Clyde Dee's Blog, page 12

Using Leverage in the Treatment of Psychosis

When I was in psychosis, or what I prefer to call message crisis, I was extremely angry when my family used leverage to force me into treatment. For starters, they contacted the police and supported a three-month hospitalization that kept me from seeking asylum in Canada. I concluded that they were a mafia family and the reason I was getting followed and harassed.

Perhaps this scenario sounds familiar to the reader? It lasted for two years after I was released from the hospital.

I continue to feel hurt by many of the things that transpired due to leverage. I may be able to act like I forgive; but I will never forget what it was like to experience such cruelty alone.

Thank god I was wrong about some of it!

Back in those days, I never imagined that I would someday write a blog about how to effectively leverage a message receiver into treatment. I would have sworn that I would never sell out so much to even suggest such an action.

Rethinking the Issue of Leverage:

Thanks to the word, “recovery,” I have been blessed with an opportunity to return to my career in mental health and work toward providing treatment for those who suffer from message crisis. It’s true, I have had to look the other way and swim against the tide a bit, but I have seen a few things work. I have witnessed how even things that I think would have been detrimental to me, can be helpful for some people.

Now, with hindsight as twenty-twenty, I ponder the issue of leverage for the conscientious family member, loved one, or helper who deals with the message receiver who is stuck. While a lot of my work emphasizes the fact that message receivers have a lot in common; there is also vast diversity in terms of strengths, preferences, support, and resources. I want to consider the message receiver who withdraws from their support and the world into the confines of their room or board and care with nothing but, perhaps cigarette smoke, and the wonderland of their messages to comfort or torment them. A recent Facebook post and unassociated conversation, encouraged me to do this

Establishing Treatment Instead of Confinement:

I think the first hurdle to clear is to assure that there is treatment available. This means that message receivers need to work with people who do not engage in senseless confinement and exploitation.

In my opinion it is rare that using leverage to impose hospitalization and involuntary medication works out. Unless the person is on board due to their own large amount of suffering, imposing involuntary hospitalization or medication may sabotage future treatment. Let involuntary hospitalization happen as a natural consequence, not something to leverage. Anyone who is familiar with trauma research might tell you, it can take a long time for a person to work through being punished for an involuntary experience that is already traumatic.

Finding real treatment is a very tall order in a public system that primarily trains the message receiver to use medication via the revolving door of incarceration. Many therapists go against their licensure training to even attempt to treat a person in psychosis. I was taught to refer out or utilize the psychiatric emergency room.

I have found that developing treatment often involves a space to process how traumatic and confusing incarceration feels.

Additionally, I have come to believe that treatment involves workers and supporters who are curious and knowledgeable about psychosis with copious and flexible coping strategies, and the humility to engage in ongoing learning. I do not believe true treatment can happen when the content of psychosis is not welcome in the relationship. I think when the reality of psychosis is always suppressed, exploitive confinement might be as good as it gets.

The Natural Benefit of Community and Structure:

During crisis, when the message receiver responds to their terrorizing or spiritual messages via social withdrawal, treatment may require community and structure of intriguing tasks and efforts that helps draw the message receiver out. In the process of trying to create such an environment, teaching the message receiver to be interested in and respect their peers can really help.

While good treatment offers the safety of time to heal, it might also require an ongoing nudge toward challenging the message receiver to move on to their hopes and dreams when they are ready. If treatment doesn’t do this, it may easily get misunderstood as confinement. I do not believe productive trust can truly exist until the full extent of recovery hopes and dreams are supported.

I acknowledge that the function of having treatment communities available, which are costly and often scarce is a real service to the special message community. Still, I am not saying that they are for everyone. Treatment might also involve the freedom to say no, but the option of less restrictive alternative actions, such as individual treatment mixed with self-support activities away from the treatment team.

Yes, a treatment facility needs to sustain itself by making money, but it also needs to not treat the message receiver like they are a commodity. It may be okay to ask for some level of commitment to services, but it is not fair to push commitment if it does not lead to something that involves substantial sustainable community integration.

Importance of Supporting Structured Activities Outside of Treatment Milieus:

Even if community and structured activity treatment exists, it is important not to overly leverage them. If they don’t exist or if they are unwanted, it may be important for the message receiver to receive support towards the social rehab endeavors that most matter to them and to have support in those endeavors.

Social rehabilitation support needs to capitalize on healthy, goal directed activities away from psychosis. Thus, any interest needs to be acknowledged and supported regardless of their ability to meet immediate career needs. If the message receiver is working against their psychosis, there is no need to impose leverage towards things they don’t want to do, like treatment.

A savvy supporter will try to help a message receiver do what they can to reflect positively on any activity away from message crisis. Likely these efforts are happening, but in my experience, they are not always talked about because they may seem to pale in comparison to the rat race we are all supposed to be in. Championing them may mean uncovering them and holding them up to the light instead of presuming that all is lost.

Processing and Reflecting on Messages:

I think it is fair to presume that the message receiver will need to take some time to process and reflect on their voices or other relevant experiences. As I suggested earlier, not inquiring about the magnificent learnings and focusing only on their inactivity with negative comments is rarely fruitful. Rather, encouraging a message receiver to schedule reflection/process time is important, as is encouraging them to join others this endeavor. The message receiver might be encouraged to do so with a therapist or mentors in a self-support group, or at least during exercise.

If a message receiver comes to therapy, it is important to be curious about the experiences they are going through and marvel and champion them, just as you marvel and champion activities away from psychosis. Support groups that bring out the silenced stories and give them time and perhaps some collective wisdom are important.

My Own Experience with Leverage and the Importance of Picking Your Poison:

My parents required me to take six hours in addition to my sixty-hour work week (two-125$-hours, plus travel time to and from the office) to meet with a therapist. A modest but life-sustaining amount of financial support was attached.

Had I been able to talk to this therapist about my messages without getting judged or treated disrespectfully, I may not have resented the large chunk she was taking away from my future nest egg. I may have been thankful. The exercise on the way to therapy plus the exercise I got on the way to my job was helpful.

Even though I did feel like a resentful slave or a piece of human traffic, what did help me get through this trying time was the fact that I had chosen it.

I wanted to work. I had happened to have worked in too many structured programs to feel they were worth my time. I felt that many programs I had worked in were too disempowering and provided little future.

I knew deep down that being a social worker was likely not feasible. Indeed, I had obtained a social work job and had an opportunity to risk homelessness for that job, or work at an Italian Deli when I believed my family was the mafia. That opportune choice was key to enduring a large amount of torment and suffering.

As a result, I did do my best to make the exercise time and therapy time work. It could have been easier for sure, but I avoided jail, homelessness and more psychiatric incarceration—things I was truly scared of.

Consequences of Using No Leverage:

While now one might argue that such drastic, do-or-die leveraging as I went through was harsh, I now reflect on how life might be with no leverage at all.

I work with some people who were once warehoused in State Hospitals and who live in board and care homes. When people are trained to withdraw into messages for years, stories become buried and goal-directed behavior get blunted. I am also aware that there are people who withdraw into messages who live at home. I am aware of the natural consequences of this: when their loved ones die, they are likely to become sequestered in board and care homes.

Thus, I think that there are times when working with leverage can make sense in lieu of negative consequences that may lie in wait. If treatment means getting to know people who are worse off, it can be an eye-opener that can help motivate. I think knowing local services and getting help with communication during the leveraging process can be helpful.

I have seen small, slow, humane amounts of leverage work without causing trauma. I think protecting a person from the harsh realities of the mental health system needs to be done with reason. Helping suffers know their choices and lead the lives they want to live even if it does not fit your own hopes and dreams for the person is certainly a brave thing to do.

The Need for Ongoing Support and Encouragement When Leverage is Used:

I still reflect on times I wanted to give up. I can say that it was helpful and redeeming when my parents credited my efforts as mattering and being financially relevant. Being encouraged at these times was very important.

I feel compelled to add that if the leveraged message receiver tries and fails, all is not lost. It is important to remember that important learning can be capitalized upon from any failure. Good support does not use a failure to impose an agenda, but rather is there to support the learning that can happen. Advocate to apply the learning to the next opportunity of their choice! Good support maintains a positive perspective on the effort put forth regardless of the outcome.

Remember, this is supported by an evidence-based practice that is applied to vocational training (The IPS Model.) If you lose a job, get a new one. Keep going until you get one that sticks.

Conclusion:

I still wouldn’t advise using leverage very often. Remember that it is possible that unprocessed ill use of leverage might be part of the problem that is keeping the message receiver stuck. Still, I have come to believe that treatment does exist and can be helpful. Now I can say that apt leverage involves a mixture of timing, series of least restrictive choices and ongoing, attentive support. It involves holding hope for full recovery when the message receiver doesn’t have it.

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Published on June 24, 2018 11:53

Practice

[image error]I run a free support group on Thursday nights 5-7pm out of PEERS office on 333 Hegenburger, suite 250. For more info about this and other free programs go to www.peersnet.org. You can meet me and see what you think.

I direct my practice towards people with public insurance and do not currently have a private practice to remain anonymous.

I support people who have extraordinary experiences and as a result do not have an easy time changing the way they think or feel. Many who have extraordinary experiences know it, but some may not. Many may feel at odds with society as a result.

With over twenty years of experience working with people in the mental health system, I have developed a unique approach to addressing the needs of people who experience external and internal trauma. They may receive what I have come to term, special messages.

What do I mean, special messages? People who receive special messages have a host of experiences that give them special information that others might or might not pick up on. Much like it is for the person who has engaged in heavy substance abuse, the whole world becomes full of clues and triggers that remind the addict of their addiction, message receivers experience a host of triggers that alert them of alternate realities. Such realities can be pleasant but often are grim. I’d argue that a lot of people aren’t adept at managing it when these kinds of realities come up and the result is contact with the mental health system.

I think special message information is real, valuable and has purpose, but it can lead many people into distress and conflict with others. It can also lead to extended periods of crisis during which messages are trusted more than anything else. During crisis large amounts of loss can ensue and a person can be marginalized.

Some examples of special message experiences are things like:

Uncanny intuitions,
ESP,
Sensing the thoughts of another,
Having others be able to sense your thoughts
Premonitions,
Hearing voices,
Visions,
Dreams,
Tactile torture,
Interpersonal feedback,
Seeing clues of conspiracy in media,
Seeing clues in words,
Seeing clues in numbers,
Seeing clues in the world that surround you.

These types of experiences go together like letters in the alphabet to create distinctive universes that can teach individuals a lot. I do not believe people who receive special messages are not hopeless or broken!

My approach has developed through running innovative groups over the past nine years. During this time I have not only worked with people who get special messages, I have learned to share my own special message experiences in ways that are helpful to others. Special messages work has successfully brought together people across the diagnostic spectrum to work together. From labels of schizophrenia, schizoaffective, or bipolar to labels associated with depression, PTSD, or disassociation, a lot can be learned from other people who share special message experiences.

I find that groups that honor this taboo subject help people collaborate, create a culture of support, and inspire each other to move forward.. I believe that groups that mix people who are still in crisis with people who are getting to the other side are ideal.

Additionally, I have had success training message receivers to help them work in mental health. I believe our voices to be very needed in the field.

If you or someone you love has had contact with the mental health system that has left you/them feeling misunderstood, punished, and suppressed, my specialized services may be just what you are looking for. Please do not hesitate to send your interest and inquiries.

More Questions About[image error]
My Special Messages Platform?

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click links to associated articles below:

Reconstructing a Culture of Psychosis Across Diagnostic Divides

A New Definition of Psychosis

Why I Say Special Messages Instead of Psychosis

Two, Trauma-Sensitive Solutions for Psychosis

How Diversifying Causation Beliefs Can Lead to Recovery from Psychosis

The Special Messages Project

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Published on June 24, 2018 09:26

Initial Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

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

Fighting for Freedom in America by Clyde Dee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Genre: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Personal Memoirs

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

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

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

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

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

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Published on June 23, 2018 17:51

Waiting to Hear Back

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Published on June 16, 2018 15:05

Maintaining a Write-to-Live Attitude in the Social Media Era

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

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

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

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

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

But the primary purpose of this essay is to review the sudden dilemmas of a writer like me who has spent his whole life sitting on his work without sending it out to be published. What does it mean to suddenly be exposed to a social media market when you are just poking your head out hoping to get a following?

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

And suddenly I am looking out on a landscape that requires a blog and a brand. There is the implied presumption on the web that you have friends and loved ones who will become fans. Suddenly, I must make friends—lots of them—and sell in a viral manner or there is no point. The expectation is leaving me in quite a state.

Maybe you’ve heard what I have: “most writers are voracious readers!” We writers are supposed to live to write! That’s what many of the publishing outlets want us to do. “Get to know our audience and then write for them,” they imply. Essentially, the whole idea of journalism operates in this way. Outsiders go and learn about the lives of others, write, and so the public who has privilege can make little tyrannical judgments about what is deemed to be different. My question: is when we live to write in this manner and then write to publish, what happens to the reality of the rest of us? How does the masses of stories that I hear at the urban psychiatric ward where I work become so invisible?

In the social media era the practice of journalism that tells people more of what they want to hear is rampant. How can we get to hear about the kinds of facts that really matter to us and make us feel good about ourselves?

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

I particularly started to work on writing once my angry mother who was on the faculty of our private school, outed all my inpatient antics to her faculty friends. News spread like wild fire straight back to my bully peers who my mother then started openly supporting and defending in our family therapy sessions.

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

When I finally resumed school, living at a friend’s house, my greatest efforts did not even bring me the grades I wanted let alone the awards that I fantasized about. In fact my best essay was turned into the school psychologist and I was formally confronted. I saw it as them threatening to kick me out of school. I still sent the essay out to colleges. It’s true, due to unrecognized dyslexia, teachers always found my spelling mistakes menacing. Perhaps they just presumed I wasn’t putting in the effort. Perhaps with my father as their manager and my mother as their reading specialist, no teacher ever knew what to do with me.

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

So, in choosing a college to attend, my biggest concern was to send almost all the people I knew the biggest, “fuck you,” I could muster toward their sensibilities. I moved to the ghetto with a woman who was eight years my senior and tried to enjoy life through the domestic abuse. And, so, the fuck-the-awards, creative writer was born.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I often found my obsessive re-writing hard to stop. I wasn’t sure it was worth it when there was no one around to check it out. But I didn’t listen to the shrink.

Eventually, that shrink encouraged my family to permanently dump me in a State Hospital. They had the police do it while I was on my way to Canada to seek asylum. A friend with a nefarious background had threatened me. I had alerted the press and was facing threats at a section eight housing authority. It was a lot of drama and three months of lock up for me. “He’s really not even college material,” she told them, “He’ll be in and out of the hospital his whole life.”

It took some time, moves, and a stint with an arranged job at an Italian delicatessen (where I learned not to whistle-blow,) to get a professional job back. Yes, it worked! I maintain a job in this corrupt country and I know how corrupt it really is.

And then there was a lot of long work days, extra shifts and additional jobs I needed to take as I vied to get my psychotherapy license and pay my way. By the time I got married, I was licensed and had earned enough for a down payment on a house.

It was then, I started to write a memoir. It took me seven years and I devoted weekends and vacations to it. I can admit I read a few memoirs along the way. But, really, writing it was just a joy. And I landed the only book contract I applied for. At last I would be a published author. Then I would bring out all my old writing out of the closet and have myself a little side career.

So fellow writers know are probably laughing about that one. Being an award-winning published author doesn’t mean much these days. It’s hard to feel good about it when almost nobody reads your work. And though I had a contract, it didn’t last. The editors turned out to be erotica-writer-ladies and, I couldn’t stand to have the facts of my experience like my sex abuse changed to fit someone else’s’ racist world view. So, I ended the contact, reclaimed my work, and self-published

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

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

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

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Published on May 20, 2018 18:30

Legal Reality

Humans inhabit the court room

Where right gets discerned from wrong

Investing all their damn money

Into the justice they long.

Anger bounces savagely

In tossed and yanked slinky veins

That domino amassment

Of hate in buzzing refrain.

These are the veins that disregard

Every glimpse of opposition,

Destroying truth in perspectives

That also yearn for fruition.

Such is any claim to truth

That harnesses the violence

Of obscure reaction,

Squawking with its insistence.

In court these truths are resolved

By the massive collection

Of endlessly abstracted,

Legally teased erections

Of verdicts gleaming brightly

Bearing a fiscal complexion

For conveyor and authors

Of soul-seizing infection.

Power pumps potent pulse

That occupies peaceful bones

Static crackling distraction

That tones out the doubts that drone.

Curse the evaluation

That sets inequality wild!

Curse the rules and regulations

That echo in the tiled

Order of institutional

Imprisonment! Curse the demise

Of esteem, punched contusions

By city’s violent sunrise!

People think that justice is concrete

When the whole concept is a cheat!

Profiteers are proud of their feats

Feasting on justice with deceit.

But what goddamn logic is it

That worships greed, and closets

Empathy? Here we elicit

Internal arrogant deposits

Of monetary tuition

That torques lawyer’s ambition

To create superstition

That breeds social recognition

And so I ask:

Why do legal collisions

Make right and wrong decisions

On god’s creative visions,

When they lack truth’s mission?

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Published on May 06, 2018 10:21

How to Work with Issues of Mental Health Warehousing as a Professional

Early in my career as a social worker, I couldn’t even see the phenomenon of mental health warehousing let alone know how address the issue in a relationship. My college texts had promoted the mainstream eugenic presumptions associated with mental illness. I didn’t know what was needed to recover from things like psychosis, personality disorders, or addictions and live a fulfilling life other than to tell the client to take their medication.

Now, in my twenty-three years of experience working in the system, I have seen many other workers not really learn about the effects of mental health warehousing. It’s as if those of us who work in the field slept during social psychology lessons of Stanley Milligram and the Stanford Prison Experiments. And many of us who do understand the dehumanization process associated with warehousing may abandon the work for private practice. It’d nice it they left a little space in their practice for warehoused individuals. Perhaps some do.

Believe me, I never imagined that mental health warehousing would happen to a conscientious person who excelled in the mental health professional like myself. I used to think I was empathetic towards clients because that’s what always impressed others about me. Now I think I was just sympathetic and encapsulated! Indeed, though it could happen to most us, we rarely think that way. When I did land in warehousing, it was a real education.

I went to work in a section eight housing project and alerted the press and challenged the police. A resident warned me to stop bucking the system, or the same thing could happen to me. He was right.

Now, seventeen years later, most of my clients live in warehoused conditions and need help adjusting to them. Many have lost family support and lived this way decades. Of course, I do what I can do to help them be free; but learning to do so has taken some time. For clinicians new to working with warehoused individuals, I have just five suggestions to make.

One, don’t presume it is easy to leave these very real experiences behind:

Once subjected to warehouse conditions, people may have a need to honor their experience and have a hard time leaving the neglect behind. Many tolerate and honor things that don’t make sense to the observer. In fact, many observers might have a hard time believing that what warehoused individuals report is real.

How could it be, for example, that in the land of the free, that the only job that a privileged white man with a master’s degree and a beef with organized crime and the police could find was at an Italian Deli with a four-hour daily bike/train commute? It was not for lack of job applications or resumes, I assure you.

During a two-year period, I had to learn not to snitch. I had to accept that people were breaking into my apartment and stealing my things, just as they had done when I was warehoused three-months in the dilapidated Montana State Hospital. Maybe you can’t believe it possible until it’s happened to you!

For people like me, it can take years of revolving door hospitalizations to get to the place where they accept warehouse living to start with. Then, to move on can be a lot for the ego to manage. It is hard to say all the warped things they learned from their experiences in incarceration were unnecessary. It is hard to abandon the post because, often, warehoused people know first-hand that things could be worse.

Two, don’t presume that you could get out of the very real holes they are in:

In working with warehoused people, it is important to temper the amount of advice you give them about how to be empowered in their situation. Just because you have power, doesn’t mean that they do. Thinking that they don’t know how to assert themselves is a good way to diminish the amount of trust that develops.

I have seen clinicians burn out because their advice is never heeded. Maybe they leave behind their duties physically or emotionally because they don’t believe the oppression is real. Many clients have seen this happen repeatedly. Here comes another staff person they are responsible for training. Now, they start from scratch, just so they can get their weekly check.

No matter how seasoned you are, it is always wise to be thankful when your client teaches you something that deepens your understanding of the layers of oppression they face.

Many workers may not realize that they couldn’t manage themselves what they are presuming their clients ought to.

Many clients, like the section eight resident who tried to warn me, know better than to try to fight the system politically. They will see advice or action towards that end as simply being naïve and insulting. Really, they usually know what’s up! Respecting the power structure but talking about how oppressive it is may help.

Three, find ways to address the fact that you are financially exploiting them in the context of the relationship:

Many would say it is cynical to look at the mental health industry and say that there is a lot of money reinforcing the suppression of its subjects into mental house warehousing. Seeing the mental health industry from this vantage point makes it seem like it is a plantation industry with finely educated suits with six figure salaries making decisions about how to keep the peasants maintained.

Clearly, not all the people I work with see managing the trauma and strife in their lives from so cynical a perspective. Still, I believe a therapist who works with people who have been warehoused needs to be prepared to work through these realities and feelings as they get unpeeled in the relationship. At times, I have found that it is important to argue the cynical perspective to help people become sensitive to how being warehoused has impacted them. It may be necessary to help people see and remember the value that they really have. This may help reinforce social rehabilitation.

Many warehoused people will appreciate it when you acknowledge your buzzard role in nickel and diming them and picking through their bones. At least talking about it will help them know you will do what you can not to get caught up in that trajectory.

Although I was only warehoused for a short time, the therapy I got at 125$ an hour while I was making 9$ an hour at a Deli seemed ridiculous. Talk about financial exploitation—for years it was. My parents mandated it and paid for it from a nest egg, but would not give me money for a car.

Four, know that therapy is still valuable and walk the line:

In retrospect, and knowing the business as I now do, I am just grateful that my therapist did not refer me back to the hospital so that I lost my job and my apartment. If I had seen an intern who wasn’t making top dollar, I likely would have overwhelmed them and their supervisor and been incarcerated back in the system where it would have taken me much longer to heal.

Having a therapist for warehoused individuals is important even if they don’t seem to like you. And good clinicians need to be tolerant, competent with what they are dealing with, and maintain unconditional positive regard.

Supporting your partners is ways that help them make well thought out slightly empowered improvements in their interpersonal situation is possible. In doing this, it is important not to act as if you know, but to collect a lot of information about the barriers in the situation with curiosity.

I think good therapy advances the mindset that it is possible to help warehoused individuals pursue healthy integrated activities that can mitigate the effects of warehousing. That is what I did maintaining a job. Many amazing people have taught me that a bed in a warehouse is just what it is. One can still do their hygiene up and go out and find healthy activities and connections. I now see and support people doing this every day.

Five, help!

And yet when I look at the workshops available to me as a licensed individual, there is little out there in my trade organization that encourages therapists to learn to work with these conditions and limitations.

I wish that more therapists would learn to specialize in helping warehoused individuals. For practitioners who care about social justice, there really is no better way to be of service in the community than to develop specialty practices that can reach out and include such individuals.

Currently we know this population growing exponentially in our local homeless encampments, our flooded shelters, our barrack-like board and care homes, our county jails and over-crowded prisons. Know people can recover and gain back their freedom! Help!

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Published on May 05, 2018 15:24

Interview on Psychosis Summit

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Published on April 01, 2018 08:06

Reflections on the Use of Leverage in Treating Psychosis:

When I was in psychosis, or what I prefer to call message crisis, I was extremely angry when my family used leverage to force me into treatment. For starters, they contacted the police and supported a three-month hospitalization that kept me from seeking asylum in Canada. I concluded that they were a mafia family and the reason I was getting followed and harassed.

Perhaps this scenario sounds familiar to the reader? It lasted for two years after I was released from the hospital.

I continue to feel hurt by many of the things that transpired due to leverage. I may be able to act like I forgive; but I will never forget what it was like to experience such cruelty alone.

Thank god I was wrong about some of it!

Back in those days, I never imagined that I would someday write a blog about how to effectively leverage a message receiver into treatment. I would have sworn that I would never sell out so much to even suggest such an action.

Rethinking the Issue of Leverage:

Thanks to the word, “recovery,” I have been blessed with an opportunity to return to my career in mental health and work toward providing treatment for those who suffer from message crisis. It’s true, I have had to look the other way and swim against the tide a bit, but I have seen a few things work. I have witnessed how even things that I think would have been detrimental to me, can be helpful for some people.

Now, with hindsight as twenty-twenty, I ponder the issue of leverage for the conscientious family member, loved one, or helper who deals with the message receiver who is stuck. While a lot of my work emphasizes the fact that message receivers have a lot in common; there is also vast diversity in terms of strengths, preferences, support, and resources. I want to consider the message receiver who withdraws from their support and the world into the confines of their room or board and care with nothing but, perhaps cigarette smoke, and the wonderland of their messages to comfort or torment them. A recent Facebook post and personal conversation, encouraged me to reconsider this issue.