Clyde Dee's Blog, page 24
January 8, 2016
Reviewed by Paige Lovitt for Reader Views (12/15)
Source: “Fighting for Freedom in America” by Clyde Dee
This review is helps me feel glad that I wrote the book. I would highly recommend readers review to any writer out there!!
In “Fighting for Freedom in America,” author and mental health counselor Clyde Dee takes us on a journey, as he relives dealing with a broken system for the down-trodden, personal mental health issues from going off his medication, family and financial issues. His 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.
Clyde moves around quite a bit while trying to find employment. His mental health issues seem to hold him back from getting the perfect job, and he has a tendency to allow self-doubts to keep him from aiming very high. Being under or unemployed does not help him with his schizophrenia. Always feeling like he is being watched and followed, it is hard for him to know what is real and what is coming from his delusional thoughts.
As Clyde gets back on medication and begins to get his life together, he really begins to start processing what he is experiencing. This includes his personal and professional relationships. It is fascinating to watch him evolve and become more aware than most people who are not facing his issues. Many lessons are taught in his story. I think that mental health workers must read this book. People who have friends and family members with mental health issues should also read this, because it will help them to see things from the other person’s perspective.
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. For that, I am grateful, especially as I am getting more and more students who are dealing with mental health issues, and really need someone to understand what they are experiencing. “Fighting for Freedom in America” by Clyde Dee is highly recommended reading.
“Fighting for Freedom in America” by Clyde Dee
Source: “Fighting for Freedom in America” by Clyde Dee
This review is helps me feel glad that I wrote the book. I would highly recommend readers review to any writer out there!!
January 4, 2016
A Psychotherapist Reflects on Shortcomings of Evidence-Based Practice: Part One | Psych Central Professional
Click to go to psychcentral pro page:
These days, more and more, the concept of evidence based practice is training mental health workers to put the cart before the horse. Setting up strict fidelity measures to replicate success grossly underestimates the impact of local culture on an individuals’ life. In particular, the widespread practice of CBT for “psychosis” with its set of strict fidelity measures, runs the risk of doing damage in place of really needed work. Unfortunately, there is rarely longitudinal studies on treatment failures that examine the negative impact of mental health politics and damage that can be done during treatment failures. Often times, big egos and manifest destiny desires of theorists that don’t respect the limits of their work continue to be promoted by administrators. I contend that the cultural art of human connection and the need for psychotherapists to learn more through authentic experiences is not and will never be fully captured in research.
My beef with therapy that follows strict theoretical fidelity measures started twenty-seven years ago when I was first hospitalized at age seventeen for anorexia in Salvador Minuchin’s clinic. My family was to receive a best practice Structural Family Therapy performed with the highest of fidelity measures with one-way mirrors and expert consultation. I was expected to gain a half pound a day or my family would be viewed as a failure. I would later learn that 6000 calories a day would not anatomically gain me a half pound a day. In therapy I kept making this point but the team was instructed to ignore me when I was oppositional. In other words, I was to lose my voice in the family system if I behaved that way. We went through intense and traumatic experiences as a family including my father being encouraged to bully me into eating. While he later did many things that worked, I was not able to conceptualize my rage and started to throw up indiscriminately. I had no idea what we were supposed to do, only that we were failing at an impractical expectation.
In working my way through my Master’s level education I did some extra reading on Salvador Minuchin. I learned that he was an Argentinian, Israeli Army guy who developed his theory for people of the “slums.” Going after psychosomatic problems like eating disorders and juvenile diabetes was a way for him to penetrate middle class markets and prove that his work was manifest destiny universal. This way students could learn that they could use his theory with anyone.
When I reflect on this, it tickles me. All those years ago Minchin was dealing with two aristocratic Quaker families who were in many ways the highest of authorities on being anti-authoritarian. My father, a Quaker school principal; my grandfather, an Ivy League administrator; being trained to insert military structure so Minuchin could prove that his ideas were universal. But the results of this simple mismatch were lasting. My family on all sides weren’t used to being told they were failures. None of us took kindly to that news and what essentially ensued was a thirteen year emotional cut-off.
When, thirteen years later, in a political thriller against the powerful housing authority of a major US city, I finally descended into a two year schizophrenia. Reunification as a prodigal son didn’t go very well. Suddenly I, considering myself a whistle-blower, found society hell-bent on incarcerating and making me accountable for being a eugenic failure. And my only remaining supporters, my long-lost family agreed. My father did what he could to get me to stay an extra nine months on the most chronic of back-wards; and later to prevent me from having a car.
The car thing became a hard way to be treated, when, six months after the three month hospitalization, I was only able to find a minimum wage job with a two hour bike/train commute while in “psychosis.” A car was key to enable me to grow out of this situation. After ten months, I was finally able to manipulate my mother into helping me. And with a car I did improve my job performance, start back on medications and eventually escape the grasp of a company that I was later able to confirm really did cooperate with a local mob boss, just as I thought.
Though most Master’s-level clinicians of my era learned that multiculturalism was important, we also learned that if you chose a best practice orientation like Minuchin’s Structural Family Therapy, or CBT and apply the concept across cultural divides and you were okay. In those days we were not taught to study the cultural ethos within which the best practice was created and translate it through ourselves while considering the cultural experiences of the subject. I certainly was not blessed with such thoughtfulness from any of the mental health providers I came into contact with. I am now left to wonder what would have happened if I received the treatment of Minuchin’s primary competitor Bowen who worked with Midwestern, white-bread schizophrenic families.
I once heard an aggressive professional teacher angrily favor Minuchin, emasculating Bowen as being over protective. This particular teacher flew in from another state, and never disclosed his Afrikaners background. It kind of made me chuckle when he yelled at me for making an insubordinate point, although perhaps a significant portion of the room was with him. I believe this highlights the need for any mental health worker to first define themselves culturally and then assert themselves locally in this increasingly multicultural society. In my opinion, a good theorist like Minuchin did this. By all reports, he interacted well with his local consumer base.
The positive thing I got from my Minuchin experience was a fondness for the inner-city community that supported me during my hospitalization. I started to listen to rap music and found that people who came from different backgrounds (particularly of African American and Puerto Rican descent) could really see who I was. I was touched by their humanity in contrast to the private school community I was raised in where I would eventually return to face stigma. It stands to be noted that there is a silver lining in this longitudinal study of my failure at Minuchin’s clinic. Just as I was coming to see insulated, Caucizoidal academia as a world where the cheaters got ahead and did less work, the eating disordered unit that saved me from Minuchin drained the college fund. Because after two stints there, the ghetto was the only place I could afford to live, it all worked out. I moved to Camden New Jersey and studied sociology and the neighborhood through working.
This brings me to take a peek at the massive funding for early intervention strategies for “psychosis” that are based on high fidelity to a best practice that was initially constructed to help an Ivy League nerd (Albert Ellis) overcome his awkwardness and get a date. Watching this practice applied to where I work in Shy Town kind of tickles me. Initially, I was not selected for the local implementations of the project. I wrote a thank you letter schooling the project on the demands of the locale. Later, when actually considered for a position, I could not bring myself to submit to the high level of fidelity measures I would be required to submit to. I have spent the last eight years using my lived experience to lead groups on “psychosis” in the heart of Shy Town. Led by the most institutionalized community members I have created my own theory based on what many community members face on the ground.
I think it is time for administrators to wake up and limit the relevance of evidence based strategies. Step inside a state hospital backward, or prison and you get a pretty good sense of where all the good intentions of counseling theorists and administrators may well lead you. I think that most other survivors of these environments will tell you that they did not get much support from a theory in that squalor. Speaking for myself, I was only helped by people who threw the theory away and treated me like a human being. And believe me we clients can tell when people are treating us like a statistic, like we are one of their “folks.” That is not helpful.
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Goodreads Book Giveaway
Fighting for Freedom in America
by Clyde Dee
Giveaway ends January 16, 2016.
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January 3, 2016
Round 3 Innovations Grant Program Learning Conference and Grantee Workshop
I will be traveling to this state making an anonymous appearance to promote research that has been done locally on research collected in the name of reconstructing a culture of “psychosis” the focus of my next book.
Click:
To get Tickets!!!!!!!
December 15, 2015
The Knowledge Show Live Featuring Lori Ann Davis and Clyde Dee 11/21 by The Knowledge Show Live | Radio Podcasts
Topic 1: Birthday Shout Outs and Announcements Topic 2: Relationship Advice from Dr. Lori Ann Davis. She is back for her second appearance on our show. Join the Conversation at 914.219.0884. No questions barred
November 29, 2015
Ways Universal Theories and Evidence Based Practice can do Damage and Waste Resources
I feel that the mental health field’s current preoccupation with evidence based practice is one of the greatest impediments to putting dollars to good use on the ground. It comes out of the psychotherapeutic tradition of teaching theory that has been tried and tested to cross cultural boundaries. I am here to exclaim that this claim alone is corrupt and a piss poor way to promote mental health! And I am here to reflect an opinion from the rank and file: that when administrators expand these concepts and suggest that fidelity measures supersede local culture, the potential for doing damage and being wasteful rises exponentially.
You can give me any amount of research that a best practice is universal and I will go back to my experience in life and gawk. I don’t think I am the only one who’d argue that authentic contact with the culture of the local situation one sees in the therapy context is more important than a measured technique. It is time administrators and therapists’ alike wake up and study themselves before they waste money on importing academic concepts.
My beef with therapy that follows strict theoretical fidelity measures started twenty-seven years ago when I was first hospitalized at age seventeen for anorexia in Salvador Minuchin’s clinic. My family was to receive a best practice Structural Family Therapy performed with the highest of fidelity measures with one-way mirrors and expert consultation. I was expected to gain a half pound a day or my family would be viewed as a failure. I would later learn that 6000 calories a day would not anatomically gain me a half pound a day. In therapy I kept making this point but the team was instructed to ignore me when I was oppositional. In other words, I was to lose my voice in the family system if I behaved that way. We went through intense and traumatic experiences as a family including my father being encouraged to bully me into eating. While he later did many things that worked, I was not able to conceptualize my rage and started to throw up indiscriminately. I had no idea what we were supposed to do, only that we were failing at an impractical expectation.
In working my way through my Master’s level education I did some extra reading on Salvador Minuchin. I learned that he was an Argentinian, Israeli Army guy who developed his theory for people of the “slums.” Going after psychosomatic problems like eating disorders and juvenile diabetes was a way for him to penetrate middle class markets and prove that his work was manifest destiny universal. This way students could learn that they could use his theory with anyone.
When I reflect on this, it tickles me. All those years ago Minchin was dealing with two aristocratic Quaker families who were in many ways the highest of authorities on being anti-authoritarian. My father, a Quaker school principal; my grandfather, an Ivy League administrator; being trained to insert military structure so Minuchin could prove that his ideas were universal. But the results of this simple mismatch were lasting. My family on all sides weren’t used to being told they were failures. None of us took kindly to that news and what essentially ensued was a thirteen year emotional cut-off.
When, thirteen years later, in a political thriller against the powerful housing authority of a major US city, I finally descended into a two year schizophrenia. Reunification as a prodigal son didn’t go very well. Suddenly I, considering myself a whistle-blower, found society hell-bent on incarcerating and making me accountable for being a eugenic failure. And my only remaining supporters, my long-lost family agreed. My father did what he could to get me to stay an extra nine months on the most chronic of back-wards; and later to prevent me from having a car.
This was a hard way to be treated, when, six months after the three month hospitalization, I was only able to find a minimum wage job with a two hour bike/BART routine while in “psychosis.” A car was key to enable me to grow out of this situation. After ten months, I was finally able to manipulate my mother into helping me. And with a car I did improve my job performance, start back on medications and eventually escape the grasp of a company that I was later able to confirm really did cooperate with a local mob boss, just as I thought.
Though most Master’s-level clinicians of my era learned that multiculturalism was important, we also learned that if you chose a best practice orientation like Minuchin’s Structural Family Therapy, or CBT and apply the concept across cultural divides and you were okay. In those days we were not taught to study the cultural ethos within which the best practice was created and translate it through ourselves while considering the cultural experiences of the subject. I often wonder if this is still the case. I certainly was not blessed with such thoughtfulness from any of the mental health providers I came into contact with. I am now left to wonder what would have happened if I received the treatment of Minuchin’s primary competitor Bowen who worked with Midwestern, white-bread schizophrenic families. Maybe then some of the pain and suffering would have been averted.
Now fifteen years later from my stint in a state hospital, I am finding that those of us workers, trained in counseling theories, are additionally hired into systems that use fidelity measures to promote proven recovery practices. Four years ago I left my job in a community I love and have since returned to, to join a county collaborative effort to jumpstart recovery via importing three evidence based practices. And so we get to my initial contention that evidence based practice, like theory, cannot override culture.
The county I work in imported the Housing First best practice; the IPS employment model; and the best practice of peer support by a leading out-of-state company. Clients were given all three practices at the same time and expected to transform into work and end their dependence on Social Security. Teams were set up with representatives of all three out-of-context best practices were and led by case managers from seven local case management teams.
I came on board during the second year of operation as the back-up administrator of peer support. I completed a comprehensive and experiential peer-employment training with a new team of workers and my first task was to attend all the team meetings and represent the peer workers. Sure enough, I would find many of our peer workers, just out of the system and battling external and internal stigma, being bullied into silence at the meetings. Though this was not what the company wanted, those who spoke up affectively also would somehow end up targeted by company.
After I made the rounds, on a day when the top administrator and our boss were present, a worker who seemed most effective, and on-the-ground respected came into my office before meetings commenced. He shook my hand and told me I was walking into a bee hive. As soon as he was gone and the door closed, I found out that the top administrator had a file on this worker, who was a racial minority; he was on track for being fired along with another minority worker, who was axed that day.
Sure enough, the man of a minority race was trying to provide for his family on wages that barely cut it according to the local standard of living. The things he had done, in my mind, demonstrated his economic need. Memories of my own sense of financial hopelessness were triggered. Indeed, the more I took inventory, I quickly became alarmed of what I considered to be racial and class in-sensitivities: workers who had harder inner-city backgrounds seemed to me to be more heavily scrutinized. With this vague sense, I forged a relationship with the county’s program director who was a racial minority and was under attack by our company’s bosses. Peer support and the training I had gone through is something I have come to believe very strongly in so I felt that the best thing to do was to send an email expressing my concerns to the boss.
Meanwhile, as I was feeling quite bullied and insulted at the tables, I quickly got feedback from my own company that I didn’t know how to present as a professional; however, the feedback from the program evaluation came back that I was well received in the eyes of the local workers.
Time passed and the worker who warned me about the bee hive was fired and the minority director was replaced. I continued to observe the other male minorities to be not treated well from my perspective: one, I had trained with seemed to be getting targeted in part for having non-Christian spiritual beliefs. The top Administrator was out sick much of the time and calling shots from her bedside and the county’s new director formed a strong relationship with our boss who seemed offended after my email.
The bullying at the table overseen by the county’s new director was now escalated. I often felt insulted and attacked. One day I was ambushed with several domain leaders present and accused of influencing and enabling “psychotic” clients to be against medication. When I explained that I myself believe in and take medication, a worker who supported me was written up for not being a team player. I experienced no sense of an apology. Shortly thereafter, I was vanquished from the meetings.
Meanwhile, back on the company’s ranch, the top administrator was out on disability, I hoped that the fact that our domain’s numbers were steadily growing with me as the temporary leader, and that our specific company boss was replaced with someone who seemed to respect me might be job security. I was not looking for control of the program I was fine with being number two. I was more interested in being in a position to advocate for better wages for the workers. From my perspective, this way key to promoting quality services making a permanent stay in the county. When the person who was hired over top of me turned out to have a temper and walk out on the job after a month; I got the word that at the call of the county’s program director, I be demoted and put in charge of the charts.
My powers were totally stripped. When a worker was sick I was not allowed to release them. They had to work until my rarely responded to emails gave me the approval. There were many examples suffering that occurred from unanswered emails. Meanwhile the productivity sank. At the same time I was micromanaged. Company people were brought in who publicly sabotaged my credibility in from of the team. Being attacked in this manner can do a number to old self-esteem scars.
It occurred to me as they hired the wife of the leader of the collaborative program that letting productivity tank could justify my demotion. I was told that I was disorganized which is true, but never had been brought to me as a concern. All details of the job that I was responsible for were factitiously done on time because, I worked sixty hour weeks. I never realized that disorganized people who have a history of success in therapy (and who’ve written their own therapeutic theory,) were gifted when it comes to taking care of charts. I went back to my old job part-time and opened up a private practice for Medi-Cal clients. My application to be a Medi-Cal provider mysteriously stalled at the county’s highest level for reason that did not make sense. I pinched pennies, worried about mortgage payments, and eventually got back to full time back in the community I love.
Ultimately, the county closed this expensive collaborative program and the out-of-state company I worked for lost its contract. I learned that the county had decided against using local peer leaders to run the peer support aspect of their program. It was true that the company I worked for had some pretty awesome training and that they have successfully expanded. I think ours was the first of their programs to close. Much of what they have to convey about mental health, I continue to agree with. I don’t even think it’s fair to conclude from what I experienced that they discriminate against racial minorities. But they did not know the ground of the community they were operating in. Though not their fault that local people were insulted that they got the contract and attacked, the unhealthy attack back mode made a few heads roll.
I believe what happened in the county is likely when a practice uses research to proclaim that their fidelity measures are going to work anywhere. It’s a false sales pitch. There are so many cultural factors at play, personalities, egos, and competing financial incentives in community mental health. There were times when competing fidelity measures didn’t match up. Perhaps the employment IPS domain was highly critical of the peer domain in part for survival purposes: if peers could do what they could, jobs might be lost, or pay cut. Likewise the more educated case managers may not have only felt threatened for those financial reasons, but there I was with more experience challenging their clinical culture and notions of superiority; that couldn’t have been very easy. I don’t like clinical culture. I was after all exhibiting some degree of ego.
In sum, with a high need for collaboration and an enormous amount of political infighting recovery was not promoted. Perhaps some will say it’s the clients’ faults. In spite of all this, though, the pilot program did transform lives on the ground. Yet, my question stands: did all the money for all the promises of the evidence based practices trickle down into the lives of the people served? Would the county not have been better off going to its strong consumer base, taking the ideas from these evidence based practices and co-constructing locally sensitive recovery? Was imposing change in top-down ways based on the notion of a superior intelligentsia cost effective?
I go back to my original paragraph and point out that things would work better if money was not spent proving that because a set of ideas worked in one place, that fidelity measures can assure it can be reproduced in another. This entails that Theorists need to first define themselves culturally and then assert themselves locally. They need to interact with their local consumer base and not sell their experience on a global market. When it comes to practice of mental health a theorist and a therapist needs to constantly define the limits of themselves and not grow so large in the head as to impose their values and experience in universal terms on others.
I think it is time for administrators to wake up and limit the relevance of evidence based strategies. Step inside a state hospital backward, or prison and you get a pretty good sense of where all the good intentions of counseling theorists and therapists and administrators may well lead you. I think that most other survivors of these environments will tell you that they did not get much support from a theory in that squalor. Speaking for myself, I was only helped by people who threw the theory away and treated me like a human being. And believe me we clients can tell when people are treating us like a statistic, like we are one of their “folks.” That is not helpful.
November 21, 2015
Reconstructing a Culture of Madness
Perhaps one of the greatest ways to oppress a people is to convince them that they don’t exist. In America, this is what many people who have experienced Madness face in standard treatment. In the absence of a sense of a supportive and functioning Mad community, many of us don’t feel we belong to a rich, interesting, and meaningful culture. The bulk of treatment, money and current policy is focused on incarceration, forced medication and facilitating marginalization into socially controlled environments. All this for the sake of suppressing rather than accepting Mad experiences. I am writing to contend that ultimately suppression alone is a treatment concept that just doesn’t work! And so in America’s history, the Mad join many marginalized groups who are cast as a threat to the status quo.
Perhaps those educated in an Abnormal Psychology class don’t realize that dividing Madness up into a variety of medical illnesses translates into denying the Mad a voice in clinical settings. In twenty years work as a provider in mental health I have seen providers, even highly trained ones, believe that letting a person talk about delusions or hallucinations will only reinforce them. Even the best practice CBT for psychosis does not encourage this. Thus, groups are often run according to the norms of the provider culture, and those who experience Madness are expected suppress their experiences, even when in crisis.
Sadly, when Madness is not treated like a culture, Mad people end up with few options. Treatment successes may sashay around with the Normals bearing painful and unspoken secrets; the privileged may end up insulated and hermetic in a back room; the abandoned, enduring impoverished circumstances on the street; and the majority, going from the hospital to oppressive institutional circumstances, with an occasional stint on the street. Those of us lucky enough to work through it, may experience degrees of tormented injustice on the job. All the while the concept of a sub-culture has been denied by the construction of tall differentiated towers of illness that often grow taller and more isolated in the current system of care. Most provider-folks would not want to be faced with the limited life they envision for their clients.
The concept of illness is so embedded in our system of care that we don’t often consider that we are treating peoples as though they are not just irreparably sick or ill, but uniquely so. We don’t think that when we go to work we are systematically attacking a history, and imposing eugenic concepts. And people in America are so quick to attach eugenics with people who enter a “psychosis” process that many of us deemed ill learn to believe that we deserve no companionship.
As a person who has walked on both corridors of the clinic, there is little doubt in my mind that this is the way trauma and noncompliance is addressed in this country. “You don’t mess with the Medical Model!” I have heard declared by many a people who work alongside me in the field of mental health. Most of us who have culturally offended the doctor in social services and need our paycheck oblige. Once cornered by a supervising psychiatrist and told that people who had been in institutions should wear a brand so employers would know never to hire them, I chose to keep my job and speak in defiant code that he would not care to decipher. This is a small example of many that reflects the nature of American clinical stink.
I’d argue that most “mental illness” constructs get to the point where they develop strategies that involve empowerment through forming sub groups that work together. Addictions treatment have a twelve step support network; bipolar support groups exist funded through the DBSA; eating disorder treatment persists; people appreciate a therapist who specializes in grief, sexual trauma, chronic pain; OCD; such groups are often built into a private practice. Veterans build support group networks; adult children of alcoholics do as well; even those chronically “sick” individuals who are said to be flawed with their personality have started to work together, led in groups by Marsha Linehan. More and more, people with lived experience are starting to defy the life sentence of misery with subcultural movements.
Thank God for DBT! Though some in the recovery movement encourage it to be considered as damn bad therapy, it sure would have been helpful for me years ago.
Linehan was not yet popularized when I had my second run in with the mental health system, plodding in out of the ghetto, still anorectic scrawny, onto a voluntary ward in black converses, two toned fluorescent green shorts, and black Marlboro shirt with slicked back hair, creating Marxist interpretations of the Rorschach on command with a habitual, yo , remark. I came out of that private hospital with a heavy psychotropic regimen, a permanent Schizotypal brand and went back at it working my way through school now sedated and addicted to diet soda. Maybe it was just that I didn’t quite fit the mold of that anorectic subgroup that drained my parents’ bank account after all. It had been a sub group that had helped to some extent. I learned how to kiss. At least as a male anorexic, I had a voice and decent living conditions.
In reflection, it was definitely my race, gender, and class privilege that helped me belong to a career in which I could impose a professional facade on the vulnerable and play a demeaning well. All I really had to do was change up my clothes and continue my work ethic. That was kind of hypocritical for a Marxian, but I was working my way through a Master’s program and too busy to reflect on whom I was or what I was becoming. I put my blinders on and did do exactly what my psycho-dynamic therapist said. It was credentials and constant streams of neuro-cocktails that kept me at bay.
Back in the days I was trained to use the word SCUTS (short for Schizophrenia, Chronic Undifferentiated Type—provider-cool lingo,) I had no idea what it was like to suddenly and permanently become a eugenic failure and to have the experts who write the books fully dehumanize you. When it happened to me, seven years into my career, the treatment of the experts like my psycho-dynamic therapist kept on making things worse until I was confined to an old back ward in which the temperature was kept below freezing and in which there was ice on the inside of my window. At least as a skinny man with a personality disorder, I may have got to study a work book with two therapists dinging on a bell.
It’s true, on that sub-freezing back ward, I wanted to have nothing to do with this sub-culture I was locked in with. That roommate who was rumored to have killed someone (all lifers carried this reputation); I didn’t think I could learn anything from that loud snoring fool! I was in a different kind of a learning experience. Indeed a year and a half later when I was in a two hour commute to work at an Italian Deli, still floridly psychotic, believing that the Italian Mob was taunting me and breaking into my apartment. Yes this sounds delusional and foolish—unless you yourself came home from your twelve hour day to find your apartment ransacked! Yes, Floridly “psychotic” on my bicycle, I’d come across a clearly “psychotic” man biking the opposite direction, towards the local Target, talking back at his voices and I wanted nothing to do with that fool. I didn’t even consider him a potential roommate so that I could have afforded more food.But now, fourteen years later, I do. And the mental health establishment continues to attack efforts to build a culture, like the Hearing Voices Network.
Now in the process of trying to market a memoir, I have obtained a practitioner license. I also now have eight years of experience post-license running groups for individuals who have experienced “psychosis” across diagnostic divides. I have developed a curriculum to help me prepare for (and justify) these groups. I have learned to define what I consider to be universal components of “psychosis.” These are a validating set of eight types of experiences that all “psychotics” or special message receivers can relate to. I have learned how to teach these concepts and corresponding coping strategies in ways that entice message receivers to pay more attention to themselves and their culture. What I have found is that authentic experiences listening to another persons’ experience of Madness does more to jolt a body into seeing themselves clearer and develop more flexibility in the way they make meaning of special message experience. Special messages may include voices but also include at least twenty-six other types of experiences that give an individual extra info to make meaning of. No special experience, good or bad, is more “crazy” than another. And coping with each is remarkably similar.
I have already written three drafts of a book about special messages, in which participants on the outpatient unit I work on, many of who are living out institutionalized conditions that are worse than I went through, are my guides.
I have also just completed a grant that sought to reach in to institutionalized circumstances and start up groups in agencies that can segue people towards Hearing Voices Network support groups. Using an experienced Program Manager, I extended my curriculum to individuals with lived experience. As a team, they educated providers with their personal stories and started up the groups effectively on their own. We tended to find that an in-between program was successful in the location in which we worked. Indeed, local economies, cultural histories, and immediate political circumstances need to be taken into consideration, I believe, not ignored.
My work is about teaching people how to effectively go down the rabbit hole with someone who is floridly “psychotic.” It offers a road map along with rationales for why paying more attention to messages and bringing it into the room can actually work. It helps shine a light on things that get carried out that are heroic, that usually would pass by unnoted in a system of treatment suppression. I believe we message receivers need to build a sub-culture and home base to support us. However, in many ways a contrarian, I would also suggest that depending on the locale, asking individuals to come to voluntary groups may result in a cultural class-skimming process with people who have been cultured in accordance with the streets or embedded in board and care homes, feeling excluded.
Once supported, individuals with message experience can successfully infiltrate Normal circles and build social rehab successes and then disclose their Mad roots to help the culture out. Over time, I have come to be rather opinionated about ways that us Mad peoples need to learn to work together and be inclusive, not fight against each other like the proverbial crabs in a pot of boiling water. So often and in so many ways sub-cultures in America are infiltrated and turned against each other to help them stay submissive. Indeed this is what a medicalized system does by calling our special skills and journeys an illness.
It is very understandable that a movement with individuals who are wounded come out believing that their route to recovery is the only route. Socially rehabbed individuals may clang around each other trying to promote their work and recovery without observing that they are using their privileges with egos rather than the spirit of collaboration. Suddenly, recovery starts to feel like a Caucizoidal (or white, of European descent) phenomena. I’ve heard many say this about the recovery movement. Or it could definitely feel male dominated; influenced by heterosexism, class biased, or non-inclusive of those with immigrant status, veteran status, homelessness, substance abuse history and criminal stigma or gang affiliations. In Oakland, basing a movement on research constructed in a European socialized country, may not fit. Europe is not everyone’s boat to swim on! “Can’t learn a thing from it,” as Zach de la Roach of Rage Against the Machine says, “And yet we hang from it.”
Failure to include those who didn’t hear voices or close mindedness to those of us who still take medication are still other ways message receivers may end up fighting each other, in an effort to rush to the top rather than work with each other to get more people into social rehab. These are my views as I still fight feelings of exclusion by gangs of folks within the movement.
In short, Stigma of all sorts needs to be addressed seamlessly in a multi-cultural healing culture of “psychosis” that that is excluded from the mainstream. If we as a culture continue the process of exclusion, perhaps we haven’t learned our lessons from being excluded. Yes I may be accused of being idealistic here, but so many people who have suffered tyranny on top of tyrannies in their “psychosis” process have had to face all these issues and some in order to recover. I believe that those of us who have are in a unique position to be inclusive especially if we help each other with this. May we use our experience to include others, even perpetrators, in a healing process so they too can heal without perpetuating more pain! May we reclaim our role as healers using our experience with trauma in our lives to address trauma that society often denies is real!
In our distant history, message receivers have played important roles in society. It is arguable that before the foundations of the modern world, we were spiritual healers in our community. Many of us face great genocidal dilemmas internally and have faced enormous apocalyptic tragedies, evil, and spiritual guidance. In this era of environmental petulance, spiritual warfare, heightening class divide, and massive denial about who really rules the government, isn’t it time to create a sub culture that can stand on its own two feet and get past the medicalized oppression that has it marginalized and going from the streets to the institutions for so many years?
