Clyde Dee's Blog, page 3

Overcoming Factions, and Politics in My Recovery from Psychosis

In my experience, being singled out and excluded from the discourse because I don’t fit in is what causes me most pain. It is taking me a long time to realize exactly how and why this happens to me repeatedly.

For me it is not a simple process. It seems to do with people who seek to manage me. My managers get internalized in my mind. I have had managers in my family, managers throughout my education, mangers in the mental health system, managers at work, managers amongst my peers, and most recently I have encountered managers in the recovery movement. Fundamentally, the needs of managers are about power and control. They define what is appropriate from what is not.

As a result, I opt to avoid power and control as much as I can.

I am not jealous that managers have the power and control. It’s just that the hurt that come from their use of it keeps smarting and preoccupying my neurodivergent mind.

It’s arguable that being excluded and politically marginalized is the very action that made me experience “psychosis” in the first place. And yet casting people out of the group is so often a cultural norm in the modern world. It can seem like if you don’t cast out a few misfits out you are likely to be seen as someone who fails to take care of yourself.

Throughout my life I have felt cast out. To get back in I have had to learn to work with managers who have tended to wrangle and control my behavior. I have never felt good enough to get noticed or acknowledged. And then, there is a part of me that is so angry about the whole process, that when I do get acknowledged, I have to fight not to want to spit at the manager in the face.

But this ultimately isn’t the story of what happens when I am cast of the ship, it is the story of trying to live a good life while the factions and politics that surround me seem to demonize and marginalize me. It’s about going to my managers and advocating for better treatment. It’s about assertively teaching them that they are wrong about me.

I’ve gone to great lengths to keep politics and factions out of my recovery. But what I’ve noticed is that others don’t. Therefore, after years of letting people play politics, and use factions against me, I am writing today to envision a different outcome. Indeed, this post is about knowing and accepting that these things will happen. It is ultimately about letting it happen and then confronting those who have done this with assertive self-advocacy.

We All Have Trigger Words:

In dealing with experiences associated with psychosis, there are as many triggers. Even when I am out of emergency and able to function optimally, when I am not attentive to my work I may get struck with flashbacks. In fact, it can happen so frequently that I don’t notice that it is happening. I just feel dissociated and depressed. It is when I take care of myself later when I realize that the political hits I have taken actually hurt. It takes time to allow myself to feel and understand them.

It can feel like every managed group with which I associate slashes me. Just persisting and working through the politics and factions is a good thing. For me, there is the medical model unit where I work, and the family of origins relations are constantly surfacing. But the worst experience for me is when people in the recovery movement do it. I had so hoped it wouldn’t happen there, but it has yet again.

For many of us in the mad movement, the words normals use to define associated experiences are triggers. The word psychosis is one itself. I call it the “p” word and put it in quotes as often as I can. I do this because it is so misunderstood and misused that it triggers cultural delusions that are eugenic and ridiculous. And sure enough, it is a word that even if you use quotes around it, might trigger a manager to correct you. I have been corrected and told that madness is really a much better word to use than the “p” word.

There are a lot of trigger words in the “psychosis” community! There is the “d” word for delusions, the “h” word for hallucinations, the “s” word for schizophrenia. The ‘p” can stand for either psychosis or paranoia. All these word trigger misunderstanding and cultural delusions about the “psychosis” experience. A medicalized perspective is most commonly used.

We all have trigger words and we all do our best to deal with them. In some cases, we might use one to reclaim it or redefine it or craftily address a cultural delusion.

Case in point, one time I used the “d” word in the title of a post: “How to help when you think someone may be delusional.” It’s true I used the “d” word a number of times without quotes. I used it a lot and then I started to add quotes around it to accent the point. Some readers got it and responded that they too were triggered by the “d” word.

I had been fishing for mainstream people to read the article and come away from the post using quotes around the “d” word. However, it provoked the ire of a highly regarded speaker who confronted me that using the word delusional was stigmatizing. When I responded to his issue by identifying myself as a fellow survivor and accenting my intention, he was unimpressed leaving bitter and what seemed to me to be superior words.

A few weeks later, a local manager who I have helped and from whom I would like to get support for my work, proposed that we pay this international speaker to come and do a local training. At this point I learned the speaker uses the “p” word without quotes in a similar manner. As a result, my hurt and frustration have been thus compounded.

In this case it is because I have a training that has been well received in several contexts that my managers ignore. Additionally, in my mind paranoia is just as misused as delusional and psychosis and schizophrenic! Is it possible that he was really just trying to hurt and alienate me from his movement? Sometimes I feel like everybody I have known who are his colleagues have done the same thing. It is a small community. I suspect that people talk. Is it the “p” word starting up yet again, or is it a legitimate perspective?

Playing Politics and Creating Factions!

At some point we all have to get over our peeves and entitlements and move on with our lives. I think we can learn to do this. But we have to see what is happening and heal. We have to avoid joining in and slandering the person who has triggered us. It is best to collect our thoughts, practice using them, and consider addressing the person who is marginalizing us. Sometimes we have to make this a long-term project and repeatedly look for openings in which we can assert ourselves. Ultimately, when we are successful a sense of healing may ensue. Maybe we finally get the inclusion.

However, when we hurt, we may factionalize and fight over trigger words and who belongs in the tent. It starts to be about who has more friends, support and power. Maybe we want to follow the person with the higher degree, or the one who went to the more prestigious college. The number of factions in the mental health recovery movement are truly incredulous.

In the “psychosis” community alone, do we split up the voice hearers from those who are targeted individuals? Do we split up the people who learn to benefit from medication from those who reject it entirely? Do we then advocate for more socially acceptable remedies like cannabis? Do we look to kick out the people who don’t fit in and create norms that exclude? Do we separate those who have been on the streets from those who have chosen to live with their parents? Do we divide positive manic camp from the depressed, schizophrenic camp? Do we separate those who abuse substances from those who have been incarcerated and are on probation? Do we gaslight those we don’t like or who ask us challenging questions?

The answer to this question for many is to factionalize. “If black people want to form a group, for example, they can, “I have heard it said by the man’s colleagues. Is it not our responsibility to incorporate their cultural needs into the larger group? Indeed, that perspective is complicated.

It starts to be about how we manage who gets in our tent and who gets cast out. Every four years the nation gets into wars of rhetoric that get everyone divided. Right now, many of us are wondering if there will be a civil war based on mainstream propaganda and cultural delusions about white supremacy.

Understanding the Origins of the Trigger:

Indeed, this kind of issue takes me back to kindergarten which I had to repeat because I used the scissors backwards. Indeed, I would have been denied entrance into what has become in mind, the vile private school I attended; however, my parents both worked there.

I may have graduated cum laude fifteen years later, but they still tried to kick me out again my senior year. Even though my father, a top administrator, had left his position the teachers were divided about me. Some would argue that my spelling was atrocious. Some accused me of lying about how much time I spent doing homework. My mother was the reading teacher and yet I evaded her radar. Some may have been shocked about how low my PSAT scores were.

Maybe I just hadn’t eaten all day and just could not concentrate! I don’t remember.

I slept at tops four hours a night. I continued to achieve mostly A’s, work around the clock, organize community services, and play sports after school; but I stopped eating and landed in the hospital to avoid dying from anorexia.

I spent much of my 12th grade year in and out of the hospital. I moved in with a friend and my room was converted to a study. My mother first called me an “asshole” and then I became a writer.

My first college essay was so good the school psychologist evaluated it and said I was on the verge of killing myself. This nearly got me re-hospitalized. I continued to re-write the essay and sent it out to spite the school, the psychologist and her husband, my English teacher. I got into some good colleges. I also got excluded from ones who didn’t approve. Meanwhile, I was starting to think college would be about more of the same bullshit. I hooked up with a twenty-five-year-old photojournalist and moved to attend school in an affordable inner-city.

It didn’t seem like I made these choices. They all just kind of fell into place. When the school lied and published that I was going to an expensive school in the yearbook, I vowed never to return. It didn’t take long for me to find myself alone in a roach infested apartment in the inner-city on all the holidays from work. I wrote.

A True Outcast:

I really don’t think anyone knows what it’s like to be outcasted until you’ve been homeless, jobless, and endlessly working for your survival while others project horrible generalizations upon you so they don’t have to feel guilty.

When I was in high school and college, I was exercising the privilege of telling the people who raised me to fuck off. Oh, how that privilege washes away when you go to low-wage, entry-level work to get your life back on track after losing everything.

I am talking about my recovery from psychosis. It was a privileged recovery albeit with white skin and family money, but there was a long-term state hospital, homelessness and a constant threat of being forced back into that lifestyle.

Mustering Up the Self-Advocacy:

Talking like this makes me repeatedly lose cultural capital among people who manage me. I have the sense that I am easy to marginalize politically. I feel like I have a different background and experience, so I am easy to disregard, slander and doubt. Many blame the victim even when they think they know better. They fall into becoming like a pack of dogs chasing a puppy in a dog park.

There comes a time when I must notice that not all managers are evil. There comes a time when I must find those few weak links in the chain and make appeals.

I think approaching the managers in a negative manner is not only hard to do, it is not always wise. Managers are renown for threatening us not to do that. Thus, it is a good thing I have internalized them in my head.

When I address a manager, I need to prepare myself. I will be asked for examples that illustrate the points I am making.

Because elements in my past have been traumatic, carrying in them underpinnings of sexual abuse and neglect, I tend to lose my ability to think when pressed for examples. When I am asked for examples or overtly mistreated, it can be hard to directly address it. When I don’t address it, people do have a way of talking and targeting.

Thus, even when the manager may be reasonable when pressed, I start out afraid. Understanding the patterns of abuse that repeat themselves takes me back to a misty October day around my third birthday. It is a memory I endlessly cannot access. But through writing I have accessed others that are significant.

Maybe it was that unremembered day, or maybe it was something else.

All I know is that I just was not able to live up to private school expectations when I was so hurt. Some days I remember nothing accept repeating patterns of marginalization.

Thus, hounded like dogs sniffing assholes, I need to remember that my body holds the trauma. Many do say it is all my fault because I am too nice. Maybe I deserve all the shit I’ve been put through because I am soft. But I am still on my way. Still, I am getting closer.

Writing so helps me prepare and honor what I’ve been through. All this work is there to help me assert myself. I must practice and run my concerns through my head and ask to have my needs met. I have to be like Tom Petty and tell them that I won’t back down.

Yes, the “D” word is bad, but so are the “P” words. Also rooting out difficult people and discarding them doesn’t fix everything when there is generational genocide and good old American inequality to muster through.

It really helps that I have reached a point where the person to whom I am asserting myself can no longer hurt me. And the manager I am dealing with is a lot more than just a comment on Facebook who may not have accurately read my post.

It helps that I have achieved a stable life that will persist regardless of what they do to me. When I was threatened with homelessness and underemployment. I just couldn’t do it, but now I can. Other people can project their stuff onto me and spread slander and refuse to say sorry, but they can’t put me out on the streets again. At least for a little while.

All the times I have been hurt, gaslit, rendered speechless, red faced and marginalized will be gone. I will assert my truth and ask the questions I need to know. I will pitch my work to my manager and ask for help and maybe it just won’t be as bad as I think.

One time recently I have done this and gotten the answer that I’ve always told myself to be true, but that was so hidden from the public. Successes can build on successes and can help me try again with the hopes that I might just might be granted that which I need. And if I don’t, I know what to do. I will return again and again steady and clear voiced and assert myself until I find my own dignity. Maybe when I realize that I can do this, the “they” will change their blaming mentality.

And I don’t need an ultimate confirmation that I or my work has value. Maybe I just need to assert myself in a new manner, Maybe I can learn something that can help me be successful.

When I can do this, the factions, the politics, the stigma will clear from out of my head and all unjust managers and control will fade into the background and I will feel a sense of relief. Maybe this will happen some day! And when it is my turn to cast someone out of the lifeboat, I just won’t do it no matter what “they” say.

The post Overcoming Factions, and Politics in My Recovery from Psychosis appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

The Neurodivergence of Fawning for Mental Health

Fawning, saying yes sir, or shining it on is such an important skill in enduring life, especially during a break from reality. It is a skill I struggled with during times of mental health crisis prior to my break. Indeed, I have had to get pretty good at this fawning skill to survive.

Prior to the break I was prone to tangential rage and resentments against people who rejected, humiliated or abandoned me. It felt like everyone I knew, would eventually betray me.

In fact, this is a repeated pattern in my social relationships. Other people would see me alone and bullied and take some interest in me and I would reciprocate. Eventually I would disappoint them or they would get what they needed from me and there would be a falling out. At times of mental breakdown this pattern would become evident to me. And I would get down on myself and the world.

It is my understanding that fawning is a symptom of complex trauma. People learn to fawn due to childhood neglect or abuse. They don’t feel safe so they fawn and fail to confront people who are abusing them. In their reality there is no point in asserting themselves. There is no use.

As a therapist I am learning to encourage people to stop fawning with me and trust me with their true process. Being able to know a person’s authentic process and feelings toward me is indeed a privilege that I am eager to promote.

But in many ways, I am not ready to throw the act of fawning under the bus. Indeed, I went through a lot to learn how to fawn.

It depends on your station in life whether it is not safe to let people know exactly where you are coming from. I believe much of the world is oppressed by privileged people. When you are supposed to be oppressed, I’ve come to feel it is wise and honorable to fawn a little.

Becoming a Targeted Individual:

In the years leading up to my two-year break from reality, I shared my realities of being targeted and undermined with a therapist in my twenties. She taught me I was paranoid. There was no concept such as complex trauma or Asperger’s at play. It was an extensive cocktail of medications. I trusted the psychology degree behind the cocktails and worked my way through a Master’s Degree in Counseling Psychology.

The mentality of blame the victim in psychology is such a powerful force. When I tried to ignore the patterns of abuse and built relationships anyway, it was far easier for the one person who had the ability to see what was going on for me, to blame it on an illness. She would one day tell my parents that I would be in and out of institutions for the rest of my life. For a long while, this did direct their support of me.

Deference to this power of psychology was the skill that made me a successful social worker prior to my break. Prior to my Master’s degree, I often respected my superiors and turned to them for direction. But along with education came the responsibility to think about what I was doing and to help rather than just cover my ass.

I moved out west where I didn’t know anyone and started work in a Section 8 Housing project in Seattle Washington. I started to resist standard business practice of blaming the victim and making the money. Indeed, I started going the extra mile.

As people were being hurt and even killed, I started talking to reporters. I worked extra hours and I made good relationships. It’s true I felt more appreciated by the people with whom I worked. When the company offered me free tickets to a concert so I would stop my vigilante patterns, I turned around and invited all the residents to the music festival. Unfortunately, this led to into a state of consciousness in which I became a real targeted individual.

I had a friend with a nefarious past who threatened me. It proved to be a very credible threat. When I admitted I was scared for my life and told him what I was doing. I tried to run to Canada and got stopped and manhandled by police. I got a three-month, hospitalization rather than a promotion for work that challenged the system to be better.

Learning to Fawn:

Earlier in my journey the therapist who had taught me I was paranoid, had already tried to institutionalize me. She’d told my parents that even though I had a 3.9 GPA I was not really college material. She urged them to put me on social security. They never told me this and I resisted her efforts to institutionalize me by working customer service jobs where I had to practice my fawning abilities. It was either that, or a repressive social program. It was embarrassing because I was really depressed, but some people cared enough to support me. Then I got back at it graduated, and went to graduate school.

Ten years later, learning to fawn again as an inmate in a state hospital was a new low. I believe the purpose of the incarceration was to teach me there was no use in even trying to take care of myself. I documented clear signs of abuse and requested to meet with my psychiatrist. It took the psychiatrist two months to actually meet with me. She said one time they had a patient who was being investigated by the FBI. When he was hospitalized for believing he was being followed he really was being investigated. Then, she told me everyone who observed me said I was an entitled person. I agreed to take my medication again.

First, I was locked on a unit for two weeks. When I finally gained grounds, I did everything I could to be industrious and work to feel better. They let me work in an automotive shop and I started to heal. Just as I was getting stable, exercising and strengthening my injured back, they moved me to the chronic unit. It is true I didn’t exactly conceal my distain for my family and the mafia. Those elements were revealed to me chronically throughout the hospital. The chronic unit was old and barely heated during the Montana winter. Massive icicles grew from the crack in the window above my cot. We dressed for the forty-degree temperature inside the dingy barracks.

Self-advocacy was pointless. When I finally took medication and surrendered to them, I did get released.

Fawning to Return to Professional Work:

However, I did not believe that outside the institution that self-advocacy was pointless. I took a greyhound bus to Fresno California with the small nest egg I had saved for myself. First, I got a job. Then I got an apartment.

This would have worked but I ran out of medication and experienced many signs of government/mafia surveillance. The day I got hired, my nefarious friend called me and let me know he knew I got the job. It wasn’t until I withdrew off my medication that I couldn’t control my rage about this.

I tried to find work anywhere. Finally, I got a job at a foster care agency, but did not have the funds for a car. My family only agreed to help if I move into a very challenging situation that my aunt set up for me in the bay area. My nefarious friend agreed that this was what I needed to do.

So, I had a two-hour bike commute and a job at an upscale Italian Delicatessen arranged for me. My grand delusion was that my family was an Irish Mafia family that had set me up for the situation I encountered in Seattle.

At the Italian Deli, I learned the learned helplessness toward the government/mafia that I needed to survive. Eventually I was able to break back into the land of social work and psychotherapy. This included a great deal of fawning towards customers, my family, employers, and mafia triggers.

This fawning skill seemed like an answer to many of my problems and I was able to suppress my experiences with being a targeted individual

Fawning to Survive Psychosis:

When a person experiences a break from reality they must learn not to react as if their tactical reality is really happening. This takes some doing and work. Especially for someone who ends up being a targeted individual, emotional triggers must be controlled.

Thus, even when the person who is in a break is right about the fact that corruption is rampant in our society, they must learn to act as if there is no such thing here in America. We don’t have indentured servants or enslaved people anymore. No, we are the land o the free.

So, on my daily ten-mile bike ride I would see signs of being followed and harassed. Once I encountered a resident who I knew from the section 8 housing complex in Seattle. He walked around with a pair of handcuffs at the train station. He sat across from me on the train. I pretended that I noticed nothing. In front of the demanding customers all that mattered was that I fawn exceptional customer service.

Targeted individuals know their apartment is broken into and their employment mail is violated. They know the people standing outside their apartment with gang tattoos on their shoulders are gang members.

They must learn to fawn for the sake of people who live in consensus reality. In spite of where they have been and what they know, they must act as if they fit in. I think it is imperative to be able to do so to survive at any job or any social setting. One must avoid any action that is triggered by one’s history of being targeted.

One time the police entered my apartment and trashed it, spreading kitty litter over my rug. The apartment complex management told me that my uncle had done this. Nobody cared or believed me that this happened. It was excellent customer service that was required to get rehired into professional work.

It is like code-switching in the African American community, one must fully understand that there is no understanding of your culture and speak as if the culture of the oppressor is the only culture out there at the workplace.

Fawning is a great skill that can help you fake it until you make it.

Fawning for Trauma Experts:

In training to work with trauma, I have attended workshops of Bessel Van der Kirk, Dawson Church and Laura Pernell. In each of these workshops I learned important things, but I did not feel particularly safe and had to do a lot of fawning with people. EMDR and EFT particularly didn’t work for me because I was to dissociated in those settings to work through my issues. I was not sipping the tea.

Bessel van de Kirk made several jokes about psychotic people in his workshop. Dawson Church was clearly angry at people like me who were reversed and for whom tapping did not help. It is very hard to be at ease when the training turns into such a hostile environment and the assumption is made that all the healers in the room are above their traumas.

Let me tell you, after being rejected endlessly for not fawning, it is a real trip to have a group of therapists in a trauma training notice that you are dissociated and fawning and dismiss you as being damaged goods. Suddenly your survival skill is a sign that something is gravely wrong with you. Suddenly if you don’t stop fawning, you will not be successful at fitting in with the clique that surrounds you. I fawned, but I withdrew and didn’t try to deal with anyone,

Teaching the Fawning Skill:

I have actively taught the fawning skill to participants in profession group therapy that accepts and explores psychosis. It is a much-needed skill that is imposed on others in institutional circumstances. But learning when to use it and when not to is a challenge.

Indeed, as a young social worker with a private high school education, the affects of which I learned to hide, I was accustomed to see others fawn at me. In the system, the power differential between the staff and the client often encourages this kind of behavior.

When I was a young social worker, I didn’t know I needed to undermine the fawning responses and make deeper connections with people. So, as I have openly taught this skill, there is always a sense of irony that has historically has made the patrons of my groups chuckle.

This is why I often argue that it can be imperative for providers who work with psychosis to work with the symptoms and normalize them without judging or reacting to them. This creates more of a level playing field so that the person in a break can have their ways respected. Then, it becomes easier to ask them code-switch back into chronically normal mainstream culture. This can give someone the social support they need to fawn for a living.

The alternative for many is to accept institutional neglect and poverty.

Overcoming the Fawning Skill?

Indeed, many people judge and take advantage of those who fawn in certain environments. People who vie for power will test another person in power. If the person in power submits and does not challenge their bully they will be demoted. I have experienced this professionally a number of times.

Indeed, this reality has cost me professionally. I have lost jobs and respect and have dealt with slander campaigns when I have tolerated bullying. It is really hard for me to know when its time to put up my dukes verses when it is time to simply survive in a humble manner. I have chosen to work in contexts in which I am not in power.

Indeed, teaching psychologists not to blame the victim and send people to an institution is not a safe thing to do. Fawning and undermining is indeed the only way to provide freedom to inmates of the institutions.

As I have started a private practice and work with a few people in the tech field, I have learned that fawning is not appreciated and does not lead to success in the corridors of power. It has made me aware that it sure is hard to know when it’s truly safe and necessary to forego fawning.

While in therapeutic service to another person, I feel safe to forgo this kind of skill. Many find me authentic and appreciate my help. I usually reflect on things when I write notes and in my off hours before I take action.

But dealing with people who do not understand their role in institutionalizing others it is not appropriate to forego fawning! I constantly have to watch my back and follow rules and pray that I don’t get made and sacrificed.

The sense that you are going to get in trouble for what you do constantly lives withing the survivors of our societies impoverished institutions. I am not really sure I want to give up this skill amid the waters in which I tread. Indeed, I consider it an emotional regulation skill in many contexts, acting opposite to the behavior you feel.

In another sense, a great deal of emotional intelligence goes with the fawning response. Taking medication has helped me enormously with my EQ and ability to fawn and reconnect with consensus reality in a meaningful way.

Sure, I want to go from surviving to thriving. Sure, when I work with others as a helper, I am able to be authentic and I do not fawn. But until the mental health system shifts from a social control model, to an integrated healing and wellness one, I may well have to keep resorting to those fawning skills. So, when I am training in a room full of therapist whom I perceive as trauma sharks, I will not feel denigrated for having to be alert and fawn.

The post The Neurodivergence of Fawning for Mental Health appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

All I Ever Wanted, by Larry “Lorenzo” Quan

 was to love from my heart

to help out & take part

all i ever wanted

 was to not be alone

not be on my own

all i ever wanted

 was to be fed and

make sure no one goes hungry

all i ever wanted

 was to be clothed of my nakedness

to cover & preserve everyone’s dignity

all i ever wanted

 was to have a home

and help shelter others

all i ever wanted

was to be sensitive to your needs

and to do everything i could

all i ever wanted

 was to be present & available

and never abandon you

all i ever wanted

was to be by your side

and to never hide

all i ever wanted

 was to rally us together

to encourage & support one another

all i ever wanted

 was to know whom to thank

for our providence

for our protection

 for our opportunities

for our families

for our love joy & peace

all i ever wanted

 was to release

all ill thoughts & feelings

all i ever wanted

 was to have world peace

amity unity solidarity

all i ever wanted

 was for all us to be free

free to live & care

free to give & share

all i ever wanted

 was to savor & appreciate

every moment with you

to love you true

The post All I Ever Wanted, by Larry “Lorenzo” Quan appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

Learning Self Compassion After A Psychosis Episode:

It’s been nearly twenty years since I came out of a two-year break from reality. I am no longer faced with the prospect of homeless and unable to find work. I have a career, a marriage and a sense of stability. But in other ways I am just starting to realize how fragmented and dissociated I remain.

It’s taken a lot of work to learn to be successful and mad in a mad world. But there are still some things to heal that have been around for a long time for me. Things like feeling joy and relaxations have always alluded me. I am still developing self-compassion given the issues with which I have dealt.

Join me today as I use internal family systems theory to help me have more compassion for myself. I will examine the interplay between my manager parts and the exile parts who need to work together with better collaboration.

Preoccupied with Slander Campaigns:

I still struggle with the sense that other people have engaged in slander campaigns against me and my work. Since the release of my memoir five years ago, my efforts to promote the book and the rest of my work redefining psychosis, have failed to create the impact for which I yearn.

It’s true my book never had a release party. Turns out local people with big names on the national stage, took the free copy of the book and did not write reviews. In fact, a few started treating me with micro aggression, leading me to believe there might be a wider slander conspiracy much like what I have witnessed at work. One person did write me a review but left a shaming comment in the middle of it.

Likewise, although I am very committed to my work, I repeatedly get passed up for promotions. I have a different perspective and expertise than my colleagues and I am often undermined.

It’s true my book won awards. It’s also true that mostly the reviews I got from workshop trainings I have conducted have suggested I did well with most opportunities I have been given. Still, I have not become a sought-out speaker. And my writing platform remains relatively small.

In quiet moments, I often have the idea of a slander campaign come up. Perhaps it is a younger part of me that has been hungry and desperate in the face of financial challenges during my break. But ideas of a slander campaign go back a lot farther, back to grade school bullying and alienation from my peers that started in fourth grade. I weigh these thoughts with the fear that my presentation skills might be a bit lacking.

Presentation Skills:

It’s true when I was in high school, my classmates used to count the number of ums that I made during my speeches. Even though I am passionate about what I am saying, my success often depends on the energy in the room that lifts me above the anxiety.

For example, I recently had a zoom interview about my book. My interviewer, Peg Morrison, actually took the time to read my book and ask me thoughtful questions in front of her NAMI network. She wrote, “If you’ve ever wondered how Holden Caulfield turned out, you’ll want to meet our guest Timothy Dreby (pen name Clyde Dee). I was given the questions ahead of time to reflect on and prepare my responses

To prepare for the interview, I took two hours off work so I could come home and ground myself in the questions. About twenty minutes from home, I found myself in a traffic standstill. The stand still took a great deal of time and I wasn’t even sure if I would make it home on time for the interview. My wife called me and read me the interview questions over the phone.

Since the interview is on YouTube, I have been able to view it and assess the extent to which my own performance might be part of the problem.

Critical Eyes:

One aspect of enduring a break from reality is learning to live with vigilant eyes. When I was in psychosis, I picked up a great deal from serendipitous occurrences. Discharged from a state hospital, I took a Greyhound to a different state. Not only was I jobless and in need of survival funds, I was convinced I was enduring a black list conspiracy after I outed covered up murder in a section 8 housing authority.

One aspect of these observations were my interpersonal interactions with others. It seemed like I had the ability to discern their subconscious intentions so as that I knew their personal thoughts. I was always vigilantly assessing for safety, sincerity, and intentions.

I was especially vigilant to sense a persons’ connection to secret societies that may be involved in persecuting me. Maybe the secret society was my family conspiring with the treatment team at the State Hospital. Or maybe it was a black-market organization conspiring with a law enforcement agency. Or at times it was the management at the only job I could find, a job at an Italian Delicatessen that my auntie arranged for me, conspiring with my young co-workers who delighted in taunting the mad thirty-year-old with vigilant eyes.

For the last thirteen years, I have engaged in redefining psychosis. I started by doing this in professional groups. I did so in a manner I could justify interventions that are radically different. In doing so I have suggested that interpersonal perceptions of others are a source of special messages for a person in a break from reality. (Of course there are other sources like dreams, intuition, hearing voices, media, visons etcetera get added into the mix.)

It’s clearly arguable that many of those acute perceptions may come from a scientific assessment of energy waves that come off a body. For example, as I have learned through learning emotional freedom techniques, a host of energy waves that reflect a person’s spirit may be more readable with a set of vigilant eyes. There are also many other non-verbal cues that are hard to explain when someone is intensely vigilant. Voice tone, emphasis, body gestures, and posture are all intensely notable when a person has vigilant eyes.

When I was eventually able to use medication and come out of my crisis, I was able to withstand having vigilant eyes without involuntarily reacting to what I experienced. It enabled me to fake it and improve my working income and come back from a choppy year of underemployment in which I only earned thirteen thousand dollars.

As I started to feel safer and perceive less danger, people stopped responding to me with ridicule and threats and I eventually returned to being able to utilize my Master’s training and maintain positions in social work and psychotherapy. But I am not sure I ever lost my vigilant eyes.

Viewing my Performance:

I have intensely critical managers in my head who take one look at my performance in this interview and think that I should not be the one up on the podium leading the discussion. This is part of me thinks it is smart, entitled to judge, and doesn’t acknowledges that it internalizes social Darwinism. It still says that that a kid with my set of disabilities should not be allowed to bring home straight A’s even if he was up all night doing his homework. This was a remark I internalized from my father. While he might have meant it as a compliment, it was an example of a patronizing attitude that has really impacted me.

One might think this manager part of me has enough life experience to know social Darwinism and eugenic concepts are false. It has seen me locked up for three months in abject State Hospital poverty with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. It has seen me in the streets in yet another strange land trying to work my way up from nothing. It saw me fail to get jobs at McDonalds and hundreds of other franchises. It’s seen me struggling to ride my bike to sixty-hour weeks of physical labor for thirteen thousand dollars a year. It has seen upstanding citizens on the streets run the other way because of the rage in my eyes. It endured the support that criticized and cut me every step of the way. I kept trying and things did get better so one would think the manager knows better.

But when I watch the video of my interview, the manager also can see that I have just sat in traffic and am tired, slow, internal, and stressed. It views the slowness of my responses with distain. The manager in me tells me I am full of myself and not giving the host enough pleasantries. It continues to be embarrassed and ashamed to be me.

How this Manager-Part Developed:

I think an aspect of this managing part of me mistrusts other people with power but also distains and internalizes their views. I have a rich history of being vigilant when I assess teachers, therapists, trauma experts, or others in power.

Both of my parents were teachers who knew that I was struggling even though I was always one of the better students in my class. I got left back in kindergarten and I was almost not admitted because of the way I used scissors in the interview.

Early writing efforts often went unnoticed and did not result in top grades. The teacher who graded my poetry notebook told my mother my work was too depressing and only gave me a B.

When I took to writing and wrote my college essay, my parents were called into school and I was nearly sent back to the hospital because the school psychologist suggested I might be suicidal. I wrote about running a half marathon at Outward Bound and was very proud of my work. It’s true that I was, as I always have been, very self-disclosing in my writing. This particular essay I had rewrote incessantly. In fact, I continued to rewrite it. I sent it out to colleges anyway.

Even though I was shamed in front of my whole class who gossiped as I was called before the school tribunal, I sent that essay out and then I didn’t go to the schools that accepted me. Shortly thereafter I got so angry at the school, I let my weight drop and I was put back in the hospital for a second time for anorexia.

I felt intensely betrayed by anyone who had tried to teach me when the school erroneously published that I was headed off to an upper crust college. Really, I was moving in with my twenty-five-year-old girlfriend to attend a commuter college in Camden New Jersey. I raged at the whole community of teachers who failed to see any value in my writing when it came time for awards.

In college I continued to be vigilant of teachers who graded my performance. When a professor finally gave me a hundred on a take-home-exam and said he hadn’t done so in ten years, I was outraged. My other efforts were just as good as this one. On this particular essay I was just regurgitating his opinion after talking with him. My other efforts were better and more heart felt. When an English Professor wanted to put my essay up for an award, I again was outraged and never got back to him. I didn’t care about a stupid reward!

In graduate school I was working full-time and, hitting classes after a full work day. My relationship with most professors remained on a similar trajectory. I thought most of my teachers knew nothing about the things I was working through during my day job. Several made fun of me for asking too many questions.

After I graduated with my masters, I moved to the west coast without knowing anyone. I met a really nice Thai Buddhist girlfriend. We attended political speeches with regard to the WTO protests together. Later she told me that when she heard how hard I criticized the speakers and author’s we talked about she felt self-conscious and wondered what I thought of her. She was right, everybody I heard speak about a political issue I was way too hard on.

I guess the manager-part feels justified because of the way it was rejected. It is still internalizing the authorities who never reached out and helped it. Many of my teachers were managed by my father. Perhaps they looked at my dyslexic spelling, disliked my father, and downgraded my work.

Compassion:

I do feel bad for the little boy who used the scissors in an unconventional manner. He never deserved to be managed and criticized by a judgmental, prep school community. I do want to protect him from the managers who are now a select few of his peers in the recovery movement.

Indeed, while others were learning to socialize in college while they built skills, I was the anorectic-white-boy working at a mom-and-pop deli mart in Camden New Jersey with a Glock under the grill and a shotgun over the trash can. I think leaders in the recovery movement may not understand why I don’t have college social skills.

But to a larger extent, managers who guard public opinion rest in cliques and decide what and who they are going to support. Yet, I need to respect their role in creating community is also important. They are smart and better than me at some things. They too need to be acknowledged. It really is important for me not to bite back at them.

My father, who was often driven to rage by my slow pace, did need to help me work faster at some points. He committed his life to leading the prep school environment trying to make it a fair and just place to get a superior education. It was not his fault that I was dissociated and depressed. I believe I had some childhood trauma that made me that way. He wasn’t used to dealing with kids who failed to thrive.

His father dumped all the family assets onto him to manage in the summers. There was no rest for the wicked for my father. He worked and worked and all he had to show for it was a modest private school salary and a slow dissociated kid. All he had was control over those family resources and relationships. They would go to the kids who respected him and didn’t bite back and bring the inner-city manners up in family gatherings.

Indeed, for every manager that I have worked with there is a similar story of someone who wasn’t seen and their work not acknowledged who just has to bite back a little. So, as I work with that kid that I want to protect, I need to teach him to understand the manager and use this understanding to assert and advocate. I need to show the managers that they need to look at what the neurodivergent mind has to say even if the associated behavior is a little different.

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A Celebration of my Book with NAMI

If you’ve ever wondered how Holden Caulfield turned out, you’ll want to meet our guest Timothy Dreby (pen name Clyde Dee). Six years into a clinical career, anonymous mental health worker Clyde Dee starts work in a notorious housing project in Seattle. Navigating a fractured system, he finds himself mysteriously compelled to break the codes of standard drug war conduct. After six months of uncanny threats and coincidences, he decides to go off a low dose of antipsychotic medication. What follows is a hero’s journey as he battles injustice, corruption, and stigma – in addition to his own mental illness. Come and meet the writer of this fearless, poignant, and funny book. Thursdays with NAMI is held virtually every Thursday from 7:00​-8:30pm. It is free of charge, but registration is required. Go to www.naminc.org and search “Thursdays” for more information and to register.

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Interview with NAMI

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It’s Never Too Late to Assert Yourself

In a personal story I am currently working on for publication in Mad in America, I am starting to realize the impact of the 2015 release of my award-winning memoir: Fighting for Freedom in America: Memoir of a “Schizophrenia” and Mainstream Cultural Delusions. Six year later I am still dealing with a sense of alienation that preoccupies me. I have stopped moving forward with my next book until I have built a large enough writer platform.

Writing and editing my memoir was a very good uplifting an enabled me to heal and provide authentic therapy for eight years. I got a book contract and thought I was set, but I had to break the contract. The two editors for the book company were erotica writers and would not let me keep my issues about sex abuse, racial injustice, and insisted that they write my greatest foe into my hero.

So, I published the book and started to go through the marketing process without direction. I didn’t know what Facebook was let alone a writer’s platform.

I gave books to local colleagues in the peer and HVN movement in the hopes of getting reviews and support. I felt I had accomplished something but it was hard to get feedback. I did start to win awards but instead of getting reviews from personal contacts with names that could help me market the book, I got silence. In fact, I felt attacked, shamed, or ignored in some instances. While I am grateful that a few people did write me reviews, I primarily felt the sting of the shame and rejection of the people who did not support me.  It may be irrational, but I distanced myself from the crowds that harbored the people who were unresponsive. I sent a lot of books out and didn’t hear back.

When I finally had the time and money available to make it to an Alternatives Conference only two local people turned out to attend my presentation.

In 2010, when Bruce Springsteen finally published The Promise album which was unpublished songs from the most prolific period of his career, I first heard the words that would characterize my experience publishing a book.

“It’s like when the truth has been spoken and it don’t make no difference, something in your heart grows cold . . . “

So I was not selected for the HVN-USA Board. My work never got incorporated into flow of the international movement. One person I gave a book to admitted that she has been talking about how I should not be permitted to talk about my work with special messages in concert with HVN. I have seen her talk about others in anger and I have often imagined it has done me harm.  She said was not going to say sorry for talking about my work in this manner.

I have been hearing the two other authors on the board of the HVN have their books promoted or highly regarded repeatedly in front of me. Finally, I have started to talk about my book in the face of those who praise these other books. But it has been painful when people from the movement have attacked me or sanctioned me in the training. I tend to feel there is talk going around and that it is not a coincidence. Additionally, I have received critical comments on Facebook from movement leaders.

Up Coming Interview with NAMI!

I first met my interviewer on Facebook when she responded to a blog that was critical of the way NAMI supports the medical model.We had a talk and she read my book and she is actually doing something to promote my book.

Thus on March 18th I will be participating in a Webinar during which she will interview me

3/18 –  Fighting for Freedom in America: Memoir of a ‘Schizophrenia’ and Mainstream Cultural Delusions  
If you’ve ever wondered how Holden Caulfield turned out, you’ll want to meet our guest Timothy Dreby (pen name Clyde Dee). Six years into a clinical career, anonymous mental health worker Clyde Dee starts work in a notorious housing project in Seattle. After six months of uncanny threats and coincidences, he decides to go off a low dose of antipsychotic medication. What follows is a hero’s journey of battling injustice, corruption, and stigma – in addition to his own mental illness. Come and meet the writer of this fearless, poignant, and funny book. Registration is required for this event, which is free and open to the public: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Ry-Ox5JVTKqITT8Unp_YiQ

Personally, I am against mental health factions. I think the government uses factions to keep us fighting each other. Kind of like the fighting felt like it marginalized my book, infighting keeps us from creating a system that is truly ours.

I do not agree that I have a mental illness. In my journey, had I accepted that characterization of my struggles, I would have ended up in board and care homes in Montana rather than taking a Greyhound to California. I tend to characterize these struggles a being neurodivergent or genetic, spiritual gifts that don’t get worked with in constructive manners.

Regardless, I’ve met other NAMI leaders who have helped me understand new and powerful information and am not ready to throw everyone who uses their support under the bus because the drug companies fund them and maintain medical model myths.

If there aren’t moles in the system that open up opportunities, warehousing and homelessness will abound. We don’t need a class divide and politics in our mad movement, we need people who know how create culture that give mad real opportunities in all walks of life! I hope you will join me and see how it goes.

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WAKE UP, I’m Coming Out of Hibernation!

I am writing to alert my community and tell them to WAKE UP. I am coming out of hibernation!

I have always been grateful to my community of readers and want to thank you for supporting me. But I admit my emails have been personal amblings and links to my blogs. First, they were monthly updates, then they were quarterly reflections. Lately they have become even more infrequent.

I am very much a person who learns by doing. I wrote my award-winning memoir without going to school for writing. If you saw my early blog sites you will notice that I have been developing not only my blog writing but also my website skills as I do. Editing the web pages has become an obsession and I am currently undergoing improvements. First impressions have never been my strong suit, but I am getting there, Now, it’s time to work on my social web skills so I can finally put my spider senses into action.

That’s right, I will be using this email list with a great deal more frequency. I have decided that instead of writing a book, I want to develop an on-line training.

This will not happen immediately. At this point I am launching a project to put a redefining psychosis workgroup together. This work groups will be free for those with lived experience. It will include material developed over twelve years with a need to develop my PowerPoint skills to make them look animated and pretty on zoom.

Not only will I be writing narratives of the processes I am going through to make this vision a reality, I will be using resources and affiliations I have to expand my email list and keep you all posted. I may be knocking at your door and asking for you to join me.

If you may be reading this on Facebook and are not on my email list, it is a great time to take the plunge so you can be part of this ground breaking work. When you do sign my email list you get a free pdf of my award-winning memoir. You can sample my work and see what you think.

No more ambling and skill development. It is time for me to WAKE UP. In fact, that is the first three words of my memoir: “I wake up!” Don’t believe me, check it out here.

My decision to focus on further development of my training is simple. It may well be an easier way to express my learning and make an impact. And because I like to write, I will be writing updates and narratives about the hurdles I have to go through.

If you know someone who would be interested in my training, please forward the email and join my list here.

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The Cultural Delusions that Put Vulnerable Communities Out on the Streets!

I have come to believe that one can learn more about on the ground social realities from personal stories than the news media or researched academic books. In fact, one could take this argument farther and suggest sometimes true reality may be more hidden in fiction or comedic insights than it is in the cultural delusions of propagandized consensus realities.

This is partly an expose the cultural delusions that persist in spite of research and media; and partly, stories about the way politics, egos, and notions of progress distort policy and research to harm the vulnerable.

It will shed light on the way cultural delusions associated with race, mental illness and the prison industry conspire to put many invisible individuals out on the streets. But, also, it is a story about how I have witnessed a political machine.

Many of us trust the news media, reporters, and academic researchers to understand what is going on in the world. They are supposed to be properly educated and conduct reliable research with integrity. However, one could read them all day and not realize how delusional one is becoming. And so, in the later part, I share story.

It’s true aspects of my career as a social worker has been about demystifying my own cultural delusions about myself. I wrote a memoir about surviving a schizophrenia diagnosis in which I learned not to let cultural delusions turn me into a statistic.

This one is eventually the story of how despite my vision and best efforts, I am watching cultural delusions harm the community that sustained me in my recovery.

How Knowledge About Cultural Delusions Becomes Part of Recovery from Psychosis:

Once Bruce Springsteen wrote, “Man, the poets out here don’t write anything at all, they just stand back and let it all be.” I pose that he was depicting a reality that afflicts many people, the reality of black-market America that just isn’t supposed to exist. People don’t typically write about it because if they out people, they will be killed, or blacklisted. Hence public figures like the rapper, Tupac, the investigative journalist, Gary Webb, and the author/pimp, Iceburg Slim, do not survive.

Cultural delusions aren’t supposed to exist. And yet I’d argue that recovery from mental health challenges, in particular recovery from psychosis and trauma, often involve insights into aspects of black-market, covert intelligence, abusive systems, and gaining psychological and spiritual (multidimensional) insight into reality.

Learning when and where to talk about these realities versus when to keep silent is a lot of what mental health survivors must learn. Getting these things right is kind of what parents and their family’s go through trying to maintain the secret of Santa Claus for a six-year-old-child. You’ve got to keep the mainstream sheltered like you have to shield the child.

So, many of us are left to investigate: what came first, the doobie, or Scooby-Doobie-Doo? We wake up at some point and realize that the Dodge Ram brand on our American automobiles is really a picture of fallopian tubes!

I must admit I often feel like I am the last one to get these jokes. I am the kind of guy (brought up to respect the banjo) who never realized that the Mummer’s parade can function thematically as a clan rally. It took me forty-seven years, the comments of a co-worker, and a quick look-see on Wikipedia to put that one together.

Not only must people in mental health warehousing learn to observe and make sense of these realities, they must learn to accept all that they have perceived isn’t safe to talk about. Instead, they must learn to manage their behavior in entry-level jobs where they may earn slave wages. Building social skills in such settings is so hard that many give up.

I know because I went through it. I imagine it is a lot like what people who get out of a prison gang go through. I was a piece of human traffic working in an Italian Delicatessen under mafia surveillance. I had to learn to mix with adolescent kids who disrespected and targeted me. Until I adjusted, I could not move on to bigger and better things.

 

Reflections on How the Marriage Between the Black-Market and Law Enforcement Works:

Many can learn about how powerful black marketeers operate by studying the trial of South Boston’s Whitey Bulger. The simultaneous cooperation of FBI agents and black marketeers is necessary for information and crime reduction. So many Netflix series are about this very conceivable reality. And yet the idea that this need for information marries law enforcement to criminal enterprise is reserved for conspiracy theorists. Still, way back in the 60’s, in an attempt to kill Fidel Castro, JFK turned to Chicago mafia hit men to do the job. This wasn’t declassified until 2007. Imagine what is going on now!

I also believe this happens with prison gangs. I believe prison gangs are a means of surveillance that help control the black market and reduce killing. Though lifetime members must comply or have their families killed, though many must endure lock up and slavery, it is functional as long as the mainstream remains deluded and doesn’t understand.

So, the government works the black-market trade. Hence, it’s conceivable that a great deal of our nation’s surveillance and control is wrangled that way. Like rapper KRS-One suggests in the early nineties, “with all this technology above and under, humanity still hunts down one another.”

Getting out of a prison gang means you have to give up your connection to power and money and go protective custody. This means you run the risk of getting hurt once you are freed. You must passively see and understand what could happen to you and have faith that you will not be killed. You have to be strong enough to be called a snitch or a pedophile and get no respect to get out of the machine. You will be isolated and suffer and when you get out all you have in the world is family support. Many who get out of prison end up homeless once free.

One of the “delusions” I had at the Italian Deli was that people thought I was a pedophile. Then one day I learned that that very rumor was being spread about me far and wide. One day a police man tailed me all the way to my psychotherapy appointment. This continued for several years. Not everyone in the Italian Delicatessen was in the know, but to this day, I believe that some were. I was left to connect the dots.

Here you see the way I have connected them since.

I eventually resigned to take medication to calm my emotions so that I could cope. Until I did calm down and make friends with my bullies, I was unable to find other work.

So often, those of us who must share housing and jobs with people who are connected to black market realities, need to understand how to integrate their cultural experience with cultural delusions. There still are Eurocentric notions of a fair and just society that must be maintained.

The Challenges of Researching Invisibility:

As I’ve already inferred, there are the challenges that come up when people try to research black market realities. Before we delve into stories of political corruption in statistics and in social programs, I am going to shed light onto an aspect of this challenge that might sound paranoid.

Secret government testing can become a legitimate concern in an invisible community. It is not just the Tuskegee covert syphilis experiments on innocent African Americans! Consider more intelligence released about the sixties, that under JFK secret syphilis tests were given to Honduran prisoners. This not only means that other countries may use our social institutions for testing it means that black markets and government surveillance can too. These are things many Americans would think sounds paranoid. But I want to point out that it’s easy to say these concerns are paranoid until you get incarcerated into them with your habeas corpus suspended.

Consider the Rosenburg experiments. Volunteers without psychosis lied and said that they heard innocuous voices. They got admitted and came out with real schizophrenic delusions. Then, consider how the famous study has been discredited. The research, we later find out was created to amplify Rosenburg’s personal experience in the mental health system.

It’s amazing the things we believe when they come from research. Meanwhile, real experiences on involuntary units paint a different picture of institutional authority and justice.

I believe people who are buried as such wouldn’t chance to answer a questionnaire for an ivy league research project. They wouldn’t trust the study enough to fill out the questionnaire. I sure wouldn’t have when I was incarcerated in Montana State Hospital.

When I was in Montana State Hospital, I would have said anything that would have led to my release. For example, I told staff that I would never toque refer but that I would sniff heroin and smoke crack. I was so turned around with the cast of characters I was surrounded by, I thought that the admission might get me released.

Eleven years later I would try to conduct such research on a shoe-string budget from an Innovations Grant I wrote, during a side gig. The majority of the program participants—many were people in psychosis on the streets and in board and care homes. The majority also refused to complete the paper work. I found this to be most noteworthy though admittedly not statistically significant.

I point this out before I tell my stories of politics and corruption in research. Remember, research and media is the stuff we trust in lieu of the black market. Distorted and warped studies from academia seem to drive all the funding.

 

How Legal and Illegal Crimes of Humanity Conspire to Put the Invisible Out on the Streets:

When I suggest cultural delusions conspire to put people on the streets, I am not only talking about black market crime. There is so much more to crime than the pipeline to prison. There are many different kinds of money for nothing enterprises

Many privileged-folk get to lead “productive” lives in which they take in more than they give. Many grow up and realize there is the whole phenomenon of easy money and class entitlement is ruled by stock brokers and family inheritance.

I have learned to accept that people who turn to fast street cash are making a very similar ethical decision than people who accept family money from capital gains. However, fast street money leads to violence, death, jail, stigma, and slavery rather than delusions of superiority and entitlement.

Let us not forget that there are a lot of businesses illegal and legal that deal with issues of human bondage, arms, crime cleaning, and sex, and drug trafficking etcetera.

I believe that the mental health industry is just one of those machines that deals with bondage because of the false medicalization of its illnesses and the trauma that it imposes. Consider the salary of top administrators who decide how to disperse funds with academic statistical research. Through layers of bureaucracy, each well-to-do layer of management ends up wrangling the person below them. If you don’t think this sounds realistic, read on and you will get a feel for how cultural delusions, slander, and politics distort statistics.

At the bottom, the often poorly paid entry-level master level social worker takes home the majority of the funds that trickle down. The poor are left homeless or in board and care homes. They are the ones who are the most nickel and dimed.

At the top sit educated people with six-digit salaries. They may be there because they endure mental health struggles. They also may not have experienced the same playing field as those they nickel and dime. At the bottom, many want to work but many are too intimidated by the amount of paperwork and organization it takes to maximize the income. They often are taught they can’t do it by people who profit off them. They hate the machine and find other ways to make ends meet.

Zoning creates culturized class, race, and sex wars. Those who live by stocks and bonds instead of violence get the ability to protect and insulate themselves with very different kinds of compassionate police forces. Then, there is this ridiculous notion of a work ethic that persists. Those who work hard are supposed to get more? Is that a joke? Those who aren’t so fortunate must live within task force zones that are less entitled and lawful.

Personal Stories that Speak to the Power of Corruption in Research and Policy:

So now I shift from expose to personal stories about politics, bureaucracy and corruption in community mental health.

The Outpatient Unit where I work is one of those places about which the poets don’t write about. Academic books, and the news media just don’t capture the level of oppression that I see on a daily basis. These stories end up being among our national secrets. Many people would just presume they are delusional.

Many of the people I work with have been homeless and are now housed in substandard circumstances. Many use the program to deal with how things improved from times they were on the streets. Others endure these realities with the support of their peers who they call their family. Still some others stay stuck in those dilemmas and endlessly “yes” the staff just to keep us off their backs. All are accepted and given a chance to socialize. Some do it by sharing shorts (cigarette butts) on the sidewalks. It is illegal to smoke on the campus.

These are the stories I’ve studied over eighteen years. And, yes, I do believe all of them to be real to a certain extent. Indeed, there has been a shift in my understanding of the world.

I am working with all the people we all agree shouldn’t have guns: the whistleblowers, the scapegoats, the burned mafia spies, the substance abusers, the bullied and abused, the saints, the orphans and the prophets. Most are just plain broke and stranded.

Twelve years ago, once properly credentialed, I started using my own story of “psychosis” in my work. I started to notice a shift in the way I serviced people on the unit. I went from providing services that seemed to be going nowhere, to introducing the concept of recovery to participants. I went from boring and flat interactions to live and industrious ones.

As time wore on, I started to develop a different vision for what it should mean to participate in mental health services. For those participants really buried in institutionalized circumstances, participating in mental health services needs to also lead to opportunities for a better life. It needs to lead to money and purpose.

The Man Who Warned Me Not to Go:

It may sound sorry, but I’ve always felt extremely guilty with the salary I make. Although I initially had to work seven days a week with side gigs to get out of my homeless financial hole and get my license, I did get my weekends back within four short years.

Once I started to get away from work, I found myself struck with guilt. I was able to backpack and meet my wife and have a social hiking hobby while the people I worked for remained confined in their board and care homes in the inner city.

My conflict escalated to the point where I decided to take a new job at a lower salary.

I still remember one of the men who particularly benefitted from the groups I entitled Special Messages. These were groups that collectively explored the content and varieties of experiences that lead to psychosis. He would tell his story weekly in the crowded room and always said my adding and reframes were helpful. He pleaded with me not to leave.

You’ve got a good thing going here,” he said “Why leave?”

I felt he didn’t understand the way he was getting sold short. The facility I would be moving into was beautiful and clean. No more urine stains from the urinal to the bathroom drain to step over for those of us with mental health challenges. No, we can work and bring each other along to the point where we can get back off the streets.

But even though the owner of the new company that would be underpaying me brought her Doberman in to the interview with me, I really didn’t understand the bee hive I was stepping into.

 

Witnessing Confabulation of Tabulation in A Real Government Experiment:

A year-and-a-half later, I would return to the old backward publicly disgraced and outed as a schizophrenic. Previous to this, I really didn’t understand that politics, ego trips, and personal vendettas result in cooked-book-research.

Politics too will distort any effort to research what the poets can’t even dare to write about. I will also demonstrate how little research matters when it comes to policy towards our society’s vulnerable.

The job for was an expensive government study involving all county agencies. My efforts to examine the result have been fruitless. I suspect the info got classified. At least, it’s not available online. This government experiment used three evidence-based practices to transform the county into the recovery model.

We all agree it didn’t work. I personally felt there were a lot of stubborn non recovery attitudes to disrupt recovery. There were also a great deal of politics and people fighting to keep their jobs.

Sure, the clients answered the questionnaires, provided by peer counselors. They had to because they gained housing subsidies. They were gently coaxed into it, but it is not clear they felt safe to tell the truth.

I wasn’t interviewed about the lies and corruption I witnessed.

I worked sixty-hour weeks and believe the lady with the Doberman had my head on the chopping block from the get go because we didn’t agree about race. I refused to side with her and say that race doesn’t matter.

Despite what I believe to be high level of productivity in the statistics, my role in the project was targeted.

The lady with the Doberman was supposedly removed from the scene by her husband, the CEO; but she clearly kept the program director in her pocket. The program manager let me know that she was doing this with a crooked smile. “Jeez you’re running this whole department for so long, why don’t they just hire you into the position,” she once snidely suggested.

I was hired as a second administrator but shortly after I started the top administrator stopped coming into work. It’s true I never ceased to lobby that our workers should get paid more due to the cost of housing in the area. The company was a corporate model, aimed to extract money, not bring justice to any locale.

Meanwhile, the director had repeatedly gone after me. She appeared to judge many of my experiences. One day she called me Stuart Smalley. I didn’t know who he was yet. Everyone laughed. There were signs of this bullying all along, but I pressed forward.

One day I was called away for a supervision meeting and I heard her exclaimed in multidisciplinary training that the learning center was not safe under my leadership.

I failed to hospitalize a client. At a certain point I did call the cops, but he split. I pressed on with the supervision meeting feeling things were rotten in the state of Denmark.

In the meantime, she was setting me up behind the scenes with Ph.D. workers. I had challenged them that taking psychiatric medication was more complicated than insulin for diabetes. I guess they found that to anti-science. They conspired and cooked up the false accusations that I was antipsychiatry without knowing that I in fact take medication.

Not long after, a whole table of providers conspired and confronted me. It wasn’t the first time I was confronted in a terrifically irrational manner under the director’s leadership. Before, she suggested that I let myself be bullied. But this time the one worker who disagreed with how I was being scapegoated got written up and eventually fired.

The program director would eventually suggest that I wasn’t well enough to work with the public. It was more appropriate for me to work just auditing charts.

But before I knew this, my power was taken away by a new supervisor, a company hack. She started challenging all things I said in front of the frontline workers. She micromanaged, but wouldn’t respond to phone calls. I couldn’t even send a sick person home.

The peer workers stopped being productive and the stats tanked. Then, they could justify demoting me.

Back in the Community with The Man Who Warned Me:

When I returned to the unit, my proud friend would refuse to return to my group. I just hadn’t realized how much I broke his heart with my effort to lead a more just and equitable existence. I think I just hadn’t understood that I was telling him that he didn’t matter by leaving.

His primary belief about himself was that he was a safe vigilante who went to great lengths to use his premonitions to bring safety and prevent crimes. He was the most beautiful singer. All I did for him in the end was tell him he didn’t matter.

Maybe in a sense, he had just been trying to save me.

Years later the man ran away from his board and care. He stopped taking his medication and returned to the streets. It was the Trump presidency. There was a massive increase in Oakland homelessness. Tech-company-tent-encampments dominated the meridians throughout the city.

One morning, I found him posturing out in front of the hospital on my way to work. I stayed with him for over a half an hour hoping he would crack and acknowledge me. But I had broken his heart and he would never forget it.

 

The Ongoing Saga: How Clandestine Academic Power Then Trumped Our Community:

Eight years after I returned to work at this community that nurtured me back from my own challenges, it is on the chopping block. Participants are not only losing their community because of COVID, though it clearly has helped leadership.

One day it was announced a year ago that our programs were no longer profitable. This claim was clearly cooked up with a confabulation of tabulation. We fought with the support of our manager.

Management then announced that the programs were going to consolidate. Thus, the majority of our program which is African American, was going to have to integrate with the majority Caucasian program or lose their services.

This announcement caused counselors of color and one of our managers to leave. Though this announcement got retracted, all the therapists who left were not replaced.

Eventually we were taught a new word, “Population Health.”

Instead of serving the more chronically ailing permanently disabled population, “population health” ensures everyone gets equitable health care options. This meant the more chronic population has to lose services, so more chronically normal people can get them.

But the way they got me was that management also wanted to staff the unit with peer counselors instead of clinical therapists

I advocated for years to get peer counselors accepted into the community. For two years I had peer counseling interns and proved to my colleagues the value that working peers could bring. Still the concept of peer counselors was introduced like it was a new idea.

Then, all the upper management had to do was replace the rock-solid manager and they had things their way.

A union battle has been mounted by our sister program, the one that doesn’t serve the inner-city clientele.

Meanwhile the news came that the company manager over behavioral health was hired in the top position over at the county.

Now we hear from our manager that the county is promising to pay for a new population health recovery program.

In the end the story seems pretty clear:

We workers are unionized and the management had to get around the union. It appears all moves were basically are set up to break the union and justify the consolidation of programs.

In the process, the remaining therapists left are white, except for the interim manager. Thus, the African American majority might become replaced.

Throughout, the new decision makers are doctors in ambulatory care, who know nothing about mental health and don’t seem to have consideration for our vulnerable community. They think that they are doing what is best for society.

Was there some other force in the county who set up the take down our program? The confabulation of the tabulation is so clearly delusional yet extremely powerful.

Meanwhile there is a company-wide strike over the union contract.

Our CEO gets removed over this.

There is a presidential election.

Now we are all waiting to see if American Democracy is legitimate anymore or if Trump will incite a coup.

The Impact of Social Change:

The changes in the community with the loss of so many therapists of color caused a great deal of destabilization and many clients quit.

Let’s say they were right! I was making to much money in the old model. Couldn’t they find a way to do this that didn’t harm the community for whom we care? It becomes about political policy and agenda.

I know many people don’t care about the vulnerable. Even though all of thirty percent of the county voted for Trump, cultural delusions are strong!

Where is the media to alert the public on this matter?

Our union representative has depicted our workers as sitting idle while I am to busy working my ass off to engage in politics. They were going to let us talk to the press and I agreed. But then they wanted to coach us. Then, they changed their minds.

The confabulation of tabulation means the city goes to population heath and gentrification.

I sit stupefied, torn and hating myself as I watch this happen. I am a believer in peer services and have been so busy working as a buffer for the clients that I serve, that some may accuse me of looking the other way.

No longer do I get to do my special group. Perhaps it is fitting that all my work gets buried so “progress” can happen. Eight years ago, I taught my client that he didn’t matter and now I am treated like I don’t matter.

Maybe I won’t get fired and rehired at a low wage and without benefits, as I fear. Maybe a majority of our remaining community members will be able to make adjustments after COVID and there will be a smooth transition.

Our managers hold the research and statistically based evidence-based practice information. They might as well own history! When you control history, you can create any policy you want. And the news media is not active or just listening to our union.

Will there be anyone to pay attention to the stories and lives of my clients and the thousands of new invisible faces of people on the streets?  The plan for years has been to ship them down to south county.

Oh, how much better the modern world would be if it just listened and learned from the heroic journey of the vulnerable.

The status quo appears to be pouring salt in the wound of the vulnerable until they die. That is what happens when we all fall for the cultural delusions of race, mental illness and the prison industry!

The post The Cultural Delusions that Put Vulnerable Communities Out on the Streets! appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

Support Healing from Psychosis Versus Imposing Social Control!

When a person has a break from reality there is often a sense of urgent rush. Most people think that if this does not get treated with antipsychotic medication immediately, that grave and progressive brain damage will ensue. Many supporters fear a degenerative process that will render the person with an institutionalized shuffle through poverty the rest of their life.

This article is written for the loving supporter or social worker. It invites you to explore what it’s like to better learn the world of your loved one! It helps you gain strategies for how to handle the relationship.

With the public mental health system, images of crowded psychiatric emergency rooms, the loved one terrorized navigating crowded streets, violent police handcuff restraints, rapid tranquilization needle sticks, jail time, or substandard warehousing barracks may come to mind.

I will convey all these realities as mechanisms of the state. They either neglect or set up the person in the break to be forced back into consensus reality. It often becomes a punitive and damaging process.

Ultimately, I view the goal of the state to be about social control, not healing and recovery. It can become about saving money and making the afflicted impotent. It can become about endless submission, silence and perpetuation of lies.

At the same time there are times when political pressure to conform to consensus reality do help a person improve their behavior. Improving one’s behavior can help a person minimize their risk of escalations of trauma via social punishment. It can be better than nothing. Many can learn lessons from abuse and improve their circumstances to heal.

Still this usually takes safety and security so that the victim can reflect upon what’s happened. This may enable many victims to grow between the cracks in the concrete.

However, often safety is not promoted via things like homelessness, jail time, or warehousing. These realities may perpetuate a state of emergency.

Efficacy of the State’s Social Control Model:

Still, in America, state social control that guides behavioral change has a low efficacy in terms of promoting recovery. It gets to be more a part of the problem than the solution.  Degenerative decline results in roughly a quarter of the people who undergo such treatment. For example, social myths and stereotypes leave most people thinking that degenerative decline is the standard for schizophrenia. When such social myths are maintained in one’s mind, it can seem like social control is the only option.

Still, as I suggested above, stints of incarceration can result in an increase in compliance with consensus reality. Half the population who experience a break associated with schizophrenia will move towards recovery within ten years of trial and error effort to raise their spirit and fit in.

In this culture, when incarceration and trauma happen, all is not lost. I believe we can learn healing alternatives instead of nurse-ratcheting up social control. Medication can be used in helpful manners at different times. However, many who continue to apply social control do learn, and repeatedly confirm, that healing is not likely.

To promote healing instead of social control, a person must understand, normalize, and navigate the break. This doesn’t happen often enough in the system because most people fear to be curious about psychosis.

Society doesn’t understand and so rarely do our psychologists and social workers! People must do the work on their own. They may do so with untrained interns/workers who may listen to burnt out managers. Many such interns/workers are focused on mainstream judgments of their collegiate education. Many managers are there to make money/justify services. This does not apply to all of us! Hence it takes ten years.

Meanwhile, the basics myths are maintained. Most are trained not to reinforce the delusions. Others fear they will catch the disease if they listen. Still others fear retraumatizing the respondent and making them angry.

There are ways around that by validating conspiracies so keep reading.

Conversely, it’s becoming known that systems that promote open dialogue and a socialist philosophy can greatly improve these kinds of rough statistics so that all can recover. If one studies open dialogue as its been applied in Finland, one learns that treating psychosis as though it is real and attempting to heal it via skilled communication works. Open dialogue, honoring the tradition of the wounded healer, empowers the victim as the prime leader and promotes healing and radically different results.

It’s a known fact that third world subsistence economies also do vastly better in promoting recovery than modern ones. While this is a fact that promotes generalized philosophic reflection, it is still worth noting.

Still, the norm among loved ones and social workers is to promote the medical model view and support social control. Consider the view of NAMI, the National Alliance for Mental Illness. It spends money and uses power to promote the concept that all mental illness is a (primarily eugenic) brain disease.

Why Do We Choose Social Control over Healing?

There are several reasons that recovery via social control is so vastly promoted in the United States. A major reason is that people are trained to be fearful of such realities is because of stigmatizing media, college texts, dubious twin studies, and sketchy studies that promote the role of genes which get disproportionately amplified in the media.

Let’s not forget we live in America, in the land of the free where the concept of government intelligence and propaganda is currently clouded by the cultural delusion of democracy, generalized propaganda of the old two-party system, family’s scapegoating neurodiversity, and the psychopharmocology industry’s imperfect understanding of mental “illness.” Currently we are all waiting to see if democracy will be toppled by a ruthless dictatorship so I do say these things with a sense of irony.

Concurrently, there is a very poor, medicalized understanding of what psychosis is. Hence, the average person will set boundaries with the person who starts talking openly about hearing voices or referencing conspiracies about being targeted or enlightened. Ridicule, social rejection, and turning the person over to the state’s care becomes the only option.

Too many people in the state and the public invalidate the trauma that ensues while social control measures occur. So many people feel it is justified. Just as the haves are known to hate the have-nots, the state’s goal becomes simple: spend as little money on the victim as possible, get them to fill unskilled labor markets, and don’t let them speak out against our cultural delusions.

It can feel like there is not much left for loved ones and good social workers to do besides support the effort to socially control the person they love and wait and see if they will recover.

Some Basic Alternatives to Social Control:

In order to promote healing from psychosis, it becomes very important to become uniquely adept at listening, validating, and contributing without getting confused, combative or dissociated. Asking the right kinds of questions and normalizing conspiracies and adding to them helps the person can realize they are not alone. Trust building and assessing is also very important.

Also, assisting your loved one in adhering to the requirements of work or making it possible for them to continue to socially network and have a social life is also an important investment. As L.A. psychiatrist, Mark Raggins suggests, work, or building relationships (to which I’d include studying spiritual traditions) are ways to teach us social skills, not incarceration.

Indeed, research in the United States behind Dartmouth’s IPS (Individualized Placement Services) model of vocational rehab suggests that a self-directed effort to conform to work with support is a real way to achieve behavioral earmarks. Hence a job is provided until the subject fails, and then another job is found and maintained until it is lost. Keeping the person moving through the job situation and adhering to social dictates until they can master the needed behaviors to keep a job—this is now proven via research to be the way to go.

Perhaps we can add this mentality to social and spiritual connectivity and enhance outcomes even further.

The majority of persons with psychosis want to work, have friends, and believe in god to avoid a life of poverty. It is a good way for many to motivate and comply with rules. But it requires support and might need to be coupled with therapy

Avoiding Pitfalls:

Sure, some social workers and perhaps some families may form secret societies that monitor their loved ones. These secret societies (like treatment teams in the hospital or family discussions/gossip) can easily be abused and defame the person with psychosis. I think family members and social workers must realize that when they do this, they mirror the oppression of other secret societies that may be real and may have something to do with their loved one’s awareness and ire.

Thus, when family or social workers recognize that they can function as agents of the state (police, FBI, corporations, prison gangs, fraternities, the Illuminati, the Ukrainian mafia, the military, religious cults and others) they can be open, communicative, and transparent about the secret societies in which they participate. This can greatly enhance trust and avoid pitfalls.

This might include taking responsibility to learn about things the person has experienced that pertain to you that you don’t feel are accurate. Consider monitoring the things your voice has expressed to your loved one (as auditory hallucinations). Then try to see the reality of what they are saying so you can confirm ways the communication is and isn’t valid. Always lead with the way it is valid.

Focus on What Healing Interactions Look Like?

In this manner, consider the opportunity that you have when the person enduring a break from reality gets mad and confronts you, their loved one, with something of which you are sure you’re not guilty.

I’d strongly recommend that before you confront that person with the reality check of your innocence, that you consider whether you want to avoid falling into the role of social control.

If you find yourself determined to prove your innocence, and confront your loved ones with your facts, I want to suggest they may see this as just another social control effort. It is a lot of the same kind of stuff they get in the state midst the jails, hospitals, and shelters that might not be appreciated

In other words, I am saying that defending yourself is a power play. It may gain you some compliance with consensus reality, but it also puts you at risk of diminishing trust between you and your loved one. In some cases, it can be a form of gaslighting.

In contrast, I suggest you take this intensely emotional situation, a potentially false accusation, and keep the goal of healing in mind. Instead of asserting the power play, let the loved one explore all the experiences that the person who is in a break has had that indicate your guilt. Then, communicate and clarify without invalidating.

When This Does Not Go as Planned:

I know this is an exceedingly simple suggestion! Let us not forget that asking the above question is a real test of the amount of trust that exists between the two of you.

For example, when I don’t trust the person who asks me to prove what I am saying with examples, I find I am often rendered speechless. It can be hard to put words to those experiences when you know they will be shot down.

In other words, unless I trust you and feel safe to speak about a misperception or two, words that define my experiences elude me.

Thus, if you are a social worker or a loved one and you don’t get any information, it is likely that you have so rejected your loved one’s reality so much over the years that they are afraid to communicate with you. It is likely that they have no hope you would ever understand.

I believe working towards a healing relationship involves cultural curiosity into your love one’s experience. If you can get yourself trusted to the point where you can explore all your loved ones associated experiences, then I think you are on the road towards healing them.

If you don’t have that kind of relationship with your loved one, focus on trying to get there and forget about the false accusation. Explore with curiosity other kinds of experience they have had.

Understanding the culture of your loved one’s psychosis to the point where you can admit the ways they are right about you, is far more likely to reality check them in a more healing manner and really move your relationship forward.

Adapting Your Strategies:

Also, it stands to be noted that people who experience psychosis often come from distinctive cultures, have different needs, and approach a break with different moods and core beliefs. In my experience I believed I was being persecuted by secret. illegal societies overseen by the government. Other people can have vastly different experiences with secret societies.

For example, some may believe they are being spiritually aided by secret Cabals like elite police and or politicians on their mission. Perhaps not all people experience social control in their family of origins the way I did. But still, you can inquire about euphoric experiences that your loved one may have had. Even so, you don’t want to come down on the forceful side of your loved one’s punitive state administrators.

Consider how some positive spiritual experiences really don’t need to be healed, true. But still there are those positive experiences have consequences that must be curbed. Consider what happens, for example, when they make the person descend from heaven back into a living hell on earth. Staying on earth can be a challenge.

Still, researching and giving them information about the negative aspects of the Cabals that tricked them and sent them soaring can help them make better decisions.

This may involve envisioning a world in which they do not have to endure social control to force them to come back down. Helping them takes communication and rational, healthy choices. It becomes more about reviewing the consequences that the state will impose if they go down that road. It become about mitigating those realities and maintain your collaborative standing.

Either way, delineating yourself from the mechanisms of control that may have led to trauma or got in the way of healing is an important thing to do! As a parent or as a social worker this may involve changing the historical role you’ve taken with your loved one.

This means, instead of telling them what to do, you should consider exploring their experiences.

Takeaways:

Do not forget that psychosis, special messages, or a break from reality is a collection of experiences. When you force your loved ones to defy their experiences and accept your reality via reality check, it is really about you imposing consensus reality on them and it puts you on the side of social control. They may know better.

I feel this becomes about your power. Ultimately it puts them down. When you do this, they will recognize this and it may trigger trauma from their run ins with the state. Thus, differentiating yourself from the state becomes an important strategy.

Helping them heal is not really not about you. Helping your loved one heal is about using your relationship to help them to navigate consensus reality in ways that they can achieve their hopes and dreams. If you care about them and their relationship with you, adapt a collaborative approach to their experiences. This is far more important than them respecting consensus reality which might be full of ignorance and propagandas.

Supporting their autonomy and freedom is needed. Learning about the mistakes you made can also be important. Give them transparent information about what you have said and done on their behalf. Ask them how they would like you to assist, then communicate.

It’s true, doing what they say and working on their behalf does require boundaries. Even if you are a lawyer, you can’t help them beat the state, only evade it.

Differentiate yourself from the social control and discriminatory laws (or the rampant corruption of those that are nondiscriminatory, like the ADA.) You really don’t want to be on the side of marginalizing your loved one!

The post Support Healing from Psychosis Versus Imposing Social Control! appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".