become of my life’s work.

Community Stories Outta Oakland:

I have learned a few things about Oakland in my years working with local people. Stories surface that paint a mosaic for myself and the people in the program that are central to the way we put our wellness together, that are central to our community. While Asian Mental Health and Casa Del Sol Clinics primarily serve Asian and Latino clients, our population is mostly black and a minority white. As I share slivers of our stories that we have learned from, I realize that these may not be as welcome in the new community.

Historically, a diaspora of black people primarily from Louisiana settled in segregated neighborhoods in the West and East after World War II. Fleeing from racism and economic oppression, many families prospered. The old Richard Hawkins gospel song Oh Happy Day came from Oakland and made it to the charts in 1968. Elders in the community tell many stories of prosperity and strength. Indeed prior to World War II only 3% of the community was African American.

I have heard many say that within segregated communities, black people could get anything they needed within their community prior to the civil rights movement. Crosses were burned in surrounding communities. Though, of course, currently there are many other enclaves of diverse peoples to which I have less ability to speak about, similar changes have resulted as work went from manufacturing to our current service economy.

Prior to this shift, Huey Newton, Bobby Seals and the Black Panther Party grew out of Oakland and worked to defend the community against racism during desegregation. I have heard many memories of this movement was targeted by the U.S. government and was replaced starting in the mid-seventies, by Felix Mitchell’s crime organization. Word has it that Huey Newton got into drugs and was shot three times in a West Oakland Neighborhood in 1989.

Felix Mitchel’s influence survived only ten years and brought crack into the community. I have heard one community member say, “It’s like you just woke up one morning and everything was just crack,” Felix Mitchel competed with Micky Moore, who survived, reformed and became a preacher. I have heard stories of relatives killed and butchered during these years. In 1991 Tupac Shakur was brutally beaten by Oakland PD. Many large businesses tended to leave the city. Though neighborhoods differ significantly, post-industrial poverty continues to pulse through parts of the city.

During the shift to post-industrialism, the incarceration industry expanded. Residents are allowed three jail visits and then are shipped out to the pen. In the pen, many enter gangs out of which they can never leave without surviving protective custody and solitary confinement. They can get assignments that they must carry out that can jeopardize their efforts to maintain employment in the community. Probation and parole monitor a person very strictly and marginalizes ones’ career opportunities.

While many proud Oaklanders object to criminal organizations and work hard to stay free and safe, it is easy to see how post-industrial wages and generations of poverty have necessitated them. The war is zoned and police precincts fight to keep it out of wealthy districts. Task force reality in your neighborhood makes living hard. I am always in awe when I walk through suburban neighborhoods and smell cannabis wafting where people are safe and free to use it.

Still there are predominately services available in Eastmont Mall, which was once a shopping mall. Still, there are neighborhoods rife with shootings and even, before 2000 there has been migration out of the city out to places like Pittsburg, Antioch, Vallejo, Hayward and Freemont.

Currently, however, the price of housing is skyrocketing, causing more and more working families to commute to the city for work spending long hours in the car. However, displacement seems to be slowed by an extraordinary amount of homelessness. Between 2017-2019 homelessness has increased 47% according to figures released in the Oakland Chronicle.  Fifteen years ago, when I started working, a person could easily get into a shelter; now an Obama phone and a waiting list is a must and the streets are full of tent encampments.

Those of us witnessing this believe that people in the tech industry are taking over the city and displacing people who have made this their home since the nineteen forties. For years I have heard of tech companies handing out the tents that are erected throughout the city. Current figures suggest that 34% of Oakland homeless live in tents and 23% live in their cars. While only 11% of the city is now African American, 50% of the homeless population is African American.

Fighting to Save Our Unit:

Perhaps the story I wanted to tell was as much a testament to why I, a white man, choose to work in an urban, primarily African American community. Perhaps it helps me understand why despite the privilege of my skin, I feel put upon to go out to the suburbs into stories that are significantly different.

If I feel this way, imagine how our community participants feel! There are many white participants who feel the same way I do. We have learned to use this community to enrich our lives.

I have sensed that the decision has been made by the company and that our appeal to power is just theater. Nevertheless, I decided to speak because my bosses said that we needed to fight for the people currently being displaced in the city of Oakland.

It hurts me extraordinarily to lose all the love I have built with patients who have been healing and improving their lives over the course of my fifteen-year tenure. Many will not tolerate the move.

Still, I recall the story that lived in my mind and wonder what it meant to me. Why did I think it would help people of power change their minds about the value of culturally competent care?

The Story that I Couldn’t Share:

Back in my junior and senior year in college I remember a woman lived in the apartment complex across the street, It a little while, but eventually she introduced herself as Gwendolyn. She was just a tad masculine when she shook my hand. She did not use the standard neighborhood handshake like the youth I’d befriended first couple of years in the city.

She was clearly the elder with her freckled face, well-tended hair, and shades. She took it upon herself to start up the conversations. Although I was initially a little guarded, fearing she’d end up asking for money, I remained receptive and open to her.

One of my schoolmates was known to joke about the amount of money he imagined that I would give out to street people. I heard him call me out of my name with his little comedy routine once. I didn’t think it was cute. He took writing classes with me and like most of our cohorts commuted into the city when he wasn’t at work. He was known to stop off at the frat house and write about his escapades.

I clearly didn’t fit in with him or many of my schoolmates. Many would tease me as they got to know me. I didn’t pay them much attention. I just thought they were dumb, in and out of the city in their old suburban high school cliques and stereotypes.

Gwendolyn (and the rest of the neighborhood for that matter) did not ask me for money.

Maybe they knew I worked at the local Korean-owned deli, which meant that I was paid under the table and was expected to guard the shop with the Glock under the grill and the shotgun over the trashcan.

I’d just recently moved into the one local apartment complex which did not allow drugs. I had spent my first year in the city living with an older woman who would not let me have outside friends. My second year was devoted to breaking up with her and establishing some independence in writing classes.

I would talk to Gwendolyn about the roach infestation problem we had.

“Oh, we won’t allow bugs in our apartment,” she exclaimed, adding, “I am absolutely certain of that!”

This seemed strange, with all the traffic going in and out of that building, it didn’t seem clean from the outside. I always did wonder if that meant they did not have cockroaches or if she was talking about something I didn’t understand.

I still think of the three winters I lived there as Gwendolyn’s neighbor and our conversations by the corner payphone. There were times I wanted to give Gwendolyn money when she was underdressed on the corner in her jean jacket shivering. But then again, I too was often too lazy to dress for the cold and was also shivering. We were both far too thin for our bodies.

Perhaps we were both not taking care of ourselves. She was often drinking from a bag and I occasionally had a small bruise on my throat.

But the fact is that Gwendolyn’s constant respectful outreach meant a heck of a lot to me. There was very little college life outside the frat house. I delivered sandwiches to the dorms and was mad at many of my lazy peers who would neglect to tip me.

Just as she practically lived alone on the corner using the phone and talking to associates, I practically lived in the library belaboring to outline everything that I read. I’d later learn that I was battling my undiagnosed ADD and Dyslexia. If I wasn’t at the library, I was at work. Once a week, I was coming home from the suburban shrink appointment on the speed line with bags of groceries that I’d bring into my studio.

Maybe Gwendolyn sensed something in me to which she could relate. In fact, maybe we were both trying to escape some of the same demons. I wouldn’t understand that until many decades later. Finally, I would recapture some memories that would help me understand my odd take on things and how my senses often turn out to be correct. I think Gwendolyn could relate to that!

I did know that I was trying to escape the dependence on a family and community that I didn’t trust.

I had been born into a Quaker school community where both of my parents were teachers, my father a principal. I had spent half of my senior year in several mental health institutions and had returned to a close-knit community that was informed of intimate details of my struggles.

I was no longer able to play sports, so I spent my time writing. My writing efforts now appeared downgraded. Now my best essay nearly got me kicked out of school! The school psychologist, the wife of my English teacher, arranged a confrontation with my parents. Everybody knew about it before I did.

I started to have the sense that grades were political and stupid. Now there is research that says that sense is accurate particularly when skin color is involved.

During my time in institutions, I had come to see things differently. I wanted to badly to avoid all the people who seemed to make up their minds about me in a way that wasn’t going to ever change. I turned down my admissions to private liberal arts colleges and made an escape.

Somehow, I sensed that Gwendolyn understood me better and valued me more than all the people in my old community of privilege.

And it was not just Gwendolyn, it was Doc and Ray who’d trained me to work at the Korean Deli. It was Julio and Jose who I’d trained to work there. It was Ruth the security guard at the library, my coworker Craig, his cousin the janitor. It was my apartment manager who I delivered lunch to on a regular basis. Sprinkled throughout the neighborhood were people who I could connect with and who kept me afloat. I felt they gave me another chance. They didn’t see me as the skinny anorexic that I was, they were curious. It was the familiar look of the customers who came in and out of the Deli. They seemed to respect me and believe in second chances where others did not.

Overcoming Generalizations and Stereotypes:

In retrospect, I was twenty years old. It was an era of extremes in my life. I overgeneralized and felt the whole world of privilege was united against me. Maybe, I just needed to establish my independence from it.

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe some of the privileged world that had reared me could understand that people deserved second chances. Many of them seemed to choose my parents and their secrets over me, but maybe not all of them were like that. Maybe there were some of them that could learn to see beyond stereotypes.

Sure, there was all the disrespect I’d witnessed towards me going to my sister’s graduation. Sure, there was the same disrespect in family get-togethers. I would eventually learn that I had a great aunt who was given a lobotomy and left to rot in an institution. Maybe the whole community of privilege is not like that.

Maybe it’s possible that some other suburban people find community in other contexts. Maybe some people on the board could understand that need to be understood and respected that is necessary to find when you have no place else to go.

Maybe that’s what I have spent the last fifteen years of my life going above and beyond in my work efforts! I feel guilty that I take a competitive salary away from the community. I must pray that I am not only taking from, but also giving back to the community that gave me a chance to come back.

Buzzards!

I am not the first person who has had the meaning and purpose in my life taken away by some people of property. I feel like I am waiting for the buzzards to pick over my bones.

When I first started leading groups on the unit, I recall walking into the “low-functioning” group and having an African American male who thought he was an aristocrat scream and had an IQ that was likely higher than mine scream, “Buzzards!”

Initially I didn’t know what to do because I was hiding my own history of “schizophrenia,” homelessness, and psychiatric incarceration. I needed the salary and did not want to set off a negative ripple.

But I came back into health. I started responding in ways that were more helpful. I’d do things like flap my arms and making a few, “caw-caw” sounds. And then, I’d simulate being shot by the aristocrat. Then I’d have a real conversation with the aristocrat. Eventually we’d end up talking in the hall as if it was Gwendolyn and I back on that corner in Camden New Jersey.

Leadership that Perpetuates Stereotypes?

Good mental health care must teach people to re-examine themselves beyond the stereotypes! I have a hard time believing that people of power know how to help people like Gwendolyn, myself, and the African American aristocrat. They seem to be like all the people back at Quaker school, not willing to give me a second chance.

If a board member was to engage me in a conversation, I would want to tell them that displacement, union-busting and psychiatric incarceration (which is precisely what our program prevents) hurts. It attacks relationships and ways of life. We lose our love and our means of survival. The architects behind these attacks should be ashamed of themselves! I am ashamed of my part in it!

The post Gentrification and Displacement in Oakland California: An Inside-Out Perspective appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

No, I still don’t believe schizophrenia is an illness! Many would say I still demonstrate poor insight into my illness for the declaration. That’s okay with me.

I received the diagnosis from a pony-tailed man wearing rodeo work boots with a decorative slab of leather along the base of his lace. He walked with a light stepping swag.  He wouldn’t identify his role to me. I did know I was in the state hospital because I had been set up by the police who I successfully evaded for three days.

Staff denied my request for food before the interview. I was just waking up in the p.m. after my 4:00am arrival the night before. I hadn’t eaten since noon the day before when I’d only walked to mile ten. I was miffed because the paper with the list of police officers on it I had collected for my competency hearing was missing out of my pocket.

***

Three days earlier I had stopped at a gas station to refill. I prepared to dive under my car in the event of gun shots from the passing cars. And then I was in the mart. The police were standing by the merchant as I approached with a coke. Part of me was relieved to see them.

“Oh, did Mommy and Daddy say your brain chemicals are distorted,” mocked a state trooper in a falsetto. He looked like a social-working co-worker of mine back in New Jersey who use to pretend he was a CIA operative.

It was true I had a slight bone to pick with the Seattle PD for leaving law enforcement up to black market forces. I had been contracted to set up services in a notorious section 8 housing project within six months of moving to Seattle. I had received a significant verbal threat from an old friend from back east who said he had the power to harm me. I was on my way to Canada to seek asylum. I had leaked corruption to the press. I now believed these actions would one day be uncovered if they hadn’t already been.

I felt my face turn red from the comment. I was angry that my parents did want me hospitalized just as I had intuited on the road before I decided to head to Canada. My intuition was proving to be correct once again. I could feel myself grimace.

The police were on me and used pain tactics to get me to my knees. They bruised my wrists from handcuffs to prove their control. For the most part, I remained limp and passive.

I knew how to evade hospitalization. I assured the copper of this on my ride to the hospital in the calmest of voice tones. I kept my eye on the mileage. I practiced what to say to the quack doctor in the ER to get released.

The doctor was a reasonable man. I told him I was having memories of being sexually abused. As soon as he said I could go, I left abruptly out the glass doors. I had my life savings in the inseam of my jean. The game wasn’t over.

Outside the hospital at dusk a pack of the local PD floated toward me like rowdy ghosts and the ringleader asked me if I was Tim Dreby.

“Leave me alone!” I shouted. I didn’t identify myself. I braced for another attack, but it never came.

A day later, after testing out what I could and could not get away with, I feared retracing my steps to my car. I also feared taking a flight from the local airport. I knew I could not risk another hospital incident. Instead, I decided to walk from Helena to Butte Montana in one day. I had hiked fifty miles in a day before. But I hadn’t counted on the midnight temperature on the mountain pass. I surrendered to the state troopers who happened to be looking for me with their bright shining light before I made it to Butte.

***

The diagnosis from the pony-tailed man came after I finished this and other parts of my story. I told him I thought my parents were part of the mafia and were pulling the strings behind the scenes.

After I finally got a small portion of cold slop on a plate, I met my roommate.

“I am here to tell you that the Mafia really is after you,” said the Native American man who dressed in a hillbilly hat. “I am just a hillbilly, schizophrenic man in the hospital with a hundred and thirty IQ,” he said during my extensive interview of him. The friend who threatened me knew that I had a hundred thirty IQ.

“Did you know Marylyn Monroe died when Jack Kennedy stuffed cyanide up her ass,” he also said.

“So, I want to ask you a question, and this is important,” said the hillbilly with a pause, “when did the mafia to start following you?”

With a certain Alan Alda vulnerability, I said, “I think I was raised by a mafia family.”

The hillbilly looked uncertain. I wondered if I had said the right thing to the pony-tailed man.

The next day the pony-tailed man testified against me at my competency hearing. I was sentenced to a three-month incarceration.

***

I would be deeply wounded in the hospital. Being confined to a day room for two weeks was very hard. Getting my back reinjured by the cowboy security squad during a misunderstanding also hurt. I was known to be entitled because I tried to hold my workers accountable for not doing their job. As a result, no worker would speak with me. Even my psychiatrist took two months to meet with me. However, the neglect of the chronic unit was the worst. A year of nightmares would ensue.

When I got out of the hospital I took a greyhound and started over with $4,500 in assets. I only had one month of medication. Withdrawing off the medication caused me to lose the job I managed to attain at a daycare. I pounded the pavement daily for three months for any job including Walmart and McDonalds. I did manage to get an offer from a foster care agency, but I was afraid to take it with all I was going through.

My family agreed to intercede if I moved to the Bay Area and I obtained an arranged job at an Italian Delicatessen. Perhaps it seems ironic that this was the only job I could get. I went through a great deal of harassment, gaslighting, and persecution. Finally, when I returned to taking medication ten months later I was able to come out of the emergency state. I stopped being prejudice against the teens who were taunting me at the Deli. I realized that my family was not pulling all the strings.

***

Nineteen years later, I make a daily choice to continue medication to prevent the catastrophic loss associated with an emergency state. Maybe I haven’t made it clear: I still object to the word “schizophrenia” and the idea that what I go through daily is an illness. In fact, the latest reports define schizophrenia as more of a syndrome or neurodevelopmental condition than a disease. They even suggest that it is something that affects people across diagnostic divides something that I have argued for years (Vinograndoy, 2019, p.1.)

I do accept that some of my perceptive abilities are different than others. I do accept that they can lead me into an emergency state if I am not careful. However, I believe the word “illness,” was behind the treatment, I received at the State Hospital. There, I was trained to be controlled by the industry. No one would let me talk about my experiences. I was forced to suppress them even when aspects of them were one hundred percent accurate. I was not encouraged to learn from others. The hospital only prepared me for poverty and to be abused in a local board and care.

I continue to perceive that many people who believe that schizophrenia is an illness internalize treatment that can communicate such negative forecasts.

Turns out the outcome of my journey didn’t coincide with the “sick,” mainstream delusions associated with schizophrenia. I’d read those delusions in school where the twin studies proved the genetic component and there was a noted progressive decline that would get worse and worse and result in brain damage. Turns out twin studies weren’t so reliable, and abuse results in brain damage, not the syndrome which is more an expression of neuro-diversity.

Even if the latest research and I are wrong, and the illness causes brain damage, how was I able to endure some harsh conditions in the community, resume working and eventually passing licensure exams in spite of my learning disabilities? For six months I had to bike twenty miles a day, take the rails for an hour each way to a wealthy suburb, and work in the belly of the beast to prove to my mafia family that this was not my destiny.

***

Now I am a licensed psychotherapist on an outpatient psychiatric unit.

Eleven years ago, I heard about the hearing voices network in Europe, and started to run professional groups in which I disclosed my lived experience with “schizophrenia.” I learned to use my experiences to facilitate storytelling and reflections in group therapy. I have found doing this in a group transforms what was once terrorizing, maddening, and unspeakable into something that can provide insight and inspiration to help others.

Furthermore, there are many details, coincidences, and evidence that I was in fact being monitored in ways many might not think possible. There are also many extremely oppressed people who share experiences of being monitored to which I relate. Such experiences include voices, disassociation, viewing bizarre television scenes, having an apartment ransacked, secret service badges, receiving job related mail that was broken open, being tailed by police officers, and oh so much more.

I may not have all the answers to all the questions I have, but, finally, I know I am not alone. Knowing this is such a relief!

Vinograndov, Sophia, M.D., “Cognitive Training for Neural System Dysfunction for Psychosis Disorders,” Psychiatric Times, Vol 36 Issue 3, March 29, 2019.

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“So, you have bipolar,” said the well-meaning psychiatrist, “So what’s the big deal?”

I had been talking about the stigma associated with presuming that all mental health challenges were disorders. He interrupted me.

But wait! This was the first time anyone ever suggested that I had bipolar!

Was I supposed to give up my perspective and feel I had achieved something? Somehow was this a more socially acceptable diagnosis? Was getting the right diagnosis supposed to fix everything that happened to me?

As a statistic, I was being moved from the 3.2 million individuals in the United States diagnosed with schizophrenia to the 5.7 million who experience bipolar. Of those with bipolar 70% experience psychosis during mania and 50% during depression.

I had been stable ten years. For the past four years I had been running innovative professional group psychotherapy that focuses on exploring psychosis across diagnostic categories.

I’d had the privilege or cracking open hundreds of stories and contrasting them against the diagnosis of differing staff psychiatrists. I felt I learned a lot about the mentality of each distinctive psychiatrist by doing this.

You see, if your bipolar is like mine and includes experiences associated with psychosis a lot can happen to you in the mental health system. If you stick with me through this article you may learn some innovative ways to cope with psychosis across diagnostic divides.

Common Reasons that People with Psychosis Get Diagnosed Bipolar: 

From my vantage point, there are many subjective reasons for bipolar to be selected over schizophrenia or schizoaffective. These subjective factors do not always involve a perfect equation of DSM-V criteria. I’ll go ahead and admit that I do not believe DSM criteria really helps the professional understand the reality of psychosis. Nor is being diagnosed with a psychotic disorder likely to result in more humane and appropriate treatment.

Perhaps, you get diagnosed bipolar because you have suffered a mood component and have a history of being expressive about it in the past. Maybe, your psychosis experiences are intermittent and discontinue with proper support. Perhaps you express experiences that are positive and spiritual that can make your mood and energy soar. Or maybe your body is responsive to small doses of antipsychotics.

Many get diagnosed bipolar because they have enough judgement to convincingly conceal or minimize their psychosis experiences. Sometimes you get the stamp because the psychiatrist respects and has hope for you. If you are a person of color or don’t come from a class the professionals relate to, you are less likely to get the bipolar stamp. I don’t feel I personally need research to believe this to be true. I believe my observations over time are acute enough. However, I do understand that this research does exist.

In my experience some professionals are open to learning and seeing people through the bipolar lenses, and some are more chronic in their ways.

Why Upgrade Your Diagnosis?

When in madness, there was no need to upgrade my diagnosis. I was living in an alternate reality, and I only wanted to feel safe. Being bipolar only meant that I was in danger of being killed and having it called a suicide. All I wanted was to get out of the reality as quick as possible.

In my experience of wellness, there is more of a sense of social acceptability associated with a bipolar diagnosis. Perhaps this is largely because of the misconception that schizophrenia is degenerative or only gets worse over time. Although this is not true, it’s arguable that social stigma does not lead the majority of people to believe otherwise. For example, in 2006 schizophrenia.com suggests a host of negative statistics about schizophrenia including that only 35% of sufferers experience repeated episodes without returning to functioning.

Still, negative statistics (like the one above) enhance the damage that gets done when supporters act without understanding that it is likely that people will heal from psychosis. Good people become institutionalized by bad statistics. Families may not finance a sufferer the opportunity to recover if they keep in mind statistic like that.

Looking closer at that 35% statistic, they come from E. Fuller Torrey’s 2006 statistics which suggest that after ten years, 15% of schizophrenics will be permanently hospitalized and 10% will have killed themselves verses those studied over thirty years during which 10% end up permanently hospitalized and 15% will have killed themselves. This starts to sound like a 35% throw away rate.

Consider that many health plans do not even offer treatment to people with schizophrenia. Likewise, I know locally it is easier to find a professional bipolar group or specialist than it is to find a professional schizophrenia group or specialist.

Less stigma, less negative statistics means less social persecution. That is why many people who are looking to make social rehabilitation gains try to suppress their psychosis and fight against a schizophrenia diagnosis. Many suffers learn to do this so people don’t reject you.

What it Takes to Suppress Psychosis Regardless of Diagnosis?

How does one suppress psychosis? I think it has a lot to do with having a project that is very meaningful to you and vying to be successful with it. Then, the sufferer just cannot let anything get in their way. Sound stupidly easy? The best way I can convey that it isn’t is to share pieces of my experience.

In State hospital, most staff who thought I was schizophrenic would just dominate and humiliate me. I believed that if people knew I was schizophrenic that that type of treatment would resume. My complex appeals to staff to convey that I okay with the FBI resulted in a beat-down by the cowboy security squad. Begging for aspirin with a highly uncomfortable fever, caused one nurse to write a note that I was sexually inappropriate with her. These are not the types of things you want to see happen to you on the outside,

Meanwhile many of my peers tried to recruit me into their white supremacy gang, or the Mexican mafia, or the FBI, or in one case, the Navy Seals. Sound safe in there?

These kinds of experiences cannot be spoken of when you suppress your experience. Nothing happened! They become buried secrets.

But the treatment that had the most lasting impact was the experiences I had to suppress in the community.

There was the woman who flashed me a secret service badge. She initially said I would be safe if I took the over-priced apartment. She showed up again the day I came home to find my apartment had been ransacked and accused my uncle of doing it.

There was also the mail that came from my county work applications that was repeatedly torn open in spite of my complaints at the postal service.

There was the occasion when I was followed on my way to work by a resident I knew from Seattle (I was working in California.) He had handcuffs and a jean jacket with a hand made sign that read CIA on it.

There was the time a computer hacker marked-up my resume at the local library. Several encounters later he told me that he worked for the multinational corporations.

This kind of treatment accompanied me for two years and stopped when I got professional employment. It was traumatic and perpetuated my emergency state, but I learned to pretend it didn’t matter.

If you can ignore the fact that you have no rights and just persist at your immediate project you can overcome psychosis.

It’s Just a Political Discussion:

Resuming professional employment, I worked seven days a week. Eventually, I managed to get a psychotherapy license and earn enough for a down payment on a house in the bay area. I met my wife and got married.

So finally, once I got that kind of support behind me and put a well-meaning psychiatrist in a spot that challenged his perception of disorders, I got bumped up from schizophrenia to bipolar, yay!

Now the DSM-V, which wasn’t yet written during my escapades, says that people with bipolar who go through psychosis in a low mood can experience fear and paranoia. This is exactly what I experienced. Perhaps, one day I’ll get out of my depression and become hypomanic! That gives me something to look forward to!

However, when we examine the recent research this point may become moot.

Laboratory Science Supports Treating Psychosis Across Diagnostic Divides!

In the laboratory they are coming out with scientific findings that strongly support the view that diagnostic differentiation is irrelevant.

In fact, in a very recent article published by The Psychiatric Times, schizophrenia is being considered a syndrome that is more of a neurodevelopmental disorder than an illness or disease. Additionally, these findings do not support different kinds of neurodevelopmental evidence for bipolar verses schizophrenia verses schizoaffective, verses depression with psychosis.

If treated poorly, the neurodevelopmental process will become more extreme! Thus, sufferers can be trained to cope like dyslexics can be trained to read. This vantage point can help promote training in social functioning like specialized job placement programs like the IPS model out of Dartmouth. This practice can help participants in early prevention programs, or at any stage of recovery. get back to work.

Of course, there are many other social skills to learn when you have to suppress trauma! Of course, social skills are gained through socialization groups.

Other Considerations Stemming from The Research:

Moreover, I believe that understanding that you have an underlying condition like ADD, Dyslexia, or Autism can save you from living out your depression and mania to their fullest. Instead of feeling like a slave to the moods, neurodevelopmental understanding helps understand the basis for the moods. By learning that there are reasons you haven’t been included, one can use it to make meaning of depression and play back tapes of the consequences of mania.

Additionally, sufferers can learn about ways they have been traumatized for being different. Also paying attention to real underlying trauma that exacerbates the expression of the syndrome becomes important.

All this can help people with bipolar psychosis learn how to live in their strengths and focus on their abilities and the ways they are exceptional. Albert Einstein, Temple Grayden, and Earnest Hemmingway are just a few of many examples of how people with neurodevelopmental issues can contribute to society in very advanced ways.

As a society, some of us are learning that celebrating neuro-diversity, like they do in some more traditional societies, can lead to better outcomes for people who are built differently. In fact, some might argue that if the problem is neurodevelopmental, expecting symptom suppression without accommodations and providing support groups is just not humane.

Treatment for Psychosis Across Diagnostic Categories:

Here is where I can help other bipolar people if they are willing to explore those terrifying experiences with other good people who are stigmatized. This may involve getting to know people who are from different cultures and may still be in challenging circumstances.

Losing privilege and connecting with those less fortunate is so counter-intuitive in this land where the haves hate the have-nots. But oddly going against the grain in this manner can help exponentially!

If your bipolar experience includes psychosis, treatment can exist in group therapy that normalizes and permits you to express your stories without getting punished. If you are encouraged to work with people with differing diagnostic histories you can learn to be a leader and supporter.

No doubt, the mental health incarceration system varies based on the socioeconomics of your locale. Regardless, it will train you to suppress those psychosis experiences and pretend like they are not real. If you fail to suppress, you will be rejected and ridiculed by others and if this upsets you, you will be punished by going back to the hospital.

If you are able to play the game and can return to work, go ahead and become the bipolar diagnosis. To do so you can simply engage in social rehabilitation and work without upsetting the applecart. It becomes a political discussion with a psychiatrist like the one I had above.

Group Therapy for Psychosis:

Okay, I’ll admit, suppression is not always so easy for all of us. But over the years I have seen many individuals hide their psychosis, avoid my groups, and pretend like what they went through was just bipolar stuff. Indeed, I had to play this game for six years. I had to start over again without anyone knowing anything about me.

However, if you are like me and had to overcome some dramatic circumstances, suppressing all those experiences and trauma may turn you into a traumatized droid. A part of you is permanently disassociated and all you can do is work and try to act in ways that keep you out of trouble.

I am here to promote one potential outlet that I was eventually able to use: group therapy in which the content of psychosis is shared and participants learn from each other.

For example, I hear very few voices and never thought of aliens, but when I learn from people who do, it helps me be more flexible in the meaning I make of what happened to me. My desire to collaborate and support helps me be flexible and decreases my distress.

As a psychotherapist, I started leading these groups and sharing my story to prompt others to feel comfortable in doing so. I learned that by sharing my story and demonstrating that I had recovered, I could use my suffering towards a useful purpose.

Whether you do it as a professional, a peer counselor, or a volunteer, getting support for those things you’ve been through and teaching others how to survive with psychosis can be very rewarding. It can help bring you back to life!

Opportunities to do this can be available through the hearing voices network movement. This is an international movement that seeks to set up peer support outside the mental health system. In the United States, you can click: www.hvn-usa.org!

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The post Learn How I Upgraded My Schizophrenia to Bipolar, And What That Means appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

With Upcoming Program Closures Announced, How Confident Should I Feel?

A few years ago, a co-worker said, “We could come into work tomorrow and the job might not be there for us! That’s why I always try to put family first!”

My job of fifteen year was there for me before I got married and gained the sense of support that I somehow seemed to lack prior. It dug me out of poverty!

Perhaps my coworker said what he said because he could see how committed I was to the job. Many colleagues notice that I am driven to go the distance for our program participants. I try to disclose my history to most. I know the grapevine still exists.”

Perhaps some coworkers have learned to respect the lived experience that makes me feel passionate about the work I do!

Regardless, right now, the program’s budget sits in the executive management’s hands. They have announced that they are going to have to close programs to balance the budget. Therefore, I find the words of my coworker playing in my mind.

Recurring Dreams and Anxieties:

There have been a lot of nights over the past fifteen years I have awoke to recurring dreams of being asked to leave my job early. Often, I am forced to move and try to start over again working for much less money. Some nights I am sleeping in shelters and riding bikes to interviews. Others I have some cushion and my wife behind me. Maybe I start out with enough money to buy a house, but have to work a low wage job.

I may be a licensed professional with twenty-five years of experience, but clearly the thought of finding a new job is very intimidating to me. I have published a memoir along with hundreds of posts, many published on professional sites, about my mental health.

Perhaps it makes sense that a part of me is afraid that I will never be able to find another job again.

Eighteen years ago, I thought I was a targeted individual and under state surveillance via a mafia entity. The only job I could get was an arranged job at an Italian Delicatessen. This lasted over a year and was extremely difficult. At age thirty, I had to bike twenty miles a day and take the rails for two hours just to get gaslit and harassed by teenage co-workers from wealthy districts.

Signs of Getting Scapegoated Still Exist!

With fifteen years of experience I am one of the most tenured staff in the union, and yet I frequently find my work scrutinized because I have a different perspective. Maybe this triggers my sense of paranoia. Even when a client responds affirmatively and shows growth, I may get challenged.

I have written my own therapy platform to support what I do. It is significantly different than mainstream treatment. Although many colleagues will acknowledge that my presentations are impressive in person, in public there is silence when I am scrutinized. I don’t blame others. I am not always able to disagree without hurting others. But still I am sensitive.

I speak at local conferences and agencies to train others with my therapy platform! But on the job, I still experience doubts and challenges. In fact, this week it was particularly bad.

Premonition?

Earlier this week I got a rare chance to talk to my manager as I was negotiating a paid role for peer counselors on the unit. I let my manager vent and supported him about the threat of programs getting cut. At one point he said some people with a lot of tenure might get cut. I walked away wondering if he was referencing me or himself.

That night I woke up screaming. A long dream through which I constantly evaded death finally ended with someone ambushing me through a doorway with an odd-looking shotgun. I was shot as I reached to grab the barrel.

I woke up the next morning convinced that I was going to lose my job to the point where I processed this as a real possibility. Although I have a clean record and a union job, the potential of trumped up complaints keep me in fear.

Shamanic Processing:

Back when I was working at the Italian Deli, the only way I was able to get employed again was to maintain the faith that it was possible despite the potential of surveillance. I went to many interviews without getting hired.

I thought about another job I have had my eye on that I have recently heard is hiring. I thought about the potential of a private practice. I thought about a long-time dream of mine, getting another grant to help create an outreach program.

I told myself that if I am frustrated that I am not supported at work, that maybe it is time to move on.

I remembered that I believe in a power that is higher than the CIA or the mafia. I used the belief in this higher power to remain open to the many potentials that a job change might mean.

I found myself thinking about how Malcolm X knew he was going to be assassinated and kept on doing what he was doing without letting it make him furious. I thought about these things and worked and worked my way through another day.

Managing Stigma with Grace:

Part of leading the life we are meant to live means being awake to all the complexities, twists, and turns that life brings. Now, thanks to my understanding of life’s messages and cues, I can be prepared for what is to come.

Instead of being victimized and scapegoated, I chose to have a good day.

Clearly the power of stigma still lives inside of me and the wider society. However, when I am wise, I can benefit from the experiences.

I choose to put the energy out into the universe that there is a plan for me. This takes the sting out of stigma and is key to overcoming it.

I am a vessel! I give what I can and I pray to get what I need in life.

I will continue to serve to challenge stigma in this way in whatever capacity that opens up. Maybe we will be okay. No matter what I will find a way to maintain my work.

I will remain hopeful and positive about my colleagues and see what happens.

The post Using My Recovery from “Schizophrenia” to Manage Job Insecurity appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

How many parents out there would rather learn that their child had developed a life-threatening cancer, than hear that their child carries a diagnosis of schizophrenia? Historically burned-out doctors may be known to make such negative statements about schizophrenia at the time of diagnosis. If they end up being wrong, they simply re-diagnose the sufferer with bipolar; but still their comment happened. Perhaps, it challenged you to devalue your loved one.

Well, I am a mental health professional, and nothing excites me more than meeting someone else who has experiences associated with schizophrenia. I instantly know aspects of what they have gone through. It makes them a potential friend to me. Additionally, I come equipped with handfuls of tools that I think may be helpful for them. I am additionally curious to see what they might teach me about myself.

Strange thing is, I am not alone in my world view. Maybe you have heard of the international movement called the Hearing Voices Network? Originating from a psychiatrist in the Netherlands named Marious Romme and Sandra Escher, this movement seeks to normalize one of the many experiences associated with schizophrenia? The movement points out that one in ten people hear voices and that not everyone needs to be institutionalized in the mental health system as a result. In fact, the movement has proved that people who have been institutionalized for years turn out to be great leaders and advocates.

Stereotypes You Are Up Against:

Maybe, it is not fair to blame anyone for a negative response to the above dilemma because of all the negative stereotypes associated with the schizophrenia word. Many people think of a homeless person who is out fighting for their survival on the streets, posturing, or bearing a cardboard sign beneath the underpass. Those a little more informed of the norms may think of a crowded board and care home with nothing to do but to smoke and drink coffee. Still others in some states imagine a lengthy state hospital stay or transitions through hospital recidivism and homeless shelters. Of course, there will be those who think of shows they’ve seen like Criminal Minds or The Guardian. They may conjure images of mass shooting events that are blasted through the media quicker than our very apparent national homeless crisis.

Of course, as a parent or loved ones there is the stereotype of the fresh-out-of-school social workers supervised by burned out administrators who dehumanizes their patients the minute their backs are turned. Perhaps it is hard to watch this happen and easier just to stay out of it. Perhaps, some of you will shield your kids from this reality and try to take care of them on your own. Meanwhile, much of the public feels that we as a nation were kinder and gentler during industrial times when we provided mental institutions. We all know stereotypes are bad but still they exist are real and scare us.

When Stereotypes Become Real:

I can relate. I worked in mental health and greatly despised the life I saw many of my clients enduring. I respected my supervisors, but it never felt right. When I advanced to be able to work independently, I was so successful at advocating for better care, that it is part of what landed me in a State Hospital myself and discharged to the streets.

“You see Tim,” I was told in my second meeting with my psychiatrist two months into my State Hospital stay, “one time we had someone come in here and say they were being followed by the FBI and we found out they were in fact being followed. They hadn’t done much, but they were under investigation.”

Was she really referencing me? I had tipped to press of to murder and mayhem on several occasions. Yes, many of those stigmatized scenes are real, but they are only a small piece of the picture.

Indeed, I was willing to call myself autistic long before I was willing to call myself the schizophrenic that I am. It took me fifteen years of recovery before I started to embrace the ugly word because the stereotypes were so threatening to me.

Hard Decisions You Face:

Such stereotypes may bring really hard decisions. Your relationship with your loved one, the extent to which you perceive justice in social institutions, and your own stigma about mental health challenges may influence your take on what you are hearing.

Remember, that even though your loved one is in an emergency state potentially flailing around with conspiracy ideas and opinions about you, they know you well enough to know how you will respond. They may sense your response and resent it. Historical problems in the relationship may become exacerbated exponentially. For a minority, there is the potential of real violence while your loved one remains in emergency state? How are you to respond if someone you love suddenly sees you as the root of all evil?

And what will your friends say? How may they judge your parenting or partnership?  How do you handle privacy needs? How have you done this throughout their lives up to this point? Do your actions further shame your loved one? How much credence do you put into the medical diagnosis? What have you heard about the word: recovery? Does your loved one deserve the best treatment, or do they need to be treated fairly, just like everyone else? What is the best treatment? What kind of money and resources do you have to play with? How willing are you to support someone who isn’t behaving appropriately? How much do you value your own safety verses theirs?

Support for You:

Providers will generally refer you to the power structure of NAMI for support and you will mingle with others who have faced these dilemmas for years. If you are even willing to stay involved, you can use these groups to figure the most humane decisions to make.

Often, with this referral comes a clear concept of a chemical imbalance to which your loved one is victim. Suddenly you are surrounded by volunteers who give their time and expect you to do the same and support their views. Accepting the power of the illness, setting behavioral boundaries, imposing medications, and accepting dilapidated housing options may be the standard with which you are encouraged to comply.

Indeed, people and families are very different as are regions and NAMI boards. A variety of things can be helpful.

What it Feels Like to Find Meaning in Stereotypes:

When I was going through dehumanizing stereotypical experiences, I only felt victimized. I had always thought I was critical of dehumanizing practices; but still, I was shocked! Oh, how much worse that horrific, maddening, and dehumanizing treatment seem when you are in an emergency state. No one believed a word I said. I didn’t think I would ever be glad for enduring it. I could see no value to losing all my social standing and being incarcerated in impoverished circumstances. I feared for my future.

Now eighteen years later, I use all those degrading experiences which lasted two years after I was discharged to the streets to convince patients I work with that I know what they are talking about. I still feel overwhelmed when I think of what I went through, but I now can say I went through them for a reason.

I often say that if I had known that my suffering could lead to a lifetime of meaningful work, it wouldn’t have been so terrorizing. Instead of waking up in night terrors, or having urinated in my bed, I could have gone through what I went through more gracefully. And I wouldn’t have been as hard to manage for all the low wage work community that surrounded me. I mean any innocent child who saw me coming would run the other way. My negative energy was quite off-putting.

You May Be Needed to Make it Possible:

Meanwhile, my father had made his opinion known, he felt incarceration and mental health warehousing would be as good as it would get for me. Just like the treatment system at Montana State Hospital which was set up to help me adjust to poverty and disempowerment, it seemed like deep down he wanted to be right about his negative prediction. Still, he gave me a year of economic support to get it together. Though I could have got food stamps, my parents did help! And I still call them weekly. The memory of them being so concerned they were just enabling me while I was biking twenty miles a day to work a forty-hour week still burns.

Thank god it worked! I was able to get back to my career.

Can you imagine how great I feel with a career in mental health, a wife, a dog, and a home?

Many Others Can Do It:

Many others of us who suffer can do a lot of healing and earning of social empowerment by helping each other out. We can do this by using our experiences to reach others who may appear unreachable to outsiders. However, we also need to be paid for our livelihood.

Not only have I been blessed with the opportunity to find meaning from my suffering, I have seen others do it as well. I have helped employ a team of four to use their experiences associated with psychosis to help others. They outreached and learned to run groups in agencies.

What Is Missing for Schizophrenics in America?

Perhaps not everyone who suffers from experiences associated with schizophrenia naturally takes to becoming a therapist the way I have, but the mental health system really lacks a vision for sustainable roles for us schizophrenics to occupy. And I believe the first step towards creating such roles involves seeing schizophrenia as a culture rather than an illness.

In other countries the hearing voices movement has taken hold, healed many, and given people valuable roles. The premise is simple: let people who hear voices from different walks of life get together and share their experiences in un-monitored support groups. Wow, so much can come from that!

For the last eleven years I have run such support groups as a professional who openly reflects on my lived experience with schizophrenia. Like many hearing voices groups, the focus of my groups extends beyond simply hearing voices. I like to include and normalize all kinds of experiences that lead people to alternative thoughts about the way the world works.

I think these kinds of support groups help direct schizophrenics to care about the experiences of their brethren. Mutual learning and coping strategies result. Hence, letting schizophrenics acculturate and be schizophrenics is a marvelous step in the right direction.

The Need for A Living Wage:

However, in my opinion, support groups are just a start to what is needed to give the culture a meaningful role. In Oakland California, services that outreach to homeless encampments, board and care homes, agencies and shelters can invite institutionalized individuals out to support groups. Many of the people I serve off the streets of Oakland, can greatly benefit from having visitors who come and bring the support groups to them in their board and care home. Then, they might then learn to come out to groups in the community and get around some of the obstacles that keep them isolated.

An organization as such can significantly train and employ schizophrenics to develop a variety of skills. It can give them a chance to make meaning from the stereotypes through which they may have lived or to which they feared Thus a training/outreach program can help schizophrenics move on to better and better jobs.

How You Can Help Your Loved Ones Realize this Vision?

I think it is important to end the medicalized view of schizophrenia. Updated research is defining psychosis across diagnostic divides as more of a syndrome or even a neurodevelopmental disorder like autism or dyslexia. This really supports the work of the Hearing Voices Network which contends that voices and other experience do have value and carry real meaning that must be addressed for healing and survival.

Believe me, there can be complex underlying issues to address.

Thus, as you live schizophrenic stereotypes through your loved one, remember that they may be transformed into your child’s mission in life. You cannot possibly be responsible for all the meanness in the system, but you can take updated research and success stories from the Hearing Voices Movement to your NAMI meetings. You can find ways to support employment for schizophrenics through empowering organizations like the one I proposed above. I ran such a program for a year and a half until the temporary funding was done. I know it can be done.

Successful Schizophrenics:

There are many things that can help schizophrenics find roles that utilize their passions and interests. As a culture, schizophrenics are historically oppressed like heretics in western society. However, if we are to explore many traditional societies, we may find many of the skills that are labeled as an illness to be shamanic and spiritual. There are many wise traditions to explore in creating solutions.

I personally do not throw the tradition of psychiatry down the toilet. I myself utilize medication and work with others who do as well. I also admire and champion people who do not. However, we must offer solutions that help heal the localized abuses that have occurred within the medicalized system. One solution does not fit all.

Ultimately, I still wouldn’t mind using another word besides schizophrenia. I call my groups and my program special messages.

The post How to Help Your Loved One Be A Successful Schizophrenic? appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

Although it may seem like binging and purging down a sink in a roach infested apartment is a likely a low point for a Where’s Waldo person born to such mainstream, Caucizoidal privilege, it wasn’t really that dire. Indeed, it would take me seven years for a catastrophic incident to happened. Then, I would find myself buried me in a state hospital as I suppose the psychometric testing predicted. So, the question remains: did the psychotherapy help, or was psychotherapy part of the problem?

Though I had some hard times, psychiatric medications and life-term psychodynamic therapy worked for seven years. Psychopharmacology was a booming industry and there was a big push to get people on medications. My goal was to fit into the mainstream and be like everybody else. It was as if I could take medications and wear name brands and maybe some people would tolerate me. I worked and worked at it. I guess the premise of this therapy was the same as it was in phase one and two, fir a square peg into a round hole.

Discharged from the state hospital to the streets with a month worth of medication, I learned that professional work was out of the question for a homeless, drifting, targeted individual. When I finally managed to arrange a life sustaining situation for myself fear of failure and chronic homelessness prompted me to reconnect with family. In order to receive financial support that could make a low-wage job sustainable, I was forced into a dehumanizing rendition of narrative therapy for three or four years.

There are many things I learned during this decade of treatment for binging and purging and schizophrenia. Was it really wise to trust psychotherapy during these twists and turns? I highlight eight things that particularly hurt me during this time.

Lesson Number Eight—Don’t Use Treatment to Attack a Political Ideology:

In my senior year in college, I went voluntary to the hospital at the urging of my new therapist because I just could re-calibrate myself into my school routine. In the hospital I was able to contain my raging eating disorder, so I avoided that diagnosis. Instead, I was diagnosed with Schizotypal personality disorder and started on three medications.

In another sense was a trusting and genuine fellow. I took the Rorschach and expressed Marxian concepts. I continued to say “yo” and dress in casual inner-city garb. One might argue these just aren’t wise things to do in an American Psychiatric Hospital.

But the worst thing I did was challenge the AMA for banning Thomas Szasz. This really concerned my doctor and he started me on medications before the results of my tests were up.

The doctor said I was impulsive! I had never heard myself being referenced in that way. It is true my emotions go from one to one-hundred, but I usually don’t act on them unless I am in life or death circumstances.

Upon my release, my therapist told my parents that I really wasn’t college material and encouraged me to go on SSI. She put me into a very repressive day program with extremely oppressed and mistreated people from a state hospital. Instead I took on a couple of seasonal jobs and got back into the next semester. I ignored the quality of her advice. I felt like I owed her for putting me in the hospital.

Lesson Number Nine–Don’t Let the Basis of Your Trust Be Credentials:

In my gut, I never trusted my therapist of seven years even though I made strides in my professional and social life under her care. I stayed with her because she had a Ph.D. from Cornel University and because I was afraid to hurt her by cutting her loose. I was dependent on her as a sounding board while I waited for the next medication cocktail to kick in.

Perhaps if I had known what she told my parents about me when I gave her permission to talk to them, I would have fired her. However, my parents and I had poor communication that even if they told me, I don’t even know if I would have believed them.

I recall repeatedly talking back to myself about my care during this time and deciding to use my mind to trust the credentials. My intuition told me I shouldn’t trust her from the start.

Case in point: I didn’t trust the entitled way she treated the security guards at the site where she first worked. I’d worked in the inner-city and seen that kind of arrogance lead to beloved cars getting keyed. I felt going up the chain and getting all dysregulated about the lack of response it in front of me was treating the security officers like slaves. I knew she’d be more successful if she talked to them like human beings. But she was the Ph.D. And she eventually found an office where she didn’t have to fight that losing battle.

Lesson Number Ten–Don’t Make Decisions for the Client:

Over the seven years, therapy never went into my past. This was my choice, but maybe it could have been contested. Instead, therapy was only about my current depression which was always getting worse and worse. As I stated before, we were constantly waiting for her latest psychopharmacology professional to fix me.

I would need therapy and medication the rest of my life. “The only way to manage a personality disorder is through an intensive psychodynamic relationship,” she would say. She lowered her price, so I could afford the sessions myself. I saved all my decisions for her to make.

Meanwhile I excelled in my profession of a mental health counselor and put myself through graduate school with accommodations for diagnosed ADD and Dyslexia. Persistent hard work always kept me out of trouble. Even though my GPA dropped from 3.9 in undergraduate to a 3.7, things were different because I also put energy into creating a social life.

Still, it was very hard to wake up through the medication fog in the morning and get into work. I would gulp 32 ounces of Coke, so I wouldn’t fall asleep at the wheel. But I was a good worker once I woke up. Also, I really worked hard on my social life and making relationships with people who rejected me. It was like the old Morrisey song: the more they ignored me, the closer I got.

Lesson Number Eleven–Don’t Presume Everything in a Paranoid Person’s Life is Paranoia:

When I graduated, I wanted to get into the Peace Corps and many other alternatives, but every program rejected me after consulting with my therapist. I didn’t want to be paranoid, so I maintained faith in her. She taught me a lot about my paranoia. I stopped trusting my intuition.

Finally, I settled for moving to Seattle and continued my treatment via phone. Within six months I took a risky job in a high-profile section 8 housing authority job. I kept making legal and ethical decisions that guided my conduct amid extreme social violence toward going against the grain.

I would tell myself that I would be paranoid if I thought that what I was doing would be frowned upon. I told myself that drugs and violence were illegal and not sanctioned by the government! People like me were not bribed to look the other way!

Indeed, maintaining these delusions in this setting was very dangerous. However, I blamed my fear of retribution and defiant behavior on my paranoia and tipped off the press on several occasions.

Still, I became very popular among the residents. My boss who I lost respect for when she started showing up to work high, threatened to fire me. The management company spied on me. There were many veiled threats that I pretended not to understand. Case in point, they tried to bribe me with free concert tickets and I didn’t get it. I hosted a community event instead in which I invited the clients out to the concert.

Lesson Twelve–Don’t Predict Permanent Warehousing for a Person in an Emergency:

I finally started to question the reality of this hold my therapist had on me and went of my medication. The violence I encountered was real and was never resolved. When coincidences started to seem suspicious to me, and my best friend from college made a direct and credible threat on my life, my therapist contacted my parents and got them to put out a missing-persons report out on me. I fled towards Canada.

“Tim will be in and out of the hospital the rest of his life,” my therapist told my parents.

With that advice my father begged me to stay on the chronic ward in the state hospital for another nine months. He promised me that if I returned to the community, I would keep on getting followed.

After a three-month incarceration in Montana State Hospital, I took a Greyhound bus to Fresno California with four thousand and five hundred dollars of assets. My Mom refused to give me access to the ten thousand dollars I inherited from my Grandfather.

Still, I stayed in touch with my mother, but not my father. I wanted to be sure the following did not return as he had predicted. Indeed, I interpreted his words as a threat.

I managed to get a job and get housing until I ran out of medication. Then, I tried everywhere for any kind of legal income. I’d resisted many outlaw recruitment efforts in the state hospital. I was sticking to legal work!

I finally got a professional job when I was down to one thousand, five hundred dollars, but even I had to admit that I was not able to work in a professional capacity with what I’d been through.

Lesson Number Thirteen—Don’t Collaborate with Imposed Treatment:

To reconnect with family, I had to move to the bay area, get a job at an Italian Deli, and see a therapist. I had come to believe that my best friend from college was not only bipolar and an ex-addict, but also an Italian mafia boss. He worked as a longshoreman as a gang leader in the ports of Philadelphia. His stories of corrupt cops who paid his way through college for under-cover surveillance took on new meaning as did the coincidences that had followed me throughout.

Nevertheless, I was the delusional person working at an Italian Deli with a two-hour bike and BART commute. I concluded that my family was a mob family. I begrudged having to fit two hours of therapy into my busy schedule. But to eat I was forced to go to therapy. I sought work that would enable me to move away and start over again free.

I begrudged the small amount of financial support I received and led an impoverished lifestyle of twelve hour work days. At work my seventeen-year-old bosses would mock me. Many came from wealthy districts. And this therapist was part of Italian family practice. “I too shop at A.G. Ferrari’s she would tell me.

Lesson Number Fourteen—Don’t Expect Psychosis to be Suppressed:

I didn’t trust or like the therapist I was forced to see in the least because she was not interested in my experiences of being followed. I did everything I could to conceal them from her because I was afraid if she knew about them, she would hospitalize me.

I was extremely angry about the $225 weekly cost of therapy when I was making nine dollar’s an hour. My therapist would sense this and get defensive. This would force me not to share any experiences of being targeted with her in a genuine way. I had some very disturbing things happen that I was forced to conceal from her.

In fact, when I finally admitted to her eight months in that I believed I was being followed and called the FBI, she became fiercely angry and threatened me. She looked like she was considering the hospital. Oops!

Lesson Number Fifteen—Don’t Impose Your Economic Reality on Your Patient:

Fundamentally, this therapist had no empathy for how hard my twelve-hour days were and how my paycheck barely covered rent. She insisted on the two-hour amount of time she felt I needed. I told her that the sessions were of no use to me. Yet they continued.

My therapist did not encourage me to find a professional job even though I sprayed resumes and had many interviews. She said, “I believe you are working hard in your head, but believe me working at a Deli for nine dollars and hour is not so hard,” “What is really happening is you are letting teenage kids bully you, you shouldn’t give away your power.”

Can I get a witness? I had a right to be angry.

This therapist didn’t believe in medication and expected me to fix things on my own. Then, she judged me a failure when progress went at a snail’s pace. She seemed to feel bad for herself and the poor kids who had to work with me. The harassment and abuse was intense because I was intense. Some of it was so bad that it would probably make anyone wonder.

When my year of support was getting close, she finally referred me to a psychiatrist and my work performance vastly improved. Then, she criticized my success, “I think you’ve lost your creativity.”

After ten months, I started to use my medications to more effectively snow her. Additionally, I needed her for rational support as I tried to get back into the professional world. Acting with professional entitlement didn’t come easy to me with rules that didn’t match the defenseless abuse I received in my state hospital training.

“Your parents are paying for these sessions because they love you, why sweat the small stuff,” she argued. “I am not being a greedy capitalist,” she said, “I have an ethical responsibility here.” “Don’t be a wounded healer,” she said.

Luckily, she wasn’t around for future family financial discussions. It wouldn’t matter. I would be financially stable by then, just hurt and angry.

The post In Psychotherapy We Trust: Part Three– The Psychopharmacology Craze appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

I grew up in the mental health system when Prozac was the new craze. Prozac was the second drug I took and within three years there was the new field of psychopharmacology. By that time, getting the right combo became quite the rave. What that meant there was little to no exploration of the role of trauma in my life. Instead of learning about elements of trauma that were related to the eating disorder that threatened my life, I was diagnosed with a personality disorder and told not to research it because it would only make it worse.

My therapist would repeat to me that the only way to deal with a personality disorder was in the context of a psychodynamic relationship. She didn’t let on that she didn’t think I was college material even though my GPA was a 3.9. She told my parents. They concealed this from me.

I stuck with this psychologist for seven years. It was true I didn’t want to look back at my life growing up with privilege. I also didn’t get the feeling that it was mature to blame my parents for the shameful eating disorder that left me dwelling in the inner-city and without a sense of support. My suffering was nurtured in psychotherapy by a rolling of the eyes and waiting for the impact of the next drug combination.

A History of Class Conflict:

I first started to notice not enjoying being around other people in fourth grade. It started by being bullied and teased by my peers for not wearing the latest fashions that my parents refused to buy. For some reason I dealt with this by fighting back and getting nerdier. My parents sought therapy for me. Perhaps, they were embarrassed by hearing about my social problems from their other friends on the private school faculty.

Back then, I could not understand why I stood out so much. My parents and shrink would tell me that my superego was too dominant. The shrink would get my Mom to let me buy more fashionable clothing.

Meanwhile, in the summers I found that I, in fact, did fit in with the welfare family who rented the downstairs of the Lodge, our vacation home in a rugged boon town in the Adirondacks. My family once owned a lumber company and my father inherited many old buildings which we used to vacation and rent out. With the welfare family living downstairs for three summers, I felt totally accepted. I was too innocent to realize that their lives depended on keeping me happy. We didn’t need to bathe and could be wild and have fun.

My welfare brothers would talk about hunting frogs with bb guns. The frogs wouldn’t die. Bbs would lodge themselves under the frog’s thick skin. They could shoot them all day. They loved to hunt frogs all day. One had so many bbs in it, it just floated in the water with a stunned look on its face.

One morning I woke up screaming from terrors. Pigs were being slaughtered in my dreams. My welfare brothers would laugh at me. They would tell me I was screaming, “Don’t you do that . . . Don’t you do that . . . Ah . . . AAAhhhh!” Then, we would go to work for my father who always told me that my welfare brothers were better workers than me.

I guess I lived and worked with that family enough to see the world from their perspective. And, boy, when I did that my family didn’t look too good. In many ways it only reinforced self-hatred.

Misfit:

Of course, even though I dressed better, things would still only get worse for me at the private Quaker school I attended in a Philadelphia suburb. I would break into my French-Canadian northern drawl to confront my peers about their teasing.

I think my social awkwardness really stood out during summer outings away from the Adirondacks. First, it was a two-week backpacking trip with middle-class Albany, NY kids at the adjacent YMCA camp. Next, it was not fitting in with rebellious rich kids who were getting straightened out at a North Carolina Outward Bound Course. And, finally, I attended a work camp in Belize where all the boarding school kids only wanted to drink and be ugly American Tourists. Meanwhile, I stuck to my stated goal, to live and work as though I lived in Belize. I was told it was the wrong reason for making the trip, but I didn’t care.

Starving:

The year before my parent’s divorced I didn’t sleep more than three hours a night for nine months. Then, when my parents got divorced things got tough as I had to keep up with sports, work, extra curriculars, travel between both houses, and the sharp increase in school work. My mom started staying out at all hours of the night and forgetting to check on me while I was up working through learning disabilities at two in the morning. My dad still expected me to do his house chores no matter how many papers I had to write or how hard I worked at my fast food job.

I was a hundred and three pounds when I got admitted to the hospital. My parents packed my bags to drop me off at the hospital and the therapist said, “Wow, these bags are really heavy!” Then, he ordered my family to attend daily family sessions with me.

When I graphically failed to gain weight in that setting, my family had to pay out of pocket for two months of inpatient treatment, so I could gain twenty pounds. My father cried signing over the check and I felt much shame. I presumed the expense depleted my college fund. Because my room was converted to a study and I moved in with a friend upon discharge, I chose the least expensive commuter school.

College:

Okay, my choice of College was not quite that simple. In the all-female inpatient unit where I’d be forced to revisit for an additional three months (this time insurance paid for it,) even a repressed fellow such as myself managed to learn to how to kiss. I started a sexual relationship with a twenty-five-year-old newspaper photographer who was schooling at the affordable commuter campus. After I graduated and worked at a summer camp, I moved in with her. Because she wouldn’t allow me to have friends, the relationship only lasted two years.

The latter two years, I hid the fact I was binging and purging by keeping to myself. I never learned to hang out and fit in. I didn’t make it to as much as a single college party. Instead, I worked with the neighbourhood kids at a local Korean gangster’s deli. Community relationships and the associated sociological learning was the thing that kept me going.

I’d do a little better with my socialization in grad school when I was medicated and under psychodynamic treatment. However, when I tried to breakaway and make a comeback on the west coast, it wouldn’t end well. I found myself compelled to uncover murder and mayhem in a local section 8 housing facility. I’d end up in a state hospital and believing I was under surveillance for two years.

One-to-One Hundred:

 It’s true with complex trauma, I am sensitive and overwhelmed by the regular issues that come up between people and in families. My emotions are based on a social justice narrative and I go from one to a hundred when I am getting teased, causing me to be further targeted. I may not get the joke right away, roll with it and have a good comeback. The insult may cut at my core when I think about it later.

During my twenty-something years, when people drank (or drugged,) I generally responded the same way I do when I get teased. I’d get a numb look on my face, withdraw, look at my watch and long to be somewhere else. Then, I notice when people talk to each other as if I’m not there and I don’t know what to do about it.

Disassociation:

Of course, despite all the years of treatment I received, nobody noticed or asked about my experiences with disassociation. It wasn’t until I wrote a memoir about surviving the schizophrenia diagnosis that I recaptured a memory of molestation the summer of my third-grade year. In fact, I don’t disassociate regularly, but it can happen in times of excessive stress.

Of course, my response to the molestation incident was so extreme, I wonder if that was my only experience. I have many traipsed memories that feel like dreams and mystery. Are they also disassociated memories? Are they Dreams? I have always had them, and I have always wondered. Additionally, having many hypervigilant memories means, I have lost trust for people without understanding why.

Post-Partum Depression:

I never really understood how devastating the experience of post-partum depression can be for a mother. Then I heard a severely-traumatized patient I work with say that her post-par-tum depression was the lowest point of her life. Think of a traumatized person. Think of years and years of homelessness, rape, physical abuse, family suicide, substance abuse. And think that all this does not compare to the pain endured during a post-par-tum depression when a woman just can’t connect with her child. This really made me think . . .

Up until recently, my mother made yearly visits to visit family in the area during which she would spend a day at my house. One year I drove out a couple of hours away to meet her at a park local to her other relatives to see her an extra day. Out walking in a flat, marshy California park amid Spring flocks of birds, my mother finally gave me a feel for what she went through after my birth. Her mother refused to support her in her most difficult hours. I knew she had been depressed when her mother died, but I hadn’t known this. I knew she only told me this because she wanted me to stop processing depressing stuff and I listened to her.

In my family two-generations back, lobotomies and institutionalization were the cure for family mental problems. There was no support available to my mother when it came to having depression. She had to buck it up. She still expects me to do the same.

Still the Pariah:

I find no comfortable around people. I avoid social engagements because I feel stigmatized, patronized or outclassed by the comments of others.

For example, while it’s true I do not know exactly what all my relatives really think about me, I think that in observing a slew of collective behaviour, most would conclude that something is going on that is not positive.

It is true I bear the stigma of having schizophrenia because I choose to live out of the closet. Additionally, my memoir was honest and not always flattering toward the family support I received going through the experience.

My grandmother with dementia could not remember who I was, but when she found out I was the author of the book, she declared, “It made the family look bad!”

My mother has said, “I could have written a book about all we did to try to help you and about how difficult you were!”

My uncle, a career professor at Princeton University, demurred in his response for a while and then said only, “the last chapter was positive.”

Even though it won awards in four contests, my aunt gave my book four stars on Amazon and wrote, “it is a difficult book, as the author, a trained mental health professional, dumps the reader into his own experience with precarious mental health . . .”

Many relatives refuse to look at me and only speak to my wife or each other when I am around.

When I had to miss a reunion because of a severe back injury that had me out of work for several months, I was told by my mother and cousin that my relatives said: “well, why couldn’t Barbara (my wife) have come!” It seems it was a joke that was tossed around so much at the reunion, some felt I should get to enjoy it as well. I still don’t know what to make of it. Do you?

It is true not all the responses of family members are necessarily negative. For example, the judicious comment of my uncle may not have been as negative as it had seemed. He later told me he liked my book when he saw I was upset. But it is much easier to withdraw and avoid my family. If my uncle really supported me, would he tolerate the jokes about me that are at my expense? I often wonder.

I perceive similar acts of hostility from other groups of people and choose to withdraw and write when I am not working.

Recovering from Psychiatric Treatment:

Being a psychiatric survivor means that I along with other marginalized groups in America like many veterans, homeless, felons, inner-city children and other abuse victims can relate to the symptoms of complex trauma. While it’s true there is the potential history of emotional neglect, the disassociation, the molestation, the hypervigilance, the psychic numbing, the emotional dysregulation, the avoidance of related things, the shame, the people-pleasing, there’s also a history of privilege.

It’s true, I didn’t have it that bad until I entered the twisted system of care that is based on a schizophrenia diagnosis.

While it’s true I continue to be dependent on medication, I do so because it helps me manage the oppression that surrounds me working in an inner-city outpatient psychiatric unit. I have learned with the help of the medications to have a public relationship with consensus reality that enables me to have meaning and purpose. I am liked and helpful to people on the unit where I work.

I suppose when I was coming up no one could get it right because a complex trauma disorder didn’t exist back then. Instead there was disorder after disorder after disorder. Nurses on the eating disorder unit suggested I was an adult child of an alcoholic. Now there’s another disorder or two to add of the epigenetic sort. What can I say, I am an easy person for whom to ring up a bill!

When I was in state hospital they couldn’t shut me up about how much trauma I was enduring locked up for being a whistle-blower. I circled the day room I was confined to for two weeks and got on the phone and yelled to my family and friends that the mafia was following me.

Meanwhile, I negotiated unwanted relationships with a red-state-Mexican-mafia-female and resisted the offers to run away with her. Then, I resisted the opportunity to join an outlaw gang for protection against her.

Also, there was a short, illiterate thief with severe scoliosis who said he was there to recruit me into the Navy Seals. He said I had what it took to be a great assassin.  He said I passed all his tests. However, for my last test, he said I had to say that Ronald Reagan was a great president. I failed that one! As a result, I was sentenced to stay in the hospital against my will for three months.

Six months later, after two moves, the only job I could find and maintain was a job at an upscale Italian Deli. So, all gaslighting, taunting and teasing aside, maybe I had a point!

Believe me, still taking medication for complex trauma is not the worst thing that can happen to those of us who are coming from an era of misinformation! But if I had been treated for trauma and experienced more compassion, I wonder if I would continue to need the medication?

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