Clyde Dee's Blog, page 5

Accepting Beacon, Magellan, Optum, and Medi-Cal

Now Accepting Beacon, Magellan, Medi-Cal, and Optum Insurance
Open for Business






































































Name & Business: Tim Dreby, MFT

Contact Email: tim@specialmessages7.com

Contact Phone :510-778-9194

Website: www.timdreby.com

Licensed in the State of CA (Y/N/NA)? Yes

Clinical Licenses or Certificates: LMFT #45563

Willing to Work Via Videoconference? Yes, on the secure doxy.me platform

Able to provide support with minimal use of medications, including tapering or discontinuation (Y/N)? Yes

Familiarity with the Hearing Voices Movement (Y/N)? Yes

Experience working with children 14 and younger (Y/N)? SomeBackground or Prior Training in Psychosis:

I have 25 years experience working in community mental health and two years of lived experience living with psychosis. For the last twelve years I have been running professional groups that involve exploring psychosis across diagnostic categories in a collaborative manner. From these experiences I have developed a six-hour training for professional to help teach them to accept and explore psychosis. Moreover, I am the award-winning author of a memoir detailing my own experience.Current Approach to Psychosis:

I have formulated my own system to address  those in emergency. This is based on redefining psychosis into eight solvable components. While I have learned that people who endure what I like to call a special message emergency are extremely culturally diverse, I also have identified eight constructs to which I find most message receivers can relate.. I like to think these constructs form the basis of might be our own inclusive culture. They encourage explorations and detail skills that can be gained to lead the kind of lives we choose. I don’t believe in dividing up message receivers and excluding some. I believe we have enough collective experiences with being excluded already. In fact I find many people who experience trauma and other marginalizing circumstances often relate and learn from message receiving experiences.

Insurance and Fee Structure: Beacan, Magellan, Medi-Cal, and Optum. I keep my fee low to be accessible to those with limited resources.






























Dont Forget to Inquire About My Training for Professional and Family Members!

I Provide Training of a variety of lengths

Limitations of the Medical Model Definintion
The Jargon of a new definition with solution concepts
Joining
Flexing
Behavioral changes
Anti-Stigma Cognition
Reframing Reality
Using the Material
Writing meaningful Treatment Plans

I will waive my fee to market my services to the community





























Find Out More

The post Accepting Beacon, Magellan, Optum, and Medi-Cal appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

How “Psychosis” Can Lead to Intuitive Knowledge and Connection to Spirit:

Consensus Reality and Psychosis (or Special Message) Reality:

I believe there are a lot of errors among those who remain in consensus reality. I mean it is quite clear when we in the United States consider that different cultures have different consensus realities that there are errors in any reality. Look at Fox News verses MSNBC, realize they are reporting on the same events and you get a feel for the way consensus reality must have errors in it. I mean how can both diametrically opposed viewpoints be true at the same time.

We all learn to accept a consensus reality in spite of errors. There are different people embedded in different cultures. Sometimes we fight and kill each other. Sometimes we get along. And sometimes we put people in concentration camps like jails, prisons, psychiatric hospitals, shelters, public housing authorities, and board and care homes. Sometimes we maintain entitlements of the few by suspending the rights of others.

I say these things because I think it is important for more people to accept psychosis reality or what I prefer to call special message reality even though there can be occasional errors much as there are with different forms of consensus reality

Indeed, I am going to argue that in reality special message reality is a part of many of our lives. If we all understood what it was, many would agree that it is a significant part of reality. Instead we think it is a magical medical brain defect.

Managing special message reality is tricky especially when we are told it is not real.

To get along with others, however, we must respect that it has to be suppressed and behaviorally managed. Much as diametrically opposed cultures that hate each other need to somehow understand each other enough in order to coexist, special message reality needs to be accepted, balanced, and integrated with the modern material world to move forward.

When this happens, I am going to argue, a person can be the recipient of intuitive knowledge and have a sense of connection to spirit. Instead, consensus reality is balanced via a state of misinformation and global delusion.

What Happens to Special Message Reality in an Emergency State:

Many people object to the process by which someone receives their information when they are in madness. I believe that this is because in an emergency state, message receivers believe absolutely in their special message experiences. They may not honor the basic tenants of survival to which we all agree. They may break various forms of social contracts in ways that scare many.

However, regardless of many peoples’ objection to how that information was obtained, there are many ways that “psychotic,” special message information is correct when consensus reality is not. It does not take long periods of psychosis for a message receiver to realize this is true once they’ve experienced psychosis. Too many people don’t realize that special message reality can be accurate. Some do, but just don’t know what to do about it.

Perhaps this is because when a person is in psychosis, many loved ones and supporters tend to disbelieve their experience because it doesn’t fit with their cultural sense of consensus reality. It becomes very clear that things the message receiver knows to be true will automatically be denied or ignored.

Sure, there can be some things the message receiver believes to be true that aren’t. But I believe that most message receivers in the early stages of a break, can tell the difference between something they know for sure verses something that is less certain.

What happens in a crisis is that the message receiver gains the experience of having their less certain beliefs confirmed to be accurate. Then, message receivers become absolute believers in all their messages. Often, many established forms of mental health treatment complete this cycle via protocol.

Once this happens enough, message receivers may need help and support to change from being absolute believers in all their message experiences to being skeptical believers. If the message experiences magically stop, they are not forgotten and it takes time to heal them.

If our loved ones and supporters know how to relate to us with respect for special message reality, they can help us return from being absolute believers, to more skeptical believers over time. Then we can learn to adjust to erroneous forms of consensus reality enough to survive. Often times, loved ones and supporters do not have any interest or understanding of our experiences.

Learning ways Special Message Reality Is Correct and Ways it Isn’t:

I have been working on defining the ways that people in psychosis or special messages emergency derive their information from experiences. Twelve years ago, I coined the term special messages which are the collection of experiences that lead to psychosis reality.

Many of those experiences lead to what I have chosen to call divergent views. When divergent views are expressed people start to get concerned about their accuracy. When a divergent view proves itself to be wrong, we call it the “D” word, delusion. Consensus people wonder why the person can see that it is an error the way we do.

Yes, some divergent views are wrong, but many aren’t.

For example, consensus reality suggests it is safe to talk on the phone and to walk naked in out private space without worrying about being caught on camera. If not for whistleblowers and wanted fugitives like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, the public would not know that consensus reality is actually incorrect about this.

In fact, we are not granted those civil liberties. If we get upset about that, we may struggle with anti-government sentiments. If we cannot behave as if we are not bothered by these realities, we may get targeted.

In other words, when you are naked, and mad at the government, do not glare into your television, say you hate the president and give the camera within it the finger. If you use the right key word, you may get surveyed, for real.

An Example of How Special Messages Lead to the “D” Word:

When I was in special message crisis, I was submerged with evidence of these realities. Although I thought the cameras were in my lights, not my television, it was clear to me that I was under surveillance.

My distress about being surveyed showed in my tortured, illuminati pupils and in many comments I made. Until I learned to suppress those realities, accept the state of my civil liberties, and shoulder the violence of police searches, haphazard community harassment, and my business mail being opened, I was not able to behave appropriately in consensus reality. When I learned to explain all this by calling myself a schizophrenic and concealing it all, I moved on.

What I did was suppress those realities and wait. I got a job in my field, mental health, and I saved my money. Eventually, thanks to wanted fugitives, I was able to learn that myself and many other targeted individuals are in fact more correct than consensus reality.

I learned to pretend it wasn’t so. Eventually, with the help of God, reality was revealed to me. I was, to a certain extent, correct.

There are still many ways my special message experiences are correct. Still, I have to recognize that I must behave as if they aren’t correct and work towards outcomes that lead to my survival. Then when the time comes, I will find out if I am correct or if the divergent views I have are, in fact, incorrect.

Ultimately, there were a few ways that I was incorrect. For example, I thought my father was covertly the head of an Irish Mafia Organization that was responsible for victimizing people in the streets. I thought everyone knew this and was compliant with scapegoating me.

While it was true the genetic tests did reveal that we were unwittingly and predominantly Irish, just as I thought—I was also inaccurate. To understand the ways it is true, the consensus reality supporter needs to know my traumatic history and how I was struggling to escape that history. Then, much of it makes sense.

Of course, I didn’t have any supporters.

Assessing Connection to Higher Powers Over Time:

In many cases I believe the message receiver is obtaining some sort of intuitive knowledge coming from a higher spiritual power or realm. If we train people who are in psychosis, how to have a high level of emotional intelligence and faith, I believe they can learn to assess special messages for intuitive reality and become truer beholders of reality than Fox and MSNBC news combined.

Toward a Definition of Reality that Includes Special Message Reality:

It is arguable that there are many dimensions of reality. Indeed, there are quite a few different subjective perspectives in the world, making the notion of ultimate reality very hard to pin down.

However, in studying special messages in group therapy I have tended to divide the world into two kinds of reality: material world; and special message reality. Defining each feels like differentiating my inward world from my life in the modern world.

 

Ultimately, I wonder if most of us can relate to both kinds of reality. Is it possible that the special message reality that dominated my life during my emergency is something to which anyone can relate?differentiating inward beliefs against the ones that I must engage in to maintain my professional life.

Indeed, I believe we all have special message experiences like intuition, dreams, and interpersonal perception. Not all of us have lived in an emergency in which we are immersed.

and profoundly preoccupied with these, but many of us have.

Additionally, there are other types of special message experience. Add phenomena like voices, premonitions, strange experiences with the television, telepathy, punny linguistic codes, to the more common special message experiences and emergency gets intense.

Perhaps, some people are graced with more of these experiences than others. For that reason, they have to learn to behave as if they don’t know when in some cases they do.

In the theory of reality that I have presented on the slide above, survival is a mix of both types of reality. Science is limited by paradigms that don’t explain everything and good mental and physical health is based on having our physiological, social, and meaningful activity needs met.

Thus, most engage in the modern, material world for mental health. Then, those of us who care about reality engage in the spiritual/message world to check and see if we are doing so in a way that is giving and loving to others.

The Reality for Those Who Are Neurodiverse:

What I argue, is that for message receivers who may be born with spiritual genes, generational trauma, or neurodevelopmental diversity primarily engage in the spiritual message world. Then, if they care about reality, they have the option of engaging in the modern material world to avoid concentration camps and homelessness. Sometimes family support helps.

How Do We Know What Is Real?

It’s true that in the paradigms of western psychology there is often thought to be emotions, cognition, and behavior. Essentially, like dumbass Freud and Carl Jung, I am simply arguing there is another category. Instead of calling it unconscious or collective unconscious, I am calling it extra sensory perception, spiritual contact, or special messages. It’s really not that complicated. We consensus reality western cowboys just have to acknowledge that we all have different degrees of special messages contact.

If we want to understand our reality, we need to check what we have going for us with the opposite theory of reality. Over time with emotional intelligence and faith we will learn what areas of our experience fit into both the spiritual and the profane world. The parts of our experience that fit both areas is the closest we can come to our reality or god.

Instead of seeing people who are different as sick and defective and rejecting and supporting the genocide against them, we need to partner with them and learn more about their special message experiences so we can all have a real experience. I don’t think this is rocket science, but it’s not likely to happen because things like superiority and privilege are so hard for so many with which to part.

Towards a More Dual Society:

So, many people need to get their ass to spirit and a few of the 1 percent and the bulk of those in poverty need to get their asses into more fitting relationships with the modern world. A good and peaceful society would make it possible to balance these realities. There would be good work/life balance and enough finances for all.

A bad society would amass power and use it to suppress its dissidents, veterans, incarcerated, and diverse-immigrant-worker-peoples-of-color into concentration camps. In my perspective the United States concentration camps exist in things like jails, prisons, mental hospitals, shelters, homeless encampments, or various forms of lawless, unregulated, public-housing-poor-houses. Of course, that is a generalization as not all such situations are that bad, but still. Future, conspiracy theorists predict that these concentration camps will be transformed into the red and blue rooms in Walmart. It’s already like that to some extent, but it could get much worse.

The question comes down to which pill you choose to take: the red pill or the blue?

In this world we call the matrix the red leads to the incorrigible Walmart rooms, and the mass incarceration industry,

In reality, if we want a peaceful, equitable, and spiritually healthy society, we all need to take both pills.

So, I don’t know what we’re going to do as the corona depression hits; not really.

The post How “Psychosis” Can Lead to Intuitive Knowledge and Connection to Spirit: appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

How “Psychosis” Can Lead to Intuitive Knowledge and Connection to God:

Consensus Reality and Psychosis (or Special Message) Reality:

I believe there are a lot of errors among those who remain in consensus reality. I mean it is quite clear when we in the United States consider that different cultures have different consensus realities that there are errors in any reality. Look at Fox News verses MSNBC, realize they are reporting on the same events and you get a feel for the way consensus reality must have errors in it. I mean how can both diametrically opposed viewpoints be true at the same time.

We all learn to accept a consensus reality in spite of errors. There are different people embedded in different cultures. Sometimes we fight and kill each other. Sometimes we get along. And sometimes we put people in concentration camps like jails, prisons, psychiatric hospitals, shelters, public housing authorities, and board and care homes. Sometimes we maintain entitlements of the few by suspending the rights of others.

I say these things because I think it is important for more people to accept psychosis reality or what I prefer to call special message reality even though there can be occasional errors much as there are with different forms of consensus reality

Indeed, I am going to argue that in reality special message reality is a part of many of our lives. If we all understood what it was, many would agree that it is a significant part of reality. Instead we think it is a magical medical brain defect.

Managing special message reality is tricky especially when we are told it is not real.

To get along with others, however, we must respect that it has to be suppressed and behaviorally managed. Much as diametrically opposed cultures that hate each other need to somehow understand each other enough in order to coexist, special message reality needs to be accepted, balanced, and integrated with the modern material world to move forward.

When this happens, I am going to argue, a person can be the recipient of intuitive knowledge and have a sense of connection to god. Instead, consensus reality is balanced via a state of misinformation and global delusion.

What Happens to Special Message Reality in an Emergency State:

Many people object to the process by which someone receives their information when they are in madness. I believe that this is because in an emergency state, message receivers believe absolutely in their special message experiences. They may not honor the basic tenants of survival to which we all agree. They may break various forms of social contracts in ways that scare many.

However, regardless of many peoples’ objection to how that information was obtained, there are many ways that “psychotic,” special message information is correct when consensus reality is not. It does not take long periods of psychosis for a message receiver to realize this is true once they’ve experienced psychosis. Too many people don’t realize that special message reality can be accurate. Some do, but just don’t know what to do about it.

Perhaps this is because when a person is in psychosis, many loved ones and supporters tend to disbelieve their experience because it doesn’t fit with their cultural sense of consensus reality. It becomes very clear that things the message receiver knows to be true will automatically be denied or ignored.

Sure, there can be some things the message receiver believes to be true that aren’t. But I believe that most message receivers in the early stages of a break, can tell the difference between something they know for sure verses something that is less certain.

What happens in a crisis is that the message receiver gains the experience of having their less certain beliefs confirmed to be accurate. Then, message receivers become absolute believers in all their messages. Often, many established forms of mental health treatment complete this cycle via protocol.

Once this happens enough, message receivers may need help and support to change from being absolute believers in all their message experiences to being skeptical believers. If the message experiences magically stop, they are not forgotten and it takes time to heal them.

If our loved ones and supporters know how to relate to us with respect for special message reality, they can help us return from being absolute believers, to more skeptical believers over time. Then we can learn to adjust to erroneous forms of consensus reality enough to survive. Often times, loved ones and supporters do not have any interest or understanding of our experiences.

Learning ways Special Message Reality Is Correct and Ways it Isn’t:

I have been working on defining the ways that people in psychosis or special messages emergency derive their information from experiences. Twelve years ago, I coined the term special messages which are the collection of experiences that lead to psychosis reality.

Many of those experiences lead to what I have chosen to call divergent views. When divergent views are expressed people start to get concerned about their accuracy. When a divergent view proves itself to be wrong, we call it the “D” word, delusion. Consensus people wonder why the person can see that it is an error the way we do.

Yes, some divergent views are wrong, but many aren’t.

For example, consensus reality suggests it is safe to talk on the phone and to walk naked in out private space without worrying about being caught on camera. If not for whistleblowers and wanted fugitives like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, the public would not know that consensus reality is actually incorrect about this.

In fact, we are not granted those civil liberties. If we get upset about that, we may struggle with anti-government sentiments. If we cannot behave as if we are not bothered by these realities, we may get targeted.

In other words, when you are naked, and mad at the government, do not glare into your television, say you hate the president and give the camera within it the finger. If you use the right key word, you may get surveyed, for real.

An Example of How Special Messages Lead to the “D” Word:

When I was in special message crisis, I was submerged with evidence of these realities. Although I thought the cameras were in my lights, not my television, it was clear to me that I was under surveillance.

My distress about being surveyed showed in my tortured, illuminati pupils and in many comments I made. Until I learned to suppress those realities, accept the state of my civil liberties, and shoulder the violence of police searches, haphazard community harassment, and my business mail being opened, I was not able to behave appropriately in consensus reality. When I learned to explain all this by calling myself a schizophrenic and concealing it all, I moved on.

What I did was suppress those realities and wait. I got a job in my field, mental health, and I saved my money. Eventually, thanks to wanted fugitives, I was able to learn that myself and many other targeted individuals are in fact more correct than consensus reality.

I learned to pretend it wasn’t so. Eventually, with the help of God, reality was revealed to me. I was, to a certain extent, correct.

There are still many ways my special message experiences are correct. Still, I have to recognize that I must behave as if they aren’t correct and work towards outcomes that lead to my survival. Then when the time comes, I will find out if I am correct or if the divergent views I have are, in fact, incorrect.

Ultimately, there were a few ways that I was incorrect. For example, I thought my father was covertly the head of an Irish Mafia Organization that was responsible for victimizing people in the streets. I thought everyone knew this and was compliant with scapegoating me.

While it was true the genetic tests did reveal that we were unwittingly and predominantly Irish, just as I thought—I was also inaccurate. To understand the ways it is true, the consensus reality supporter needs to know my traumatic history and how I was struggling to escape that history. Then, much of it makes sense.

Of course, I didn’t have any supporters.

Assessing Connection to Higher Powers Over Time:

In many cases I believe the message receiver is obtaining some sort of intuitive knowledge coming from a higher spiritual power or realm. If we train people who are in psychosis, how to have a high level of emotional intelligence and faith, I believe they can learn to assess special messages for intuitive reality and become truer beholders of reality than Fox and MSNBC news combined.

Toward a Definition of Reality that Includes Special Message Reality:

It is arguable that there are many dimensions of reality. Indeed, there are quite a few different subjective perspectives in the world, making the notion of ultimate reality very hard to pin down.

However, in studying special messages in group therapy I have tended to divide the world into two kinds of reality: material world; and special message reality. Defining each feels like differentiating my inward world from my life in the modern world.

 

Ultimately, I wonder if most of us can relate to both kinds of reality. Is it possible that the special message reality that dominated my life during my emergency is something to which anyone can relate?differentiating inward beliefs against the ones that I must engage in to maintain my professional life.

Indeed, I believe we all have special message experiences like intuition, dreams, and interpersonal perception. Not all of us have lived in an emergency in which we are immersed.

and profoundly preoccupied with these, but many of us have.

Additionally, there are other types of special message experience. Add phenomena like voices, premonitions, strange experiences with the television, telepathy, punny linguistic codes, to the more common special message experiences and emergency gets intense.

Perhaps, some people are graced with more of these experiences than others. For that reason, they have to learn to behave as if they don’t know when in some cases they do.

In the theory of reality that I have presented on the slide above, survival is a mix of both types of reality. Science is limited by paradigms that don’t explain everything and good mental and physical health is based on having our physiological, social, and meaningful activity needs met.

Thus, most engage in the modern, material world for mental health. Then, those of us who care about reality engage in the spiritual/message world to check and see if we are doing so in a way that is giving and loving to others.

The Reality for Those Who Are Neurodiverse:

What I argue, is that for message receivers who may be born with spiritual genes, generational trauma, or neurodevelopmental diversity primarily engage in the spiritual message world. Then, if they care about reality, they have the option of engaging in the modern material world to avoid concentration camps and homelessness. Sometimes family support helps.

How Do We Know What Is Real?

It’s true that in the paradigms of western psychology there is often thought to be emotions, cognition, and behavior. Essentially, like dumbass Freud and Carl Jung, I am simply arguing there is another category. Instead of calling it unconscious or collective unconscious, I am calling it extra sensory perception, spiritual contact, or special messages. It’s really not that complicated. We consensus reality western cowboys just have to acknowledge that we all have different degrees of special messages contact.

If we want to understand our reality, we need to check what we have going for us with the opposite theory of reality. Over time with emotional intelligence and faith we will learn what areas of our experience fit into both the spiritual and the profane world. The parts of our experience that fit both areas is the closest we can come to our reality or god.

Instead of seeing people who are different as sick and defective and rejecting and supporting the genocide against them, we need to partner with them and learn more about their special message experiences so we can all have a real experience. I don’t think this is rocket science, but it’s not likely to happen because things like superiority and privilege are so hard for so many with which to part.

Towards a More Dual Society:

So, many people need to get their ass to spirit and a few of the 1 percent and the bulk of those in poverty need to get their asses into more fitting relationships with the modern world. A good and peaceful society would make it possible to balance these realities. There would be good work/life balance and enough finances for all.

A bad society would amass power and use it to suppress its dissidents, veterans, incarcerated, and diverse-immigrant-worker-peoples-of-color into concentration camps. In my perspective the United States concentration camps exist in things like jails, prisons, mental hospitals, shelters, homeless encampments, or various forms of lawless, unregulated, public-housing-poor-houses. Of course, that is a generalization as not all such situations are that bad, but still. Future, conspiracy theorists predict that these concentration camps will be transformed into the red and blue rooms in Walmart. It’s already like that to some extent, but it could get much worse.

The question comes down to which pill you choose to take: the red pill or the blue?

In this world we call the matrix the red leads to the incorrigible Walmart rooms, and the mass incarceration industry,

In reality, if we want a peaceful, equitable, and spiritually healthy society, we all need to take both pills.

So, I don’t know what we’re going to do as the corona depression hits; not really.

The post How “Psychosis” Can Lead to Intuitive Knowledge and Connection to God: appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

Ways the Peer Movement Could Be Just a Little Bit Better About Avoiding Neocolonialism:

The peer movement and Wellness Recovery Action Planning helped revolutionize my approach to therapy and being a real person. In some ways I am grateful but still there are ways I am dissatisfied with the way too many peers perpetuate neocolonialism in the system.

I always struggled with the way the peer movement’s best practice, WRAP, attempts to define consumer values and ethics. It started out as a small sense of internal discomfort. But somehow the, “you cannot practice WRAP unless you uphold its values and ethics,” has become more a bone of contention for me twelve years after the concept was first introduced to me.

Values and ethics—it’s something you hear a great deal about in the consumer movement. ‘It’s important to understand our values, ethics and history,” you may hear a leader say. The more I stop letting myself feel victimized and alienated by these voices who have seemed to treat me just like my family of origin did, the more I start to see this as socially violent stance.

As I have grown as a therapist and built my own private counseling theory, I have reflected on my experiences studying different counseling theories and crossing cultural divides. I have found myself equating the imposition of values, ethics, and fidelity measures more and more with neo-colonialism, greed, manifest destiny, best practice, rather than with liberation and justice.

If you want to avoid the potential of inflicting generalizations on multitudes of people, don’t overreach. Don’t say it is a universally researched practice. Most certainly don’t say it’s an international movement with these values and ethics. Think about defining who you are and who you represent before you spread out with megalomania and glee.

I believe when you start imposing values and ethics, you bear the risk of invading other regions, extracting local resources for your benefit, and starting political feuds. Sure, we all want to affect sorely needed change, but there is a way to go about that so that you don’t create more of the same insanity.

Remember as you spread out into different regions, there is a lot to learn. It is not wise to suggest that because you have research that your way will work in a different geopolitical landscape.

Recognize that as you spread out your ideas, you become at risk of spreading gossip, gaslighting, and bullying people. Remember in any region there will be winners and losers in the system. The winners will be more likely to befriend you and move up by spreading venom and dominating others. Is it really worth it to sacrifice your ideals, just to have things your way in a foreign context?

If you want to promote change in the way you believe is best based on your experience in your region, marginalized cultures from other regions will find white, patriarchal, wealthy, prestigious, and exploitive. (For some reason people of color don’t tend to write and own these practices as far as I can tell.) Many may smile and honor you to your face, but they also may sense another layer of oppression added to their burden.

What Might Happen When You Overextend Your Perspective:

I don’t think these kinds of unintended consequences need to exist. I think it is possible to avoid them.

However, I do know for sure ways that I have been treated when values and ethics clash with portions of my experience that are real, idiosyncratic and rebellious. It burns me. It preoccupies my mind. Parts of me who have been most abused and hurt emerge. And, no, I won’t just give in and sip the tea!

It’s not hard to define who you are and what you’ve done and consider the geopolitical circumstances that have enabled you to be successful. Defining the limits of your approach is just as important as making a social change. If you’ve been successful, let go of your work and let others interpret and learn from it. Indeed, this approach seems to me to be the way to go.

In WRAP, for example, Mary Ellen Copeland does a good job defining her culture and her story. When she does this, she defines who she is and what her landscape is like. However instead of telling us the limits of her vantage point, we get values and ethics that we must maintain whether we are operating in an urban shelter, a county jail, or a New England Community Center.

Don’t get me wrong, there are aspects of the WRAP program that can travel into different contexts and do extraordinary things. But I do want to consider that what is needed to avoid institutionalization can be different in different areas.

For example, in my WRAP training, which happened twelve years ago, there was a participant who wanted to bring up the fact that he killed a person. I recognize there were vulnerable people in the group who might not have felt comfortable with that reality. Indeed, at times in my madness journey that would have been challenging for me. Indeed, it is arguable that it was a murder that I uncovered that set me into madness in the first place.

But because I was well, I was curious about what the participant was getting at and felt the participant was further shamed. When that participant was shut down and told not to do that in a WRAP group, I couldn’t help contrasting it to other challenges that were brought to light by other people. I ended up thinking that we lost an opportunity to learn something real.

I don’t mean to challenge the leader who was really powerful and helped me a lot, but I think that issue depends on the context. There were some participants who were high up in the county power structure who were participating in the training. I imagine they could have negatively judged the program if those boundaries weren’t set.

At the same time there are some places where that issue needs to be addressed. In fact, back in state hospital where there were lifers, I needed to have that issue addressed. Maybe my concerns and feelings couldn’t be addressed in a warehouse setting. I lived among whispers among us clients about those among us who had killed. I was far too invisible to have concerns addressed. And I was too branded as the entitled, out-of-state, political-prisoner who deserved to be ignored.

In short, how might it feel in a jail where every person is facing those fears and concerns to have that issue remain invisible. And so I ask: does the best practice become institutional by denying those realities? Does the need for funding and mainstream acceptance dilute the practice?

How to Know When You Are Engaging in Neo-Colonialism

To be honest, my experience with WRAP has very little to do with my motivation for writing this blog. I make these observations based on more personal experiences with other peer movements. It has been my frustration with things I’ve seen along the way that makes me challenge the way social change happens in the industry at large.

It’s true that everybody needs money to survive. When movements sweep into town based on research and try to change the way we understand trauma, change substance abuse patterns or motivate people to get back to work, they need money to survive. However, in these times the streets are jammed up with homeless encampments. It seems like things just get worse and worse. In spite of lots of innovation, recovery seems to rarely trickle down to the homeless and institutionalized.

Part of mental health is about the exponentially increasing disparities between the haves and the have-nots. When administrators import ideas that worked elsewhere without looking to their own region for people who know the local economy and realities shit storms will arise.

In the industry we have people who are so removed from the ground making the decisions that affect recovery movements it gets ridiculous. They may move from state to state in insular administrative jobs and fail to connect with the people in the trenches who need to be trained and who need to likewise contribute from their own views and notions of justice.

When I consider stories that sparked movements like the one that Marious Romme, Sandra Escher, and Betsy Kline tell, I get excited about the potential for much needed change. But when my work and contribution is overlooked because it failed to follow a charter of ethics that is written in a different country for people of totally different social realities, I get upset. When large payments go out to international travelers from people who won’t even consider supporting my efforts, indeed, I get frustrated.

I understand that some really great people made them up, but I also see that I am surrounded by really great people who are coming back from homelessness and need to be empowered to discover what works best for them. They deserve to be heard more than me. If you come to town and they speak up, honor them. No need to overwhelm them with your superiority.

Hell, I mad similar mistakes and even been suckered by a story of how a few mental health consumers built a recovery empire out of the Southwestern dust. Yes, I allowed myself to be hired by them and be deeply wounded by them. I am lucky I survived that fiasco.

But when any best practice comes to town with their fidelity measures and fails to acknowledge local socioeconomic issues like housing challenges, generations of poverty and slavery and how those issues impact their workers, I start to think about neocolonial transfer of money and resources away from our county. When you start formulating ethics and values or fidelity measures from the geopolitical contexts out of which you arise that you start to create hypocrisy and neo-colonialism.

Moreover, when you find yourself having to gaslight, gossip, bully, slander or politically marginalize people to justify your own position and salary, you are probably engaging in neocolonialism. I just thought some leaders might like to know in case it applies to them.

Conclusion:

Peer movements are not responsible for the vast amount of disparity that exists between top administrator salaries (and between a therapy salary or a peer administrator salary for that matter) and the abysmal resources available to subjects confined in squalor in board and care homes.

It is not my intention to diminish the achievements of the peer movement either. The peer movement has helped change the language used in public policy. It has vastly improved the system by allowing peer workers in the work force. It has inspired many people to improve their wellness.

I wouldn’t dare say what I have to say about values and ethics to researched best practices. Okay maybe that’s not entirely true. I am an entitled paranoid loud mouth! Maybe that’s why I felt sanctioned in my HVN training.

But I tend to see the peer movement as being far better able to consider my comments than I would other best practices with high level academic platforms surrounded by elite university Ph.D. titles. It’s true though that in these days of disparity even peer movements also have educated platforms behind them.

I think everyone of us in the peer movement can do a little better with avoiding neo-colonialism. I think that questioning the need to impose values and ethics is a great place to start. I think that each peer services worker needs to tend to the gardens it their own backyard, without trying to incorporate themselves into the mechanisms of agribusiness.

When the way you do things becomes the only way to go. When you have to gossip and slander others to make a name for yourself and, then, gaslight upon confrontation, you are wearing a neocolonial wig.

I think the peer movement is doing a good job in many ways, why sell out and try to join a false best practice bandwagon. Why not try to be just a little bit better.

The post Ways the Peer Movement Could Be Just a Little Bit Better About Avoiding Neocolonialism: appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

Modern Day Healers and Tupac’s Illuminati

It will be my first EMDR training with a master trainer. I receive a message on my Facebook Messenger account. Someone I friended from Los Gatos California asks if I want to be rich and famous? I can join the illuminati, there are twenty available slots. Do I want to apply?

I have heard many people denounce the illuminati. I mostly know about the organization from a Tupac lyric. Still, it takes me a minute to figure that the post is probably a hoax. I get my ass off the commode and prepare to depart.

If I can trust this EMDR trainer, I may choose to pay to join her network and attend her trainings. I have found the other two famous experts I have taken workshops from to personally wound me.

I have already tried EMDR with my therapist. I am in therapy because of my history of bad experiences with therapists and my inability to get along with my head-shrinking colleagues. One time my therapist got frustrated with me and said he thought I wasn’t a good candidate for EMDR, but I hadn’t allowed him to give up on me.

Taking time for the sake of learning is a challenge at this time. At work we are switching to computerized records. It is not clear if we are going to survive this transition. Our unit has been targeted by administrators who call our service a dinosaur.

***

On my way across San Francisco traffic I listen to a podcast I’ve agreed to appear on in a few days. This podcast is: Baltimore is Talking Live; with hosts Reverend Dr. Q and Aaron Green. I am a little old school. Podcasts are generally not a part of my world unless I am going to appear on one.

In this era, reality is NPR and MSNBC verses Fox News. The impeachment inquiry is on the table and Dr. Q bounces from the bullets in his neighborhood to slavery to the hypocrisy of the left.

I think about the propaganda of each side so often I have a tendency to tune out; but I kind of like Dr. Q.

I work primarily for people who live in board and care homes amid the buzz of bullets in the inner-city. I feel their stories of oppression are not even part of the debate.

If I believed the text books I’d read in college, I would not believe the things they tell me about oppression in the inner city. It seems like books and education the fact program participants can’t write notes on themselves as a justification to take money that should be going to them.

Alas, I don’t trust books written by psychotherapists all that well.

On the podcast, the guest is an author about porn addiction who seems to talk like the hosts weren’t there. His own porn addiction put him in jail for a year and he clearly was far more down to earth than he would have been otherwise. I am impressed that he speaks from a place of lived experienced.

For my clients with porn addiction, the short discussion really helps.

***

I race through the last lanes of traffic and break a few laws. I follow google and park in a lot under the Hilton and get to the bathroom before the conference starts.

As introductory comments are being made a woman who is my age slips into the seat next to me. She whispers at me some introductions and asks if I had read the book that the training is based on. I lift my hand to flash my wedding ring and tell her no just a bit bluntly.

I think back the dating years and think about how blatantly rude I had been. Others might think it was as if someone had lobbed a big fat softball at me and I whiffed horribly. I make some other friendly comments to compensate.

At the first break, I am feeling pretty good about the training.

The woman next to me explains her behavior by exclaiming she’s got poison oak. This genuinely interests me and I inquire and learn that she’s been in Ventana Wilderness which I know well.

I met my wife on an event like that and recall how hard it is being single.

I am quick in and out of the restroom because there are almost no males in the conference. Scanning the room of hundreds, one might see maybe three or four.

As if he read my mind, a man walks up and starts a conversation. He looks very dapper wearing an earthy necklace with a stone in it. He works in a group practice in Palo Alto primarily with adolescents. Clearly ten year older that me, he approaches me like he is interviewing me for a position and wants to know what I’ve read about my specialty, psychosis.

I explain that I am an award-winning author who writes about my experience running professional groups for psychosis. I am not afraid to tell him I have not read many authors who write about my specialty.

He suggests John Weir Perry. Of course, I recognize the name. He was mentor to a psychotherapist I know. I have heard this psychotherapist call me out my name with a bitter voice. Meanwhile, other cohorts he would call, dear.

I acknowledge that I have heard of this deceased writer who was in favor of medication free clinics in the seventies. I mention Soteria House, I-Ward, and Diabasis. The man correctly acknowledges that Perry started Diabasis . It figures, Diabasis was clearly the expensive version of the three! I am less motivated to read the academic ghoul now.

The man, really suggests that I read Perry. “He really did some deep work, and it is very assessible.”

***

The illuminating woman with poison oak invites me to lunch. As if she knows it will interest me, she talks about living in Nicaragua and how most Americans don’t even understand how lucky they are.

She agrees with me when I talk about the facility I work at and the disparities in mental health treatment verses physical health. She says in the nonprofit she works at the quality of facility is an afterthought.

My attention lapses. I remember the trainer’s rehearsed voice, “and then, you start bilateral stimulation and let the person process . . .”

I think about the urinal I am most used to using. I think about the leak that has colored the underneath floor on its way to the drain. Seven years ago, I put in a work order to fix the urinal and years later the drip did get fixed. Still the glistening yellow stain remains. Stradling the stain daily, my eyes are likely to notice the psychotropic shit smears on the textured wall. Psychotropic shit is particularly rich in odor! I think of the soot on the screen outside the bubbled window. The soot built up the years they demolished the old wing next to us the clang and buzz sounding above our voices in the group rooms.

And when I am ready, I submerge from my trance. I figure maybe three seconds have lapsed.

Somehow, I doubt the we are talking about the same level of neglect!

I continue listening to the poison oak woman who has talked about her South Bay family in a scenic suburb. Sure enough, they were personal friends with the trainer. She intends to say “Hi” to the trainer from her sister.

My first supervisor comes from the same town and it conjures up images.

“You know mental health is a very small community,” said that old supervisor the last time I saw her, “If you do something to piss someone off, word definitely gets around.”

I think about how I believe I have been black balled from the county panel that would enable me to open a practice.

***

In the next hour I listen to the trainer’s current concern about the rise of homelessness that is overwhelming the Bay Area. I think about the Great Depression and the presence of Hoover towns often when I see the sprawling encampments.

She launches a story about a kid from Danville who ran away and lived on the streets. Years later a newspaper found the hardened street person and reconnected them to their wealthy brother and got him therapy. He was doing well and getting treatment for his trauma, but then ran away again and overdosed in an encampment. It’s a story that sounds like the movie, Paris Texas.

The trainer says, “I think when people live on the streets, they get a sense of community in the encampments. I mean why else would someone return and choose to live there?”

As the whole room bobs its head, I fume.

I think of the old flick Paris Texas and I know there can be a lot of reasons people choose to run away. Why can’t a trauma specialist think of other reasons? When I saw Paris Texas, I remember the clear sense of an affair that happened between the homeless man and the brother’s wife who hadn’t wanted him to return home. It was a reality one had to sense. My whole life I have wondered how it is that other people don’t all run to join the streets!

One can feel very guilty for coming back from leading a life outdoors and feel rageful! And there can be so many millions of reasons to run! Some of us are born to run, baby!

At lunch I get a Messenger spot on my phone. The person who invited me to join the illuminati has actually contacted me again and is demanding a response. This time the face on the little circle is one that I recognize. I put the phone down before I am sure of this.

I remember collaborating with the face on the little circle picture. She’d sent me a flyer with the silhouette of a cannabis leaf to announce our mutual event at the hospital.

I recall how I played dumb and asked a patient who was once affiliated with a famous drug dealer before legalization. Publicly he says his family business is in “manure” so some of us may not understand. He comes to program so he has a public excuse not to behave violently and works to avoid smoking.

When I’d taken the time to assess his feelings about the cannabis symbol, he’d sighed and confirmed it was a leaf. I think he appreciated my effort to console him. We’ve always liked shooting the shit with each other.

I think that as a psychotherapist on a psychiatric unit, I am already a member of too many secret treatment team societies.

I pick up the phone and respond: “No, thank you for asking.”

I am not going to sell my soul any more than I already have.

***

I bump into a colleague who used to work at the unit I work in and we decide to lunch.

She got caught in a cross-fire of bullets one evening outside the hospital on the way to her car. This caused her to ask for a transfer to the more suburban outpatient psychiatric unit.

She is an attractive married woman with a slender physique. She says she’s on a gluten-free diet and we discuss this a bit.

I want to tell her that she can’t con a con.

We had never been super close. I’d shied away from her because I’d sensed she was still a partier. But we’d had a few good experiences together.

She was a basketball star in college, comes from Texas, and likes Whole Foods. She has recently seen my presentation on psychosis and was nice about it.

I am surprised to learn that she comes from El Paso as she also is part Italian. She talks about how distressed she is about the mass shooting that happened in the WalMart. She has a private practice two days a week and that is what I want so I pick her brain a little. She talks about her history of receiving EMDR and what she’s gone through to become a specialist.

I think about how I felt hearing about homelessness and lie. I say how much I am enjoying the conference. She really supports me in my wish to open up a private practice for my niche.

“People at Fairmont don’t understand how well they have it. Things were really tough at Highland,” she says. “I have a friend in the county, I will follow up with him and see if I can find out if you are really on a blacklist for the county panel. I heard they are currently looking for providers”

***

The rest of the training is a review of the basic tenets of EMDR mixed with four videos that demonstrate them in action. I am pretty able to follow. Participants are asked to visit very dark places and use images and memory of personal resources they have developed in their life to now support them in imagining different outcomes.

The fist two videos are done with therapists who are in training. They are clearly very trusting and articulate. They really demonstrate how this treatment can transform lives. The discussion and review of the points of training are very helpful.

However, as we all know, people who are used to therapy have an easier time processing traumatic events and moving on with their lives.

When I worked with my therapist on resourcing, I realized that all the people I identified as resources had also seriously hurt and betrayed me. Outside my wife and my dogs, it was hard to identify sources of comfort. When I was finally able to think of the writer Charles Bukowski as a resource, I got somewhere. I love his writing and never felt bruised by him.

Indeed, when I will try EMDR post workshop, I will find that bilateral stimulation with the paddles to sound artists like Tupac and Bruce Springsteen help me significantly as well.

***

The rest of the day is a video on her effort to do EMDR on a difficult community person. He is a porn and meth addict who got busted for having some child pornography mixed in with his volumes of pornography.

He did a year in jail and got connected to a church and is now clean, but denies that he has much of a problem and expresses no remorse or emotions when you ask him.

“And,” says the trainer a little playfully, “You might notice that this man is not very intelligent.”

As the video starts the hulking man is wearing a Yankees cap. He is clearly not a hat wearer as the hat is unworn and does not come close to looking good on him. The hat reminds me of Omar from The Wire wearing a tie in the courtroom. His demeaner is like Kevin Spacy in Unusual Suspects.

I instantly think of the Yankees cap as a gang symbol. I know some local gang signs from Oakland, but this man appears to be of Italian Heritage and I think of the New York five families.

He comes across like he’s not going to trust this snobby goof and does deny all his feelings as promised. And who would? The good doctor’s demeaning opinion of the man comes across clear in my eyes.

Sure enough, the man is married with children to whom he had stopped paying attention because of his addiction. He admits that he used the porn to seduce porn stars who stayed late at the strip clubs to film after hours. There is no mention or concern for how he got money for the copious amount of meth he used. In high school, he regrets he was more of a bully than a student.

I rage at the trainer’s clear lack of understanding.

The man has the respect of authority of a soldier. In the conference, the expert doctor makes fun of him for having it. At the end he pretends to want to make her happy.

I have been trafficked by people like him. And now I work in a public sector job that is being choked by one of his buddies.

Once again, bovine heads bob. Now I am almost certain I do not want to learn EMDR from this person who speaks before me.

I have been too hurt by people who have failed to understand me in therapy!

That said, the man did get to the point where he could cry before her and access those pent-up gangster emotions.

Who knows what masterminded violence he was processing by taking that meth and porn! I think about drugs women, or guns, the commodities of the black-market America. I think of how smart and twisted the courts were to use the child pornography charge to force him away from gangsterism. He likely would have had to go protective custody in the pen with a sex offence.

I am grateful he is healing and living more in love, though. He’s got to live in mind-dumbing fear of retaliation through, no doubt.

***

On my way home at the end of the conference, I say goodbye to the male adolescent therapist. The illuminating poison oak woman has distanced herself since I stood her up at lunch. Oops!

I check my phone and clearly the option to join the illuminati has passed as the two messages have been erased off my messenger account.

My ex-coworker comes over to say goodbye and I lie again and say I really liked the conference. I really can’t say anything bad about our talk other than the fact that I lied.

I know that I have gotten a lot of learning from the conference. I am impressed with how EMDR enables a person to work through trauma without taking the therapist there with them. Like the last scenes of the TV series the Sopranos, I feel surrounded by shrinks who are sipping wine and being asses all around me.

I remain unmotivated to read therapy books or join therapy associations.

Alas, I am not internally moved past my stubbornness. I am not vying to become a fucking liar like the rest of them!

The post Modern Day Healers and Tupac’s Illuminati appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

Attend My Training for Free

This is an announcement that Quality Improvement of Solano County Health and Social Services (Provider #57883) is offering Redefining Psychosis in two parts – 9:00 am – 12:15 pm on Thursdays, May 14 and 21, 2020.   For details regarding registration, please see attached Registration Form.

This is a 2-part training.  It is recommended that participants attend both days, but it is not required.

This workshop is intended for all levels of trainees. Parts of it are introductory and parts are advanced. It is intended to inspire clinicians to bravely address the issues that are experienced in a psychotic break or what becomes redefined as a special message crisis.

Maximum attendance for this training is 50 participants.

Course Title:      Redefining Psychosis

Date:                    Part 1 – Thursday, May 14, 2020

                              Part 2 – Thursday, May 21, 2020

Time:                   Each session is from 9:00 am – 12:15 pm

Location:             Zoom – Information on accessing the trainings will be sent out closer to the training dates

 Educational Objectives:

Historically, clinicians are trained to avoid engaging with people when they are in an emergency state for fear of escalating symptoms. This workshop is intended to provide a roadmap to the rabbit hole. In other words, it redefines what is happening during a person’s journey through madness in a structured way that justifies intervention and highlights solutions. This can help a clinician feel confident that listening and intervening has value and can be necessary to form an alliance that can help. Interventions and solution strategies that get suggested can be used at any stage of a person’s recovery to explore what is happening or what has been experienced. Often clinicians struggle to know what is and isn’t helpful. This presentation will give attendees not only a better sense of what is helpful, but also hosts of strategies to consider using.

This course is being presented by Timothy C Dreby, M.Ed., LMFT.

Tim states:  “I have been running professional survivor-led psychosis focus groups for the past twelve years in a public Intensive Outpatient Program at Highland Hospital in Oakland CA. I have a Masters of Education from Temple University obtained in 1998 and a MFT License obtained in 2008. I also survived a mid-career “schizophrenia” diagnosis that involved a three-month hospitalization in Montana State Hospital and a two-year emergency state about which I wrote an award-winning memoir. In 2013, I authored an Alameda County Innovations Grant and started to make public presentations with a small band of people with lived experience I trained and hired to promote this methodology. Since the close of this program I have been presenting and developing this material in local venues and through collaborations with the Bay Area Hearing Voices Network. This has involved annual presentations at the California Association of Social Rehabilitation Conference and other local venues.”

Please submit the attached Registration Form via QI fax at (707) 427-2774 or email at QualityImprovement@SolanoCounty.com no later than May 12, 2020.  County employees must receive supervisory approval.

If you register and are later unable to make the training, please cancel at least 24 hours ahead.

Each of the courses meets the qualifications for 3 hours of continuing education credit for LMFTs, LCSWs, and/or LPCCs as required by the California Board of Behavioral Sciences. Solano County Health and Social Services (Provider #57883) is approved by the California Association of Marriage and Family Therapists to sponsor continuing education for LMFTs, LCSWs, and/or LPCCs. Solano County Health and Social Services maintains responsibility for this program/course and its content.

Participants must attend the fully scheduled time to receive CEUs – partial credit will not be awarded.  Participants will not earn CE credit if more than 5 minutes late to the training, take excessive breaks, or leave early.

 

Certificates of Completion will be sent to participants within 3 weeks of participation once attendance is verified.

Professional credit is at no cost to the participant. The course includes course materials and learning activities to all participants.

If any special accommodations are needed, please contact Quality Improvement at least 3 days prior to the date of the training.  Quality Improvement can be contacted at (707) 784-8323 or at QualityImprovement@SolanoCounty.com.

If you would like to make a complaint following this training, please contact Quality Improvement at (707) 784-8323 or at QualityImprovement@SolanoCounty.com.

Thank you!

Quality Improvement

Behavioral Health Division

Solano County Health and Social Services

Phone:  (707) 784-8323

Fax:        (707) 427-2774

Nonproprietary

 

Redefining Psychosis Registration Form May 2020 Zoom

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TWO TRAININGS

May is Mental Health Month!! Celebrate with me online with Solano County!










































I am excited to report that I will be providing two online events for Solano County this month:

On Friday May 8th I will tell my story for peer counselors:.Entitled: Finding Meaningful Work, this event will stream online on Solano County’s Facebook Page . Check it out from 10-12;00!

On Thursday May 14th and May 21st I will present my six hour training from 9am-noon. This training has developed out of twelve years from running professional group therapy as a survivor. From these group experiences I have developed an eight-part definition of psychosis that will help supporters explore associated experiences with a sense of direction and a sense of what is helpful. I am available to come train your organization and hope to be able to sell this webinar on my website.

I have spent recent weeks refining my training and story telling so posts on my blog have been fewer in number. Still my most recent post: How to Validate Conspiracy When Working with People in Extreme States of Psychosis has been my most viewed post. I also published a post in the Better Because Project that may be viewed on my site, entitled: A Different Kind of Worker:

I have also opened my practice and am very busy with teletherapy five days a week at Highland Hospital.

The post TWO TRAININGS appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

How to Validate Conspiracy When Working with People in Extreme States of Psychosis:

PART ONE–Introduction: 

Perhaps it can seem daunting to agree with some of the radical conspiracies that get tossed around during extreme states of psychosis. When people experience what I prefer to term a special message emergency, sharing their stories becomes very important. However, it can be hard for supporters to truly believe that the resulting beliefs they have about the world are valid. When they are talked about and aren’t believed the participant can become retraumatized. That is why I argue that it is important to honor such beliefs if you are ever to form a collaborative relationship

Maybe aliens aren’t your thing. Maybe you actually believe the earth is round like they say it is. How can you entertain ideas that just don’t fit your training and experience?

***

I have been honoring such beliefs for twelve years and have grown in my ability to have an open mind to conspiracy that doesn’t fit my experience.

I still remember one of those beliefs I heard about which I didn’t believe. One day in the group room I had a participant suggest that there were in fact cameras in televisions so that the federal government could spy on you.

Now, to be honest, I have believed similar things. I may have chimed in that I had believed that my apartment was bugged with cameras in the lights. I easily relate and share those past beliefs to contribute and help that participant feel included. But cameras in the television? Really? A part of me felt that concept was ridiculous.

Well years later, I still remember listening to the radio when the latest wiki leak exposure was released. There it was. Suddenly, there were cameras in television that the government could use to spy on the public. And within the week, the president was accusing President Barak Obama of spying on him in like manner during the probe into Russian interference.

And so I’ve learned to use that story to help me give credit to conspiracy theories in my groups. It helps me remind people that conspiracy ideas and intuitive knowledge need to be honored even if they sound unusual.

***

Sure, at one point I thought the mafia had a tracker implanted int my dog when I had her fixed in the pound. Sure, that sounds unlikely. However, helpers need to be on the side of validating such thoughts. Remember, when I walked with my dog, I experienced things that suggested that I was experiencing an increase in harassment.

If a helper was to work with me and use information to challenge me, knowledge and evidence of potential for such conspiracy is needed. For example, if I was really such a high-level target, maybe it wasn’t the mafia, maybe it was the federal government.

The fact is, if you study phenomena like what transpired in South Boston during the Whitey Bulger years, or when you realize that the intelligence reports reveal that Jack Kennedy turned to mafia assassins during the Bay of Pigs, you start to better realize how high level targets get dealt with in the United States. Facts about real conspiracy can be very helpful. If I were to get that support during my time of need, imagine the decrease in anxiety I might have experienced.

It’s true that when I learned to ignore these realities, I was removed from the blacklist and allowed to work amidst the drug toting public again. But to get there it took a great deal of time and work.

The bulk of this article will explore real theories of causation that can help the supporter know productive ways to validate conspiracy. The point is to create flexible, mindful responses to distressing content. This can involve validating conspiracies in ways that include other modalities or frameworks. Often, offering healing alternative suggestions can help a sufferer feel safer and less stuck.

Quid Pro Quo Stories Leading to Collaboration:

Something that has clearly helped me make such alternate suggestions is my own experience with psychosis, and having achieved a social rehabilitation and the position I hold as a mental health therapist. With my demonstrated ability to work with people who recite the pledge of allegiance and participate in consensus reality, I am also able to choose to tell my own story in ways that are believable and in ways that aren’t so believable.

I know that the America that I’ve experienced is not the America that kids are taught about in grade school and that adults understand by listening to the news media.

I still notice the furrowed brow look I get when let people know what I think about what happened to me.

I believed I was being harassed by my mafia family and the only job I could get was a job arranged by my family at an Italian Deli. But when I tell my story in a way that might arouse doubt, I can quickly add details that are a bit more credible that can help someone understand how I could have come up with such beliefs.

When I am well, I can talk about evidence that sounds suspect and con a person into reality checking me. Then I can use parts of my story that are a bit more valid and suggestible and help them realize that their reality check was a bit premature.

Remember, that when a therapy participant doesn’t believe the conspiracy that I went through and tries to reality check me, there is an unspoken quid pro quo that arises. Now this gives them the ability to tell parts of their story. Now they have something on me. Now if I disbelieve them, it will not be so morally devastating.

See, I believe that whether I say so or not, I will disbelieve them. I believe they will be able to sense that I disbelieve them. I need to establish that permission to work with them and ultimately be a validating, trustable force. If they see I have the ego strength to reconsider my experience, they maybe they can muster the same ego strength.

This is a strategy I’ve learned to exploit over the years to get people to talk to me who otherwise would have only seen me as an officer of oppression or a sell-out. It’s about developing a trusting rhythm that can be used to validate conspiracy. I believe that this is achievable for people who haven’t experienced psychosis and van learn to believe that intuitive knowledge is a force with which to be reckoned

How Understanding Components of Psychosis can a Help A Supporter Validate Conspiracy:

I think it is important to understand that when confronted with experiences like voices, visuals, or other hallucinations, there are also other experiences to consider. Consider powerful intuition, premonitions, or interpersonal observation of non-verbal behavior; consider dreams and linguistic codes; symbolism and imagery, dreams; and consider ESP or mind reading abilities that may in fact be inexplicably real. Imagine being inundated with these vast lists of anomalous experiences so that they preoccupy your mind and dominate the day.

People who get inundated make meaning of these experiences. I have called this making meaning process sleuthing. This is the important process of understanding what these experiences mean and how they may affect your survival. During this process of sleuthing, the person focuses hard on trying to understand where each message or experience or hallucination is coming from and what it means. According to the Hearing Voices Network jargon, this process is termed making meaning and results in developing frameworks.

Message receivers or people who encounter psychosis, spend hours sleuthing by making meaning and exploring frameworks and weighing the consequences of different actions. What I am suggesting is that by better defining and exploring frameworks a message receiver has developed a strong capacity to understand and validate conspiracy. Thus, in groups, exploring frameworks is an extremely important thing to do.

It is my intention to are findings from twelve years of doing this in professional groups with the reader. My hope is to help the reader understand the importance of validating conspiracy frameworks no matter how unlikely they may appear.

From holding these discussions in groups, I have identified five types of framework or styles of conspiracy that can be explored all of which have value. It’s true these ideas may bleed together a great deal, but I believe a lot can be learned by understanding these five frameworks better. I believe that understanding each framework can help a supporter feel a whole lot better about supporting conspiracy because perhaps they will see how all are all possible.

PART TWO—Five Validating Frameworks:

One, Political Frameworks:

This is the controversial argument that persecution is real because social power structures are conspiring to harm a person who is rebelling and outing the real presence of secret societies and corruption in American Society. In other words, schizophrenia is a formal way that snitches end up in ditches.

In this framework secret societies meet and conspire behind a persons’ back to try to control their behavior. This can be like the treatment team in a hospital or case management team. It can involve teams of people with access to covert databases of information like the local police or the FBI. It can involve secret crime syndicates that likewise have access to those same databases, like cartels, foreign agents, or other entities that engage in black market activities. Finally, there are other kinds of secret societies like the illuminati, the masons, skull and bones, scientology, MKULTRA, the AMA, the APA, the Prison Unions, or other powerful cabals that illegally or legally protect the privileges of the powerful.

Discussing the realities of these secret societies can help validate many message receivers concerns and help give them valid insight into the way they are being marginalized and controlled in the community. When someone is on a psychiatric hold, it is often the cabal of the person’s family working in concert with other power brokers. It is helpful for a political prisoner in a state hospital to understand that they are not alone and that it isn’t safe to out secret societies.

A helper can really validate a special message receiver by revealing what they do really know about what the secret societies want from them. If you know about the rules and workings of a secret society, it can help a message receiver weigh the consequences of their rebellious actions. Of course, you don’t want to out individual members of the team and set them up to get attacked, that is not what I am suggesting. It is, however, possible to give the sufferer a general glimpse into the mentality of the secret society that might be controlling them.

Validating the injustice connected with the existence of secret societies is a good way to validate conspiracy. And so, studying Whitey Bulger in South Boston, oligarchies in the United States, and speculating on other top-secret realities starts to make more sense. Now we may start to weigh the difference between natural evolution and alien intrusion back when civilization first started back in the Sumerian days.

These things aren’t so hard to validate when a person starts to value the role of secret societies from the white house, to high-level administrative healthcare meetings, to medical ethics panels, to the multidisciplinary treatment teams that control behavioral health decisions.

Two, Abuse Frameworks:

Many of the special messages that message receivers get may be related to past abuse. For example, a voice may be that of a past perpetrator that has had negative influence on them. Also, there can be triggered by events, people or objects. These are people or symbols that have the same energy or attitudes that the past perpetrator did. Then, the message receiver in on guard and triggered to re-experience associated feelings.

Police and psychiatric ER nurses may be examples of trigger people. People wearing bow ties may likewise trigger fear of secret societies. Seeing someone restrained and rapidly tranquilized may trigger mistrust for authority. It is arguable that hypervigilance to these roles, events and symbols that oppress and take away the message receivers rights that may further fuel sleuthing.

In simpler terms, messages may become noticeable because of hypervigilance when bad things that happened in the past seem to be happening again. In another sense, they may not be as upsetting to a person if they realize they are being retriggered and evade danger.

In a very real sense, unexplained intuitions and illogical responses may include generational trauma. For some of us who become inundated with hypervigilant awareness some may come from trauma from past lives or historical realities.

It is also arguable that psychic numbing or dissociation may cause message receivers to get in touch with different parts of themselves. On some occasions these parts reflect voice characters that may have uncanny knowledge or even be triggered for better or worse by external events. In situations of severe dissociation people may black out and lose their memory and sometimes have another personality come forth. Some people describe this as a voice taking over and controlling their bodies.

While there is a great deal of controversy over whether a dissociative identity is real (often by people who believe in imprisonment and capital punishment,) I think a lot can be explained and validated through dissociation experiences. Perhaps some of the hallucinations that are experienced are dissociative and point to different dimensions of reality or phenomena like time travel, astro-planning through the neighborhood, derealization, depersonalization and other checks on the mental status exam. For example, dissociative experiences may take over the body and cause blindness, deafness or other hysterical phenomena.

Within this framework a supporter can learn about past trauma and help the message receiver make connections and realize that they are being hypervigilant or dissociating because of particular triggers and restore them to a state of safety.

Additionally, as the science of body energy is currently being acknowledged, it is fully understandable that some people develop senses of stress or energy waves that are getting emitted off the surface of the body. Some even may see colored auras around a person.

Also understanding of neurobiology has taught us new ways of helping people revisit traumatic content through EMDR and bilateral stimulation. One could argue meditation has done this for years. There are ancient eastern practices like Chi Gong or Tai Chi. And what is walking meditation? It is bilateral stimulation.

Often psychosis itself is very traumatic and leads to abusive responses. Consider what it feels like to lose your rights and be hospitalized against your will for having experiences for which you did not sign up. When safety is restored and hypervigilance and dissociation can be reduced the messages will just go away.

Conversely when abuse is not seen or a person is judged negatively for emitting signs of abuse; when people become warehoused and forced to submit to abusive directives; and in the worst case scenario when they learn to trust such circumstances, it not only validates the hypervigilance and dissociation, it activates associated messages which get more extreme especially when they are not allowed to be talked about.

Three, Spiritual Frameworks:

It might sound strange, but a lot of people believe that there is an all-knowing spirit that is sometimes even thought to come in the form of a human being. Perhaps, like Kevin Smith envisions in the Movie, Dogma, such visions take the form of Alanis Morrisette. But oddly, there are also other formulations.

Based on this concept, there is the sense that things happen that are beyond the human realm. There can be good energies and bad energies but generally something larger is behind these experiences that promotes good. There may be good entities and bad entities; there maybe telepathy with loved ones; there may be ghosts or aliens that intermix with human history; there may be inexplicable emotional connections and things like church, scripture, meditation, or Sunday School that cause people to believe such obscure principles.

While many people generally have faith that good will triumph over bad. Still the idea that some people are connected to this spiritual realm has often caused people to be killed as heretics, witches, lepers, or schizophrenics because such beings challenge the social order and power structures.

It’s true the idea that some people are touched by bad spirits or are angry and abused. Currently, the medicalized notion is that what people think is spiritual contact is really just a deficit caused by neurotransmitters called dopamine. Also, many also believe artificially micro-dosing with ketamine and LSD can help heal and advance functioning through likewise tampering with dopamine.

But who’s to say some born with different kinds of minds are born with spiritual genes, kind of like the Jedi’s in Star Wars. Or, maybe god creates people who are different who may be there to challenge or change humanity with developing mutations like Darwin suggested. Either that, or god’s sends divergent aliens to tamper and change the human beings to be more aware of spiritual realities. Some people get more in touch with those kinds of realities. Perhaps these prophets are trained to walk the earth like Job and suffer despicable mistreatment only to become wise kind of like Siddhartha.

Ever talk to an exceeding wise homeless person? I work with them.

The issue of good and evil and a heavy reliance on spiritual texts, from the Bible to the Koran to the Bhagavat-Gita can cause people to reflect on history in really profound ways to make sense of good and evil with spiritual interventions. And many people who experience psychosis do feel they are being blessed and reporting wonderful experiences. It’s just better not to speak of such realities with anyone, otherwise they will call you crazy.

Sometimes people need to learn not to incite these states because of the social consequences. They may believe they are prophets but most people just thing they are broke and crazy and fail to be impacted by the true beauty of their spiritual interventions. These realities need to be worked with carefully because spirituality can lead to Smith Wigglesworth behavior that seems harmful and abusive in consensus reality.

Certainly, there are great mysteries of nature and existence that do happen so that people are greatly comforted and live happier and healthier lives because of what they learn from spirit. It’s a good thing to validate, support, and assist people in making sense of the supernatural. When, however, people are faced with an anomaly like a person who can predict the future, experiences that challenges their own belief system, persecution and hospitals can happen.

Four, Psychological Frameworks:

The idea that messages originate within the mind of the afflicted person I define as a psychological framework. This may suggest that the person is working through their inner conflicts that may be subconscious or based on early attachment issues that have created the conflict that cause the mind to act out.

It’s true that some might argue this is similar to the abuse formulations. However, psychological frameworks stem from a tradition that honors corruption of power. This tradition tends to presume all the experiences of psychosis are happening within the mind of the afflicted.

This is often the explanation or tact that many mainstream therapists take. In contrast to the political explanations which may be thought to be misunderstandings and the abuse theory associated with neuroscience, there is often a push to get the sufferer take the responsibility to change themselves because they can’t possibly change the world.

Thus, messages are seen as the result of their own troubled mind. In some cases, this may be true. The thought is that with understanding and insight of the true conflicts within ones mind, that a person can stop thinking that what is happening is political or trauma and start using personal responsibility.

Particularly with dreams, which are special messages according to my formulation, things experienced are thought to bear a particular meaning that can be uncovered. A trained analyst can tell you what the unconscious is processing. Consider, the belief that you are being followed and the message evidence collected along the way that proves it. This might be signs that you imagine because you are hurting and once you realize this and stop hurting you can choose to ignore them. Same with voices.

Historically, if the therapist learns how to be a secure attachment for the person with the troubled mind, they can heal the issues through the relationship. Thus, the rapist therapist (notice the linguistic code in the word, a special message?) adjusts and proves to you that the world is not so awful.

Psychological approaches tend to focus on insight and understanding yourself so you can explain the reasons for the suffering and struggle which are not true.

Although the reader may pick up on some sense of frustration from me with these processes, it is wise to validate these kinds of processes even when they are not true and other processes are more operant. To be honest, many therapists do not tend to validate these processes even when they are more accurate. It’s true that the relationship can heal so why not allow for that.

Five, Scientific Frameworks:

Right now, the dominant paradigm that gets perpetuated in college texts and abnormal psychology classes (as was done back in the nineties when I studied these things) is that schizophrenia is a eugenic hereditary disease that impairs social functioning. The medical explanation for this rests in the regulation of neurotransmitters between the synapses of nerve cells.

While many message receivers tend to rant and rail against such negative medicalized notions, secretly they may fear that it is the truth about them and that they are doomed to live meaningless lives of poverty and squalor. It’s arguable that the good people among us do accept and live such lives.

Many of us in crisis rebel against such outrageous claims and lash out until we lose our rights and citizenship. We may end up warehoused in situations where they are forced to comply with the most simplistic notions of consensus reality.

What gets conveyed when all is lost in warehoused conditions is that social punishment that is not beatable will be put upon you if you fail to cooperate religiously with the basic tenets of consensus reality.

Being confined in solitary suicide watch in jail for months or years on end makes this situation unbeatable. In the process of being forced to sit on your ass and be patronized, neurotransmitter adjustments are mad to make it easier to comply with the basic tenets.

The fact is that such heinous beliefs and treatment must be conveyed and integrated into a persons’ journey. Many survivors spend their lives condemning and rejecting all aspects of this kind of thinking.

Many who endure the extremes of this experience dissociate and advance in the extremes of their experience. But many do learn and improve. Given a chance to achieve and function within the confines of consensus reality many will work and achieve incredible manners just to battle this cursed social contract.

In my opinion, the fact is that these realities need to be conveyed to people who are at risk of enduring them to help them accept consensus reality to the point where they can achieve social rehab.

In other words, people who experience psychosis need to share and learn about the harsh social abuse that ensues and can be perpetrated by the people who are most close to them. This needs to be taught and conveyed in ways that are not invalidated! There needs to be places people learn about these realities without having to lose their rights and go through it.

Let someone who’s suffered teach the group about this reality and protect them from it. This is a clear win-win.

Message receivers need to put the pieces together and understand the abuse they’ve experienced in order to heal. They must learn to know their enemy. They must protect each other from being hurt, not functioning and becoming warehoused. Additionally, to avoid failing the social functioning tests, some of us may need to learn that medication helps them function better in spite of the detriment that does to their physical bodies.

PART THREE—Conclusion:

Overcoming an Anti-Psychiatry Class Division in Our Culture that May Get Exploited:

Ultimately, I believe people have a right to honor the hell that they’ve experienced the way they chose. Some may condemn all parts of the scientific paradigm and others deserve to function the way they chose to in spite of the damage that gets done to their human organs. I think the division that gets perpetrated here is class-based and it prevents survivors from working together.

At the same time many people who play a role in enforcing consensus reality must learn to dehumanize subjects and do not want to hear or think about their participation in enforcing a ridiculous atrocity.

Personally, I feel guilty for the role I have played taking money from such a system. To go from utter poverty to bay area home ownership in the course of eight years of espionage is despicable. Many in the movement exploit that vulnerability in me. And they don’t want me to be a spokesperson because I take medication.

Then again, I look at what other professions get and how many people accept the crimes of free Wall Street money and deflect some of the criticism that comes at me from other survivors who may hate or distrust me. I particularly cut myself a break if my judgers have been given more than me and use what they have to silence, slander, marginalize, and mistreat me. That’s right, I don’t have too many friends.

Get a sense of my anger here? Consider that this results from a three-month state hospital hospitalization, only one month of it was in true warehouse circumstances. Then, consider what a person who has been through months of solitary on suicide watch and years of hospitalization all for instigating a violent conflict with gang members. This stuff is hard to come back from and leaves permanent isolation scars.

Ultimately there is a strong need for diverse groups for those touched by institutionalization in different ways. There needs to be space for all participants regardless for their takes on medication.

Conclusion:

Really, to understand and heal from the scientific framework atrocity, space to study and explore all of all these frameworks need to be granted. All frameworks deserve equitable space in our minds, bodies, souls and spirit. Learning how to be fluid and perform in consensus reality is important in social rehabilitation.

Often, when one framework dominates the day, mistakes are more likely. Then, pronounced messages dominate the mind-space, and social decline and issues associated with poverty become threatening. For example, internalizing the psychological framework when you are in a psychiatric hospital might be a problem. What I learned from trying it out was that treatment just doesn’t exist in those contexts. Outside of two or three anomalous staff people, the scientific framework will dominate the day.

Accept that the system is rigged and act like brer rabbit in the briar patch to get your needs met. Then, the scientific paradigm becomes less traumatizing.

***

It stands to be noted that there can be other valuable forms of frameworks that can be identified, many of which may fall in between these frames I’ve laid out today. For example, I considered adding artistic frameworks, but due to space limitations, I would argue that art falls under the spiritual realm. At the same time, I could certainly argue that studying dreams and cultural archetypes is an artistic venture, but they are discussed in psychological frameworks because of the fathers of psychology.

The point I am making is that no framework should be invalidated. There is a time and a place for all of them. I believe that the more a message receiver explores and studies anomalous experiences, the more flexible they are likely to become in interpreting what they’ve experienced. That’s why, rest assured, it takes time to learn to recovery. Patience on the part of providers is important.

The greater the flexibility, the less likely message receivers are to act out against consensus reality in ways that will get them in trouble.

***

I think the resistance to the exploration of validating conspiracy comes from being closed off to different kinds of frameworks. Often, the belief that there is one presiding framework that makes up reality. If we think of reality as being multi-faceted or not immediately clear it reinforces the mindfulness and emotional intelligence that is needed to respond and not react to the dilemmas posed by the existence of the message receiver.

For example, the message receiver who is entrenched in the scientific framework I laid out should not bring those discussions up at the formal family Thanksgiving meal of the people who perpetrated that system against them. They may need to borrow from things they’ve learned during their spiritual frameworks and scripture or healing modalities from the trauma framework.

It doesn’t mean that they may not be right about their family having overemphasized the scientific framework, but to change the reality of eugenic oppression they may need to teach their family new frameworks so they don’t have to be forever, mistreated or misunderstood.

***

If what I am saying makes sense, the system is ridden with this very eugenic framework which punishes message receiver for involuntary experiences. The quicker a message receiver is able to understand this, accept the system, and join safe zones as promoted by the hearing voices network or therapy specialists who entertain all frameworks, the quicker they will be able to learn to manage their experiences in ways that evade social decline.

Again, if what I am saying makes any sense, it becomes the responsibility of professionals to tolerate and respectfully learn about conspiracy thoughts from frameworks other that the dominant paradigms of scientific and psychological conspiracies that dominate oppression of the system that is creating homelessness and justifying warehousing.

The post How to Validate Conspiracy When Working with People in Extreme States of Psychosis: appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

A Different Kind of Worker

When I took the job at the Housing Authority facility dubbed the “Hotel of Horrors” in the local media, I thought I was on a mission from god. 

The weekend before I started the job, I took a spiritual retreat with the Quaker community I frequented. Out on an island on the Puget Sound, in a quaint room, I told a small group of my cohorts that I was following a spiritual calling by taking this job. Maybe that’s just how I dealt with my nerves.

Everybody at the community mental health center where I worked was far too afraid to take a job there. 

I was a master’s level professional. I was able-bodied and good at helping others. I knew that trying to “save” a community was risky. But I did not imagine what I was about to endure.

***

Years earlier, in college, I’d moved to the inner-city in Camden, New Jersey to hide a history of male anorexia.

In the beginning of my senior year, I had to take a semester off because of a mental health crisis. An observant resident of my apartment complex introduced herself to me upon my return from the hospital as if she knew what was going on with me. Her name was Cece. 

Like me, Cece was a fish out of water in the inner-city, entirely alone, surviving amid the roaches. She admitted to a history of shooting heroin in her toes. She knew a lot about psychiatric meds and liked to recommend different medications to me often second guessing my doctors. She had been on all of them!  Now she was on social security, clean, and was seeking employment. 

At the same time I started to get invited out with a group of my fellow students who all commuted in from the suburbs. The leader of this clique was an English student who wanted to help me out in spite of my hospitalization. He would go to law school and use my rental history to establish a bachelor pad for four of us. I was invited to go out with the group, but they made it clear, I was not to bring Cece. 

A year later I was living with the suburban clique and I received a call from Cece. She found a job at a photography store and had managed to get off social security. I had just landed a job in a mental health clinic and was starting my master’s program. Somehow, Cece found out my work number and called me. 

“You are getting ready to do things that are really wrong, but that’s okay, I forgive you.”

What a wise intervention that was! Indeed, I felt bad about leaving her behind. At my new job I’d have to follow the lead of my supervisor who seemed to demean the clients. Cece was right: I’d surely done wrong, and I was fixing to do a lot more that I didn’t feel was right. 

It was the psychopharmacology craze of the nineties and I learned to see schizophrenia as a medical problem that just required medication. I distracted myself from feelings of guilt by chasing connections with fellow students in my master’s program and holding on to the bachelor pad clique. Maybe curing my loneliness, and tendency to get scapegoated by suburbanites, really was as simple as a complex cocktail of four medications. 

To my credit, I worked hard and went the extra mile to help the people coming to the clinic where I worked. And as I got credentials, I took more risks and made more effort to do the right thing. 

Once I successfully graduated, I left it all behind and moved to the west coast. 

***

So, as I was on my mission from god and entering the “Hotel of Horrors,” I pledged to only do what I felt was right. 

In six months there I saw doors torn off of hinges by thugs in broad daylight. I saw addicts get stabbed and nothing done about it. I saw vulnerable residents get hauled off to jail when they were bullied into using their apartments for drug deals. Mostly, the police only came around to take a barricaded paranoid resident off to the hospital because he refused to pay rent.

I did a lot to support vulnerable clients. I met with local advocates. I leaked stories to the media. My job was threatened. When a resident without an addiction ended up dead from a heroin overdose I was suspicious. I arranged for a young newspaper reporter to investigate. I stopped taking my medication.

“One time we had a social worker come down here like you and try to straighten out this mess,” a resident told me. “They told him to stop but he wouldn’t. He ended up having to move down here with us. I just don’t want that to happen to you!”

I started to get a sense of connection. All parts of my life were in play. Had I heard those words for a reason? Were they a threat! I was getting scared. 

I tried to escape to Canada, but I was followed and harassed by police. My parents had put out a missing-persons report so the police were initially violent with me. I believed that they were trying to trap me in a hospital and went to great lengths to resist.  Finally, I surrendered.

Being confined to Montana State Hospital for three months was a lot to go through. Two months in, I was transferred to the chronic unit which was barely heated above freezing and over-crowded. When I finally got discharged to the streets, I purchased a Greyhound bus pass to Fresno California.

***

When I ran out of medication, I lost my low-wage job. I couldn’t seem to find another job and, with my money dwindling, my family arranged a job for me if I moved to the Bay Area. If I didn’t take the job, I was on my own. 

It was quite a coincidence because I had decided that my family was a mafia family, and the job they arranged for me was at an Italian deli. I kept the deli job for close to a year before I agreed to go back on medication and try to return to working in mental health.

Returning to my former career wasn’t easy though. I had to bike twenty miles plus take the rails for two hours just to get to my job at the deli and back. Customers and co-workers targeted and humiliated me; they seemed to know things about me they shouldn’t. I ran into residents I recognized from Seattle on my way to work who sat next to me on the train. Every day there were signs I was being followed. Sometimes it seemed that I would be the only person who could recognize the signs, but they were always there. One day the police tailed me in the car I managed to acquire.

When I started back on medication the following continued, but I was better able to ignore it.  Eventually, I was able to get hired away from the deli and back into a mental health position.

For me, it took being diagnosed a schizophrenic to finally realize that just because I am an educated rich kid who knows how to write billable notes, I am not any better. I never fit in with the graduate students that went on to populate suburbia, I was a better fit with my inner-city neighbor, Cece.

Now, I am grateful for all I went through. 

I have found so much meaning in my work in the seventeen years since I returned to working in mental health. It took me six years to start to disclose my history. Then, I started psychosis focus groups and looking for a systematic way of redefining psychosis. I have really appreciated my privilege of working and being innovative to get results that might not have happened if I didn’t know that recovery was real.

I still take medication, but I would never do something like leaving Cece behind again. Instead, I am opening up a practice that aims to help people like her rise above a hopeless mental health system.

I feel for people who work in mental health and believe schizophrenia is just a medical disease that entitles mental health workers to their salary and power. I would be so burnt out and uncaring if I still believed that to be true. I am grateful that I have learned to be a different kind of worker.

 

This was published in the Better Because Project!

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The post A Different Kind of Worker appeared first on Redefining "Psychosis".

The Best of Times and the Worst of Times

The Corona virus is shutting down our social institutions. Our streets are full of displaced people living in shelters or tent encampments. The Federal Government is steering services away from the poor and the elderly in ways that seem to be working. Sure, it’s affecting me, man! But I am still here, scheduled to lead three trainings on the subject of redefining psychosis.

These trainings are based on twelve years of experience running professional groups that explore psychosis. They have not yet been cancelled!

Yes, that’s right on 3/20, 5/6. And 5/20 I am scheduled to lead trainings that aim to impact the way our social workers, peers and educators meet and greet psychosis in the clinics and in the public. I argue that the working definition we have of psychosis is non-descriptive and that a new definition can highlight solutions and justify exploration and intervention.

And as I am preparing to open a private practice, I am willing to train local agencies and treatment teams for free. This is a limited time offer. If you have a heart condition, be forewarned!

Historically, clinicians are trained to avoid engaging with people when they are in an emergency state for fear of escalating symptoms. This workshop is intended to provide a road-map to the rabbit-hole. In other words, it redefines what is happening during a person’s journey through madness in a structured way that justifies intervention and highlights solutions.

I feel my training can help a supporter feel confident that listening and intervening has value and can be necessary to form an alliance that can help. Interventions and solution strategies that get suggested can be used at any stage of a person’s recovery to explore what is happening or what has been experienced.

Often the public struggles to know what is and isn’t helpful. These presentations will give attendees not only a better sense of what is helpful, but also hosts of strategies to consider using.

On 3/20, the Peer Support Services Networking Meeting of Solano County will be hosting the first section of my training. This has yet to be cancelled!

On 5/6, I will be presenting a workshop at the annual CASRA Conference that also will describe the introduction of my work. This has yet to be cancelled as well!

And finally, on 5/20 I will be presenting for six hours of continuing credit, the full Monty. This includes an eight-part definition that better describes what psychosis is like from the inside out and eight solution concepts that can help guide effective interventions. And, of course, this is a social engagement that has not yet been cancelled!

Have you too heard it said that insanity is doing the same thing time and time again and expecting different results?

We’ll have to wait and see.

Click Shop to schedule a training at your agency.

Also, check out this Interview that Deb Brasher from CASRA did with me to help promote that event.

Tim Dreby, LMFT Interview Redacted

Tim, could you tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to be involved in the Special Messages Project?

I was working in Seattle at a section eight housing authority and I was astounded at how covered up people’s lives were.  I started to try to investigate and find out what was going on a little bit.  At the same time, I went off my medication, which I had been on for about seven years.  I started to feel this profound sense of connection and that things were related and that things weren’t coincidental.  I went through a bit of an emergency and was hospitalized for three months.  Then coming out, I had a little bit of money, but I was basically on the streets, trying to recoup and come back from that kind of situation.   That’s the part of my background that taught me about special messages.  A lot of my work has been opening up people’s stories and getting people to tell their story, how the stories work in concert with each other, and how to work through the experiences as a result.  Then learning from that and documenting some of the processes that I’ve seen going on and can relate to from my own story.

Could you define what the Special Messages Project is?

Absolutely.  Special messages are experiences that people have that lead to alternative ways of thinking.  The experiences can be things like voices.  Or extra sensory perceptions that are very bad.  It can also be things like an inner person.  It can be codes in letters and numbers.  They can be intuitions.  They can be premonitions.  It can be an assortment of things that give people information that other people may or may not get.

Could you talk about how your approach is so different from our current general psychological approach to these experiences?

Certainly.  I think the way things work in the mainstream treatment is that people are taught to suppress these experiences because they feel they’re punished when they have them.  So they judge them and then when the experience happens again, they are in conflict with them, or they learn that they can’t talk about them anywhere and it’s not safe.  When this suppression happens, it makes it harder to heal from these experiences because they’re real.  They cause real feelings and they cause real experiences.

How has it changed for you to come out about your lived experience at work, and out in the world, Did it take you a long time to decide to do that?

Yes.  I think, to be honest, I started doing these groups about 11 years ago and I didn’t come out to my fellow staff till more recently.  I learned in supervision – every supervisor I had, had bad things to say about schizophrenics, and that was my diagnosis.  So, I learned that it was very much not safe.  I came out through the help of taking WRAP courses.  That really helped me.  I started doing them and what happened was it was so popular on the unit where I worked that there was no taking it back.  However, there were efforts to get me in trouble for talking about my experiences.  And eventually I learned that I needed to tell people that I was out and I needed to learn how to do that.  It’s a very hard thing to manage.

I had a supervisor who knew and he supported me.  That was really helpful.  I had other people who weren’t so sure.  I wrote up manuals for what I was doing.  They made it requirement that people write things up after I started writing things up (for other groups).  So, it was kind of like a gift.   You know it’s it’s a privilege to be able to do it.

And so this is the birth of the Special Messages Project.  What’s been the response of the people that are in the group, like how have you seen it work? 

People in the group get to tell their stories.  They get to go places that they’re afraid to go elsewhere.  It’s been something that has transitioned here at work.  But I’ve also done it in the community and there’s been very powerful responses.  They do this work at the Hearing Voices Network in Berkeley.  I help out there, and that’s another good place to do this kind of work.  It really, really makes a difference when there’s someplace you can talk about these experiences and and make them less shameful, less traumatizing.

What changes have you noticed in people once they’re able to find a safe place to talk?  And put words to their experiences?

Many people feel more open with psychiatrists, they feel less punished in general.  And they have more motivation to get to know other people who are also dealing with, what they’re going through, “quote unquote psychosis”, or other types of experiences.  A lot of times, when I was in the system, I didn’t want anything to do with the person that was talking to themselves.  I just didn’t want to be like that person.  But it takes a transition period to say, oh, what he’s going through is actually similar to what I’m going through.  If we’re not allowed to talk and realize that, we’re not able to form community and community is very important to healing.  Many people say, when they come to my groups, I never realized just happened to anybody else until I heard you tell your story.  It is powerful.

So, you are a busy man.  You are doing a lot of trainings, like what you’re going to do at the conference.  You’ve got a blog.  You’re the author of the book: Fighting for Freedom in America, and you’re still working in the field.  So, first: how do you do it all?

Well, I think that I do it because I don’t have kids.  This project is like my baby.  And I have support from my wife.  My wife, without her I would probably not be able to do what I do, so I’m grateful for those things.  It took me awhile to get those things and I’m extremely grateful.  I had to work a lot, and I developed a style of working through my hardships.  And so, if anything, when I stop working, which I do on a regular basis, when I hike, I have to process a lot of things and a lot of emotions.  So I’m kind of in a regular pattern of working and processing in writing, which is part of how I process.

So, so what can we, as practitioners, do better?  Even if we’re not running special messages groups?  And don’t come at it from our own lived experience, what’s your advice for us.

I think it’s really important to be curious about the experiences that are happening behind the scenes. Instead of punishing, get people to talk about what they’re going through and what they’re experiencing.  Find out what’s behind the ideas and the beliefs they have.  If they don’t make sense or they don’t fit for you – what is normal or not normal?  Just even having the awareness.

Many practitioners are taught NOT to delve into this kind of topic – “delusional” material.  You were taught to “reality check”.  So what you’re doing when talking to staff is educating them about another way to be present for the person.

Exactly.  I’m making it into something that can be understood.  When the staff person understands what’s going on instead of saying “they’re more symptomatic today” or “they’re showing more delusions”, they can see it as this person is giving me an opportunity to trust them.  I can plan for and I can know what to do when they trust me with this material to open them up.  That is, in a nutshell, what I hope people do.  When I give these trainings in the field, a key part is the idea that you become a trustworthy person.  And that’s huge.  People have different minds.  It’s much more of a neurodiversity issue than it is a disease issue.  The idea of inclusion of different ways of processing the world and experiences is important.  When we think of diversity, we don’t think of people who are different as “you’re wrong and we’re going to punish you”.  You form relationships

So, people that come to your workshop, what can they expect?

We will look at redefining what psychosis is, and how it can lead to alternate ways of helping.  We’ll look at what special messages are and look at what other components of psychosis are.  We’ll look at solutions that arise when we know what those parts of psychosis are.  There are different interventions when you’re paying attention to the special messages, in the way you’re talking about them.  It’s the main meat of how to do things differently.

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