Clyde Dee's Blog, page 4

Support Healing from Psychosis Verses 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 Verses Imposing Social Control! appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

The Challenges of Finding Community Support When You Have A History of Exile

Maintaining a sense of community support is precious when you struggle a history of exile. In my life words like “schizophrenia” and “anorexia” mixed with periods of institutional incarceration have resulted in alienation, trauma, and exile. It’s been twenty years since my most recent incarceration for “schizophrenia” and it remains very hard to find community support. I find the pattern of being othered replicates itself.

Healing from my most extreme experience of exile, “schizophrenia,” has involved outreach into many communities. I’d like to recommend community outreach because it’s been full of great experiences and rewards. But to be honest, although it is needed, it often results in repeated triggers that bring on emotional distress and familiar thinking patterns. Persisting has been very important as has finding ways to process those negative experiences and finding primary support.

Ultimately, I have learned to honor the communities where I have sensed safety and support that have enabled me to thrive and be authentic. These communities have enabled me to persist when I get triggered and feel othered. I am writing to share my perceptions about persisting through exile and to honor those places that have assisted in healing and soothing that sense of exile.

Starting with the Origins of Feeling Targeted:

This sense of exile I recently traced back in memory during an EMDR training. I remember being at a family friend’s farm and finding horns that fell off baby cattle. I remember being told that’s what happens to baby cattle as they grow, they lose their horns. It must have been Halloween, after my birthday at age of two or three. I remember the melancholy of feeling like one of those horns. The gray misty rain, the green pastures, the mud, the need to hold onto the horn that I identified with, those images have come back to me during periods of exile.

The family story is that the farm owner hid with me during hide and seek. No one could find us Otherwise I remember only traipses of what I presume to be the day. A glimpse into a crowded, festive room, the visual of a costumed witch, and the contrast, the grey, billowing fog, the misty rain.

I remember the owner asking me at a later point if I remember the day. I remember his sense of intensity. I remember feeling revolted when he touched my ass as I rode on his back. I remember feeling perplexed seeing him interact with his children who were far older than me.  I remain only suspicion about what may have happened.

The main reason I am suspicious is that I have recaptured other dissociated memories about other sex abuse events that went along with family stories. Those stories help explain behavior and actions that were always frowned upon. Clothing myself in the shower and refusing to let anyone see me in the buff, not sleeping for a year on end, starving, sacrificing myself for people I love, these actions would result in incarceration and labels.

Ultimately, I only have a sense that the intensity of my reactions against sex abuse goes back further. For example, I just can’t imagine that I would dissociate so easily fondled in a tub at the age of nine and later, to behave so cowardly at the age of seventeen in the face of an atrocity that I am not even sure is real.

Sense of Exile:

Because I was “so sensitive” and perhaps because I frowned in all the pictures taken of me, I was exiled from my family and the school community in which I was raised. Male anorexia ultimately had a lot to do with this. Who starves themselves like that? It diminished a great deal of constructive work! I stopped being seen.

However, when I trace my history back at the school there was always a sense of rejection. Always a good student, I was nearly not admitted because I cut paper in an unusual manner. Luckily my parents worked there and were willing to have me repeat a year. There were early reports of how I failed to connect with other kids. There was the year I spent a lot of time home and sick. There was the fact that the kids picked on and bullied me. When I rebelled against the other kids, I got sent to counseling. I got psychological testing.

My sense of exile was clear in my decision to thumb my nose at the private school expectations of an expensive collegiate utopia. They published that I was going to a good school in the yearbook, regardless. However, I chose a local inner-city commuter college campus where I could afford to divorce myself from my parent’s influence. I would end up creating the space to hide daily binging and purging. I studied and worked the whole time. I never wasted time to go to a single college party. I graduated with a 3.9 GPA.

I fought a sense of exile among my graduate school affiliates, but I fought for acceptance. I was exiled at most jobs and among my twenty-something associates. I moved west where I knew very few people.

Extracting Pockets of Support:

I write to highlight the importance of finding the places where I did find a sense of acceptance. I owe them gratitude and vie to give back. I have developed and survived in spite of exile. I am more fortunate than many in that I have a career and have developed a sense of primary support.

I was first hospitalized at Child Guidance Center with whom Salvador Minuchin termed “kids from the slums.” I am relieved to say that in the face of what I consider to be significant institutional abuse, I did find streetwise kids had more compassion and acceptance for me than cohorts at private school.

Likewise, in college, working under the table at an inner-city Korean owned deli fifty hours a week through the spank of summer, I was profoundly touched by the fact that the community accepted me. They didn’t care if I was skinny and afraid of food. Meanwhile support and acceptance from cohorts continued to elude me as I entered professional positions.

For the last eighteen years I have found support working for psychiatric patients in a psychiatric unit. It’s true I have been less likely to feel supported by colleagues who called the clients, “crazies” or have took action to have me removed. But once again in the face of institutional abuse, I found community members heard my stories once I grew secure enough to tell them. It was with the clientele community that my mindful spontaneity and facilitation skills developed. I may have been a disrespected droid at family reunions and mainstream events, but I found myself again in the hospital back ward.

Support in the community gives you that sense of being known, respected and belonging. It is an important part of healing and human development. And yet to promote safety, the nature of many communities is that they set standards of behavior or social discourse that govern that sense of belonging. I have found that being fond of and accepted in one context can preclude one from fitting into another.

The road to rediscovering that sense of belonging can certainly be a long and winding one!

The Exile that Resulted from Battling Institutional Hypocrisy:

When I moved to the west coast, I decided that the mainstream needed to know how homeless and disabled people suffer. I was setting up services in a notorious section 8 housing complex. I alerted the newspapers. While it’s arguable I had the experience and capacity to understand the consequences of this prior, I had been taught by a mainstream therapist that if I thought corruption was real, I was paranoid.

It was the era of the psychopharmacology professional and the psychotherapy establishment that monitored me fronted kindness, yet predicted that I would be in and out of the hospital the rest of my life to any semblance of family support system that remained.

My coping strategy was to ignore corruption and work hard in the face of it. Housing Authority officials tried to bribe me by offering me as many tickets as I wanted to a music festival. I didn’t want to be paranoid and think it was a bribe, so I turned around and invited the whole community of residents that they serviced. I requested over a hundred tickets for the residents and was given twenty-four.

I have since accepted that the uninvestigated killing that alarmed me go with the territory in housing authorities, inner-city, and poor-community realities. It’s taken me a long time to accept. I had to go homeless and be an indentured servant for some time.

In my view, we are all a part of perpetuating those realities and decisions. The lure of fast money and soldiering results in a steady stream of death that is not often noted. Many people understand the injustice that happens, but they also know it isn’t safe to shine a light on it. Those that do end up in prison, dead, or unable to find work.

With unobserved rage from getting beat up in the WTO Protest and feeling ashamed for having run away from an incestuous rape, I was one bad ass who didn’t care. I was like Serpico! When I was threatened and told that curiosity killed the cat, I retorted, “Yes, but the cat has nine lives!”

As I started to believe I was being followed, I stopped taking medication and started to understand corruption better. I reached out to my one remaining college friend with a nefarious history and he made a credible threat. Still, I didn’t believe him. I tried to escape to Canada and was intercepted by police.

In fact, they were following me. It’s just that no one believed me.

Understanding the Reality of How American Society Maintains Control:

Being kicked out of the circle or rejected by the majority of the group often gets perpetuated by group leaders who either volunteer or get paid to manage. They vie to control the business and stay in power via controlling behavior and negotiating norms.

Whether done by the FBI, social service employers, educators, unions, lawyers or heads of the family fortunes, crime ring bosses, managers will go to great lengths to control and shape your behavior regardless of laws and justice. I have come to believe that much of it is about maintaining cultural delusions about wealth and privilege.

Thus, people who refuse to conform are pushed out and exiled. This can happen easily if you are not corrupt and are targeted by the community. It can also happen if you are too corrupt and targeted.

People have ways of sniffing out your history of belonging or failure to do so. They may look at the color of your skin or your gender or manners, or friends and presume the culture and experiences you have be subjected to and decide if they want you around.

For example, I believe that as a social services worker, being a productive and effective healer and promoting justice is a good way to get targeted. Clinics are there to make money and control costs, and arguably to control people. Input a little healing, and you become a threat to some people with six figure salaries.

It seems a good way to frame this is that you must agree to toque reefer, but must agree not to toque too much of it. Toque too much and you become a burner or addict. No toque, and one becomes an exiled joke. I feel its arguable that this was the quintessential dilemma that governed acceptance in American culture during the X generation. When Bill Clinton said, “but I didn’t inhale,” it clarified a lot. He promoted the very large Housing Authority company, with whom I was contracted to work, as a model of urban development. I knew that but I still alerted the press.

I must admit that I presume the toque, no toque dilemma happens at many sleep-away colleges and other developmental institutions like the military. I avoided this stage of life by living in a roach infested apartment and working under the table. This way I could live skinny and heal without being further targeted and shamed for being a thin man.

Some Historical Context:

Maybe in other generations it was different. In American history at one point it was more about accepting slavery or genocide. To fit in, one must sip the tea. One must go corrupt, just not too much so. Thus, Thomas Jefferson was cool, but hid his pedophilia exploits so as not to go too far. That’s a real American hero, yeah! He got to coauthor the American Constitution.

Makes you wonder what the history books will say about this era? When law and order is about preserving the Jeffery Epstein way of life via the execution of black men in the inner city, you’ve got to wonder! Perhaps this is what America First is all about. Donald Trump did say he could kill someone down on some avenue in broad daylight and his supporters would still vote for him. I have to say, I think he knew what he was talking about.

On the other hand, I would suggest that Donald Trump is transparent about the realities of social control and the feudal oligarchy we have all stupidly called American democracy. All the defenders of the dumb shit authored by Thomas Jefferson and other feudal pimps really believe in the law and constitutional democracy. I work hard to expose lies and cultural delusions, but I sure hope they can protect us from the mind state of a fascist xenophobe.

Perhaps it all boils back to the quintessential American dilemma, do I toque reefer!

“Take it easy, but take it!” This odd quote extracted from one of the bizarre cinematographic dissociative sequences in the movie, Midnight Cowboy still eludes me all these years later. I still say, no.

People like me who repeatedly get exiled and cannot find community might struggle with a sense of shame, trauma and the ongoing exile of pain.

The Science of Trauma and Surviving Exile

Indeed, when we turn to advances in neuroscience to understand what heals trauma: we end up with several different sects about how to create safety and resources. Some proponents identify community support as being important. Thus, in my local EMDR sect, people or things that have served as wise, protective, or nurturing support emerge as necessary resources to address the unthinkable.

The basic concept is to take inventory of good relationships that have existed and create community that you can bring with you to revisit victimization and help you through can be very transformative. Of course, some of these relationships can be with mythical fictional characters or public figures like artists, tv personalities. Or (gulp) politicians who are admirable (if that is possible.) For example, I have realized that Midnight Cowboy’s character Joe Buck is a personal resource for me. “Well, I am not a for-real Cowboy, but I sure am one hell of a stud.”

Taking a deeper dive into resourcing, I am learning that there are many ways to create a safe environment. Indeed, sometimes using mindfulness techniques and meditations can help create safety between the therapist and client. Thus, creating safety can form the basis for community support.

Taking the risk to listen and reflect on what the person experiences might be and help them feel safe and in the window of tolerance when they revisit traumatic images like the gray billows of misty rain, the green pastures, the mud and the cow horns.

Using mindfulness exercises is another way to build resources and keep the person in the window of tolerance. Then, using desensitization or bilateral stimulation and encouraging the person to reprocess that trauma or sense of exile can give people the tools to broaden their sense of safety and sense of support.

The result is that the sense of exile does not get triggered and new community support becomes attainable. Thus, people who attack you politically don’t trigger you into that sense of exile. Thus, you remember the community that accepts you and you avoid the tendency to dissociate and withdraw.

Keep Persisting!

I believe powerful community managers of many sorts will continue to exile you if your experience does not fit the mold they want to see or the realities that they have championed and the power of their salaries. Hacienda owners will attack you with all the power they have when you have done nothing wrong. Maybe it all boils down to the fact that you just don’t want to toque reefer for them, I don’t know.

Ultimately being exiled from their community doesn’t mean you should give up. The more you persist and utilize those communities that do support you, even if they are just in spirit, the less power those community managers have to exile you.

Furthermore, as they treat you like you don’t matter, are invisible, are inferior or are deficient, it gives you the opportunity to practice healing in the face of your original form of exile. You persist and reprocess and perhaps continue to champion the communities of support that have in fact been there for you.

The past year and a half as the community of support that I have worked for has been under assault. Managers say the county wants to create a new system. I tend to see it as another gentrification, race and class war cloaked in mental health reform.

Managers threatened closure and there was a massive exodus of many of the competent counselors of color with lesser tenure. Additionally, the one manager who supported me, was removed from power. Many of the clients gave up their treatment.

Indeed, I have witnessed yet again top down change imposed on the community has been very devastating for community members. I have seen this happen repeatedly in the hacienda system.

I have tended to view many layers of mismanagement. Ultimately, I believe plans have shifted towards blaming the unit’s failings it on the workers and layoffs. The inequity of work is stunning. The atmosphere is: keep one’s productivity high, and get targeted. My theory is that it will make it harder to fire us if we are productive. I have persisted and prayed, but have started up a private practice to protect myself if the cuts in fact prevail.

This week there has been a strike and the power that has mismanaged and harmed the community is reportedly going to be replaced. I still don’t know what this is going to mean for the community.

I have kept my memory of inner-city support in my heart and fought to maintain my productivity. Perhaps I am only clinging on to a baby cow horn in the misty rain. I have documented the work of the community. I worked with them for twelve years to create my redefining “psychosis” therapy platform. They are its architects and they have always deserved better.

I could write about ways I feel blacklisted and betrayed, but I am persisting to maintain community with love in my heart. I feel so touched as to encourage the reader to keep reaching for new community! Things may change.

I believe in peer support and not in involuntary medication. I have fought for these changes for our community for years. I have brought in peer counselors and they worked well. But when change is imposed in a top down manner, communities dwindle and the point is missed. Let change happen regardless of which top down political fool got in the latest punch.

I have heard that my boss of many years who supported hard work and good client care, says, keep fighting. He seems to have come around on the issue of peer support in his years of knowing me.

Me, I am just persisting as I always have done. Perhaps one day all those communities that have seemed to be turned against me will change. Maybe I will recapture a memory and realize that I am truly delusional. Until then, I will continue to persist and call out our cultural delusions.

The post The Challenges of Finding Community Support When You Have A History of Exile appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

The Challenges of Maintaining Community Support on the Hacienda of the Mental Health System:

Maintaining a sense of community support is precious when you struggle a history of exile. In my life words like “schizophrenia” and “anorexia” mixed with periods of institutional incarceration have resulted in alienation, trauma, and exile. It’s been twenty years since my most recent incarceration for “schizophrenia” and it remains very hard to find community support. I find the pattern of being othered replicates itself.

Healing from my most extreme experience of exile, “schizophrenia,” has involved outreach into many communities. I’d like to recommend community outreach because it’s been full of great experiences and rewards. But to be honest, although it is needed, it often results in repeated triggers that bring on emotional distress and familiar thinking patterns. Persisting has been very important as has finding ways to process those negative experiences and finding primary support.

Ultimately, I have learned to honor the communities where I have sensed safety and support that have enabled me to thrive and be authentic. These communities have enabled me to persist when I get triggered and feel othered. I am writing to share my perceptions about persisting through exile and to honor those places that have assisted in healing and soothing that sense of exile.

Starting with the Origins of Feeling Targeted:

This sense of exile I recently traced back in memory during an EMDR training. I remember being at a family friend’s farm and finding horns that fell off baby cattle. I remember being told that’s what happens to baby cattle as they grow, they lose their horns. It must have been Halloween, after my birthday at age of two or three. I remember the melancholy of feeling like one of those horns. The gray misty rain, the green pastures, the mud, the need to hold onto the horn that I identified with, those images have come back to me during periods of exile.

The family story is that the farm owner hid with me during hide and seek. No one could find us Otherwise I remember only traipses of what I presume to be the day. A glimpse into a crowded, festive room, the visual of a costumed witch, and the contrast, the grey, billowing fog, the misty rain.

I remember the owner asking me at a later point if I remember the day. I remember his sense of intensity. I remember feeling revolted when he touched my ass as I rode on his back. I remember feeling perplexed seeing him interact with his children who were far older than me.  I remain only suspicion about what may have happened.

The main reason I am suspicious is that I have recaptured other dissociated memories about other sex abuse events that went along with family stories. Those stories help explain behavior and actions that were always frowned upon. Clothing myself in the shower and refusing to let anyone see me in the buff, not sleeping for a year on end, starving, sacrificing myself for people I love, these actions would result in incarceration and labels.

Ultimately, I only have a sense that the intensity of my reactions against sex abuse goes back further. For example, I just can’t imagine that I would dissociate so easily fondled in a tub at the age of nine and later, to behave so cowardly at the age of seventeen in the face of an atrocity that I am not even sure is real.

Sense of Exile:

Because I was “so sensitive” and perhaps because I frowned in all the pictures taken of me, I was exiled from my family and the school community in which I was raised. Male anorexia ultimately had a lot to do with this. Who starves themselves like that? It diminished a great deal of constructive work! I stopped being seen.

However, when I trace my history back at the school there was always a sense of rejection. Always a good student, I was nearly not admitted because I cut paper in an unusual manner. Luckily my parents worked there and were willing to have me repeat a year. There were early reports of how I failed to connect with other kids. There was the year I spent a lot of time home and sick. There was the fact that the kids picked on and bullied me. When I rebelled against the other kids, I got sent to counseling. I got psychological testing.

My sense of exile was clear in my decision to thumb my nose at the private school expectations of an expensive collegiate utopia. They published that I was going to a good school in the yearbook, regardless. However, I chose a local inner-city commuter college campus where I could afford to divorce myself from my parent’s influence. I would end up creating the space to hide daily binging and purging. I studied and worked the whole time. I never wasted time to go to a single college party. I graduated with a 3.9 GPA.

I fought a sense of exile among my graduate school affiliates, but I fought for acceptance. I was exiled at most jobs and among my twenty-something associates. I moved west where I knew very few people.

Extracting Pockets of Support:

I write to highlight the importance of finding the places where I did find a sense of acceptance. I owe them gratitude and vie to give back. I have developed and survived in spite of exile. I am more fortunate than many in that I have a career and have developed a sense of primary support.

I was first hospitalized at Child Guidance Center with whom Salvador Minuchin termed “kids from the slums.” I am relieved to say that in the face of what I consider to be significant institutional abuse, I did find streetwise kids had more compassion and acceptance for me than cohorts at private school.

Likewise, in college, working under the table at an inner-city Korean owned deli fifty hours a week through the spank of summer, I was profoundly touched by the fact that the community accepted me. They didn’t care if I was skinny and afraid of food. Meanwhile support and acceptance from cohorts continued to elude me as I entered professional positions.

For the last eighteen years I have found support working for psychiatric patients in a psychiatric unit. It’s true I have been less likely to feel supported by colleagues who called the clients, “crazies” or have took action to have me removed. But once again in the face of institutional abuse, I found community members heard my stories once I grew secure enough to tell them. It was with the clientele community that my mindful spontaneity and facilitation skills developed. I may have been a disrespected droid at family reunions and mainstream events, but I found myself again in the hospital back ward.

Support in the community gives you that sense of being known, respected and belonging. It is an important part of healing and human development. And yet to promote safety, the nature of many communities is that they set standards of behavior or social discourse that govern that sense of belonging. I have found that being fond of and accepted in one context can preclude one from fitting into another.

The road to rediscovering that sense of belonging can certainly be a long and winding one!

The Exile that Resulted from Battling Institutional Hypocrisy:

When I moved to the west coast, I decided that the mainstream needed to know how homeless and disabled people suffer. I was setting up services in a notorious section 8 housing complex. I alerted the newspapers. While it’s arguable I had the experience and capacity to understand the consequences of this prior, I had been taught by a mainstream therapist that if I thought corruption was real, I was paranoid.

It was the era of the psychopharmacology professional and the psychotherapy establishment that monitored me fronted kindness, yet predicted that I would be in and out of the hospital the rest of my life to any semblance of family support system that remained.

My coping strategy was to ignore corruption and work hard in the face of it. Housing Authority officials tried to bribe me by offering me as many tickets as I wanted to a music festival. I didn’t want to be paranoid and think it was a bribe, so I turned around and invited the whole community of residents that they serviced. I requested over a hundred tickets for the residents and was given twenty-four.

I have since accepted that the uninvestigated killing that alarmed me go with the territory in housing authorities, inner-city, and poor-community realities. It’s taken me a long time to accept. I had to go homeless and be an indentured servant for some time.

In my view, we are all a part of perpetuating those realities and decisions. The lure of fast money and soldiering results in a steady stream of death that is not often noted. Many people understand the injustice that happens, but they also know it isn’t safe to shine a light on it. Those that do end up in prison, dead, or unable to find work.

With unobserved rage from getting beat up in the WTO Protest and feeling ashamed for having run away from an incestuous rape, I was one bad ass who didn’t care. I was like Serpico! When I was threatened and told that curiosity killed the cat, I retorted, “Yes, but the cat has nine lives!”

As I started to believe I was being followed, I stopped taking medication and started to understand corruption better. I reached out to my one remaining college friend with a nefarious history and he made a credible threat. Still, I didn’t believe him. I tried to escape to Canada and was intercepted by police.

In fact, they were following me. It’s just that no one believed me.

Understanding the Reality of How American Society Maintains Control:

Being kicked out of the circle or rejected by the majority of the group often gets perpetuated by group leaders who either volunteer or get paid to manage. They vie to control the business and stay in power via controlling behavior and negotiating norms.

Whether done by the FBI, social service employers, educators, unions, lawyers or heads of the family fortunes, crime ring bosses, managers will go to great lengths to control and shape your behavior regardless of laws and justice. I have come to believe that much of it is about maintaining cultural delusions about wealth and privilege.

Thus, people who refuse to conform are pushed out and exiled. This can happen easily if you are not corrupt and are targeted by the community. It can also happen if you are too corrupt and targeted.

People have ways of sniffing out your history of belonging or failure to do so. They may look at the color of your skin or your gender or manners, or friends and presume the culture and experiences you have be subjected to and decide if they want you around.

For example, I believe that as a social services worker, being a productive and effective healer and promoting justice is a good way to get targeted. Clinics are there to make money and control costs, and arguably to control people. Input a little healing, and you become a threat to some people with six figure salaries.

It seems a good way to frame this is that you must agree to toque reefer, but must agree not to toque too much of it. Toque too much and you become a burner or addict. No toque, and one becomes an exiled joke. I feel its arguable that this was the quintessential dilemma that governed acceptance in American culture during the X generation. When Bill Clinton said, “but I didn’t inhale,” it clarified a lot. He promoted the very large Housing Authority company, with whom I was contracted to work, as a model of urban development. I knew that but I still alerted the press.

I must admit that I presume the toque, no toque dilemma happens at many sleep-away colleges and other developmental institutions like the military. I avoided this stage of life by living in a roach infested apartment and working under the table. This way I could live skinny and heal without being further targeted and shamed for being a thin man.

Some Historical Context:

Maybe in other generations it was different. In American history at one point it was more about accepting slavery or genocide. To fit in, one must sip the tea. One must go corrupt, just not too much so. Thus, Thomas Jefferson was cool, but hid his pedophilia exploits so as not to go too far. That’s a real American hero, yeah! He got to coauthor the American Constitution.

Makes you wonder what the history books will say about this era? When law and order is about preserving the Jeffery Epstein way of life via the execution of black men in the inner city, you’ve got to wonder! Perhaps this is what America First is all about. Donald Trump did say he could kill someone down on some avenue in broad daylight and his supporters would still vote for him. I have to say, I think he knew what he was talking about.

On the other hand, I would suggest that Donald Trump is transparent about the realities of social control and the feudal oligarchy we have all stupidly called American democracy. All the defenders of the dumb shit authored by Thomas Jefferson and other feudal pimps really believe in the law and constitutional democracy. I work hard to expose lies and cultural delusions, but I sure hope they can protect us from the mind state of a fascist xenophobe.

Perhaps it all boils back to the quintessential American dilemma, do I toque reefer!

“Take it easy, but take it!” This odd quote extracted from one of the bizarre cinematographic dissociative sequences in the movie, Midnight Cowboy still eludes me all these years later. I still say, no.

People like me who repeatedly get exiled and cannot find community might struggle with a sense of shame, trauma and the ongoing exile of pain.

The Science of Trauma and Surviving Exile

Indeed, when we turn to advances in neuroscience to understand what heals trauma: we end up with several different sects about how to create safety and resources. Some proponents identify community support as being important. Thus, in my local EMDR sect, people or things that have served as wise, protective, or nurturing support emerge as necessary resources to address the unthinkable.

The basic concept is to take inventory of good relationships that have existed and create community that you can bring with you to revisit victimization and help you through can be very transformative. Of course, some of these relationships can be with mythical fictional characters or public figures like artists, tv personalities. Or (gulp) politicians who are admirable (if that is possible.) For example, I have realized that Midnight Cowboy’s character Joe Buck is a personal resource for me. “Well, I am not a for-real Cowboy, but I sure am one hell of a stud.”

Taking a deeper dive into resourcing, I am learning that there are many ways to create a safe environment. Indeed, sometimes using mindfulness techniques and meditations can help create safety between the therapist and client. Thus, creating safety can form the basis for community support.

Taking the risk to listen and reflect on what the person experiences might be and help them feel safe and in the window of tolerance when they revisit traumatic images like the gray billows of misty rain, the green pastures, the mud and the cow horns.

Using mindfulness exercises is another way to build resources and keep the person in the window of tolerance. Then, using desensitization or bilateral stimulation and encouraging the person to reprocess that trauma or sense of exile can give people the tools to broaden their sense of safety and sense of support.

The result is that the sense of exile does not get triggered and new community support becomes attainable. Thus, people who attack you politically don’t trigger you into that sense of exile. Thus, you remember the community that accepts you and you avoid the tendency to dissociate and withdraw.

Keep Persisting!

I believe powerful community managers of many sorts will continue to exile you if your experience does not fit the mold they want to see or the realities that they have championed and the power of their salaries. Hacienda owners will attack you with all the power they have when you have done nothing wrong. Maybe it all boils down to the fact that you just don’t want to toque reefer for them, I don’t know.

Ultimately being exiled from their community doesn’t mean you should give up. The more you persist and utilize those communities that do support you, even if they are just in spirit, the less power those community managers have to exile you.

Furthermore, as they treat you like you don’t matter, are invisible, are inferior or are deficient, it gives you the opportunity to practice healing in the face of your original form of exile. You persist and reprocess and perhaps continue to champion the communities of support that have in fact been there for you.

The past year and a half as the community of support that I have worked for has been under assault. Managers say the county wants to create a new system. I tend to see it as another gentrification, race and class war cloaked in mental health reform.

Managers threatened closure and there was a massive exodus of many of the competent counselors of color with lesser tenure. Additionally, the one manager who supported me, was removed from power. Many of the clients gave up their treatment.

Indeed, I have witnessed yet again top down change imposed on the community has been very devastating for community members. I have seen this happen repeatedly in the hacienda system.

I have tended to view many layers of mismanagement. Ultimately, I believe plans have shifted towards blaming the unit’s failings it on the workers and layoffs. The inequity of work is stunning. The atmosphere is: keep one’s productivity high, and get targeted. My theory is that it will make it harder to fire us if we are productive. I have persisted and prayed, but have started up a private practice to protect myself if the cuts in fact prevail.

This week there has been a strike and the power that has mismanaged and harmed the community is reportedly going to be replaced. I still don’t know what this is going to mean for the community.

I have kept my memory of inner-city support in my heart and fought to maintain my productivity. Perhaps I am only clinging on to a baby cow horn in the misty rain. I have documented the work of the community. I worked with them for twelve years to create my redefining “psychosis” therapy platform. They are its architects and they have always deserved better.

I could write about ways I feel blacklisted and betrayed, but I am persisting to maintain community with love in my heart. I feel so touched as to encourage the reader to keep reaching for new community! Things may change.

I believe in peer support and not in involuntary medication. I have fought for these changes for our community for years. I have brought in peer counselors and they worked well. But when change is imposed in a top down manner, communities dwindle and the point is missed. Let change happen regardless of which top down political fool got in the latest punch.

I have heard that my boss of many years who supported hard work and good client care, says, keep fighting. He seems to have come around on the issue of peer support in his years of knowing me.

Me, I am just persisting as I always have done. Perhaps one day all those communities that have seemed to be turned against me will change. Maybe I will recapture a memory and realize that I am truly delusional. Until then, I will continue to persist and call out our cultural delusions.

The post The Challenges of Maintaining Community Support on the Hacienda of the Mental Health System: appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

How Writing Helped Me Make Sense Of Madness, By Emma Goude

When I came out of hospital, after my first psychotic episode in 1996, aged 27, I felt compelled to write about my experiences. I used to have romantic notions of madness, was the first sentence of what, I didn’t realise at the time, would become My Beautiful Psychosis. Reading it now, it doesn’t sound like me: I never use the word ‘notions’ for a start. And the narrative voice was a little self pitying but it was part of the process of recovery.

When I was in hospital, I didn’t realise that I was experiencing psychosis. To me it felt like a spiritual awakening. I couldn’t understand why the doctors thought differently. They weren’t the ones on the inside of it and didn’t even ask me what I was experiencing so how could they know. I wrote because I needed to communicate. I felt so unseen, so pathologised and labeled. I was no longer a ‘normal’ person; I was a mental health service user. I wanted to right the wrongs that had been done to me in the name of psychiatry and tell my story as a form of complaint. The motivation to write was to share what a terrible time I’d had. But injustice and feeling misunderstood was just the top layer. There were deeper elements at play.

Apart from a poem about my pony that was printed in Pony Magazine when I was about 12, I had made zero attempts at writing. Teachers sometimes read allowed my work to the rest of the class so I had a natural talent. I didn’t admit to myself that I wanted to be a writer until I married one. I was privileged enough to witness up close someone going through the publishing process. It seemed doable.

Psychosis gave me something important to write about. I’m not a novelist: I find it difficult to make things up so memoir became my medium. It was a while before I figured out whether My Beautiful Psychosis was a novelised memoir or just a memoir. I would have loved to have been a novelist but I realised I needed to make it clear that my story was a true one. This was essential for the message to have the impact that I wanted it to have.

That brings me to the next layer. I have written My Beautiful Psychosis because the mental health services have got it so badly wrong. I not only need to put the record straight and tell my version of the story, I need to change how people see psychosis so that we can better treat it. The psychiatric service is not working. It is failing people, leaving them to live compromised lives instead of helping them to heal. We have accepted this situation for too long. It is time for a change.

In order to do that, we have to find new ways of looking at psychosis and new ways of treating it. So what is the current definition of psychosis? An official definition might go something like this: psychosis is a mental disorder, which causes you to lose touch with reality. You might see, hear, or believe things that aren’t real.

The perception of psychosis as being out of touch with reality is at best arrogant and at worst, false. For a start, there is no way of knowing what ‘reality’ actually is. It is something the brain constructs. Cats see everything blue but that does not make them deluded. It makes them better hunters. There is no reason why consensus reality of humans is any more real than cats. It is simply the one that humans have evolved to perceive in order to best function in our world. Perhaps there is another animal that sees reality more clearly than us.

An experiment shows that people with schizophrenia, the condition involving repeated psychoses, are actually able to perceive more accurately than so called normal people. It uses the Hollow Mask Illusion and involves identifying whether an image of a mask is concave or convex. All the participants with schizophrenia could distinguish between the two types of photos, whereas control volunteers without the condition were fooled 99 per cent of the time. ‘Normal’ perception is not something we can even trust as accurate.

During my own personal experiences of psychosis, I was able to see auras around objects and people, in real life and onscreen. I heard a voice, I can only describe as angelic, tell me that I was beautiful. I knew about certain traumatic events from childhood that I had repressed and forgotten. I saw a sparkler of light appear and form a figure of eight shape, the infinity sign, before disappearing again. I had memories from past lives play out with certain people around me. I could hear incongruent thoughts that people were thinking but denied, which I thought was their unconscious mind. They were being nice on the surface but it was simply a fake cover up for their socially unacceptable negative thoughts beneath.

Even in times when I was not experiencing psychosis, I have had some unusual experiences that would be interpreted by our modern material reductionist view as not being real. I saw a golden ribbon of light come from my belly button and attach itself to the duster that I was holding. I have also felt the energy of spirits inside my body communicating to me how they had died, by taking the shape of the weapon that had killed them. Each time I acknowledged their death, they sent love into my heart as thanks before moving on. I have also communicated with dolphins, psychically. There is no way we can prove that any of this in not real. Unfortunately the onus is on me to prove that it is and that is not possible either.

To say a person is out of touch with reality is to ignore the validity of the reality that they are in touch with. This is not only disempowering, it fails to celebrate the journey that the person is on, albeit in their alternate reality. It is also, more tragically, a missed opportunity.

I have been able to study psychosis, first hand, as someone with a degree in psychology. I have also been a professional shiatsu therapist for 10 years, which has given me an eastern perspective through which to view my experiences. I now believe that psychosis is actually an attempt by the psyche to heal.

Psychosis comes from the Greek word for ‘psyche’ meaning soul and ‘osis’ meaning process. So it can be seen as a soul process. On the highest level, it is the soul attempting to return to wholeness. It does this by first moving the ego out of the way. The ego is an identity that is constructed by the mind in order to survive as a social species. It doesn’t exist per se, as a physical organ, like the brain. It is simply the mind’s created idea of who it thinks it is. Observe a child at the age of 3, as yet without a fully formed ego. It expresses itself freely and in the moment. It doesn’t care what anybody else thinks about it. The ego provides a useful function: making sure we behave in a socially acceptable way so that we’re not banished from the tribe and made vulnerable to predators. Watch the same child at age 5, with an ego, and you will see how it is watching to see how it should behave. It is working out the rules and deciding which ones it wants to break and which ones it needs to work with. The ego helps us survive by taking care of ourselves as a separate body. If we were to remain like a baby, feeling oneness and bliss gazing into faces and eyes, we’re likely to walk across a busy road and get splattered. But when it comes to the health of the soul and the spirit, the ego is not only unnecessary, it can be an obstruction.

So once the ego is offline, the soul can take over. It can re-connect with Oneness, Bliss, Peace and Love. This is the point at which some people mistake their own Christ Consciousness for being the actual Jesus. Without the ego to remember who it thinks it is, mistakes like this are easy to make.

Next all of the repressed psychological material that the ego banished to the basement of the subconscious comes up to join the party. The love actually attracts it out of hiding. This psychological material needs to be fully digested in order to re-integrate rejected parts of the self that were treated by the ego as socially unacceptable. To fully digest it would be to accept and welcome it. When that happens, it no longer causes problems. To label these as symptoms is to miss a unique opportunity. Psychosis is a moment in time in which we have privileged access to our repressed nature. It therefore holds the potential for transformation, if we know what to do with it.

We can see it like a broken clock that doesn’t work because there is too much dirt in the mechanism. The mental health service puts the clock on the shelf labeled ‘damaged’ and gives it a little oil so it feels less bothered about the fact that it doesn’t work properly. But there is nothing wrong with the mechanism: it just needs a good clean. Psychiatry could and should be doing just that. I believe that psychosis makes the ego disintegrate for a very important reason: in order to access the dirt that is clogging up the mechanism. This dirt is the trauma from childhood and even further back. What if psychiatry were to help clean this out?

It’s time to tell a new story about psychosis. One that shows how it is process that holds within it the potential for transformation. My Beautiful Psychosis describes the process of 7 episodes of psychosis as I try to make sense of them. It is available on Amazon.

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The post How Writing Helped Me Make Sense Of Madness, By Emma Goude appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

Eulogy On Irish Schizophrenia

I unlock the door to the institution’s finest office. A doctor’s name is inscribed on a linoleum slide that changes every few years. I press the darkened door smudge on the off-white paint job that dominates the unit. The door swings open. I invite Eugene’s cousin in.

Eugene’s cousin sits in the cushioned seat that matched the last dirty rug. The soot spattered on the outside of the window blocks the sun’s stream. She missed my eulogy. She depicts her challenges in finding the right freeway.

I had been up In the ER waiting room anxiously reviewing what I had to say about Eugene in front of the community. When I finally gave up on her, I had to rush back and make the memorial service happen. Somehow, I doubt it was an honest mistake to have missed the community event.

Eugene’s cousin announces has brought pictures and starts positioning them on the wobbly table.

I know that if I do my job, she will leave feeling just a bit of the guilt that I feel.

Eugene could have been given treatment that could have saved him. People do rehab and come back from strokes. The nursing home had reached out to the cousin repeatedly, I had been reassured. There had been no response.

“As usual,” I explain, scanning the pictures on the table, “many community members had listened to my eulogy understanding well the importance of acknowledging the passing.”

In reality many had strained to get a facial recognition of Eugene.

“As you know, Eugene is very quiet. Many were surprised and lifted to hear the complex details of his life and his miraculous turn around . . .

Eugene had spent years amidst the chronic, room 2, crowd. He’d talk to the therapist and answer stupid questions, but he was hard to really get to know.

As I continue to speak, I feel the strongest sense of grief. There has been staff turnaround due to the threat of closure amid the Trump era financial crisis that’s hit urban cities. The sense of sprawling tent encampments that surround us overwhelms me. It feels like Eugene and his legacy will close and be so easily forgotten.

***

When I first started on the unit, it was hard to reach anyone in room 2. The prescribed topics of illness management and functional skills were the only direction and support I was given to solve the complex phenomena of schizophrenia.

Company managers used to say that our clients would never get any better. I vehemently objected to that mentality, and I also was very worried about job security. As long as I wrote meaningful notes, I could survive.

The first time I went in there, one of Eugene’s peers had screamed, “BUZZARDS.” There was wild laughter, and some moaning. Amidst the lonely groaning and drool going on, I had a list of questions about recovery with which to work. I just didn’t know what to do except persist.

Over time, conversing with the three or four loud personalities in the group putting out disjointed content, I’d learn that the one who yelled, “BUZZARDS” thought he was an aristocrat. The aristocrat was light skinned African American man in a porkpie hat with gums instead of dentures.

Eugene would just sit in silence next to him while he talked throwing his head and his eyes back in repetitive manner. He called this “play acting” or “just acting crazy.” He would tell me he did it because he had nothing to lose. He wasn’t really crazy.

Meanwhile, loud personalities would have creative moments of clarity. For example, I once made sure one of the aristocrat’s quotes made it into the community magazine I put together: “Some days I feel like I am somewhere between a giblet and a human being,”

As per the “BUZZARDS!” comment I always knew there was meaning to it, but it’d take time to learn to come out of my shell and really get down with it.

Of course, the buzzard in the room was me. I was feeding off the dead and decrepit. Indeed, with the salary I was making, I would be able to go from nothing to having the down payment for a bay area house.

One day I would have the confidence to start cawing like a crow. I’d caw like a crow and circle the room until I got close to the aristocrat. Then, I’d simulate getting shot straight in the heart. Then, I’d fall until I laid flat on the floor beneath him and abreact a slow and painful death. It was the only appropriate response.

I still remember the aristocrat’s laugh the first time I pulled something like this. The laugh would happen periodically at the oddest of moments, “HA-HA!”

At least when I finally got down with him, the laugh happened at the appropriate moment. Over time I did manage to understand. The aristocrat was an aristocrat. An aristocrat and a philosopher.

Still, Eugene didn’t have time for these kinds of antics. He would just give you straight forward and stale answers.

***

I had a few years to onboard before I officially carried Eugene on my caseload.

Our first meeting, Eugene said, “I want to purchase a book to read with the solution to schizophrenia in it. I had a box filled with haphazardly xeroxed recovery materials I’d gleaned off the internet. I shuffled through it until I found the Patricia Deegan article introducing the hearing voices network in Europe. There was a book recommendation at the bottom I explained.

It took us a while but we sent away for it through snail mail. It was a good effort but it never arrived.

One day we were sitting in doctor’s office. It was the end of the session and Eugene exclaimed, “I see alien green!” They were the last words I’d hear from him for years.

Unlike a few of the colleagues who have come and gone over the years, I insisted in keeping weekly appointments with muted Eugene. Instead of talking we walked.

He was an extremely fast and aggressive walker. I ran ten miles on Saturday and hiked twenty miles every Sunday vying to meet a soul mate; yet, I could barely keep up.

As the muted walks continued, I would try one-way comments to connect with him. I would ask if he saw any objects as we walked that were signs of alien surveillance. I would point out things I saw that could be signs of surveillance. I let him lead.

It took me a while to develop these kinds of connection techniques. We did a lot of silent walks.

When Eugene had a housing crisis, I did some research and found an odd doctor named Bassard who had a board and care that was off in the Hayward foothills. There was reportedly a lot of space out there to walk.

His dutiful case worker in West Oakland had told me he used to lead Sierra Club backpacking trips in his younger years. She sometimes talked to his aunt who would pick him up and take him Christmas shopping for his nieces and nephews who lived in undisclosed location. The aunt might be how she found out about his secret life as a backpacker.

***

Doctor Bassard’s board and care seemed to be a good fit for a while.

One day after our walk Eugene sat with me and explained that he used to work in a print shop, the hardest kind of physical labor there was. He reported that he was the hardest worker and would often demonstrate his superiority to the other workers. He didn’t give a fuck!

The next thing I heard from Eugene was that he was thinking about going to the Alameda County Fair. Then I’d hear about Christmas shopping with his aunt.

I’d learn that he had been a drug and alcohol counselor early on. When he’d gotten married and had his son, he switched to the print shop to increase his income.

His mom had been, “nuts.” The daughter of a famous Irish protestant radio preacher and artist. In fitful rages she would accuse Eugene of being a spy for the Irish Republican Army and beat him. His father was a roofer and (according to Eugene) a bit of a slacker. He supported the mother and later Eugene through the years of madness

Growing up, Eugene’s peers would tease him because his Mom was “nuts.” He learned to hang out with the druggies even though he refused to use. Thus, the drug and alcohol job.

I learned much of this far later in my tenure when Eugene returned to treatment.

We took a walk before he got taken to jail on assault charges. It had been a return to the mute days. He littered. Sensing his ire, I hadn’t corrected him. There was a can on the hospital grounds and he smashed it with his foot. I hadn’t done anything . . .

His roommates had been constantly stealing his food at Bassard’s. They were largely unmonitored. Eugene’s efforts to fix this were not supported by the strange doctor.

***

Throughout I was volunteering after work for my child and family hours. Finally, I passed the exams. I managed to meet my soul mate and collect enough for down payment on a house.

I heard about an expensive group curriculum for psychosis developed by Patricia Deegan. Me being the arrogant cheapskate that I am I decided to develop my own. Thus, I started running psychoses focus groups for years developing a curriculum.

By the time Eugene was referred back to our program, I had left my job for a year and a half, but been permitted to return when the new job hadn’t worked out.

***

This time Eugene was staying at McClure’s board and care home, one of the best licensed board and care in town. His trusty case manager advocated for him.

Eugene was mandated to complete our five day a week PHP program by the board a care facility. Turns out all he had done was gotten angry about taking his medication on day and slammed a door. Now, the hospital could make a lot of money off him.

The hospital had erected world class facilities but left its historic psych ward with bubbled windows (our unit) alone. No longer could we go out and sit by the trash compacter and watch the men work. Walks were no longer easily accessible.

Eugene and his peers had to weave through the historic backwards, passing the freshly built shower facilities for doctors, the hole-in-the-wall medical records department, down a flight of stairs and down and then around the substance abuse ward to find the sunlight. Then they had to walk down a sizeable hill all the way down to the sidewalk to smoke.

Everyday in community meeting they would be reminded that tickets for smoking were eight hundred dollars, the same price as their monthly SSDI checks.

Eugene was one of the few remaining room 2 clients who obeyed these daily threats. He’d be known to skip the last group and stay down on the sidewalk smoking.

By the time he had sat through two days of PHP which was four groups with the same small group of people who were just out of the hospital, he was fuming. When I sat down with him for the second time, I knew I had to do something.

Board and care homes have no legal right to mandate treatment, but they can kick Eugene out for misconduct. When he half way expressed the reason he was fuming, I could see how right he was.

Luckily the clinical manager who hated me was out for the day. I went straight to the director who had been around as long as I had. I made the appeal. I kept it simple, but was compelling enough.

I reported to Eugene that he could come just two days a week as he’d requested.

***

“See, what happened to me was that I leaked a suspicious death to the newspapers. I was afraid thuging residents I knew at the section 8 complex where I worked would find out.

“I sought consult from my best college friend back east, an ex-drug addict. He warned me not to leave town, he had the power to find me.

“Had he set me up to take a fall? That’s what I started thinking.

“I tried to escape to Canada and they put me in a State Hospital for three months. I was discharged to the streets and I took a Trailways to California.

“Turns out the only job I could get was arranged by my family at an Italian Delicatessen. I had to move to the outskirts of the bay area, bike ten miles and take the rails an hour to get to the job. Everyday I was followed on my way to and from the job and no one believed me.

I had told my story as such a million times in the psychoses focus group. If I hadn’t done so repeatedly, I would not have been able to even articulate secrets so raw. But I had a lot of practice and gotten a lot of support from participants who loved and advocated for my group.

“I don’t think your family is really an Irish mafia family!” exclaimed Eugene. Sure, enough he had tracked the details. His words gutted me as brutally as possible. “I don’t think you were really followed on your way to the Italian Delicatessen. I think those are paranoid delusions!”

I remained cool as a cucumber in hot sauce. Experience had prepared me for this moment. I spoke softly and peacefully . . .

“One day at the BART station, a man I knew well from the section 8 housing authority in Seattle Washington walked past me with handcuffs and a shirt that read “CIA.” He sat across from me and stared at me the whole ride. He had told me he killed people.

I answered a few questions: “yes, I knew for a fact he had been busted for impersonating a CIA officer in the past;”  “yes, I knew that for a fact because I had read his file as a social worker;” yes, I ignored him;” “yes, it was just another day for me.”

Eugene’s questions were intelligent ones!

“Then there was the day I came home and my apartment was trashed. My kitty litter had been slashed and emptied over the carpeted floor; my belongings had been taken out of my closet; and the labels of my clothes had been slashed with a knife. When I went to the managers office to complain, this woman I had met before was there. She had flashed her official secret service badge at me. She told me that my uncle had entered my apartment and had the right to do so because he had co-signed on the apartment.

I paused. I was afraid Eugene wouldn’t follow the very real details I shared with him.

“Yeah, I had the secret service follow me once as well,” admitted Eugene. “One time I tried to escape to Canada myself.”

***

“Yes, Eugene started talking,” said his case manager. “I think he did so because he finally met someone to whom he could relate.” I could feel the social worker smiling as she acknowledged me. “I think now he has hope for recovery.”

Eugene and I had a lot of good years of talking and relating. I used to go down and have sessions with him on the sidewalk. Eventually, he started coming to see me in the office during the third group.

***

When I finally get to the place where I tell the cousin about how I had cracked Eugene’s case, to her credit she shifts to trying to help me grieve smoothly.

Listening to her stories is nice. She tells me about cheerful parts of Eugene: his generosity to his family and to his fellow peers at the board and care. I choose to keep a picture of Eugene with her husband, a stout Irish musician, as they shared a cigar with a smile.

Her stories help me see that when he started to tell me about cooperating and sharing TV with his roommates that we really had accomplished something. Previously he’d just talked about walking up to Berkeley to go to a doughnut shop.

The cousin tells me about how they used to visit him at the board and care home in the inner-city with gifts and that by the time they had left they would see those gifts getting sold in a garage sale at the neighbors’ yard. It must have filled them with so much guilt to see what he was going through in contrast to them.

When I was in the State Hospital, the few belongings I had to my name were constantly stolen. For Eugene, living like that was a life sentence.

Eugene had learned more about the mental illness of schizophrenia, than he’d learned about the hidden world of recovery.

In our treatment, I’d finally gave him a book with the solution to schizophrenia. I wrote it. It was my memoir.

***

When my mother told family acquaintances what had happened to me on my way to Canada, everybody we knew, she was sure to tell me, cursed the closings of the institutions in the eighties. They were trying to sooth her. They didn’t want her to have to enable-me any longer.

My life ended in the folklore of the Christmas Card.

Sure, I have had some mainstream accomplishments that could be cited. Sure, the community of people I once knew could stand to learn about the reality of mental illness in the U.S.

But alas, my achievements only become embarrassing reminders of the word that defines me to everyone with whom I grew up, schizophrenia. Some days it feels like that word defines me to almost every one I once knew.

Once, when I credited my Mom that investing three thousand dollars in a car for me, I was trying to honor her support. I said that it was the main thing that enabled me to recover.

Her words were, “I shouldn’t have purchased you that car!”

When I published my award-winning memoir, my grandmother’s dying words to me (who she couldn’t recognize) was that the book made the family look bad.

A relative wrote a bad review. Another made a salty, veiled-in-a-compliment criticism. The whole Clan ignored me at the family reunion.

Eugene in contrast sacrificed himself for his family. That is somehow more admirable in our shared cultural heritage.

***

Sure, Eugene and I talked openly about aliens. He’d explain that he could feel implants obsessively on his brain. I think they were caused by ongoing voices about which he never did get to the point where he’d share.

Sure, he’d talk about the very common experience of being able to transition into different dimensions of reality. He could tell because the board and care rats he’s seen skittering across the floor suddenly disappear into thin air. Finally, he told me about his relative with Top Sec clearance for NASA.

Neither of us suffered for the sharing of these details. We didn’t become worse or traumatize each other. No, we formed a valuable allegiance that enabled him to have relationships with others.

True, this only happened because I broke all the rules and shared with him what many would consider to be delusions about my brush with the underworld and Italian Mafia.

Sure, he died before he could start up his business or take the stained-glass, art class he wanted to take. I almost got him to pay for an art class at one point.

It’s true I wasn’t so committed to him that I would quit my day job and help him come back from his stroke.

***

So, when the cousin leaves the hospital, I think she feels some of the guilt I felt when I drove across town with cards and letters after work only to learn that he expired. As she leaves the hospital, she expresses a little upset that I only accepted one picture of Eugene that she had collected. I sure hadn’t realized she would feel that way.

But as I say goodbye, I still hope for the best for the cousin and Eugene’s family who accepted his gifts at Christmas and never reached back. I call his son with the phone number the cousin gave me, but never hear back. I still call my mother weekly and vie for a less hurtful relationship.

Still. I hope and pray that the fact that Eugene and I were finally able to work together gave him a sense of peace and that he may rest from the torment of that damned word we use to bill for services, schizophrenia.

The post Eulogy On Irish Schizophrenia appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

Eulogy on an Irish Schizophrenia

I unlock the door to the institution’s finest office. A doctor’s name is inscribed on a linoleum slide that changes every few years. I press the darkened door smudge on the off-white paint job that dominates the unit. The door swings open. I invite Eugene’s cousin in.

Eugene’s cousin sits in the cushioned seat that matched the last dirty rug. The soot spattered on the outside of the window blocks the sun’s stream. She missed my eulogy. She depicts her challenges in finding the right freeway.

I had been up In the ER waiting room anxiously reviewing what I had to say about Eugene in front of the community. When I finally gave up on her, I had to rush back and make the memorial service happen. Somehow, I doubt it was an honest mistake to have missed the community event.

Eugene’s cousin announces has brought pictures and starts positioning them on the wobbly table.

I know that if I do my job, she will leave feeling just a bit of the guilt that I feel.

Eugene could have been given treatment that could have saved him. People do rehab and come back from strokes. The nursing home had reached out to the cousin repeatedly, I had been reassured. There had been no response.

“As usual,” I explain, scanning the pictures on the table, “many community members had listened to my eulogy understanding well the importance of acknowledging the passing.”

In reality many had strained to get a facial recognition of Eugene.

“As you know, Eugene is very quiet. Many were surprised and lifted to hear the complex details of his life and his miraculous turn around . . .

Eugene had spent years amidst the chronic, room 2, crowd. He’d talk to the therapist and answer stupid questions, but he was hard to really get to know.

As I continue to speak, I feel the strongest sense of grief. There has been staff turnaround due to the threat of closure amid the Trump era financial crisis that’s hit urban cities. The sense of sprawling tent encampments that surround us overwhelms me. It feels like Eugene and his legacy will close and be so easily forgotten.

***

When I first started on the unit, it was hard to reach anyone in room 2. The prescribed topics of illness management and functional skills were the only direction and support I was given to solve the complex phenomena of schizophrenia.

Company managers used to say that our clients would never get any better. I vehemently objected to that mentality, and I also was very worried about job security. As long as I wrote meaningful notes, I could survive.

The first time I went in there, one of Eugene’s peers had screamed, “BUZZARDS.” There was wild laughter, and some moaning. Amidst the lonely groaning and drool going on, I had a list of questions about recovery with which to work. I just didn’t know what to do except persist.

Over time, conversing with the three or four loud personalities in the group putting out disjointed content, I’d learn that the one who yelled, “BUZZARDS” thought he was an aristocrat. The aristocrat was light skinned African American man in a porkpie hat with gums instead of dentures.

Eugene would just sit in silence next to him while he talked throwing his head and his eyes back in repetitive manner. He called this “play acting” or “just acting crazy.” He would tell me he did it because he had nothing to lose. He wasn’t really crazy.

Meanwhile, loud personalities would have creative moments of clarity. For example, I once made sure one of the aristocrat’s quotes made it into the community magazine I put together: “Some days I feel like I am somewhere between a giblet and a human being,”

As per the “BUZZARDS!” comment I always knew there was meaning to it, but it’d take time to learn to come out of my shell and really get down with it.

Of course, the buzzard in the room was me. I was feeding off the dead and decrepit. Indeed, with the salary I was making, I would be able to go from nothing to having the down payment for a bay area house.

One day I would have the confidence to start cawing like a crow. I’d caw like a crow and circle the room until I got close to the aristocrat. Then, I’d simulate getting shot straight in the heart. Then, I’d fall until I laid flat on the floor beneath him and abreact a slow and painful death. It was the only appropriate response.

I still remember the aristocrat’s laugh the first time I pulled something like this. The laugh would happen periodically at the oddest of moments, “HA-HA!”

At least when I finally got down with him, the laugh happened at the appropriate moment. Over time I did manage to understand. The aristocrat was an aristocrat. An aristocrat and a philosopher.

Still, Eugene didn’t have time for these kinds of antics. He would just give you straight forward and stale answers.

***

I had a few years to onboard before I officially carried Eugene on my caseload.

Our first meeting, Eugene said, “I want to purchase a book to read with the solution to schizophrenia in it. I had a box filled with haphazardly xeroxed recovery materials I’d gleaned off the internet. I shuffled through it until I found the Patricia Deegan article introducing the hearing voices network in Europe. There was a book recommendation at the bottom I explained.

It took us a while but we sent away for it through snail mail. It was a good effort but it never arrived.

One day we were sitting in doctor’s office. It was the end of the session and Eugene exclaimed, “I see alien green!” They were the last words I’d hear from him for years.

Unlike a few of the colleagues who have come and gone over the years, I insisted in keeping weekly appointments with muted Eugene. Instead of talking we walked.

He was an extremely fast and aggressive walker. I ran ten miles on Saturday and hiked twenty miles every Sunday vying to meet a soul mate; yet, I could barely keep up.

As the muted walks continued, I would try one-way comments to connect with him. I would ask if he saw any objects as we walked that were signs of alien surveillance. I would point out things I saw that could be signs of surveillance. I let him lead.

It took me a while to develop these kinds of connection techniques. We did a lot of silent walks.

When Eugene had a housing crisis, I did some research and found an odd doctor named Bassard who had a board and care that was off in the Hayward foothills. There was reportedly a lot of space out there to walk.

His dutiful case worker in West Oakland had told me he used to lead Sierra Club backpacking trips in his younger years. She sometimes talked to his aunt who would pick him up and take him Christmas shopping for his nieces and nephews who lived in undisclosed location. The aunt might be how she found out about his secret life as a backpacker.

***

Doctor Bassard’s board and care seemed to be a good fit for a while.

One day after our walk Eugene sat with me and explained that he used to work in a print shop, the hardest kind of physical labor there was. He reported that he was the hardest worker and would often demonstrate his superiority to the other workers. He didn’t give a fuck!

The next thing I heard from Eugene was that he was thinking about going to the Alameda County Fair. Then I’d hear about Christmas shopping with his aunt.

I’d learn that he had been a drug and alcohol counselor early on. When he’d gotten married and had his son, he switched to the print shop to increase his income.

His mom had been, “nuts.” The daughter of a famous Irish protestant radio preacher and artist. In fitful rages she would accuse Eugene of being a spy for the Irish Republican Army and beat him. His father was a roofer and (according to Eugene) a bit of a slacker. He supported the mother and later Eugene through the years of madness

Growing up, Eugene’s peers would tease him because his Mom was “nuts.” He learned to hang out with the druggies even though he refused to use. Thus, the drug and alcohol job.

I learned much of this far later in my tenure when Eugene returned to treatment.

We took a walk before he got taken to jail on assault charges. It had been a return to the mute days. He littered. Sensing his ire, I hadn’t corrected him. There was a can on the hospital grounds and he smashed it with his foot. I hadn’t done anything . . .

His roommates had been constantly stealing his food at Bassard’s. They were largely unmonitored. Eugene’s efforts to fix this were not supported by the strange doctor.

***

Throughout I was volunteering after work for my child and family hours. Finally, I passed the exams. I managed to meet my soul mate and collect enough for down payment on a house.

I heard about an expensive group curriculum for psychosis developed by Patricia Deegan. Me being the arrogant cheapskate that I am I decided to develop my own. Thus, I started running psychoses focus groups for years developing a curriculum.

By the time Eugene was referred back to our program, I had left my job for a year and a half, but been permitted to return when the new job hadn’t worked out.

***

This time Eugene was staying at McClure’s board and care home, one of the best licensed board and care in town. His trusty case manager advocated for him.

Eugene was mandated to complete our five day a week PHP program by the board a care facility. Turns out all he had done was gotten angry about taking his medication on day and slammed a door. Now, the hospital could make a lot of money off him.

The hospital had erected world class facilities but left its historic psych ward with bubbled windows (our unit) alone. No longer could we go out and sit by the trash compacter and watch the men work. Walks were no longer easily accessible.

Eugene and his peers had to weave through the historic backwards, passing the freshly built shower facilities for doctors, the hole-in-the-wall medical records department, down a flight of stairs and down and then around the substance abuse ward to find the sunlight. Then they had to walk down a sizeable hill all the way down to the sidewalk to smoke.

Everyday in community meeting they would be reminded that tickets for smoking were eight hundred dollars, the same price as their monthly SSDI checks.

Eugene was one of the few remaining room 2 clients who obeyed these daily threats. He’d be known to skip the last group and stay down on the sidewalk smoking.

By the time he had sat through two days of PHP which was four groups with the same small group of people who were just out of the hospital, he was fuming. When I sat down with him for the second time, I knew I had to do something.

Board and care homes have no legal right to mandate treatment, but they can kick Eugene out for misconduct. When he half way expressed the reason he was fuming, I could see how right he was.

Luckily the clinical manager who hated me was out for the day. I went straight to the director who had been around as long as I had. I made the appeal. I kept it simple, but was compelling enough.

I reported to Eugene that he could come just two days a week as he’d requested.

***

“See, what happened to me was that I leaked a suspicious death to the newspapers. I was afraid thuging residents I knew at the section 8 complex where I worked would find out.

“I sought consult from my best college friend back east, an ex-drug addict. He warned me not to leave town, he had the power to find me.

“Had he set me up to take a fall? That’s what I started thinking.

“I tried to escape to Canada and they put me in a State Hospital for three months. I was discharged to the streets and I took a Trailways to California.

“Turns out the only job I could get was arranged by my family at an Italian Delicatessen. I had to move to the outskirts of the bay area, bike ten miles and take the rails an hour to get to the job. Everyday I was followed on my way to and from the job and no one believed me.

I had told my story as such a million times in the psychoses focus group. If I hadn’t done so repeatedly, I would not have been able to even articulate secrets so raw. But I had a lot of practice and gotten a lot of support from participants who loved and advocated for my group.

“I don’t think your family is really an Irish mafia family!” exclaimed Eugene. Sure, enough he had tracked the details. His words gutted me as brutally as possible. “I don’t think you were really followed on your way to the Italian Delicatessen. I think those are paranoid delusions!”

I remained cool as a cucumber in hot sauce. Experience had prepared me for this moment. I spoke softly and peacefully . . .

“One day at the BART station, a man I knew well from the section 8 housing authority in Seattle Washington walked past me with handcuffs and a shirt that read “CIA.” He sat across from me and stared at me the whole ride. He had told me he killed people.

I answered a few questions: “yes, I knew for a fact he had been busted for impersonating a CIA officer in the past;”  “yes, I knew that for a fact because I had read his file as a social worker;” yes, I ignored him;” “yes, it was just another day for me.”

Eugene’s questions were intelligent ones!

“Then there was the day I came home and my apartment was trashed. My kitty litter had been slashed and emptied over the carpeted floor; my belongings had been taken out of my closet; and the labels of my clothes had been slashed with a knife. When I went to the managers office to complain, this woman I had met before was there. She had flashed her official secret service badge at me. She told me that my uncle had entered my apartment and had the right to do so because he had co-signed on the apartment.

I paused. I was afraid Eugene wouldn’t follow the very real details I shared with him.

“Yeah, I had the secret service follow me once as well,” admitted Eugene. “One time I tried to escape to Canada myself.”

***

“Yes, Eugene started talking,” said his case manager. “I think he did so because he finally met someone to whom he could relate.” I could feel the social worker smiling as she acknowledged me. “I think now he has hope for recovery.”

Eugene and I had a lot of good years of talking and relating. I used to go down and have sessions with him on the sidewalk. Eventually, he started coming to see me in the office during the third group.

***

When I finally get to the place where I tell the cousin about how I had cracked Eugene’s case, to her credit she shifts to trying to help me grieve smoothly.

Listening to her stories is nice. She tells me about cheerful parts of Eugene: his generosity to his family and to his fellow peers at the board and care. I choose to keep a picture of Eugene with her husband, a stout Irish musician, as they shared a cigar with a smile.

Her stories help me see that when he started to tell me about cooperating and sharing TV with his roommates that we really had accomplished something. Previously he’d just talked about walking up to Berkeley to go to a doughnut shop.

The cousin tells me about how they used to visit him at the board and care home in the inner-city with gifts and that by the time they had left they would see those gifts getting sold in a garage sale at the neighbors’ yard. It must have filled them with so much guilt to see what he was going through in contrast to them.

When I was in the State Hospital, the few belongings I had to my name were constantly stolen. For Eugene, living like that was a life sentence.

Eugene had learned more about the mental illness of schizophrenia, than he’d learned about the hidden world of recovery.

In our treatment, I’d finally gave him a book with the solution to schizophrenia. I wrote it. It was my memoir.

***

When my mother told family acquaintances what had happened to me on my way to Canada, everybody we knew, she was sure to tell me, cursed the closings of the institutions in the eighties. They were trying to sooth her. They didn’t want her to have to enable-me any longer.

My life ended in the folklore of the Christmas Card.

Sure, I have had some mainstream accomplishments that could be cited. Sure, the community of people I once knew could stand to learn about the reality of mental illness in the U.S.

But alas, my achievements only become embarrassing reminders of the word that defines me to everyone with whom I grew up, schizophrenia. Some days it feels like that word means more to almost every one I once knew.

Once, when I credited my Mom that investing three thousand dollars in a car for me, I was trying to honor her support. I said that it was the main thing that enabled me to recover.

Her words were, “I shouldn’t have purchased you that car!”

When I published my award-winning memoir, my grandmother’s dying words to me (who she couldn’t recognize) was that the book made the family look bad.

A relative wrote a bad review. Another made a salty criticism, one veiled in a compliment. The whole Clan ignored me at the family reunion.

Eugene in contrast sacrificed himself for his family. That is somehow more admirable in our shared cultural heritage.

***

Sure, Eugene and I talked openly about aliens. He’d explain that he could feel implants obsessively on his brain. I think they were caused by ongoing voices about which he never did get to the point where he’d share.

Sure, he’d talk about the very common experience of being able to transition into different dimensions of reality. He could tell because the board and care rats he’s seen skittering across the floor suddenly disappear into thin air. Finally, he told me about his relative with Top Sec clearance for NASA.

Neither of us suffered for the sharing of these details. We didn’t become worse or traumatize each other. No, we formed a valuable allegiance that enabled him to have relationships with others.

True, this only happened because I broke all the rules and shared with him what many would consider to be delusions about my brush with the underworld and Italian Mafia.

Sure, he died before he could start up his business or take the stained-glass, art class he wanted to take. I almost got him to pay for an art class at one point.

It’s true I wasn’t so committed to him that I would quit my day job and help him come back from his stroke.

***

So, when the cousin leaves the hospital, I think she feels some of the guilt I felt when I drove across town with cards and letters after work only to learn that he expired. As she leaves the hospital, she expresses a little upset that I only accepted one picture of Eugene that she had collected. I sure hadn’t realized she would feel that way.

But as I say goodbye, I still hope for the best for the cousin and Eugene’s family who accepted his gifts at Christmas and never reached back. I call his son with the phone number the cousin gave me, but never hear back. I still call my mother weekly and vie for a less hurtful relationship.

Still. I hope and pray that the fact that Eugene and I were finally able to work together gave him a sense of peace and that he may rest from the torment of that damned word we use to bill for services, schizophrenia.

The post Eulogy on an Irish Schizophrenia appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

Upcoming Training and Workshops

In the upcoming months I will be doing a number of training/workshops that I wanted my supporters to know about.

First I will participate in a panel discussion in a panel discussion at UCSF from 10-11:30 on Wednesday, September 9th representing the hearing voices network perspective.

Then, later the same day I will be utilizing some portion of the short version of my training to clinical staff at Community Forward San Francisco along with a colleague from the BAHVN, Heather Riemer.

At work, on Friday September 18, I will provide a brief, hour long didactic training  from 1-2 to doctoral interns who work at Highland Hospital.

Then, October 8, thanks to zoom I will be presenting an hour of my training for a community group in Cincinnati Ohio.

Finally I am in negotiations with Morton Baker Hospital in Oakland to provide a full six-hour training to a small group that wants to start a Special Messages Program in the hospital.

At work I am transitioning down to three days a week as I am expanding my practice to include a yet-to-be-determined weekday. As a result, I am available for a limited time only to provide training to various agencies for free to help gain referrals for my practice.

As we all find ourselves confined by the COVID pandemic, there are many people who are struggling with special message crisis who need our help and support. Now it is easier than ever to get training out there. Do not hesitate to contact me with your request.

Six Hour Format (click the image)

 

Intro Format (click the image)

The post Upcoming Training and Workshops appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

How Message Mindfulness Can Help Change the Madness Within Our System!

A Definition of Psychosis that Includes Internal Processes:

I believe there are fundamental ways that the inaccurate social definition of psychosis and schizophrenia lead to mistreatment in mental health institutions. The historical definition of psychosis in all the Diagnostic Statistical Manuals is: hallucinations, delusions, and disorganized thinking. In master’s level training I never got more information than that when it came to working with psychosis. I did not understand psychosis. With that limited framework, I was paid to work with schizophrenia for seven years. Oh, how it limited my view of the potential for recovery.

Now, decades later, I think calling it a thought disorder is a fundamental misunderstanding of what is happening. I believe there are processes going on internally to create the external behavioral descriptors of the mainstream definition. I think its high time mental health workers get trained to pay attention to the internal processes that create these anomalous behaviors. Instead metal health workers team up to madly try to correct behavior through incarceration, medication, and behavioral health treatment like case management.

I believe it is important that people we call psychotic or schizophrenic be more self-aware of what they are doing as they are playing truth detective. In the process, it is important for supporters to be aware of those processes and to support, learn about and eventually collaboratively guide those internal processes.

I believe that people like me who experience them need them to be so aware of their internal processes that they can willingly let go of them and chose to behave in accordance with consensus reality. I call this ability to let go and comply with social dictates, message mindfulness.

Applying Mindfulness to Psychosis:

Six years after I was able to suppress my experiences to the point where I could resume my career, I got my Marriage and Family Therapy License. I began my quest to define those internal processes. I wrote a curriculum for groups. I ran them, and I revised and sharpened my views. I have developed eight components of which to be mindful and eight resulting solution strategies that can help a person create a social rehabilitation. I am writing today to present the first concept in my list of eight solution concepts, message mindfulness.

Mindfulness is currently a popularized concept in mental health that involves going toward your feelings and getting close enough that you can fully experience them enough to process and let go of them so they don’t linger in your body and overwhelm you. Marsha Linehan has done a good job identifying six skills associated with mindfulness, which is based on Buddhist Philosophy.

According to Linehan’s training, one can achieve mindfulness by noticing your feeling, putting words to it, and taking the time to fully participate with it. It is also important not to judge the feeling, only do one thing at a time, and focus on trying to do what works in the situation. All this allows the feeling to be released and forgotten about. Those who live mindfully stay present and engaged in the moment.

With mindfulness, we balance our thought processes and our emotional processes so we can let go of painful emotions and the occurrences that cause them. Instead of changing our thoughts, we experience our emotions.

When I talk about message mindfulness though, I am not talking about emotions, I am talking about experiences that trigger the sleuthing process that lead to thoughts that diverge from consensus reality.

Indeed, in that short sentence I have introduced the first three internal processes of psychosis. These are my first three components and are essential to understanding message mindfulness. Thus, it is important to help the person with psychosis pay more attention to what they are doing. This actually entitles them to talk about their experiences without getting shut down, rejected or controlled.

Suppressing triggers to psychosis is a fundamentally different process. Often the person who is trying to suppress their experiences does so because they have been punished for having them. The person may end up at war with those experiences and tormented, they only increase the frequency and intensity with which they experience them. They start to trust them more and to trust people with cultural delusions less.

I am arguing that suppression conversely makes those experiences stronger.

Hence, if someone is traumatized and rages in defeat without trying to function through it, their quality of life and social functioning, declines into a stew and everyone rolls their eyes and calls them a bump on a log. If they fight for survival, the world will see them as a royal pain in the ass and torment them because they are different. Both are recipes for ongoing trauma and suffering.

In contrast, message mindfulness suggests we not judge these experiences, we experience them fully and we move through them staying focused only on the present. It becomes important for supporters and the person experiencing them to learn this lesson. The outcome can be some interesting metaphysical philosophies. With the right kind of balanced conclusions, social life can resume and persist.

Hence, I will officially pause to abolish the words psychotic and schizophrenic because they are profoundly judgmental words to those of us who have experienced them. Instead I will call the person who experiences these phenomena message receivers who will benefit from gaining awareness of message mindfulness

  The First Component of Message Mindfulness: Special Messages.

Message receivers deal with special messages. These are experiences that trigger awareness of an alternate way of making sense of things that others may or may not understand. The definition is very broad because there are a lot of types of things that can be special messages.

Special messages may involve things that everyone can relate to: a sense of intuition; a dream; or the nonverbal sense of another person we get that is based on body language. In a state of hypervigilance, people can be very attuned an sensitive to these experiences. These experiences alone can lead to pondering conspiracies, positive or negative.

Special messages can also be more peculiar voices or visions, tactile, taste, or olfactory hallucination that are unique to the individual but that others probably do not experience in the same way.

These special messages get complicated and mix with other special messages.

For example, a voice says, “I am the devil and you smell like shit!” Perhaps the person figures that the devil is criticizing them for lack of cleanliness. But there is still so much to consider like the race sex and age of the voice. Is the devil really coming from telepathy with the message receiver’s German Sheppard who is just talking wuff talk?

When there is a stabbing pain in the back when the message receiver is not able to get to the shower, one might feel tortured by the devil. It might help to engage with the devil and assert oneself and try to compassionately stave of the stabbing.

Maybe we’ve studied the devil’s voice over time and learn the right ways to heal it so we can prevent the stabbing.

These kinds of messages need to be drawn out and interacted with to help people heal. There is a growing body of literature on this: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-rUvtCwt_cvc5_yqWQX7uA?fbclid=IwAR0clCSfZOWp3u8tCUmFb3OOehLvzWO5IVivdmiTIBV7hSTqUZNy4UQCY3I

Extra sensory perception is also an example of a special message, as are de ja vu experiences, serendipitous coincidences, or mindreading telepathic abilities. Many of us may have these abilities/occurrences. At the same time, it can be hard to know when we have access to them. Thus, we successfully mindread on three occasions, and then we think we are doing it on a fourth but are incorrect. Also, we may assess that others can read our minds when they can only do so fifty percent of the time.

Coded words, double meanings and numeric associations can also lead to special message experiences. For example, pigs in a blanket for a dollar means a hot dog on a bun; not police in a sleeping bag by a campfire, or raw pork chops rolled up in a newspaper. Or does it? Also consider the meaning of the name of my favorite rapper: KRS-ONE, Knowledge Reigns Supreme Over Nearly Everyone. Or consider the name of another rapper: fifty cent, 50 cent or 5-0-scent. Playing the game of punny coincidences can get very complicated especially when spies are involved. Just watch Austin Power’s, The Spy that Shagged Me!

Additionally, the written word may lack a clear emphasis or have an unintended emphasis to make significant conspiracy inferences that may or may not be true. Finally, words can be metaphors with entirely different meanings, like children’s song, puff the magic dragon means a bone of cannabis getting smoked. Or Captain Jack will get you high tonight mean booting heroin into your veins.

The world and reality become full of symbolic occurrences. So does TV and movies. There may be more learned about reality in art than there is on the local news.

These may be guided by corrupt powers in the government, by a wide variety of secret societies, or by righteous spiritual processes. Perhaps time travel has influenced covert futuristic codes. Then, these coded coincidences may mix with the actions of people around them that are acting in similar manners or using TV or movie references to make a point.

Welcome to the work of divergent views, causation theories/frameworks, and spiritual trickster and self-fulfilling prophesies. All of these are other components of psychosis that we gain with mindfulness. There still are others.

To get a better sense of special messages, you can sign up for my mailing list and more extensive list of examples: https://timdreby.us17.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=875d1a8dc62c7e575c8572fc9&id=d384b7dd74

Mix all the special messages up in a bag and it can lead to some very troubling or wonderful interpretations of reality. Each interpretation might need to be experienced and understood mindfully without letting the emotions get negatively impacted and affecting the message receiver’s behavior. That’s a lot to ask. As a result, to achieve message mindfulness, there may be massive conflicts that need to be worked out or metaphysical beauty to be distracted from. Often it is a mixture of both once you really start to explore a message receivers experience.

The Second Concept of Message Mindfulness: Sleuthing

When a person gets a special message, they may need to get busy in their mind to figure out what the message means. Behind the sleuthing process is an intense emotional alarm that results from the special message. As a result, the message receiver may be on high alert for other details or messages that may add to their plot/journey. Once they are convinced a conspiracy is present or alternative ideas of what is going on are at play, they may end up on the lookout for more clues. Suddenly with a heightened awareness, clues and messages become more frequent and support the concept of the conspiracy. Figuring out what is going on, can be like a twenty-four hour a day job that is rarely interrupted by activities or tasks.

I call this state sleuthing. It is also called making meaning in the hearing voices movement. In a sense, all these special message experiences become highlighted and are often received as they are traumatic or enlightened. Thus, making meaning becomes a coping strategy that helps the message receiver endure. Tell them to stop doing it and distract themselves from these dilemmas and the intensity of the sleuthing is likely to increase. They may sleuth while they are trying to accomplish something making them slow in accomplishing it. They may not get reinforced for their efforts and may feel discouraged in comparison to chronically-normal accomplishment.

I believe that effective therapy becomes sleuthing alongside the message receiver. It means helping them be more aware of the special messages they are receiving that lead them to formulate their thoughts or conclusions. That in a nutshell is message mindfulness. But it also means learning more about and normalizing the next component of psychosis, divergent views.

Additionally, as mentioned above, there are still other parts of psychosis, like studying causation theories or frameworks, or studying negative/positive self-fulfilling prophesies can cause errors, oppression and persecution, Thus, later concepts exist and can also can assist with working with divergent views to change the trauma or elation they may cause.

The Third Concept: Divergent Views

Many message receivers are trained not to share their divergent views. Divergent views can be spot on accurate and they can lead to errors. Usually, reality is a mix. If a divergent view is expressed others are likely to call them crazy, psychotic, or schizophrenic. Many of us have lost many friends and supports this way. Some people get consequences that bite them back within the system in which they are embedded.

The funny thing about divergent views is that so many of the divergent views we have, as I mentioned above, are true.

For example, if we say our phones are tapped it is a major admission that make people call us schizophrenic, but, in reality, the phones are really tapped. Thanks to international fugitive, Edward Snowden, we now know this to be true. But when it comes down to it, people don’t want to hear about intelligence secrets. Message receivers need to learn not to talk about those elements of reality when they experience evidence of them. However, there also needs to be safe havens where they can discuss like therapy and support groups.

With the sleuthing stoked by divergent views, the message receiver wants to talk about it. However, if they share their concerns, they get identified as a schizophrenic. That may intensify the secrecy and privacy of the sleuthing process. They are constantly tempted to behave as if their divergent views are accurate, behavior that could lead to incarceration. Thus, they make an effort to bury that information.

In their swirls of special message experiences, message receiver’s emotions get peaked. They learn that some of their divergent views are accurate and it is a strong positive reinforcer. Intermittent punishment makes no sense. What I am arguing is that divergent views need to be normalized instead of punished.

However, a good way to start discussions about special message experiences is to talk about conspiracy theories associated with governmental abuse or social control. There are many of them out there in the media from the secret knowledge of alien involvement in the evolution of civilization to the history of the Templar Knights in the crusades. Conspiracies theories about all the assassinations in the sixties are another good way to discuss conspiracy. Once you have identified the conspiracy, it is possible to try to identify the special message evidence that reveals the conspiracy to the message receiver.

Message Mindfulness:

Ultimately message mindfulness is the ability to accept the special message experience with no emotional charge and with complete acceptance. It is the ability to let go of the divergent view and divert your attention from sleuthing. It means staying engaged in an activity that will help you survive. This may mean setting limits with sleuthing and doing it after the fact.

Message mindfulness is the ability to act as if consensus reality is all that matters when that isn’t true. It is a willingness to engage with lies and flawed paradigms of the modern world and constructively work to better them.

In another sense message mindfulness is the ability to be aware of the experience, detach from the meaning that is made from the experience, and make peace with the resulting conspiracies in a way that they can be released from the thinking mind. Staying busy and focused on a task can help accelerate the mindfulness phenomena

There is more to message mindfulness than we have reviewed in this blog. Remember there are still five other components of psychosis in my definition. I have alluded to only two others on a few occasions.

The awareness of all those concepts makes it easier to accept things the way they are and resolve the conflicts with society that usually get highlighted by special message experiences. Once the issues are addressed mindfulness becomes easier.

It only takes a bit of faking your way through and projecting the cultural delusions that modern society depends on to survive. That is how you can achieve message mindfulness.

The Madness with Which We Are Treated in the Mental Health System:

In behavioral health treatment they tend to believe that psychotics and schizophrenics of the world are better when they give up on their pursuit of the truth, and behave in concert with the millions of social myths that make up consensus reality. When they can do so they can take care of themselves. If this is the goal, there are good and bad ways to achieve it.

Though its arguable that it can work to criminalize and incarcerate schizophrenia and psychosis, there is also carnage in the process. There ends up being many people who get permanently warehoused or stuck in crisis states. Incarceration and homelessness happened to me and I managed to make it back. I could have been trapped a lot longer if I had not used family support.

I just think it can be done more gently with far less institutional damage and punishment.

I am arguing that this starts by understanding how our internal processes are different. Once we understand we can join with people who are trained to understand and form trusting relationships. We can find people who are supports rather than adversaries and controllers. In doing so, we can learn to be mindful of our internal processes, let them go and act in accordance with the cultural delusions we all agree upon in order to function in nation states.

Message mindfulness, just does not happen in hospitals and treatment facilities on a regular basis. Instead, for everyone’s safety, we get locked up a one size fits all system that forces us to behave in accordance with behavioral norms. If we comply, we may end up living in warehousing conditions, dependent on social security, and perhaps feel like cash cows. Something is foul in the state of Denmark!

Indeed, in the hospital we find ourselves locked up, stripped of our rights, and not even allowed to talk about what we are thinking about and going through. We must suppress what we are going through and act as if it doesn’t matter without becoming violent. Then we can get set free. It isn’t a great deal of help.

We get released unto a world where we must suppress our experiences enough to make a living and, in many cases, pull ourselves out of poverty. Maybe the family takes care of us and becomes responsible for figuring it out all on their own without any guidance. Maybe the family learns the social definition of the problem and the illness mindset and is able to control the situation utilizing warehousing or providing sanctuary. Ultimately this may lead to satisfying relationships, but it often does not.

The question becomes can we train people with the message mindfulness mindset and insert them into our institutions to improve the outcomes? Can we build this into our punitive system via changing the definition of psychosis one mind at a time?

The post How Message Mindfulness Can Help Change the Madness Within Our System! appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

Why I’m Not Sure I Trust All White People Who Bare Black Lives Matter Signs:

Many of us who face a sense of ostracism from our family and community of origin end up feeling like aliens. In the United States there are many divided people who might have this sense of alienation. Now while I see sprinklings of Black Lives Matter signs throughout my neighborhood, you might think I feel a sense of reckoning, of unity, or of a homecoming. While it does make me feel happy to see the signs, I’m still just not so sure I trust all white people who use them.

Finding Community in Black and Brown Communities:

Early in my life I learned to fight my sense of alienation by playing with kids who were younger, older, or profoundly different than me. In high school, I may have seemed to grow out of this on the outside, but inside the sense of alienation burned. When things went bad at the private school in which I was raised, I survived by moving into the inner city where a commuter college was located.

In communities of color, many neighborhood kids were curious welcoming and open. Sure, there were some adults with whom I had to persist, but once I earned acceptance, I found the sense of community to be less judgement and more righteous. I will never forget the intelligent outreach that individuals from the community did to help me feel included. They were there for me and accepted me, regardless.

The white world streamed in during the day and frequented under-the-table business to which I attached myself. Then, they were gone. One person, during my fifty-hour-a-week summer shifts, told me I was “down with the brown.” Another said they knew a local mechanic who was “flaco,” like me. To hear that I wasn’t alone and that I was okay, it is something for which I have been eternally grateful. Community doesn’t come easy for a young, male anorexic.

Balance through Medication And Professional Social Work:

When it came time to move on from this community and into the professional field of social work, I faced another crisis and started taking medication. When I responded to a Rorschach picture with a detailed Marxian analysis of power in society, they started me on a small dose of an anti-psychotic. Sure, I was binging and purging in fitful rages, but that was no longer what concerned them.

With that medication, I learned to suppress my sense of neighborhood justice and do what my supervisors said for years until I got my Masters Degree. I used that same sense of suppression to engage in the community of graduate students. I tried to make friends with other professionals.

When I graduated, I left it all behind and moved to the west coast to use my skills where no one had to know about my past. I worked only eight hours a day for the first time in my life.

I was doing it. I was building a community for myself.

I transferred into a pilot project at work that involved setting up services in a housing project that was dubbed the hotel of horrors, in the local media. That way I could give back to black and brown communities that supported me.

Things heated up that summer. There ended up being a political battle over management of the housing project. There was human and drug trafficking involved. I went off my antipsychotic medication. I was needing my sense of intuition back to protect me.

I Never Saw White Privilege Until I Lost It:

Years of surviving an extreme state of psychosis can also be an alienating experience. I did not believe aliens were real until I went through it. And I thought I had already been through a lot! But I really didn’t get it through my thick skull how much privilege I held until I came out of psychosis. Being without has a way of helping you see your privilege. In the end, I recognize that I did little but run back to my whiteness.

When I finally got it together to get hired back in social services, I was just returning to consensus reality. Back on medication, I could pretend I wasn’t being gangstalked by the mob. I could behave my way out of the persecution.

Paula a manager at the upscale Italian Deli where I had worked through my psychosis for almost a year, had a few words to say to me.

Paula had always been a professional and had never had an abusive word to say to me. It was true that she once had nearly got me fired via attesting for my nineteen-year-old supervisor that I looked stark raving mad and scary. Still, I kind of respected Paula.

Sure, she saw the young rich kids from Danville (a wealthy town) taunt, tease, and disrespect me. Sure, she acted like it was nothing. But she was a few years older than me and her non abusive, professional air had helped me survive the year of underemployment.

“Yeah I just feel bad for the ones who can’t go back to an opportunity to work a job like this,” she said.

These few words cut at me. It’s right what they say, you have to watch out for the quiet ones.

But Paula was right: if I acted the way I did and had black skin, I wouldn’t have made it at the Deli. I probably would have been killed for leaking information to the press. Years later with the strings of killings unveiled via I Phones, and plenty of abusive stories revealed to me as I conduct therapy in the inner city, it becomes clear to me how lucky I was to survive.

Living without my privilege was harder than I could ever have imagined. Being locked up as a vigilante mental health professional was profoundly traumatic. I had devoted my career to fighting mental health warehousing. I had ignored warnings this might happen to me if I persisted. I didn’t want to be paranoid. Now everyone treated me as though I was paranoid when I wasn’t.

I got confined to some neglected, dilapidated, and frigid wards at Montana State Hospital. Knowing about mental health warehousing the way I did, kept me from trusting the institution. I avoided institutional behavior and I knew what they were saying about me in the team meetings. I was entitled and protested it. I wrote complaints about my psychiatrist and social worker who refused to meet with me. I refused to take medication.

“One time we had a client come in here saying the FBI was after him and the FBI was really after him,” said the doctor when she finally met with me. “He hadn’t really done anything too bad, but the FBI was following him.” I had gone through a fever that felt like it was going to kill me and been unable to get aspirin the whole weekend because she hadn’t written the orders. I hadn’t trusted the old hag. My fellow inmates had all told me the mafia was after me.

Because my parents had called a missing-persons on me and supported the hospitalization, I had concluded that they were an Irish Mafia family and had concealed this from me growing up.

Once discharged, I really struggled to find work. I took a greyhound to California. I did finally get hired at a foster care agency. My family agreed to help only if I turned down the job and took a job at an Italian deli near my aunt in the bay area.

My uncle cosigned on an apartment in affordable Antioch California which was on the outskirts of the bay area. I could get to work with a mere ten-mile bike ride and hour-long BART commute. I had to keep my job and see a therapist and my family sent me monthly money so that I could afford to eat. At nine dollars an hour, I barely made the cost of my rent.

It took six months to get a car, nine months to agree to go back on medication and ten months to get a job back in social services. If that sounds easy, I assure you it wasn’t. I didn’t think things would ever get better for me for that short amount of time. I was learning what it felt like to be a label. It meant no references and no work.

While this did not feel like privilege while I was going through it, Paula was right, white privilege gave me the opportunity. There was no greater fear through any of the life-threatening things I endured, than the fear that I would return to an institutional life. I was disrespected and treated terribly because I looked like a deer trapped in a headlight. At least that was something I could overcome.

Alien View on White Privilege:

Losing privilege really helps one see how oppressive and hateful it is. I am constantly reminded of my loss of privilege every which hoop through which I jump.

For example, I believe the loneliest walk I ever had was the one I had before I got married eight years later.

My wife and I had wanted to elope but we decided to give my parents, especially my Mom, the celebration they wanted.

It was true my wife had done the majority of the planning. I worked longer hours and tended not to be able to slow down enough to take the lead. But I did participate in creating two parties, one for family and one for more public friends.

My mom arrived at the house I had just purchased with eight years of savings for the first time. I had worked for four years without a day off or vacation. I had wanted to show her around but she was in a tizzy and showed no interest. This hurt. We had needed to show the borrower that I had financial support, and my Mom had balked and protested about her role. My wives’ parents paid her back immediately, but somehow it really didn’t seem to be about the money.

When my father arrived, he insisted that I drop everything and plan a separate party for his family. He was clearly angry. I ended up being able to arrange it at a local pizza joint with informal seating. But I suppose I failed to read his mind. Of course, my wife couldn’t come as she had planned to connect with her friends. My oldest friend came out from back east along. He crashed his rental against my neighbors’ car as we rode to the pizza joint.

When the young child of my step sister was led forth with adult approval, she told me off for not bringing my wife. And, so, I wondered what the adults had been saying about me before I arrived. I really wasn’t sure this was true. Maybe I was just being paranoid. If I was right, I have to say it didn’t surprise me. It always seemed if my Dad was angry at me so was the rest of his kin.

I responded by trying to talk to an uncle. I had last talked to him in my days of madness, when I reached out to him. The only thing he said me back then was that my father was right about everything. He interviewed me for a few minutes and declared, “my god you actually seem to be better!”

And then my Dad insisted that I arrange for my mother and he to visit with my wife’s parents before the wedding the next day.  So, I couldn’t enjoy the party, I had to call my wife and set that up. But clearly the party wasn’t set up for me.

The next day after meeting with my wife’s parents, everyone left and I was left alone to fume for two hours before the wedding.

I took the walk with my dog who I rescued during my homelessness.

I hadn’t yet experienced smiling at my cousin to thank her for making the wedding and having her give me the dirtiest most disapproving face I couldn’t imagine. I hadn’t yet got yelled at by another uncle because I wore Chuck Taylor shoes with my suit. I hadn’t had my stepfather get drunk and talk about what a wealthy family he comes from; or my father and aunt get into a cat fight and curse each other out in front of the party. I hadn’t yet been interrupted the next morning by my aunt demanding that I allow her to do her skit at the public gathering.

I already felt so utterly alone and invisible to the world. I regretted that I couldn’t bring just bring my dog to the ceremony. She was my sense of community.

I have found that my reputation in the family has just gotten worse as time has worn on, particularly after I wrote my memoir. At one point, even my father acknowledged this. He said I had to be responsible to turn things around.

Sure, during that lonely walk I was replaying the experience of madness over in my head. Sure, that was part of my utter alienation. Sure, it went deep into my childhood when I didn’t seem to measure up to the person I was expected to be. But stigma and discrimination make it feel like nothing you do will ever be seen. It feels like they eternally expect the worst from you.

Privilege Seems to Replicate and Repeat its Hatred:

My efforts to find support in the white community have continued to fall flat outside the community of color from which I take my money. Oh, how I longed and prayed for an organized community of aliens like me. I believed if we schizophrenics could just work together, I could find my true community.

I finally came out as a mental health worker with lived experience at a conference. I told the county consumer manager about my history with psychosis. He said, “it’s too bad you never have experienced psychosis yourself!”

So went my introduction to the community consumer movement. I have heard many people of color say the consumer movement is an overwhelmingly white movement. Indeed, the conferences I have gone to replicate a sense of college that I never had. They make me feel very awkward and out of place.

I tried to gain the managers approval repeatedly. He left my emails unreturned and said to me, “Usually I try to be a good person, but I cannot always be.”

Later, in the work place, I faced discrimination. A group of powerful county employees suggested I was being a bad influence on a client who refused to take medication. They presumed that I am against medication. They suggested that because I was out with my own history, he was not taking his medication. It was irrational, but the whole table was there confronting me. There was nothing I could do. The one person who objected to what was happening, ended up getting written up for doing so. There was no one I could talk to. Shortly thereafter, my career was threatened. I got demoted.

The county consumer manager explained, “It’s just something interpersonal that doesn’t work between us.”

When I persisted, I got invited to join a group of which he was part. It was only then I learned that he and his gang was sharply against medication. I found myself repeatedly marginalized.

Years later after I barely managed to land on my feet, I joined a conversation with the consumer manager a fellow peer counselor at a conference. They admitted they were talking about me. I had just presented and neither had come to see me. “The thing about you, Tim, is that you can keep on going. You don’t need support.”

I realize that the manager is a UC Berkeley graduate and that some of the things I say come from the way I developed in the inner-city. I also realize that I am a psychotherapist and he may see me as part of the establishment. I really don’t otherwise understand why it’s been such a hurtful relationship to me. It’s really not his fault, but I continue to feel alienated.

Sometimes I feel like, for baby boomers like he and my parents, it all boils down to the fact that I went to school at a non-prestigious commuter school. Suddenly, I am automatically undervalued even though I achieved high honors.

I went from being told I could be anything I wanted to at private school to being told that the majority of us wouldn’t graduate. The career counseling office suggested I become a cop, not anything I wanted to be. Sometimes it feels like all I needed to do was have these experiences and I am permanently demoted in the eyes of others.

Indeed, other efforts to get support in the community are fraught with these kinds of barriers. Race, gender, prestige, socioeconomic status and so many other privilege isms are so woven into the fabric of the way we think about things, it leaves some of us to be hopeless aliens.

So often I have been rejected or judged by people I observe to have a sense of privilege.

I often feel like I lost privilege because I am not worthy. It often feels like other people pick up on this and replicate the procedure. I can keep going and persist, but I can hide this loss of privilege.

Oh, how I resent privilege. Each time I am undervalued, it opens up wounds.

It makes me forever wonder how a black person feels.

Being Aware of the Privilege and Racism that Lurks Within:

When I first moved into my neighborhood twelve years ago there was a campaign to save a local park and not build an integrated school. I decided then I wanted nothing to do with the underlying racist nimbyism. A Caucazoid neighbor tried to put a sign up on my property and I took it down. The whole neighborhood seemed to stand united. It seemed that no property didn’t have the sign up.

Now as I walk my dog through the neighborhood, I see a sprinkling of Black Lives Matter signs. There is an occasional sign that says End White Silence. Unfortunately, this does little to change my feelings of alienation. I still am not sure I want to be part of this insular suburban community.

One could argue at least my neighbors are waking up. Also, they are not all white. One could argue, I don’t have the signage up on my property.

I feel happy when I see the signs. However, to be honest I don’t necessarily trust white people who bare them. I question whether they are really doing the work they need to do.

I make the daily commute from my suburban neighborhood to Oakland where I work in the historical backward of the modern hospital. Most of the old widows are still bubbled and old. They were put up that way so onlookers couldn’t see the violence that happened therein. The clear windows are dusted with soot from the constructions of the new building. On the widow above my desk, there is such a spattering of soot you can barely see any California sun stream through.

I am proud of the work I do on this urban ward in which the majority culture is African American. I think a great deal of exposure to cultures of color have helped challenge the racism that lurks within. Every day I work on this. I believe the more aware I am of my privilege and racism, the better job I can do.

The community on this backward is the only community I have known. It’s what got me the money for a house. And now with COVID pandemic, the looming depression and the administrative restructuring, I cannot help but know that its days are numbered. It’s true, I may need to find new community very soon.

It does not change the feelings I have about my neighborhood and the liberal communities I was raised in that denounce racism.

The fact of the matter is I might have found myself to be, “down with the brown,” a few summers during my youth, I may know what it is like to be treated with suspicious looks for two years, and to be financially exploited by poverty, but black people face that kind of threat their whole lives. In fact, I have to watch out that I check my own racism. I vigilantly watch myself all the time.

Just as happens at the end of a long work day when I am feeling vulnerable and tired the thoughts from the generations of privilege that I come from enter my head. They tell me: I am no good; I am not smart enough; I work too slow; I am alienated from others; and I don’t deserve friends because I am weird. The sense of alienation comes back and I am like a different person.

Just as easy as that I can look the wrong way at a black person and trigger them. I have had so many black people nurture and give me a chance, and still I can do this to them.

I am tired of acting like I am not part of the problem. When I see a Black Lives Matter sign I feel happy. But I don’t feel I deserve to put one up on my property. I wonder if white people who bare them are really doing the work they need to do to end racism. It’s easy to hold up a sign and it is oh so much harder to lose privilege.

Protest, Privilege, Hypocrisy, And Waiting for the Great Alien Reckoning:

I can’t understand how anyone who has ever faced institutional abuse could ever feel free to go back into a protest. I remember the gangstalking police searches that destroy property, my employment mail violated, and my endless strings of failed job interviews, and I feel a need to protect myself.

I once told this to my step-mom, a private school teacher at the school I attended and a lifelong protester, that people who were locked up in institutions truly did not have the privilege to protest and how most of us know better.

Of course, she had only gotten mad and told dismissive stories about the good she was doing. However, she has also honored me enough to ask for advice with how to help her granddaughter who experienced psychosis and sexual abuse as a youth.

I once told her: “you know, what is really a shame about a schizophrenia diagnosis is that it denies people like us the opportunity to have a culture and community with each other. That is ultimately what we need, the chance to be there to support each other.

Oh, how my stepmother had fumed. Years later she told me her mother was a schizophrenic and attacked her with a knife.

Every effort I made to be there for her granddaughter never got anywhere.

A person I work with told me that she saw a group of white protesters out in East Oakland and one of her neighbors was yelling at them because there were no black people in the protest. We talked about how we both wanted to be out in the protests but didn’t want to be triggered back into the gangstalking days.

I sure am glad that we support each other. I sure wish she got paid for it the way I do. I think being a good social worker means owning your privilege and ending it!

I am preparing to lose my job and lose my privilege with love in my heart. Do white people baring the signage even understand what that means? Maybe some do.

I know change is around the corner. I am grateful to have been taken care of by black and brown people. That does give me hope. And there are times I successfully give back in spite of my privilege. Humanity sits on the edge of a massive reckoning. With the sense of impending doom, I pray for the sense of balance and community that social work has granted me.

And still I work, fight and pray that there might be a little alien community as well!

 

The post Why I’m Not Sure I Trust All White People Who Bare Black Lives Matter Signs: appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

Why I’m Not Sure I Trust White People Who Bare Black Lives Matter Signs:

Finding Community in Black and Brown Communities:

Many of us who face a sense of ostracism from our family and community of origin end up feeling like aliens. And these days, I wonder how other aliens feel when they see white people baring Black Lives Matter signs.

Early in my life I learned to fight my sense of alienation by playing with kids who were younger, older, or profoundly different than me. In high school, I may have seemed to grow out of this on the outside, but inside the sense of alienation burned. When things went bad at the private school in which I was raised, I survived by moving into the inner city where a commuter college was located.

In communities of color, many neighborhood kids were curious welcoming and open. Sure, there were some adults with whom I had to persist, but once I earned acceptance, I found the sense of community to be less judgement and more righteous. I will never forget the intelligent outreach that individuals from the community did to help me feel included. They were there for me and accepted me, regardless.

The white world streamed in during the day and frequented under-the-table business to which I attached myself. Then, they were gone. One person, during my fifty-hour-a-week summer shifts, told me I was “down with the brown.” Another said they knew a local mechanic who was “flaco,” like me. To hear that I wasn’t alone and that I was okay, it is something for which I have been eternally grateful. Community doesn’t come easy for a young, male anorexic.

Balance through Medication And Professional Social Work:

When it came time to move on from this community and into the professional field of social work, I faced another crisis and started taking medication. When I responded to a Rorschach picture with a detailed Marxian analysis of power in society, they started me on a small dose of an anti-psychotic. Sure, I was binging and purging in fitful rages, but that was no longer what concerned them.

With that medication, I learned to suppress my sense of neighborhood justice and do what my supervisors said for years until I got my Masters Degree. I used that same sense of suppression to engage in the community of graduate students. I tried to make friends with other professionals.

When I graduated, I left it all behind and moved to the west coast to use my skills where no one had to know about my past. I worked only eight hours a day for the first time in my life.

I was doing it. I was building a community for myself.

I transferred into a pilot project at work that involved setting up services in a housing project that was dubbed the hotel of horrors, in the local media. That way I could give back to black and brown communities that supported me.

Things heated up that summer. There ended up being a political battle over management of the housing project. There was human and drug trafficking involved. I went off my antipsychotic medication. I was needing my sense of intuition back to protect me.

I Never Saw White Privilege Until I Lost It:

Years of surviving an extreme state of psychosis can also be an alienating experience. I did not believe aliens were real until I went through it. And I thought I had already been through a lot! But I really didn’t get it through my thick skull how much privilege I held until I came out of psychosis. Being without has a way of helping you see your privilege. In the end, I recognize that I did little but run back to my whiteness.

When I finally got it together to get hired back in social services, I was just returning to consensus reality. Back on medication, I could pretend I wasn’t being gangstalked by the mob. I could behave my way out of the persecution.

Paula a manager at the upscale Italian Deli where I had worked through my psychosis for almost a year, had a few words to say to me.

Paula had always been a professional and had never had an abusive word to say to me. It was true that she once had nearly got me fired via attesting for my nineteen-year-old supervisor that I looked stark raving mad and scary. Still, I kind of respected Paula.

Sure, she saw the young rich kids from Danville (a wealthy town) taunt, tease, and disrespect me. Sure, she acted like it was nothing. But she was a few years older than me and her non abusive, professional air had helped me survive the year of underemployment.

“Yeah I just feel bad for the ones who can’t go back to an opportunity to work a job like this,” she said.

These few words cut at me. It’s right what they say, you have to watch out for the quiet ones.

But Paula was right: if I acted the way I did and had black skin, I wouldn’t have made it at the Deli. I probably would have been killed for leaking information to the press. Years later with the strings of killings unveiled via I Phones, and plenty of abusive stories revealed to me as I conduct therapy in the inner city, it becomes clear to me how lucky I was to survive.

Living without my privilege was harder than I could ever have imagined. Being locked up as a vigilante mental health professional was profoundly traumatic. I had devoted my career to fighting mental health warehousing. I had ignored warnings this might happen to me if I persisted. I didn’t want to be paranoid. Now everyone treated me as though I was paranoid when I wasn’t.

I got confined to some neglected, dilapidated, and frigid wards at Montana State Hospital. Knowing about mental health warehousing the way I did, kept me from trusting the institution. I avoided institutional behavior and I knew what they were saying about me in the team meetings. I was entitled and protested it. I wrote complaints about my psychiatrist and social worker who refused to meet with me. I refused to take medication.

“One time we had a client come in here saying the FBI was after him and the FBI was really after him,” said the doctor when she finally met with me. “He hadn’t really done anything too bad, but the FBI was following him.” I had gone through a fever that felt like it was going to kill me and been unable to get aspirin the whole weekend because she hadn’t written the orders. I hadn’t trusted the old hag. My fellow inmates had all told me the mafia was after me.

Because my parents had called a missing-persons on me and supported the hospitalization, I had concluded that they were an Irish Mafia family and had concealed this from me growing up.

Once discharged, I really struggled to find work. I took a greyhound to California. I did finally get hired at a foster care agency. My family agreed to help only if I turned down the job and took a job at an Italian deli near my aunt in the bay area.

My uncle cosigned on an apartment in affordable Antioch California which was on the outskirts of the bay area. I could get to work with a mere ten-mile bike ride and hour-long BART commute. I had to keep my job and see a therapist and my family sent me monthly money so that I could afford to eat. At nine dollars an hour, I barely made the cost of my rent.

It took six months to get a car, nine months to agree to go back on medication and ten months to get a job back in social services. If that sounds easy, I assure you it wasn’t. I didn’t think things would ever get better for me for that short amount of time. I was learning what it felt like to be a label. It meant no references and no work.

While this did not feel like privilege while I was going through it, Paula was right, white privilege gave me the opportunity. There was no greater fear through any of the life-threatening things I endured, than the fear that I would return to an institutional life. I was disrespected and treated terribly because I looked like a deer trapped in a headlight. At least that was something I could overcome.

Alien View on White Privilege:

Losing privilege really helps one see how oppressive and hateful it is. I am constantly reminded of my loss of privilege every which hoop through which I jump.

For example, I believe the loneliest walk I ever had was the one I had before I got married eight years later.

My wife and I had wanted to elope but we decided to give my parents, especially my Mom, the celebration they wanted.

It was true my wife had done the majority of the planning. I worked longer hours and tended not to be able to slow down enough to take the lead. But I did participate in creating two parties, one for family and one for more public friends.

My mom arrived at the house I had just purchased with eight years of savings for the first time. I had worked for four years without a day off or vacation. I had wanted to show her around but she was in a tizzy and showed no interest. This hurt. We had needed to show the borrower that I had financial support, and my Mom had balked and protested about her role. My wives’ parents paid her back immediately, but somehow it really didn’t seem to be about the money.

When my father arrived, he insisted that I drop everything and plan a separate party for his family. He was clearly angry. I ended up being able to arrange it at a local pizza joint with informal seating. But I suppose I failed to read his mind. Of course, my wife couldn’t come as she had planned to connect with her friends. My oldest friend came out from back east along. He crashed his rental against my neighbors’ car as we rode to the pizza joint.

When the young child of my step sister was led forth with adult approval, she told me off for not bringing my wife. And, so, I wondered what the adults had been saying about me before I arrived. I really wasn’t sure this was true. Maybe I was just being paranoid. If I was right, I have to say it didn’t surprise me. It always seemed if my Dad was angry at me so was the rest of his kin.

I responded by trying to talk to an uncle. I had last talked to him in my days of madness, when I reached out to him. The only thing he said me back then was that my father was right about everything. He interviewed me for a few minutes and declared, “my god you actually seem to be better!”

And then my Dad insisted that I arrange for my mother and he to visit with my wife’s parents before the wedding the next day.  So, I couldn’t enjoy the party, I had to call my wife and set that up. But clearly the party wasn’t set up for me.

The next day after meeting with my wife’s parents, everyone left and I was left alone to fume for two hours before the wedding.

I took the walk with my dog who I rescued during my homelessness.

I hadn’t yet experienced smiling at my cousin to thank her for making the wedding and having her give me the dirtiest most disapproving face I couldn’t imagine. I hadn’t yet got yelled at by another uncle because I wore Chuck Taylor shoes with my suit. I hadn’t had my stepfather get drunk and talk about what a wealthy family he comes from; or my father and aunt get into a cat fight and curse each other out in front of the party. I hadn’t yet been interrupted the next morning by my aunt demanding that I allow her to do her skit at the public gathering.

I already felt so utterly alone and invisible to the world. I regretted that I couldn’t bring just bring my dog to the ceremony. She was my sense of community.

I have found that my reputation in the family has just gotten worse as time has worn on, particularly after I wrote my memoir. At one point, even my father acknowledged this. He said I had to be responsible to turn things around.

Sure, during that lonely walk I was replaying the experience of madness over in my head. Sure, that was part of my utter alienation. Sure, it went deep into my childhood when I didn’t seem to measure up to the person I was expected to be. But stigma and discrimination make it feel like nothing you do will ever be seen. It feels like they eternally expect the worst from you.

Privilege Seems to Replicates and Repeat its Hatred:

My efforts to find support in the white community have continued to fall flat outside the community of color from which I take my money. Oh, how I longed and prayed for an organized community of aliens like me. I believed if we schizophrenics could just work together, I could find my true community.

I finally came out as a mental health worker with lived experience at a conference. I told the county consumer manager about my history with psychosis. He said, “it’s too bad you never have experienced psychosis yourself!”

So went my introduction to the community consumer movement. I have heard many people of color say the consumer movement is an overwhelmingly white movement. Indeed, the conferences I have gone to replicate a sense of college that I never had. They make me feel very awkward and out of place.

I tried to gain the managers approval repeatedly. He left my emails unreturned and said to me, “Usually I try to be a good person, but I cannot always be.”

Later, in the work place, I faced discrimination. A group of powerful county employees suggested I was being a bad influence on a client who refused to take medication. They presumed that I am against medication. They suggested that because I was out with my own history, he was not taking his medication. It was irrational, but the whole table was there confronting me. There was nothing I could do. The one person who objected to what was happening, ended up getting written up for doing so. There was no one I could talk to. Shortly thereafter, my career was threatened. I got demoted.

The county consumer manager explained, “It’s just something interpersonal that doesn’t work between us.”

When I persisted, I got invited to join a group of which he was part. It was only then I learned that he and his gang was sharply against medication. I found myself repeatedly marginalized.

Years later after I barely managed to land on my feet, I joined a conversation with the consumer manager a fellow peer counselor at a conference. They admitted they were talking about me. I had just presented and neither had come to see me. “The thing about you, Tim, is that you can keep on going. You don’t need support.”

I realize that the manager is a UC Berkeley graduate and that some of the things I say come from the way I developed in the inner-city. I also realize that I am a psychotherapist and he may see me as part of the establishment. I really don’t otherwise understand why it’s been such a hurtful relationship to me. It’s really not his fault, but I continue to feel alienated.

Sometimes I feel like, for baby boomers like he and my parents, it all boils down to the fact that I went to school at a non-prestigious commuter school. Suddenly, I am automatically undervalued even though I achieved high honors.

I went from being told I could be anything I wanted to at private school to being told that the majority of us wouldn’t graduate. The career counseling office suggested I become a cop, not anything I wanted to be. Sometimes it feels like all I needed to do was have these experiences and I am permanently demoted in the eyes of others.

Indeed, other efforts to get support in the community are fraught with these kinds of barriers. Race, gender, prestige, socioeconomic status and so many other privilege isms are so woven into the fabric of the way we think about things, it leaves some of us to be hopeless aliens.

So often I have been rejected or judged by people I observe to have a sense of privilege.

I often feel like I lost privilege because I am not worthy. It often feels like other people pick up on this and replicate the procedure. I can keep going and persist, but I can hide this loss of privilege.

Oh, how I resent privilege. Each time I am undervalued, it opens up wounds.

It makes me forever wonder how a black person feels.

Being Aware of the Privilege and Racism that Lurks Within:

When I first moved into my neighborhood twelve years ago there was a campaign to save a local park and not build an integrated school. I decided then I wanted nothing to do with the underlying racist nimbyism. A Caucazoid neighbor tried to put a sign up on my property and I took it down. The whole neighborhood seemed to stand united. It seemed that no property didn’t have the sign up.

Now as I walk my dog through the neighborhood, I see a sprinkling of Black Lives Matter signs. There is an occasional sign that says End White Silence. Unfortunately, this does little to change my feelings of alienation. I still am not sure I want to be part of this insular suburban community.

One could argue at least my neighbors are waking up. Also, they are not all white. One could argue, I don’t have the signage up on my property.

I feel happy when I see the signs. However, to be honest I don’t necessarily trust white people who bare them. I question whether they are really doing the work they need to do.

I make the daily commute from my suburban neighborhood to Oakland where I work in the historical backward of the modern hospital. Most of the old widows are still bubbled and old. They were put up that way so onlookers couldn’t see the violence that happened therein. The clear windows are dusted with soot from the constructions of the new building. On the widow above my desk, there is such a spattering of soot you can barely see any California sun stream through.

I am proud of the work I do on this urban ward in which the majority culture is African American. I think a great deal of exposure to cultures of color have helped challenge the racism that lurks within. Every day I work on this. I believe the more aware I am of my privilege and racism, the better job I can do.

The community on this backward is the only community I have known. It’s what got me the money for a house. And now with COVID pandemic, the looming depression and the administrative restructuring, I cannot help but know that its days are numbered. It’s true, I may need to find new community very soon.

It does not change the feelings I have about my neighborhood and the liberal communities I was raised in that denounce racism.

The fact of the matter is I might have found myself to be, “down with the brown,” a few summers during my youth, I may know what it is like to be treated with suspicious looks for two years, and to be financially exploited by poverty, but black people face that kind of threat their whole lives. In fact, I have to watch out that I check my own racism. I vigilantly watch myself all the time.

Just as happens at the end of a long work day when I am feeling vulnerable and tired the thoughts from the generations of privilege that I come from enter my head. They tell me: I am no good; I am not smart enough; I work too slow; I am alienated from others; and I don’t deserve friends because I am weird. The sense of alienation comes back and I am like a different person.

Just as easy as that I can look the wrong way at a black person and trigger them. I have had so many black people nurture and give me a chance, and still I can do this to them.

I am tired of acting like I am not part of the problem. When I see a Black Lives Matter sign I feel happy. But I don’t feel I deserve to put one up on my property. I wonder if white people who bare them are really doing the work they need to do to end racism. It’s easy to hold up a sign and it is oh so much harder to lose privilege.

Protest, Privilege, Hypocrisy, And Waiting for the Great Alien Reckoning:

I can’t understand how anyone who has ever faced institutional abuse could ever feel free to go back into a protest. I remember the gangstalking police searches that destroy property, my employment mail violated, and my endless strings of failed job interviews, and I feel a need to protect myself.

I once told this to my step-mom, a private school teacher at the school I attended and a lifelong protester, that people who were locked up in institutions truly did not have the privilege to protest and how most of us know better.

Of course, she had only gotten mad and told dismissive stories about the good she was doing. However, she has also honored me enough to ask for advice with how to help her granddaughter who experienced psychosis and sexual abuse as a youth.

I once told her: “you know, what is really a shame about a schizophrenia diagnosis is that it denies people like us the opportunity to have a culture and community with each other. That is ultimately what we need, the chance to be there to support each other.

Oh, how my stepmother had fumed. Years later she told me her mother was a schizophrenic and attacked her with a knife.

Every effort I made to be there for her granddaughter never got anywhere.

A person I work with told me that she saw a group of white protesters out in East Oakland and one of her neighbors was yelling at them because there were no black people in the protest. We talked about how we both wanted to be out in the protests but didn’t want to be triggered back into the gangstalking days.

I sure am glad that we support each other. I sure wish she got paid for it the way I do. I think being a good social worker means owning your privilege and ending it!

I am preparing to lose my job and lose my privilege with love in my heart. Do white people baring the signage even understand what that means? Maybe some do.

I know change is around the corner. I am grateful to have been taken care of by black and brown people. That does give me hope. And there are times I successfully give back in spite of my privilege. Humanity sits on the edge of a massive reckoning. With the sense of impending doom, I pray for the sense of balance and community that social work has granted me.

And still I work, fight and pray that there might be a little alien community as we

Finding Community in Black and Brown Communities:

Many of us who face a sense of ostracism from our family and community of origin end up feeling like aliens. And these days, I wonder how other aliens feel these days when they see white people baring Black Lives Matter signs.

Early in my life I learned to fight my sense of alienation by playing with kids who were younger, older, or profoundly different than me. In high school, I may have seemed to grow out of this on the outside, but inside the sense of alienation burned. When things went bad at the private school in which I was raised, I survived by moving into the inner city where a commuter college was located.

In communities of color, many neighborhood kids were curious welcoming and open. Sure, there were some adults with whom I had to persist, but once I earned acceptance, I found the sense of community to be less judgement and more righteous. I will never forget the intelligent outreach that individuals from the community did to help me feel included. They were there for me and accepted me, regardless.

The white world streamed in during the day and frequented under-the-table business to which I attached myself. Then, they were gone. One person, during my fifty-hour-a-week summer shifts, told me I was “down with the brown.” Another said they knew a local mechanic who was “flaco,” like me. To hear that I wasn’t alone and that I was okay, it is something for which I have been eternally grateful. Community doesn’t come easy for a young, male anorexic.

Balance through Medication And Professional Social Work:

When it came time to move on from this community and into the professional field of social work, I faced another crisis and started taking medication. When I responded to a Rorschach picture with a detailed Marxian analysis of power in society, they started me on a small dose of an antipsychotic. Sure, I was binging and purging in fitful rages, but that was no longer what concerned them.

With that medication, I learned to suppress my sense of neighborhood justice and do what my supervisors said for years until I got my Masters Degree. I used that same sense of suppression to engage in the community of graduate students. I tried to make friends with other professionals.

When I graduated, I left it all behind and moved to the west coast to use my skills where no one had to know about my past. I worked only eight hours a day for the first time in my life.

I was doing it. I was building a community for myself.

I transferred into a pilot project at work that involved setting up services in a housing project that was dubbed the hotel of horrors, in the local media. That way I could give back to black and brown communities that supported me.

Things heated up that summer. There ended up being a political battle over management of the housing project. There was human and drug trafficking involved. I went off my antipsychotic medication. I was needing my sense of intuition back to protect me.

I Never Saw White Privilege Until I Lost It:

Years of surviving an extreme state of psychosis can also be an alienating experience. I did not believe aliens were real until I went through it. And I thought I had already been through a lot! But I really didn’t get it through my thick skull how much privilege I held until I came out of psychosis. Being without has a way of helping you see your privilege. In the end, I recognize that I did little but run back to my whiteness.

When I finally got it together to get hired back in social services, I was just returning to consensus reality. Back on medication, I could pretend I wasn’t being gangstalked by the mob. I could behave my way out of the persecution.

Paula a manager at the upscale Italian Deli where I had worked through my psychosis for almost a year, had a few words to say to me.

Paula had always been a professional and had never had an abusive word to say to me. It was true that she once had nearly got me fired via attesting for my nineteen-year-old supervisor that I looked stark raving mad and scary. Still, I kind of respected Paula.

Sure, she saw the young rich kids from Danville (a wealthy town) taunt, tease, and disrespect me. Sure, she acted like it was nothing. But she was a few years older than me and her non abusive, professional air had helped me survive the year of underemployment.

“Yeah I just feel bad for the ones who can’t go back to an opportunity to work a job like this,” she said.

These few words cut at me. It’s right what they say, you have to watch out for the quiet ones.

But Paula was right: if I acted the way I did and had black skin, I wouldn’t have made it at the Deli. I probably would have been killed for leaking information to the press. Years later with the strings of killings unveiled via I Phones, and plenty of abusive stories revealed to me as I conduct therapy in the inner city, it becomes clear to me how lucky I was to survive.

Living without my privilege was harder than I could ever have imagined. Being locked up as a vigilante mental health professional was profoundly traumatic. I had devoted my career to fighting mental health warehousing. I had ignored warnings this might happen to me if I persisted. I didn’t want to be paranoid. Now everyone treated me as though I was paranoid when I wasn’t.

I got confined to some neglected, dilapidated, and frigid wards at Montana State Hospital. Knowing about mental health warehousing the way I did, kept me from trusting the institution. I avoided institutional behavior and I knew what they were saying about me in the team meetings. I was entitled and protested it. I wrote complaints about my psychiatrist and social worker who refused to meet with me. I refused to take medication.

“One time we had a client come in here saying the FBI was after him and the FBI was really after him,” said the doctor when she finally met with me. “He hadn’t really done anything too bad, but the FBI was following him.” I had gone through a fever that felt like it was going to kill me and been unable to get aspirin the whole weekend because she hadn’t written the orders. I hadn’t trusted the old hag. My fellow inmates had all told me the mafia was after me.

Because my parents had called a missing-persons on me and supported the hospitalization, I had concluded that they were an Irish Mafia family and had concealed this from me growing up.

Once discharged, I really struggled to find work. I took a greyhound to California. I did finally get hired at a foster care agency. My family agreed to help only if I turned down the job and took a job at an Italian deli near my aunt in the bay area.

My uncle cosigned on an apartment in affordable Antioch California which was on the outskirts of the bay area. I could get to work with a mere ten-mile bike ride and hour-long BART commute. I had to keep my job and see a therapist and my family sent me monthly money so that I could afford to eat. At nine dollars an hour, I barely made the cost of my rent.

It took six months to get a car, nine months to agree to go back on medication and ten months to get a job back in social services. If that sounds easy, I assure you it wasn’t. I didn’t think things would ever get better for me for that short amount of time. I was learning what it felt like to be a label. It meant no references and no work.

While this did not feel like privilege while I was going through it, Paula was right, white privilege gave me the opportunity. There was no greater fear through any of the life-threatening things I endured, than the fear that I would return to an institutional life. I was disrespected and treated terribly because I looked like a deer trapped in a headlight. At least that was something I could overcome.

Alien View on White Privilege:

Losing privilege really helps one see how oppressive and hateful it is. I am constantly reminded of my loss of privilege every which hoop through which I jump.

For example, I believe the loneliest walk I ever had was the one I had before I got married eight years later.

My wife and I had wanted to elope but we decided to give my parents, especially my Mom, the celebration they wanted.

It was true my wife had done the majority of the planning. I worked longer hours and tended not to be able to slow down enough to take the lead. But I did participate in creating two parties, one for family and one for more public friends.

My mom arrived at the house I had just purchased with eight years of savings for the first time. I had worked for four years without a day off or vacation. I had wanted to show her around but she was in a tizzy and showed no interest. This hurt. We had needed to show the borrower that I had financial support, and my Mom had balked and protested about her role. My wives’ parents paid her back immediately, but somehow it really didn’t seem to be about the money.

When my father arrived, he insisted that I drop everything and plan a separate party for his family. He was clearly angry. I ended up being able to arrange it at a local pizza joint with informal seating. But I suppose I failed to read his mind. Of course, my wife couldn’t come as she had planned to connect with her friends. My oldest friend came out from back east along. He crashed his rental against my neighbors’ car as we rode to the pizza joint.

When the young child of my step sister was led forth with adult approval, she told me off for not bringing my wife. And, so, I wondered what the adults had been saying about me before I arrived. I really wasn’t sure this was true. Maybe I was just being paranoid. If I was right, I have to say it didn’t surprise me. It always seemed if my Dad was angry at me so was the rest of his kin.

I responded by trying to talk to an uncle. I had last talked to him in my days of madness, when I reached out to him. The only thing he said me back then was that my father was right about everything. He interviewed me for a few minutes and declared, “my god you actually seem to be better!”

And then my Dad insisted that I arrange for my mother and he to visit with my wife’s parents before the wedding the next day.  So, I couldn’t enjoy the party, I had to call my wife and set that up. But clearly the party wasn’t set up for me.

The next day after meeting with my wife’s parents, everyone left and I was left alone to fume for two hours before the wedding.

I took the walk with my dog who I rescued during my homelessness.

I hadn’t yet experienced smiling at my cousin to thank her for making the wedding and having her give me the dirtiest most disapproving face I couldn’t imagine. I hadn’t yet got yelled at by another uncle because I wore Chuck Taylor shoes with my suit. I hadn’t had my stepfather get drunk and talk about what a wealthy family he comes from; or my father and aunt get into a cat fight and curse each other out in front of the party. I hadn’t yet been interrupted the next morning by my aunt demanding that I allow her to do her skit at the public gathering.

I already felt so utterly alone and invisible to the world. I regretted that I couldn’t bring just bring my dog to the ceremony. She was my sense of community.

I have found that my reputation in the family has just gotten worse as time has worn on, particularly after I wrote my memoir. At one point, even my father acknowledged this. He said I had to be responsible to turn things around.

Sure, during that lonely walk I was replaying the experience of madness over in my head. Sure, that was part of my utter alienation. Sure, it went deep into my childhood when I didn’t seem to measure up to the person I was expected to be. But stigma and discrimination make it feel like nothing you do will ever be seen. It feels like they eternally expect the worst from you.

Privilege Seems to Replicates and Repeat its Hatred:

My efforts to find support in the white community have continued to fall flat outside the community of color from which I take my money. Oh, how I longed and prayed for an organized community of aliens like me. I believed if we schizophrenics could just work together, I could find my true community.

I finally came out as a mental health worker with lived experience at a conference. I told the county consumer manager about my history with psychosis. He said, “it’s too bad you never have experienced psychosis yourself!”

So went my introduction to the community consumer movement. I have heard many people of color say the consumer movement is an overwhelmingly white movement. Indeed, the conferences I have gone to replicate a sense of college that I never had. They make me feel very awkward and out of place.

I tried to gain the managers approval repeatedly. He left my emails unreturned and said to me, “Usually I try to be a good person, but I cannot always be.”

Later, in the work place, I faced discrimination. A group of powerful county employees suggested I was being a bad influence on a client who refused to take medication. They presumed that I am against medication. They suggested that because I was out with my own history, he was not taking his medication. It was irrational, but the whole table was there confronting me. There was nothing I could do. The one person who objected to what was happening, ended up getting written up for doing so. There was no one I could talk to. Shortly thereafter, my career was threatened. I got demoted.

The county consumer manager explained, “It’s just something interpersonal that doesn’t work between us.”

When I persisted, I got invited to join a group of which he was part. It was only then I learned that he and his gang was sharply against medication. I found myself repeatedly marginalized.

Years later after I barely managed to land on my feet, I joined a conversation with the consumer manager a fellow peer counselor at a conference. They admitted they were talking about me. I had just presented and neither had come to see me. “The thing about you, Tim, is that you can keep on going. You don’t need support.”

I realize that the manager is a UC Berkeley graduate and that some of the things I say come from the way I developed in the inner-city. I also realize that I am a psychotherapist and he may see me as part of the establishment. I really don’t otherwise understand why it’s been such a hurtful relationship to me. It’s really not his fault, but I continue to feel alienated.

Sometimes I feel like, for baby boomers like he and my parents, it all boils down to the fact that I went to school at a non-prestigious commuter school. Suddenly, I am automatically undervalued even though I achieved high honors.

I went from being told I could be anything I wanted to at private school to being told that the majority of us wouldn’t graduate. The career counseling office suggested I become a cop, not anything I wanted to be. Sometimes it feels like all I needed to do was have these experiences and I am permanently demoted in the eyes of others.

Indeed, other efforts to get support in the community are fraught with these kinds of barriers. Race, gender, prestige, socioeconomic status and so many other privilege isms are so woven into the fabric of the way we think about things, it leaves some of us to be hopeless aliens.

So often I have been rejected or judged by people I observe to have a sense of privilege.

I often feel like I lost privilege because I am not worthy. It often feels like other people pick up on this and replicate the procedure. I can keep going and persist, but I can hide this loss of privilege.

Oh, how I resent privilege. Each time I am undervalued, it opens up wounds.

It makes me forever wonder how a black person feels.

Being Aware of the Privilege and Racism that Lurks Within:

When I first moved into my neighborhood twelve years ago there was a campaign to save a local park and not build an integrated school. I decided then I wanted nothing to do with the underlying racist nimbyism. A Caucazoid neighbor tried to put a sign up on my property and I took it down. The whole neighborhood seemed to stand united. It seemed that no property didn’t have the sign up.

Now as I walk my dog through the neighborhood, I see a sprinkling of Black Lives Matter signs. There is an occasional sign that says End White Silence. Unfortunately, this does little to change my feelings of alienation. I still am not sure I want to be part of this insular suburban community.

One could argue at least my neighbors are waking up. Also, they are not all white. One could argue, I don’t have the signage up on my property.

I feel happy when I see the signs. However, to be honest I don’t necessarily trust white people who bare them. I question whether they are really doing the work they need to do.

I make the daily commute from my suburban neighborhood to Oakland where I work in the historical backward of the modern hospital. Most of the old widows are still bubbled and old. They were put up that way so onlookers couldn’t see the violence that happened therein. The clear windows are dusted with soot from the constructions of the new building. On the widow above my desk, there is such a spattering of soot you can barely see any California sun stream through.

I am proud of the work I do on this urban ward in which the majority culture is African American. I think a great deal of exposure to cultures of color have helped challenge the racism that lurks within. Every day I work on this. I believe the more aware I am of my privilege and racism, the better job I can do.

The community on this backward is the only community I have known. It’s what got me the money for a house. And now with COVID pandemic, the looming depression and the administrative restructuring, I cannot help but know that its days are numbered. It’s true, I may need to find new community very soon.

It does not change the feelings I have about my neighborhood and the liberal communities I was raised in that denounce racism.

The fact of the matter is I might have found myself to be, “down with the brown,” a few summers during my youth, I may know what it is like to be treated with suspicious looks for two years, and to be financially exploited by poverty, but black people face that kind of threat their whole lives. In fact, I have to watch out that I check my own racism. I vigilantly watch myself all the time.

Just as happens at the end of a long work day when I am feeling vulnerable and tired the thoughts from the generations of privilege that I come from enter my head. They tell me: I am no good; I am not smart enough; I work too slow; I am alienated from others; and I don’t deserve friends because I am weird. The sense of alienation comes back and I am like a different person.

Just as easy as that I can look the wrong way at a black person and trigger them. I have had so many black people nurture and give me a chance, and still I can do this to them.

I am tired of acting like I am not part of the problem. When I see a Black Lives Matter sign I feel happy. But I don’t feel I deserve to put one up on my property. I wonder if white people who bare them are really doing the work they need to do to end racism. It’s easy to hold up a sign and it is oh so much harder to lose privilege.

Protest, Privilege, Hypocrisy, And Waiting for the Great Alien Reckoning:

I can’t understand how anyone who has ever faced institutional abuse could ever feel free to go back into a protest. I remember the gangstalking police searches that destroy property, my employment mail violated, and my endless strings of failed job interviews, and I feel a need to protect myself.

I once told this to my step-mom, a private school teacher at the school I attended and a lifelong protester, that people who were locked up in institutions truly did not have the privilege to protest and how most of us know better.

Of course, she had only gotten mad and told dismissive stories about the good she was doing. However, she has also honored me enough to ask for advice with how to help her granddaughter who experienced psychosis and sexual abuse as a youth.

I once told her: “you know, what is really a shame about a schizophrenia diagnosis is that it denies people like us the opportunity to have a culture and community with each other. That is ultimately what we need, the chance to be there to support each other.

Oh, how my stepmother had fumed. Years later she told me her mother was a schizophrenic and attacked her with a knife.

Every effort I made to be there for her granddaughter never got anywhere.

A person I work with told me that she saw a group of white protesters out in East Oakland and one of her neighbors was yelling at them because there were no black people in the protest. We talked about how we both wanted to be out in the protests but didn’t want to be triggered back into the gangstalking days.

I sure am glad that we support each other. I sure wish she got paid for it the way I do. I think being a good social worker means owning your privilege and ending it!

I am preparing to lose my job and lose my privilege with love in my heart. Do white people baring the signage even understand what that means? Maybe some do.

I know change is around the corner. I am grateful to have been taken care of by black and brown people. That does give me hope. And there are times I successfully give back in spite of my privilege. Humanity sits on the edge of a massive reckoning. With the sense of impending doom, I pray for the sense of balance and community that social work has granted me.

And still I work, fight and pray that there might be a little alien community as well!

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