Clyde Dee's Blog, page 20

On a Writer’s Need for Acknowledgement

Ever since I finally, at the age of forty-three, published some of my writing, I’ve found that I am particularly prone to pain again. Ever since, each morning I have woken up driven to find ways to get people to read my book.

A year and a month later, I have primarily had to pay people to check out my work. There are those who accepted the free book without giving it a read, let alone write promised reviews. Sure the memoir itself has collected two awards and primarily five star reviews, but amid the boom of self-published authors I find myself more hurt by the silent echo, than grateful to the friends who have read, and not balked.

After a tough week,  I find  this pain expounding itself through every facet of my consciousness. I am out walking with my wife and I think about how psychiatrists have hustled me through explanation of my psychotherapy; about the numerous presentations I have provided that ended up empty; about leaders of the psychiatric survivors movement who promote those with less experience; about the presentation when I had people finally laughing and listening to me, and the smoke bomb that forced evacuation. There were past company owners who hired me, ignored statistics as I worked sixty hour weeks and demoted me . . .

Indeed, it’s been quite a goddamn week! A person I’ve employed via a grant ended up seeming to capture all the credit in the county’s eyes; other survivors have excluded my contribution on email chains; a boss has seemed to minimize my stats and expected more and more; coworkers have snickered and blamed me, the schizophrenic, for the vermin in our office. This all seems so overwhelming, I think. I am in fear of losing everything.

Save the awards and professional reviews, this feels like precisely the response my writing and existence has always received. It is why I never shared the decades of poetry I puzzled over for hours with anyone. Because each time I did, I walked away more wounded and invisible. Even better-than-expected compliments had their way of backstabbing and reminding me of my invisibility. Therefore, why try?

I have recently witnessed this sense of starving for acknowledgement from other people who, like me, end up feeling scapegoated in their family. I have seen them set themselves up for this same kind of relentless sense of bullying. It’s a pattern that one cannot break out of if they still let themselves hurt.

Bruce Springsteen’s voice sounds in the background as we walk. I recall his voice in his documentary on the making of Darkness on the Edge of Town.  Out of the hundred songs he wrote during his most prolific period he says humbly he’s done the best he could in his new album. The desire and pain in his voice tell a part of the story of that period of his life as do his lyrics,”It’s like when the truth has been spoken and it don’t make no difference, something in your heart goes cold . . .”

I think that it is some of that same eternal need for acknowledgement that drives all the pained writers that I most respect.

I think abut Charles Bukowski, who somehow captured the ethos of the drunken of the English majors in the ghetto commuter college that I attended. It would be years until I’d actually get a grasp on how the dirty old man  would be a hero to me as well. When I’d see the documentary on Netflix that I’d realize that getting just the bare essential was enough for him to devote himself to the craft that would eventually heal him. Bukowski didn’t write to become famous. In his prison, he wrote to be free and just to get by. That’s what makes someone a real writer.

The music song on my phone shifts and I think of Tom Waits as he writes: “why put a song bird in a cage? Why, why, why, why . . .So the river won’t drown it and the highway won’t take it and the dust won’t settle it and the wind won’t blow it away.”  I think of KRS-One who says: “I am going to teach you about MC longevity: secret one, if it ain’t fun your done, and about your career, yo, choose another one.”

It dawns on me that in craving acknowledgement I am giving my power away and hurting terribly for no reason. All this pained rage from being ignored and silenced in my life is really what makes me able to write.  It assures me that I will go on writing. It is people keeping me in my cage so I can continue to heal and be me. They need to take what they need for themselves. They play a different role in this life. They are helping me really be a real writer.

“Really I could give a fuck if they call me the roach man at work,” I say to my wife.

“But, Poopee you just admitted that they are hurting you when they are blaming you for the roaches in the office,” my wife says, “they shouldn’t do that!”

“As long as I get my basic needs met, I can write.  And that’s good enough for me.” I say, “I get to tell my truth to the computer. I could give a shit if I am their roach man”

I am not needing to give them that power anymore. It is not fair to anyone to continue to continue being a hurting victim when they are trying to make you a writer.

 

 

 

Blurbs

“I finally understand what a person with a mental illness feels like,lives like, and how he fights for his sanity and his life every single day . . .This book has compassion, passion, understanding, and a force of will that will allow any person to become better and make peace with themselves. Great job.”

Reviewed by Rabia Tanveer for Readers’ Favorite

 

“[Clyde’s] story is fascinating because he is able to intellectualize what he was thinking and feeling at the time, even if he is discussing his paranoid delusional thoughts . . . As someone with a Master’s of Science degree in a counseling field, I have found my greatest lessons have been from real people and not material in textbooks. As I read Clyde’s story, I felt like I learned many lessons through what he has to share. My work will definitely be more beneficial by what I learned from him.”

Reviewed by Paige Lovitt for Reader Views (12/15)

 

“An intensely personal and impressively well written memoir, “Fighting for Freedom in America: Memoir of a ‘Schizophrenia’ and Mainstream Cultural Delusions” is a compelling read from beginning to end.”

Reviewed by Midwest Book Review

midwestbookreview.com

 

“Candid, compelling and above all accessible, Fighting For Freedom In America,makes a notable memoir that’s sure to engender much reflection.Deserving of your attention it is highly recommended.”

Reviewed by Book Viral Spotlight

 

“Clyde Dee takes us on a heroes journey from condemnation to redemption, from diagnosis to self-definition. Seen through a filter of race, culture and often patriotism, Clyde Dee reminds us how fragile our human existence can be. . .”                                   Reviewed by Cardum Harmon, Executive Director of Heart and Soul in San Mateo County

 .
“This is the tale of what happens when a compassionate, honest, humble man is confronted by corruption, cruelty and malice. . . Clyde’s journey is one of self-discovery which ultimately leads him not away from but back to the man he always was one of society’s unrecognised treasures.”
Reviewed by Debra Lampshire, the University of Aukland
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“Go ahead and read this book. I guarantee you won’t be able to put it down. Read cover to cover fast!”

Reviewed by Niki’s book review

Readers Favorite Award

Honorable Mention Non-Fiction Biography

https://readersfavorite.com/2016-award-contest-winners.htm#cat64

https://readersfavorite.com/book-review/fighting-for-freedom-in-america

Letter To New York Daily News

Dear Editors:

I wanted to thank the Daily News for covering the Deborah Danner shooting in a way that bears witness to experiences of stigma, oppression, and extreme isolation that Ms. Danner went through.

As a licensed mental health practitioner who has been exceedingly lucky to be able to provide services to extraordinary individuals like Ms. Danner over the past decade plus, I am am privy to many silenced stories that fit her profile. I find myself surprised and grateful that in this era of turmoil that the perspective in her essay makes its way to the public.

Eight years ago, frustrated by the limits of standard treatment, I started to run groups that sought to access experiences of oppression triggered by supernatural experiences such as Ms. Danner’s premonition about her future victimization by cop.

In order to illicit and gain access to such silenced stories, I had to start talking about my own experiences. I found that with a leader who related their own experiences in a State Hospital and the resulting homelessness, poverty, abuse, alienation and underemployment that resulted was the only thing that gave Ms. Danners’ of the world the opportunity to talk.

While my experiences in these groups parallels an international social movement that started in Europe, the Hearing Voices Network, I have found that my professional successes have resulted in some of the most extraordinary isolation. As a culture in our inner-city environments, we message receivers in America are so divided by issues of not only prestige, race, class, gender, and sexual orientation; we are also divided by an institution of diagnostic divides that helps pit one against another. My groups help message receivers gain cultural skills that help us use each other as resources, but outside the safety of the group, even within the consumer survivor work groups I have participated in, social and diagnostic divides have left me bruised and so alone.

After I was incarcerated in a State Hospital by police, the experience of having badges flashed at me, having a barely decorated apartment trashed after a twelve hour work day, and having all mail associated with employment opened before arrival did not help me recover. Then, when I finally managed to afford a car, I found myself followed by cherry tops on several occasions. While I was able endure in spite of all harassment and controlling family support, and the social ridicule, it pains me to no end that Ms. Danner, in spite all of her efforts did not.

I thank you to bringing voice to her suffering. I thank you for acknowledging that we schizophrenic people exist in spite of what they say.

—

Clyde Dee

Award-Winning Author an Anonymous Licensed Mental Health Practitioner
http://www.fightingforfreedominaamerica.wordpress.com





To View Article, click:

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/bronx/bronx-woman-killed-nypd-wrote-essay-cops-mentally-ill-article-1.2838291

Virtual Book Launch for Award-Winning Memoir on “Psychosis”

“You mean all you do it sit at your desk and write, you don’t know anybody?” she says.

First of all, it’s odd that a person like me whose spends the majority of his time with his heart healing in the ghetto gets connected to an established author as such. My wife has facilitated this conversation at the birthday of the author’s family matriarch. Indeed, I feel a long way from the downtrodden community that financially supports me here  at this restaurant in Marin County.

Perhaps another reason this author has taken note of me is because I have mentioned my book contract with a small press. I mentioned that I am struggling to keep them from editing out my perspective.

The author’s brother-in -law, a professional cartoonist, had just finished telling me he is working on a project with a Chinese artist who is selling out his work . The artist doesn’t understand our market he’d stated. ” That’s our job, to make his work sell in our market.”

To be honest I wish I didn’t even know this man. The last time I saw him, at the spreading of a beloved ones ashes, when he found out that I had just quoted Tupac, he only made a hateful judgment. Tupac got what he deserved. It’s hard to hear someone who, I’ve been told, primarily raises a family off passed on money from a multi-generational family business, judge something that he knows so little about.

I do not even have a Facebook account, or know what a blog is at this point. In addition to editing my book, I am running a grant program in my spare time, proving that people with lived experience with “psychosis” can come up off the streets and use a training I’ve developed to transform into mental health workers. With my job and the project, I don’t have time for a social life or time to read anyone else’s work. I only know one other writer and have not the luxury of a single beta reader.

Meekly, I nod my head, no.

In my family, I am far too much of a shame to be considered a writer. “Your cousin, he is a real writer,” my father has told me. My sister has published two books to my cousin’s nil, but he is the real writer in the family as designated by the patriarch.

I do not know at this time that in a few years that I will be launching an award winning book on my two and a half year experience with “psychosis” in a virtual manner. I will have fired the small press and reclaimed the social perspective on race and society.

The book will have languished over-priced on Amazon for a year while I learned the ropes of the business and built an online presence. If it hadn’t collected five-star professional reviews and two awards I may have given up.

Most of the few remaining “post-psychosis” friends I have, will not have bothered to read it. Of the fewer who will have, there will be several who refuse to support with reviews. There will even be one who writes a review that feels like a condemnation. There will be many who distance themselves. There will be poorly attended workshops among the consumer survivor community and many blog sites that will have refused to promote my work because my pen name is little known among their ranks.

But now that there is an internet there is hope for the writer who do not have insulation from social elements. There is the potential of  telling stories about the reality of unspoken shadows of American life. Perhaps reality doesn’t have to be enslaved to rhetorical cliques. Perhaps with an online presence it doesn’t have to be all about who you know, but the quality and message in your work.

I write this for other writers who have real stories to express who don’t chose to write but have to. For such individuals I am here to officially announce that I have hope that my virtual launch date, October 17, will result in sales.

 

 

 

Why I am Motivated to Write

I trimmed this down a little more

Perhaps, early in my career as a mental health counselor, I couldn’t even see the untold story.  Landing my second job gave me the financial power to leave a ghetto apartment in the most murderous city on the East Coast. Since I was only just entering a Master’s Program, I felt extremely privileged. As a result, I aligned myself with my supervisor and other more experienced workers. Without credentials, I was focused on working with people who would get my back.

One day, I received a client and was ready to get to work on housing issues, when I found out that she came attached with a more experienced case manager. Though not very talkative, she did tell me very clearly that she did not want to go to a particular boarding home, the largest such facility in the county. When I talked to the case manager who would later…

Another Goodreads Giveaway

Goodreads Book Giveaway


Fighting for Freedom in America
by Clyde Dee

Giveaway ends December 18, 2016.

See the giveaway details

at Goodreads.

Enter Giveaway

The Importance of Causation in “Psychosis”

I think groups may well be necessary to help helpers hone in on being helpful when it comes to being flexible with the concept of causation of “psychosis.” One of the few rules of a Hearing Voices Network Group is that all causation explanations are allowed. I’d argue that this sets the stage for what I have come to term functional flexible theory styles. This is a spiritual coping skill that I feel is central the healing from periods of crisis.

I think that hearing other ideas about causation in groups challenges message receivers who want to belong and collaborate with a peer group. Belonging to a peer group that permits them to discuss their experiences without punishment is a novel and emancipating idea. A positive consequence is that they become more flexible with how they view causation. For eight years I have watched this process help heal people. It is true I have developed some jargon to describe this increase in causation flexibility that I describe.  For starters, in my upcoming book on Special Messages, I identify five causation styles:

5 Styles of Theory

psychologies

Messages are your inner thoughts or unconscious beliefs. They are just in your head.  We broadcast our unconscious beliefs in ways that cause others to interact with us in ways that make our unconscious beliefs realities.


Messages are a way of processing things that we aren’t willing to deal with.


Messages are a return to a regressed period of attachment in which the baby has destructive relationships with the boobs.

 

oppression of the state

Messages come from people following you around and tormenting you in order to control or seek revenge on you who could be a gang, government, corporations, masons, aliens, or other secret societies.


Messages are real evidence that the government has to socially control snitches and put them in ditches.

 

trauma

Messages are nothing but figments of past perpetrators or abusers.


Messages come from the social thoughts or judgments of others, the social mainstream, or the collective unconscious of others (Stigmas) that are being used to decrease your social standing

 

spiritual

Messages come from god, fairies, aliens, ghosts or what we in the west call supernatural experiences.


Messages are processes that may help or hurt you in evolving or adapting to the dilemmas of a modern environment.


Messages are there to test your ability to be good and evil and are there to lead you to lead others.

 

scientific processes

Message are caused by genetic differences or scientific processes that develop because of nuero-diversity that isn’t socially selected to survive.


Message happen when neuro-transmitters get changed through things like environmental stress patterns that fall into genetically derived conditions


Messages happen when spiritual genes get persecuted in our society

 

When I jargon-talk functional flexible theory styles with people, I explain that every special message (voice, intuition, interpersonal perception, symbolic interpretation, punny linguistic coincidence, cue from the media or natural occurrences, etcetera) that causes distress can simply be dealt with by, swapping out the theory style and make alternative meaning of the experience.

When the message receiver can  learn to become open to accepting alternative theories, it can catapult them in terms of their social functioning. Then, they simply need to choose to believe an explanation that they can accept that decreases distress. An alternative theory doesn’t even have to claim to be real or true, but if the message receiver can use it to decrease distress, they need to choose to do so. Then, they need to wait and let god reveal the answer to them. Hence I like to call this a spiritual skill.

What does this look like?

Below I have identified five different kinds of message experiences and and created different causation explanations based on the above theory styles. To be helpful to a message receiver in distress from a special message, I propose using  the graph below to create alternative meanings of the special message experience.  These can be proposed to a message receiver not as a reality check but as a means to evade extreme distress.

 

Punny verbal coincidence:

Speakers unconscious projecting
Intentional coded disrespect
Spiritual linguistic coincidence
Currently insignificant but reminds victim of a past of abuse
Neuro-chemicals enhancing reality

 

Object in the road:

Visual illusion created by the unconscious
Intentional mafia expression of control
God or the devil put it there
Still impacted by the last piece of random litter and in trauma
Gene code that forces the brain to make insignificant meaning

 

Voice:

Unconscious thoughts
Governmental/mafia communication via vibrations in your fillings
Alien Satellite communication through a computer chip in your head
Telepathic directives from evil societies such as the Church of Satan
Dead relative
Past perpetrator
Result of a specific inherited gene that gets activated

 

Special broadcast on TV movie

Unconscious illusions based on: what’s really on the message receiver mind
Hollywood illuminate coding its secret reality
A special broadcast from the CIA
Propaganda overseen by the US Government
Spiritual coincidence that relates to your life
Witnessing a coincidence that is tipping of a traumatic recall
Flood of dopamine between the neurotransmitters

 

Uncanny intuition from an interpersonal interaction:

Message receivers personal issues being projected onto the situation
Maybe message receiver is witnessing a real FBI sting, or undercover agent
An ability to pick up on real spiritual energy
Able to sense a real perpetrator/victim interaction
Coincidental flood of serotonin

 

I believe that having a cultural feel for what is going on during a psychotic episode or message crisis enables a helper to propose alternative meaning that may help the message receiver decrease the distress. Different explanation will work in different contexts.  It is up to the helper to know the message receiver well enough to propose a successful alternative meaning that is acceptable to them.  This can help further the relationship and increase trust for something other than the information and power that the messages wield.

But don’t expect to run off and propose alternative meanings immediately. Using this functional flexible theory style strategy takes some time and relationship to make work in my opinion.

   Two Inflexible Dudes!

 

“Fighting for Freedom in America” is a 2016 Readers’ Favorite Honorable Mention in the Non-Fiction – Biography category!

 

For Immediate Release:  September 24, 2016

Reader’s Favorite recognizes “Fighting for Freedom in America” in its 2016 international book award contest.

The 2016 Readers’ Favorite International Book Award Contest featured thousands of contestants from over a dozen countries.

Oakland, California. Readers’ Favorite has become the fastest growing book review and award contest site on the Internet. They have earned the respect of renowned publishers like Random House, Simon & Schuster, and Harper Collins, and have received the “Best Websites for Authors” and “Honoring Excellence” awards from the Association of Independent Authors. They are also fully accredited by the BBB (A+ rating), which is a rarity among Book Review and Book Award Contest companies.

In addition to reviewing for some of the biggest names in the literary industry, as well as the first time independent author, they host a respected award contest which features entries from new authors to NYT best-sellers, as well as celebrities like Jim Carrey and Henry Winkler.

“Readers’ Favorite is proud to announce that “Fighting for Freedom in America” by Clyde Dee is a Honorable Mention in the Non-Fiction – Biography category in our 2016 International Book Award Contest.”

This is the story that reveals both the innards of “Schizophrenia” and the way a person can make peace with the forces that are following them around. Learn about some of the harshest realities in American life: inner-city poverty, housing authority politics, gangsterism, off the grid murder, long-term psychiatric incarceration, homelessness, and isolation from family. This is the perspective of one mental health worker who took advocacy too far and landed in a chronic backward of a repressive state hospital. Clyde Dee is an anonymous psychotherapist who currently works with twelve years of tenure in an inner-city mental health facility. One day he hopes to help revolutionize treatment for “psychosis” across diagnostic divides.

Learn more at https://readersfavorite.com/book-review/fighting-for-freedom-in-america

“Fighting for Freedom in America was shortlisted for the Book Viral 2015 Book Award, ranking 8th out of over a thousand contestants: http://bookviral.com/shortlisted-for-2015-bookviral/4591767508. “I finally understand what a person with a mental illness feels like, lives like, and how he fights for his sanity and his life every single day.” Reviewed  by Rabia Tanveer for Readers’ Favorite.

Clyde Dee

Fighting for Freedom in America

https://readersfavorite.com/book-review/fighting-for-freedom-in-america

510-735-1358

clydedee.fighting@gmail.com

https://readersfavorite.com/2016-award-contest-winners.htm#cat64

Speaking at Alternatives

Speaker Presentation Information




Please review carefully!







Title
The Special Messages Project: Location-Based Research to Support a Local Paradigm Shift in Work with “Psychosis”


Paper Status
Approved


Presentation Type
90-Minute Workshop


Theme
Promising Practices in Peer-Run Programs & Peer Delivered Services


Session Details
Sep 21, 2016

1:30 PM – 3:00 PM


Abstract
This session examines how a training that reframes how “psychosis” is viewed, can accelerate a local paradigm shift in therapeutic work. An innovative curriculum and grant in Oakland, California were used to both research the locale and train individuals with lived experience to help augment the spread of the Hearing Voices National (HVN) locally.


Presenting Author
Tim Dreby


Biography
Tim Dreby spent three months in a State Hospital psychiatric ward, six years into a career as a mental health counselor. Now a licensed Mental Health Practitioner and an anonymous debut author, he works with twelve years of tenure in Oakland California at Highland Hospital.


Audio Visual
I will bring MY OWN LCD Projector

I will bring MY OWN Laptop

I am willing to share my equipment with other presenters.