Clyde Dee's Blog, page 7

Workshops with a Sense of Spontaneity:

I learned a lesson in spontaneity some twenty years ago that I try to bring with me to each workshop I do.

At the time, I was heavily engaged in writing poetry. I explored socializing at poetry readings to meet other people who liked to write. In my notebooks and on the word processer I was obsessively rewriting. I believed I was creating some good stuff, but alas I had no one to read and affirm me.

I found a South Jersey poetry group called the Mad Poets. I took my most recent and best poem to an open reading hoping to shed the sense of invisibility that one has when no one will glance at your work.

The poem I read was a carefully constructed villanelle about being a social worker. I had spent hours and hours getting some phat one-line images. I still think I had some good ones. Lines like “Rooting through boarding home shanties, stench swept:” “Costly mansions adorn our cross-town schlep;” or, “Now my flesh freezes, colors mannequin clam.” In each line of that poem, I felt I was able to convey a complex story with a lot of movement and with colorful words.

When I took the microphone, I apologized in advance because there was one curse word in the poem that got repeated throughout. A proud suburban woman in the audience complained and asked me to read without the curse word.

It so happened there was a word of the day, spam, and all the known writers were trying to use it for points. Thus, when I came to the repeated curse, I substituted the word: “Because housing subsidy is a godspam scam!”

It was the first time I ever got a major acknowledgement for reading a poem.

Usually, with poetry, I am terrified to read in front of an audience. I have learned there is dyslexia behind that phenomenon.

But at the coffee house that day, people were laughing and complimenting me. I was truly excited.

However, when I checked in with my peers nobody appreciated my phat one-liners. They just hooted and hollered and said that godspam scam was really funny

So, as usual, I walked away from the reading really distressed. I remained an isolated poet. I never sent my poetry away for publishing. My drunken roommate became a Pultzer Prize winning poet. Now I am just another isolated, award-winning writer who wants to change the way the public greets psychosis.

***

This power of spontaneity is a lesson I try to take with me into each of my workshops. Spontaneity has a way of grabbing the participants attention and engaging them. If one wants to get one’s work seen, spontaneous moments can be necessary. Maybe later, people notice the phat one-liners much as I do when I reflect on music.

In my most recent workshop which I gave to Fairmont Hospital Outpatient Psychiatric Unit in San Leandro, California, I had prepared extensively for an hour-long presentation. I was trying to shave off a lot of content out of a six-hour presentation and complete an overview in a short amount of time. However, as often happens in life, everything that could go wrong did.

My co-presenter brought his slide presentation on a Mac device that wasn’t compatible with my laptop. As a result, instead of clearing my mind and approaching the event with even nerves, I was frenetically playing around with technology before the presentation.

Then, participants started shuffling in a half hour late.

Then we futzed with the technology for ten minutes.

By the time my co-presenter was finished (barely using his slides after all that) I had at tops a half hour.

I have done my best to create slides that outline information and depend on my own muse to fill in the blanks with spontaneous examples. So, I simply targeted the first part of my presentation and went with the flow. Though I didn’t get to all the material I tried to flash forward and capture the most important points.

The result was that we got some very interesting questions. I fumbled around with a good opportunity to debate some of the most important issues that come up in when professionals fear retriggering participants by letting them tell their stories. The result is I am working on an important piece to professionals about strategies that can be utilized in group settings to avoid re-traumatization.

I was recently coached to be so structured and organized with time management in my presentations so as to complete what I say I am going to do. This was really helpful feedback to receive! And yet I am still glad to say that I am still able to adjust to circumstances and grab people attention with spontaneity.

Leading group therapy for twenty-five years has trained me to be very attentive to the energy in the room and respond accordingly. Additionally, my spontaneous effort to get people to read my poetry twenty years ago has also helped.

***

In my next training which is at Alameda County’s BEST NOW peer provider training, I plan to restructure my presentation based on the request of the instructor. But I know I can do this and maintain that sense of spontaneity that is so important to reshaping the way the public approaches people who are in emergency.

***

I now offer a shorter hour-and-a-half overview of my training delivered with flexible spontaneity in addition to a six-hour training. If you are interested in a training where you work, I will even come voluntarily.

The post Workshops with a Sense of Spontaneity: appeared first on Working through Psychosis.

Gentrification and Displacement in Oakland California: An Inside-Out Perspective

Watching Buzzards Swirl:

It has been my honor and privilege to work for fifteen years on an urban inner-city psychiatric unit that is currently being targeted for closure by a hospital system that is facing a budget crisis. There is a proposal on the table to merge our program with its suburban counterpart, taking away the specialized care we provide to the urban, primarily African American, community that we serve.

This week I went in front of the board to argue against the closing of this clinic. In preparing to do this, I found myself recollecting things I had learned at commuter college I attended in Camden New Jersey. I developed a grand plan to tell a story that would change the board’s mind.

I sat in front of the board for three hours before I was able to break the spell of the story. Listening to the board belabor many points, I realized it wasn’t the place for my personal perspective. I ended up barely getting my head together and saying some words that fit in with the wider efforts of my professional peers.

Our team said what it had to say and did a good job. Now I must wait two months and see what will become of my life’s work.

Community Stories Outta Oakland:

I have learned a few things about Oakland in my years working with local people. Stories surface that paint a mosaic for myself and the people in the program that are central to the way we put our wellness together, that are central to our community. While Asian Mental Health and Casa Del Sol Clinics primarily serve Asian and Latino clients, our population is mostly black and a minority white. As I share slivers of our stories that we have learned from, I realize that these may not be as welcome in the new community.

Historically, a diaspora of black people primarily from Louisiana settled in segregated neighborhoods in the West and East after World War II. Fleeing from racism and economic oppression, many families prospered. The old Richard Hawkins gospel song Oh Happy Day came from Oakland and made it to the charts in 1968. Elders in the community tell many stories of prosperity and strength. Indeed prior to World War II only 3% of the community was African American.

I have heard many say that within segregated communities, black people could get anything they needed within their community prior to the civil rights movement. Crosses were burned in surrounding communities. Though, of course, currently there are many other enclaves of diverse peoples to which I have less ability to speak about, similar changes have resulted as work went from manufacturing to our current service economy.

Prior to this shift, Huey Newton, Bobby Seals and the Black Panther Party grew out of Oakland and worked to defend the community against racism during desegregation. I have heard many memories of this movement was targeted by the U.S. government and was replaced starting in the mid-seventies, by Felix Mitchell’s crime organization. Word has it that Huey Newton got into drugs and was shot three times in a West Oakland Neighborhood in 1989.

Felix Mitchel’s influence survived only ten years and brought crack into the community. I have heard one community member say, “It’s like you just woke up one morning and everything was just crack,” Felix Mitchel competed with Micky Moore, who survived, reformed and became a preacher. I have heard stories of relatives killed and butchered during these years. In 1991 Tupac Shakur was brutally beaten by Oakland PD. Many large businesses tended to leave the city. Though neighborhoods differ significantly, post-industrial poverty continues to pulse through parts of the city.

During the shift to post-industrialism, the incarceration industry expanded. Residents are allowed three jail visits and then are shipped out to the pen. In the pen, many enter gangs out of which they can never leave without surviving protective custody and solitary confinement. They can get assignments that they must carry out that can jeopardize their efforts to maintain employment in the community. Probation and parole monitor a person very strictly and marginalizes ones’ career opportunities.

While many proud Oaklanders object to criminal organizations and work hard to stay free and safe, it is easy to see how post-industrial wages and generations of poverty have necessitated them. The war is zoned and police precincts fight to keep it out of wealthy districts. Task force reality in your neighborhood makes living hard. I am always in awe when I walk through suburban neighborhoods and smell cannabis wafting where people are safe and free to use it.

Still there are predominately services available in Eastmont Mall, which was once a shopping mall. Still, there are neighborhoods rife with shootings and even, before 2000 there has been migration out of the city out to places like Pittsburg, Antioch, Vallejo, Hayward and Freemont.

Currently, however, the price of housing is skyrocketing, causing more and more working families to commute to the city for work spending long hours in the car. However, displacement seems to be slowed by an extraordinary amount of homelessness. Between 2017-2019 homelessness has increased 47% according to figures released in the Oakland Chronicle.  Fifteen years ago, when I started working, a person could easily get into a shelter; now an Obama phone and a waiting list is a must and the streets are full of tent encampments.

Those of us witnessing this believe that people in the tech industry are taking over the city and displacing people who have made this their home since the nineteen forties. For years I have heard of tech companies handing out the tents that are erected throughout the city. Current figures suggest that 34% of Oakland homeless live in tents and 23% live in their cars. While only 11% of the city is now African American, 50% of the homeless population is African American.

Fighting to Save Our Unit:

Perhaps the story I wanted to tell was as much a testament to why I, a white man, choose to work in an urban, primarily African American community. Perhaps it helps me understand why despite the privilege of my skin, I feel put upon to go out to the suburbs into stories that are significantly different.

If I feel this way, imagine how our community participants feel! There are many white participants who feel the same way I do. We have learned to use this community to enrich our lives.

I have sensed that the decision has been made by the company and that our appeal to power is just theater. Nevertheless, I decided to speak because my bosses said that we needed to fight for the people currently being displaced in the city of Oakland.

It hurts me extraordinarily to lose all the love I have built with patients who have been healing and improving their lives over the course of my fifteen-year tenure. Many will not tolerate the move.

Still, I recall the story that lived in my mind and wonder what it meant to me. Why did I think it would help people of power change their minds about the value of culturally competent care?

The Story that I Couldn’t Share:

Back in my junior and senior year in college I remember a woman lived in the apartment complex across the street, It a little while, but eventually she introduced herself as Gwendolyn. She was just a tad masculine when she shook my hand. She did not use the standard neighborhood handshake like the youth I’d befriended first couple of years in the city.

She was clearly the elder with her freckled face, well-tended hair, and shades. She took it upon herself to start up the conversations. Although I was initially a little guarded, fearing she’d end up asking for money, I remained receptive and open to her.

One of my schoolmates was known to joke about the amount of money he imagined that I would give out to street people. I heard him call me out of my name with his little comedy routine once. I didn’t think it was cute. He took writing classes with me and like most of our cohorts commuted into the city when he wasn’t at work. He was known to stop off at the frat house and write about his escapades.

I clearly didn’t fit in with him or many of my schoolmates. Many would tease me as they got to know me. I didn’t pay them much attention. I just thought they were dumb, in and out of the city in their old suburban high school cliques and stereotypes.

Gwendolyn (and the rest of the neighborhood for that matter) did not ask me for money.

Maybe they knew I worked at the local Korean-owned deli, which meant that I was paid under the table and was expected to guard the shop with the Glock under the grill and the shotgun over the trashcan.

I’d just recently moved into the one local apartment complex which did not allow drugs. I had spent my first year in the city living with an older woman who would not let me have outside friends. My second year was devoted to breaking up with her and establishing some independence in writing classes.

I would talk to Gwendolyn about the roach infestation problem we had.

“Oh, we won’t allow bugs in our apartment,” she exclaimed, adding, “I am absolutely certain of that!”

This seemed strange, with all the traffic going in and out of that building, it didn’t seem clean from the outside. I always did wonder if that meant they did not have cockroaches or if she was talking about something I didn’t understand.

I still think of the three winters I lived there as Gwendolyn’s neighbor and our conversations by the corner payphone. There were times I wanted to give Gwendolyn money when she was underdressed on the corner in her jean jacket shivering. But then again, I too was often too lazy to dress for the cold and was also shivering. We were both far too thin for our bodies.

Perhaps we were both not taking care of ourselves. She was often drinking from a bag and I occasionally had a small bruise on my throat.

But the fact is that Gwendolyn’s constant respectful outreach meant a heck of a lot to me. There was very little college life outside the frat house. I delivered sandwiches to the dorms and was mad at many of my lazy peers who would neglect to tip me.

Just as she practically lived alone on the corner using the phone and talking to associates, I practically lived in the library belaboring to outline everything that I read. I’d later learn that I was battling my undiagnosed ADD and Dyslexia. If I wasn’t at the library, I was at work. Once a week, I was coming home from the suburban shrink appointment on the speed line with bags of groceries that I’d bring into my studio.

Maybe Gwendolyn sensed something in me to which she could relate. In fact, maybe we were both trying to escape some of the same demons. I wouldn’t understand that until many decades later. Finally, I would recapture some memories that would help me understand my odd take on things and how my senses often turn out to be correct. I think Gwendolyn could relate to that!

I did know that I was trying to escape the dependence on a family and community that I didn’t trust.

I had been born into a Quaker school community where both of my parents were teachers, my father a principal. I had spent half of my senior year in several mental health institutions and had returned to a close-knit community that was informed of intimate details of my struggles.

I was no longer able to play sports, so I spent my time writing. My writing efforts now appeared downgraded. Now my best essay nearly got me kicked out of school! The school psychologist, the wife of my English teacher, arranged a confrontation with my parents. Everybody knew about it before I did.

I started to have the sense that grades were political and stupid. Now there is research that says that sense is accurate particularly when skin color is involved.

During my time in institutions, I had come to see things differently. I wanted to badly to avoid all the people who seemed to make up their minds about me in a way that wasn’t going to ever change. I turned down my admissions to private liberal arts colleges and made an escape.

Somehow, I sensed that Gwendolyn understood me better and valued me more than all the people in my old community of privilege.

And it was not just Gwendolyn, it was Doc and Ray who’d trained me to work at the Korean Deli. It was Julio and Jose who I’d trained to work there. It was Ruth the security guard at the library, my coworker Craig, his cousin the janitor. It was my apartment manager who I delivered lunch to on a regular basis. Sprinkled throughout the neighborhood were people who I could connect with and who kept me afloat. I felt they gave me another chance. They didn’t see me as the skinny anorexic that I was, they were curious. It was the familiar look of the customers who came in and out of the Deli. They seemed to respect me and believe in second chances where others did not.

Overcoming Generalizations and Stereotypes:

In retrospect, I was twenty years old. It was an era of extremes in my life. I overgeneralized and felt the whole world of privilege was united against me. Maybe, I just needed to establish my independence from it.

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe some of the privileged world that had reared me could understand that people deserved second chances. Many of them seemed to choose my parents and their secrets over me, but maybe not all of them were like that. Maybe there were some of them that could learn to see beyond stereotypes.

Sure, there was all the disrespect I’d witnessed towards me going to my sister’s graduation. Sure, there was the same disrespect in family get-togethers. I would eventually learn that I had a great aunt who was given a lobotomy and left to rot in an institution. Maybe the whole community of privilege is not like that.

Maybe it’s possible that some other suburban people find community in other contexts. Maybe some people on the board could understand that need to be understood and respected that is necessary to find when you have no place else to go.

Maybe that’s what I have spent the last fifteen years of my life going above and beyond in my work efforts! I feel guilty that I take a competitive salary away from the community. I must pray that I am not only taking from, but also giving back to the community that gave me a chance to come back.

Buzzards!

I am not the first person who has had the meaning and purpose in my life taken away by some people of property. I feel like I am waiting for the buzzards to pick over my bones.

When I first started leading groups on the unit, I recall walking into the “low-functioning” group and having an African American male who thought he was an aristocrat scream and had an IQ that was likely higher than mine scream, “Buzzards!”

Initially I didn’t know what to do because I was hiding my own history of “schizophrenia,” homelessness, and psychiatric incarceration. I needed the salary and did not want to set off a negative ripple.

But I came back into health. I started responding in ways that were more helpful. I’d do things like flap my arms and making a few, “caw-caw” sounds. And then, I’d simulate being shot by the aristocrat. Then I’d have a real conversation with the aristocrat. Eventually we’d end up talking in the hall as if it was Gwendolyn and I back on that corner in Camden New Jersey.

Leadership that Perpetuates Stereotypes?

Good mental health care must teach people to re-examine themselves beyond the stereotypes! I have a hard time believing that people of power know how to help people like Gwendolyn, myself, and the African American aristocrat. They seem to be like all the people back at Quaker school, not willing to give me a second chance.

If a board member was to engage me in a conversation, I would want to tell them that displacement, union-busting and psychiatric incarceration (which is precisely what our program prevents) hurts. It attacks relationships and ways of life. We lose our love and our means of survival. The architects behind these attacks should be ashamed of themselves! I am ashamed of my part in it!

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Why I Still Don’t Think Schizophrenia is an Illness!

No, I still don’t believe schizophrenia is an illness! Many would say I still demonstrate poor insight into my illness for the declaration. That’s okay with me.

I received the diagnosis from a pony-tailed man wearing rodeo work boots with a decorative slab of leather along the base of his lace. He walked with a light stepping swag.  He wouldn’t identify his role to me. I did know I was in the state hospital because I had been set up by the police who I successfully evaded for three days.

Staff denied my request for food before the interview. I was just waking up in the p.m. after my 4:00am arrival the night before. I hadn’t eaten since noon the day before when I’d only walked to mile ten. I was miffed because the paper with the list of police officers on it I had collected for my competency hearing was missing out of my pocket.

***

Three days earlier I had stopped at a gas station to refill. I prepared to dive under my car in the event of gun shots from the passing cars. And then I was in the mart. The police were standing by the merchant as I approached with a coke. Part of me was relieved to see them.

“Oh, did Mommy and Daddy say your brain chemicals are distorted,” mocked a state trooper in a falsetto. He looked like a social-working co-worker of mine back in New Jersey who use to pretend he was a CIA operative.

It was true I had a slight bone to pick with the Seattle PD for leaving law enforcement up to black market forces. I had been contracted to set up services in a notorious section 8 housing project within six months of moving to Seattle. I had received a significant verbal threat from an old friend from back east who said he had the power to harm me. I was on my way to Canada to seek asylum. I had leaked corruption to the press. I now believed these actions would one day be uncovered if they hadn’t already been.

I felt my face turn red from the comment. I was angry that my parents did want me hospitalized just as I had intuited on the road before I decided to head to Canada. My intuition was proving to be correct once again. I could feel myself grimace.

The police were on me and used pain tactics to get me to my knees. They bruised my wrists from handcuffs to prove their control. For the most part, I remained limp and passive.

I knew how to evade hospitalization. I assured the copper of this on my ride to the hospital in the calmest of voice tones. I kept my eye on the mileage. I practiced what to say to the quack doctor in the ER to get released.

The doctor was a reasonable man. I told him I was having memories of being sexually abused. As soon as he said I could go, I left abruptly out the glass doors. I had my life savings in the inseam of my jean. The game wasn’t over.

Outside the hospital at dusk a pack of the local PD floated toward me like rowdy ghosts and the ringleader asked me if I was Tim Dreby.

“Leave me alone!” I shouted. I didn’t identify myself. I braced for another attack, but it never came.

A day later, after testing out what I could and could not get away with, I feared retracing my steps to my car. I also feared taking a flight from the local airport. I knew I could not risk another hospital incident. Instead, I decided to walk from Helena to Butte Montana in one day. I had hiked fifty miles in a day before. But I hadn’t counted on the midnight temperature on the mountain pass. I surrendered to the state troopers who happened to be looking for me with their bright shining light before I made it to Butte.

***

The diagnosis from the pony-tailed man came after I finished this and other parts of my story. I told him I thought my parents were part of the mafia and were pulling the strings behind the scenes.

After I finally got a small portion of cold slop on a plate, I met my roommate.

“I am here to tell you that the Mafia really is after you,” said the Native American man who dressed in a hillbilly hat. “I am just a hillbilly, schizophrenic man in the hospital with a hundred and thirty IQ,” he said during my extensive interview of him. The friend who threatened me knew that I had a hundred thirty IQ.

“Did you know Marylyn Monroe died when Jack Kennedy stuffed cyanide up her ass,” he also said.

“So, I want to ask you a question, and this is important,” said the hillbilly with a pause, “when did the mafia to start following you?”

With a certain Alan Alda vulnerability, I said, “I think I was raised by a mafia family.”

The hillbilly looked uncertain. I wondered if I had said the right thing to the pony-tailed man.

The next day the pony-tailed man testified against me at my competency hearing. I was sentenced to a three-month incarceration.

***

I would be deeply wounded in the hospital. Being confined to a day room for two weeks was very hard. Getting my back reinjured by the cowboy security squad during a misunderstanding also hurt. I was known to be entitled because I tried to hold my workers accountable for not doing their job. As a result, no worker would speak with me. Even my psychiatrist took two months to meet with me. However, the neglect of the chronic unit was the worst. A year of nightmares would ensue.

When I got out of the hospital I took a greyhound and started over with $4,500 in assets. I only had one month of medication. Withdrawing off the medication caused me to lose the job I managed to attain at a daycare. I pounded the pavement daily for three months for any job including Walmart and McDonalds. I did manage to get an offer from a foster care agency, but I was afraid to take it with all I was going through.

My family agreed to intercede if I moved to the Bay Area and I obtained an arranged job at an Italian Delicatessen. Perhaps it seems ironic that this was the only job I could get. I went through a great deal of harassment, gaslighting, and persecution. Finally, when I returned to taking medication ten months later I was able to come out of the emergency state. I stopped being prejudice against the teens who were taunting me at the Deli. I realized that my family was not pulling all the strings.

***

Nineteen years later, I make a daily choice to continue medication to prevent the catastrophic loss associated with an emergency state. Maybe I haven’t made it clear: I still object to the word “schizophrenia” and the idea that what I go through daily is an illness. In fact, the latest reports define schizophrenia as more of a syndrome or neurodevelopmental condition than a disease. They even suggest that it is something that affects people across diagnostic divides something that I have argued for years (Vinograndoy, 2019, p.1.)

I do accept that some of my perceptive abilities are different than others. I do accept that they can lead me into an emergency state if I am not careful. However, I believe the word “illness,” was behind the treatment, I received at the State Hospital. There, I was trained to be controlled by the industry. No one would let me talk about my experiences. I was forced to suppress them even when aspects of them were one hundred percent accurate. I was not encouraged to learn from others. The hospital only prepared me for poverty and to be abused in a local board and care.

I continue to perceive that many people who believe that schizophrenia is an illness internalize treatment that can communicate such negative forecasts.

Turns out the outcome of my journey didn’t coincide with the “sick,” mainstream delusions associated with schizophrenia. I’d read those delusions in school where the twin studies proved the genetic component and there was a noted progressive decline that would get worse and worse and result in brain damage. Turns out twin studies weren’t so reliable, and abuse results in brain damage, not the syndrome which is more an expression of neuro-diversity.

Even if the latest research and I are wrong, and the illness causes brain damage, how was I able to endure some harsh conditions in the community, resume working and eventually passing licensure exams in spite of my learning disabilities? For six months I had to bike twenty miles a day, take the rails for an hour each way to a wealthy suburb, and work in the belly of the beast to prove to my mafia family that this was not my destiny.

***

Now I am a licensed psychotherapist on an outpatient psychiatric unit.

Eleven years ago, I heard about the hearing voices network in Europe, and started to run professional groups in which I disclosed my lived experience with “schizophrenia.” I learned to use my experiences to facilitate storytelling and reflections in group therapy. I have found doing this in a group transforms what was once terrorizing, maddening, and unspeakable into something that can provide insight and inspiration to help others.

Furthermore, there are many details, coincidences, and evidence that I was in fact being monitored in ways many might not think possible. There are also many extremely oppressed people who share experiences of being monitored to which I relate. Such experiences include voices, disassociation, viewing bizarre television scenes, having an apartment ransacked, secret service badges, receiving job related mail that was broken open, being tailed by police officers, and oh so much more.

I may not have all the answers to all the questions I have, but, finally, I know I am not alone. Knowing this is such a relief!

 

Vinograndov, Sophia, M.D., “Cognitive Training for Neural System Dysfunction for Psychosis Disorders,” Psychiatric Times, Vol 36 Issue 3, March 29, 2019.

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Learn How I Upgraded My Schizophrenia to Bipolar, And What That Means

“So, you have bipolar,” said the well-meaning psychiatrist, “So what’s the big deal?”

I had been talking about the stigma associated with presuming that all mental health challenges were disorders. He interrupted me.

But wait! This was the first time anyone ever suggested that I had bipolar!

Was I supposed to give up my perspective and feel I had achieved something? Somehow was this a more socially acceptable diagnosis? Was getting the right diagnosis supposed to fix everything that happened to me?

As a statistic, I was being moved from the 3.2 million individuals in the United States diagnosed with schizophrenia to the 5.7 million who experience bipolar. Of those with bipolar 70% experience psychosis during mania and 50% during depression.

I had been stable ten years. For the past four years I had been running innovative professional group psychotherapy that focuses on exploring psychosis across diagnostic categories.

I’d had the privilege or cracking open hundreds of stories and contrasting them against the diagnosis of differing staff psychiatrists. I felt I learned a lot about the mentality of each distinctive psychiatrist by doing this.

You see, if your bipolar is like mine and includes experiences associated with psychosis a lot can happen to you in the mental health system. If you stick with me through this article you may learn some innovative ways to cope with psychosis across diagnostic divides.

Common Reasons that People with Psychosis Get Diagnosed Bipolar:  

From my vantage point, there are many subjective reasons for bipolar to be selected over schizophrenia or schizoaffective. These subjective factors do not always involve a perfect equation of DSM-V criteria. I’ll go ahead and admit that I do not believe DSM criteria really helps the professional understand the reality of psychosis. Nor is being diagnosed with a psychotic disorder likely to result in more humane and appropriate treatment.

Perhaps, you get diagnosed bipolar because you have suffered a mood component and have a history of being expressive about it in the past. Maybe, your psychosis experiences are intermittent and discontinue with proper support. Perhaps you express experiences that are positive and spiritual that can make your mood and energy soar. Or maybe your body is responsive to small doses of antipsychotics.

Many get diagnosed bipolar because they have enough judgement to convincingly conceal or minimize their psychosis experiences. Sometimes you get the stamp because the psychiatrist respects and has hope for you. If you are a person of color or don’t come from a class the professionals relate to, you are less likely to get the bipolar stamp. I don’t feel I personally need research to believe this to be true. I believe my observations over time are acute enough. However, I do understand that this research does exist.

In my experience some professionals are open to learning and seeing people through the bipolar lenses, and some are more chronic in their ways.

Why Upgrade Your Diagnosis?

When in madness, there was no need to upgrade my diagnosis. I was living in an alternate reality, and I only wanted to feel safe. Being bipolar only meant that I was in danger of being killed and having it called a suicide. All I wanted was to get out of the reality as quick as possible.

In my experience of wellness, there is more of a sense of social acceptability associated with a bipolar diagnosis. Perhaps this is largely because of the misconception that schizophrenia is degenerative or only gets worse over time. Although this is not true, it’s arguable that social stigma does not lead the majority of people to believe otherwise. For example, in 2006 schizophrenia.com suggests a host of negative statistics about schizophrenia including that only 35% of sufferers experience repeated episodes without returning to functioning.

Still, negative statistics (like the one above) enhance the damage that gets done when supporters act without understanding that it is likely that people will heal from psychosis. Good people become institutionalized by bad statistics. Families may not finance a sufferer the opportunity to recover if they keep in mind statistic like that.

Looking closer at that 35% statistic, they come from E. Fuller Torrey’s 2006 statistics which suggest that after ten years, 15% of schizophrenics will be permanently hospitalized and 10% will have killed themselves verses those studied over thirty years during which 10% end up permanently hospitalized and 15% will have killed themselves. This starts to sound like a 35% throw away rate.

Consider that many health plans do not even offer treatment to people with schizophrenia. Likewise, I know locally it is easier to find a professional bipolar group or specialist than it is to find a professional schizophrenia group or specialist.

Less stigma, less negative statistics means less social persecution. That is why many people who are looking to make social rehabilitation gains try to suppress their psychosis and fight against a schizophrenia diagnosis. Many suffers learn to do this so people don’t reject you.

What it Takes to Suppress Psychosis Regardless of Diagnosis?

How does one suppress psychosis? I think it has a lot to do with having a project that is very meaningful to you and vying to be successful with it. Then, the sufferer just cannot let anything get in their way. Sound stupidly easy? The best way I can convey that it isn’t is to share pieces of my experience.

In State hospital, most staff who thought I was schizophrenic would just dominate and humiliate me. I believed that if people knew I was schizophrenic that that type of treatment would resume. My complex appeals to staff to convey that I okay with the FBI resulted in a beat-down by the cowboy security squad. Begging for aspirin with a highly uncomfortable fever, caused one nurse to write a note that I was sexually inappropriate with her. These are not the types of things you want to see happen to you on the outside,

Meanwhile many of my peers tried to recruit me into their white supremacy gang, or the Mexican mafia, or the FBI, or in one case, the Navy Seals. Sound safe in there?

These kinds of experiences cannot be spoken of when you suppress your experience. Nothing happened! They become buried secrets.

But the treatment that had the most lasting impact was the experiences I had to suppress in the community.

There was the woman who flashed me a secret service badge. She initially said I would be safe if I took the over-priced apartment. She showed up again the day I came home to find my apartment had been ransacked and accused my uncle of doing it.

There was also the mail that came from my county work applications that was repeatedly torn open in spite of my complaints at the postal service.

There was the occasion when I was followed on my way to work by a resident I knew from Seattle (I was working in California.) He had handcuffs and a jean jacket with a hand made sign that read CIA on it.

There was the time a computer hacker marked-up my resume at the local library. Several encounters later he told me that he worked for the multinational corporations.

This kind of treatment accompanied me for two years and stopped when I got professional employment. It was traumatic and perpetuated my emergency state, but I learned to pretend it didn’t matter.

If you can ignore the fact that you have no rights and just persist at your immediate project you can overcome psychosis.

It’s Just a Political Discussion:

Resuming professional employment, I worked seven days a week. Eventually, I managed to get a psychotherapy license and earn enough for a down payment on a house in the bay area. I met my wife and got married.

So finally, once I got that kind of support behind me and put a well-meaning psychiatrist in a spot that challenged his perception of disorders, I got bumped up from schizophrenia to bipolar, yay!

Now the DSM-V, which wasn’t yet written during my escapades, says that people with bipolar who go through psychosis in a low mood can experience fear and paranoia. This is exactly what I experienced. Perhaps, one day I’ll get out of my depression and become hypomanic! That gives me something to look forward to!

However, when we examine the recent research this point may become moot.

Laboratory Science Supports Treating Psychosis Across Diagnostic Divides!

In the laboratory they are coming out with scientific findings that strongly support the view that diagnostic differentiation is irrelevant.

In fact, in a very recent article published by The Psychiatric Times, schizophrenia is being considered a syndrome that is more of a neurodevelopmental disorder than an illness or disease. Additionally, these findings do not support different kinds of neurodevelopmental evidence for bipolar verses schizophrenia verses schizoaffective, verses depression with psychosis.

If treated poorly, the neurodevelopmental process will become more extreme! Thus, sufferers can be trained to cope like dyslexics can be trained to read. This vantage point can help promote training in social functioning like specialized job placement programs like the IPS model out of Dartmouth. This practice can help participants in early prevention programs, or at any stage of recovery. get back to work.

Of course, there are many other social skills to learn when you have to suppress trauma! Of course, social skills are gained through socialization groups.

Other Considerations Stemming from The Research:

Moreover, I believe that understanding that you have an underlying condition like ADD, Dyslexia, or Autism can save you from living out your depression and mania to their fullest. Instead of feeling like a slave to the moods, neurodevelopmental understanding helps understand the basis for the moods. By learning that there are reasons you haven’t been included, one can use it to make meaning of depression and play back tapes of the consequences of mania.

Additionally, sufferers can learn about ways they have been traumatized for being different. Also paying attention to real underlying trauma that exacerbates the expression of the syndrome becomes important.

All this can help people with bipolar psychosis learn how to live in their strengths and focus on their abilities and the ways they are exceptional. Albert Einstein, Temple Grayden, and Earnest Hemmingway are just a few of many examples of how people with neurodevelopmental issues can contribute to society in very advanced ways.

As a society, some of us are learning that celebrating neuro-diversity, like they do in some more traditional societies, can lead to better outcomes for people who are built differently. In fact, some might argue that if the problem is neurodevelopmental, expecting symptom suppression without accommodations and providing support groups is just not humane.

Treatment for Psychosis Across Diagnostic Categories:

Here is where I can help other bipolar people if they are willing to explore those terrifying experiences with other good people who are stigmatized. This may involve getting to know people who are from different cultures and may still be in challenging circumstances.

Losing privilege and connecting with those less fortunate is so counter-intuitive in this land where the haves hate the have-nots. But oddly going against the grain in this manner can help exponentially!

If your bipolar experience includes psychosis, treatment can exist in group therapy that normalizes and permits you to express your stories without getting punished. If you are encouraged to work with people with differing diagnostic histories you can learn to be a leader and supporter.

No doubt, the mental health incarceration system varies based on the socioeconomics of your locale. Regardless, it will train you to suppress those psychosis experiences and pretend like they are not real. If you fail to suppress, you will be rejected and ridiculed by others and if this upsets you, you will be punished by going back to the hospital.

If you are able to play the game and can return to work, go ahead and become the bipolar diagnosis. To do so you can simply engage in social rehabilitation and work without upsetting the applecart. It becomes a political discussion with a psychiatrist like the one I had above.

Group Therapy for Psychosis:

Okay, I’ll admit, suppression is not always so easy for all of us. But over the years I have seen many individuals hide their psychosis, avoid my groups, and pretend like what they went through was just bipolar stuff. Indeed, I had to play this game for six years. I had to start over again without anyone knowing anything about me.

However, if you are like me and had to overcome some dramatic circumstances, suppressing all those experiences and trauma may turn you into a traumatized droid. A part of you is permanently disassociated and all you can do is work and try to act in ways that keep you out of trouble.

I am here to promote one potential outlet that I was eventually able to use: group therapy in which the content of psychosis is shared and participants learn from each other.

For example, I hear very few voices and never thought of aliens, but when I learn from people who do, it helps me be more flexible in the meaning I make of what happened to me. My desire to collaborate and support helps me be flexible and decreases my distress.

As a psychotherapist, I started leading these groups and sharing my story to prompt others to feel comfortable in doing so. I learned that by sharing my story and demonstrating that I had recovered, I could use my suffering towards a useful purpose.

Whether you do it as a professional, a peer counselor, or a volunteer, getting support for those things you’ve been through and teaching others how to survive with psychosis can be very rewarding. It can help bring you back to life!

Opportunities to do this can be available through the hearing voices network movement. This is an international movement that seeks to set up peer support outside the mental health system. In the United States, you can click: www.hvn-usa.org!

 

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The post Learn How I Upgraded My Schizophrenia to Bipolar, And What That Means appeared first on Working through Psychosis.

How Will I Let the Next Three Months of My Life Define Me?

Perhaps we all go through periods of time when we are asked to redefine ourselves. As the summer is underway, I find myself challenged to find new ways to commit to my work supporting people who experience psychosis.

If you are receiving this email or post, you are likely familiar with my blogs and efforts to use my experience to help change the way psychosis is approached. A large part of my writing platform depends upon having meaningful work that enables me to share experiences with others and that financially supports me in doing so.

Early this summer, the company I work for announced that programs will be getting cut and closed to address a huge budget shortfall. More information was released and we learned that there is a proposal to merge the urban Highland Program where I work with the suburban Fairmont Program.

This could function to devastate a community that has supported me. It is Highland that allowed me to create my special message group which gave me the opportunity to learn how to redefine psychosis.

The potential loss of this community breaks my heart. I worry for the clients who don’t want to acculturate to the new community. What will they do to stay busy and get support? But I have to confess that sometimes I fear that without this supportive community, it is I who will not be able to thrive and create content that matters. Giving to others and seeing them happy clearly feeds me and keeps me going.

I do believe that I will be okay, but this change ushers in fundamental changes towards who I am and how I have been able to survive. I have already started straining to find an alternative course of income in the event the merge or in the event that my position gets eliminated. Talk from the company has been tough and has made me question the stability of my union entitlement and right to “bump” a less experienced worker.

I have kept my writing practice up to the best of my ability and have some irons in the fire in terms of new blog posts to publish. Still, my confidence as a writer is shaken my need to create a new identity. Relationships with new colleagues will be very different if I am selected to continue my service in Alameda Health System. The issue has caused me to evaluate my values and professional options. How do I make a living without selling out my values and passion for understanding and working through psychosis?

If I go to private practice, how do I fill that practice with people who can benefit from my expertise? How do I get on insurance panels? What if private practice causes me to stray away from my passions? Can I be as open and forthright if I work with people who don’t relate to psychosis? Do I need to hide my identity on my blog and as a writer? These are dilemmas that currently interfere with publishing the posts I am working on

Are there some ways that this change might help me grow for the better?

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How to Help When You Think Someone Might Be Delusional

When you think a person has a delusional idea, it is so important to remember that they often have amassed a significant amount of evidence to convince them they are correct. They likely know what they used to think, it is just that what they currently think seems to be more accurate. In fact, we consider ways the persons’ course of study might make some of their ideas more accurate than mainstream ideas on some occasions!

Ask Yourself: How Did You Get So Lucky to Witness a Delusion!

In many cases, the delusional person has experience in the mental health system has had other people tell them they are delusional in the past. Thus, the fact that they have let you know their thoughts is significant. To know how to respond, it can be important to know why they have told you their thought in the first place.

Maybe they have told you because:

You have spent time with them so that they trust you,
They have hope that you can help them,
They presume you and everyone else have had the same experiences that they have,
They are desperate and endangered in their emergency,
or perhaps they are just testing you out to see where you stand in the conspiracy.

It is a good idea to understand why they have shared the idea and be delighted that they did.

In group therapy, I have found countering with your own experience with delusions and stories about what happened to you, and encouraging others to do the same, helps invite exploration. More on this later.

Don’t Presume Delusions are Wrong, Explore and Confirm Ways They Are Right:

In dealing with people in a mental health setting who are labeled as delusional, across the board, I think the worst thing that you can do is confront them and tell them you think they are wrong! They historically don’t have enough support in the world to be able to agree to disagree and it can really hurt them to hear that you too don’t believe or care about what they are going through.

Ultimately, more and more we are finding that voices and other experiences that make them delusional have value! The hearing voices movement has helped emphasize the importance of this. Often, the delusional person will need to know that you believe this before they will let you be of assistance to them.

Even if a delusional person asks you your opinion and says it will help, I believe you will be far more valuable to them if you are willing to spend a little time getting to know the journey of what they are experiencing without having an agenda.

Believe me they will be testing you to see if you have an agenda.

How can it hurt them or you to listen for a while? We often entertain ideas from distinct ideologies and look for common ground to make relationships. Instead of looking for ways they are wrong, confirm ways that they are right.

Join in and Contribute Conspiracy Ideas:

It is far more effective to share conspiracy ideas that you have yourself to normalize their experience. Do you think JFK was really killed by Lee Harvey Oswald? Clearly there is some degree of conspiracy that you can buy into! In group therapy that I have run over the past eleven years, it is helpful to normalize conspiracy topics and collaborate with them.

When “delusional” people get together and get invited to share, they often help each other by working together to excavate these ideas or experiences. Often, they will not volunteer their thoughts unless other conspiracies are on the table. Expounding on conspiracy with peers is a great way to tease them out.

I have learned to respect conspiracy ideas as bearing the potential of being more correct than mainstream ideas; but also bearing the possibility of being wrong when examined over time. I find that most delusional people can accept this with reflection. A group is often effective if it just lets the conspiracies rip and gets people talking.

The Importance of Finding Out How the Idea Came into Being:

As I suggested above, conspiracy ideas don’t come from nowhere. They come from a long string of experiences that get put together. I call these experiences special messages. A lot can be achieved when a delusional person is willing to identify what experiences they have had that help them think this way.

When experiences can be uncovered and identified, I believe the delusional person will feel a sense of relief and will be more mindful of those experiences. I don’t believe that identifying experiences only serves to reinforce them,

Think of it this way: being more mindful means, they judge them less and accept them more. Instead of racing to solve the conspiracy that may threaten their existence, they can reflect on the one experience with someone else. As if each experience was traumatic, uncovering it and clearly explaining is more likely to help the person let go of it.

Identifying These Underlying Experiences in a Group Context:

In group therapy with other delusional people, defining the different kinds of experiences that can lead to delusions (or what I prefer to term divergent views) can help facilitate associated stories that highlight certain kinds of special messages. A group facilitator can share their own experience with an experience and others can relate to it. This way individuals become more aware of their experiences.

Examples of special message experiences are things like:

Uncanny intuitions,

ESP,

Sensing the thoughts of another,

Having others be able to sense your thoughts

Premonitions,

Hearing voices,

Visions,

Dreams,

Tactile torture,

Interpersonal feedback,

Seeing clues of conspiracy in media,

Seeing clues in words,

Seeing clues in numbers,

Seeing clues in the world that surround you

Not Moving too Fast:

Often, before a delusional person is willing to disclose their underlying experience, they may need to have a corrective experience of making sure they will not be punished or incarcerated again for sharing their ideas. There is a tendency in mainstream treatment to impose reality on delusional people that often comes with loss of rights, unwanted medications, and, most commonly, by being ignored or called “crazy” or “delusional.”

Additionally, many have experienced severe poverty, like homelessness, as a result of their delusional ideas and these kinds of depravations can be perceived as an even worse form of punishment.

Thus, a facilitator is wise to recognize when a delusional person just needs to tell their shocking stories and beliefs without connecting with others or disclosing underlying experiences. This story, while it may raise eyebrows, may be getting told to establish safety and freedom from punishment. It needs to be encouraged and valued by the facilitator even if other delusional people don’t get it.

What About Reality Testing?

Someone who is delusional for some years likely feels oppressed in the mental health. Reality testing often leads to an end in the exploration or relationship.

It is important to remember that, in most cases, the person who is looking for reality testing would prefer being in control of the test. They may ask you questions and trick you to get authentic answers.

For best outcomes, anticipate this and provide persistent authenticity. Thus, all questions need to be answered with honesty, without defensiveness, and with congruent non-verbal and verbal responses.

Rarely will your feedback resolve the issue and experiences they are having. It is possible that the experiences they are having will continue to some extent for a while. But hopefully they can get to the point where they trust you through it all.

I work with delusional people a long time before I try to provide reality feedback. I generally do this when the person is testing me to see if I am the mastermind of their problems. When I am aware of this happening, I believe correcting them via non-verbal cues, and communicating about the feedback they are receiving from me can help.

In general, I will support what I think they believe to the best of my ability. Indeed, I still believe that often delusional people are correct in ways that are surprising.

Teaching the Public What You Know:

In fact, delusional people are quite common. But when delusional people are treated in the mental health system, the result be very severe isolation. Too often, this isolation is totally reinforced in repressive treatment that tries to further suppress traumatic experiences, rather than heal.

A far better strategy is to try to change public opinion about underlying experiences like ESP or voices. are and how to further include people who experience an influx of them in crisis. Most people get feedback from dreams, nonverbal communication, and intuitions, which are types of underlying experiences. They can learn to relate

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Using My Recovery from “Schizophrenia” to Manage Job Insecurity

With Upcoming Program Closures Announced, How Confident Should I Feel?

A few years ago, a co-worker said, “We could come into work tomorrow and the job might not be there for us! That’s why I always try to put family first!”

My job of fifteen year was there for me before I got married and gained the sense of support that I somehow seemed to lack prior. It dug me out of poverty!

Perhaps my coworker said what he said because he could see how committed I was to the job. Many colleagues notice that I am driven to go the distance for our program participants. I try to disclose my history to most. I know the grapevine still exists.”

Perhaps some coworkers have learned to respect the lived experience that makes me feel passionate about the work I do!

Regardless, right now, the program’s budget sits in the executive management’s hands. They have announced that they are going to have to close programs to balance the budget. Therefore, I find the words of my coworker playing in my mind.

Recurring Dreams and Anxieties:

There have been a lot of nights over the past fifteen years I have awoke to recurring dreams of being asked to leave my job early. Often, I am forced to move and try to start over again working for much less money. Some nights I am sleeping in shelters and riding bikes to interviews. Others I have some cushion and my wife behind me. Maybe I start out with enough money to buy a house, but have to work a low wage job.

I may be a licensed professional with twenty-five years of experience, but clearly the thought of finding a new job is very intimidating to me. I have published a memoir along with hundreds of posts, many published on professional sites, about my mental health.

Perhaps it makes sense that a part of me is afraid that I will never be able to find another job again.

Eighteen years ago, I thought I was a targeted individual and under state surveillance via a mafia entity. The only job I could get was an arranged job at an Italian Delicatessen. This lasted over a year and was extremely difficult. At age thirty, I had to bike twenty miles a day and take the rails for two hours just to get gaslit and harassed by teenage co-workers from wealthy districts.

Signs of Getting Scapegoated Still Exist!

With fifteen years of experience I am one of the most tenured staff in the union, and yet I frequently find my work scrutinized because I have a different perspective. Maybe this triggers my sense of paranoia. Even when a client responds affirmatively and shows growth, I may get challenged.

I have written my own therapy platform to support what I do. It is significantly different than mainstream treatment. Although many colleagues will acknowledge that my presentations are impressive in person, in public there is silence when I am scrutinized. I don’t blame others. I am not always able to disagree without hurting others. But still I am sensitive.

I speak at local conferences and agencies to train others with my therapy platform! But on the job, I still experience doubts and challenges. In fact, this week it was particularly bad.

Premonition?

Earlier this week I got a rare chance to talk to my manager as I was negotiating a paid role for peer counselors on the unit. I let my manager vent and supported him about the threat of programs getting cut. At one point he said some people with a lot of tenure might get cut. I walked away wondering if he was referencing me or himself.

That night I woke up screaming. A long dream through which I constantly evaded death finally ended with someone ambushing me through a doorway with an odd-looking shotgun. I was shot as I reached to grab the barrel.

I woke up the next morning convinced that I was going to lose my job to the point where I processed this as a real possibility. Although I have a clean record and a union job, the potential of trumped up complaints keep me in fear.

Shamanic Processing:

Back when I was working at the Italian Deli, the only way I was able to get employed again was to maintain the faith that it was possible despite the potential of surveillance. I went to many interviews without getting hired.

I thought about another job I have had my eye on that I have recently heard is hiring. I thought about the potential of a private practice. I thought about a long-time dream of mine, getting another grant to help create an outreach program.

I told myself that if I am frustrated that I am not supported at work, that maybe it is time to move on.

I remembered that I believe in a power that is higher than the CIA or the mafia. I used the belief in this higher power to remain open to the many potentials that a job change might mean.

I found myself thinking about how Malcolm X knew he was going to be assassinated and kept on doing what he was doing without letting it make him furious. I thought about these things and worked and worked my way through another day.

Managing Stigma with Grace:

Part of leading the life we are meant to live means being awake to all the complexities, twists, and turns that life brings. Now, thanks to my understanding of life’s messages and cues, I can be prepared for what is to come.

Instead of being victimized and scapegoated, I chose to have a good day.

Clearly the power of stigma still lives inside of me and the wider society. However, when I am wise, I can benefit from the experiences.

I choose to put the energy out into the universe that there is a plan for me. This takes the sting out of stigma and is key to overcoming it.

I am a vessel! I give what I can and I pray to get what I need in life.

I will continue to serve to challenge stigma in this way in whatever capacity that opens up. Maybe we will be okay. No matter what I will find a way to maintain my work.

I will remain hopeful and positive about my colleagues and see what happens.

The post Using My Recovery from “Schizophrenia” to Manage Job Insecurity appeared first on TIM DREBY, MFT.

How to Help Your Loved One Be A Successful Schizophrenic?

How many parents out there would rather learn that their child had developed a life-threatening cancer, than hear that their child carries a diagnosis of schizophrenia? Historically burned-out doctors may be known to make such negative statements about schizophrenia at the time of diagnosis. If they end up being wrong, they simply re-diagnose the sufferer with bipolar; but still their comment happened. Perhaps, it challenged you to devalue your loved one.

Well, I am a mental health professional, and nothing excites me more than meeting someone else who has experiences associated with schizophrenia. I instantly know aspects of what they have gone through. It makes them a potential friend to me. Additionally, I come equipped with handfuls of tools that I think may be helpful for them. I am additionally curious to see what they might teach me about myself.

Strange thing is, I am not alone in my world view. Maybe you have heard of the international movement called the Hearing Voices Network? Originating from a psychiatrist in the Netherlands named Marious Romme and Sandra Escher, this movement seeks to normalize one of the many experiences associated with schizophrenia? The movement points out that one in ten people hear voices and that not everyone needs to be institutionalized in the mental health system as a result. In fact, the movement has proved that people who have been institutionalized for years turn out to be great leaders and advocates.

Stereotypes You Are Up Against:

Maybe, it is not fair to blame anyone for a negative response to the above dilemma because of all the negative stereotypes associated with the schizophrenia word. Many people think of a homeless person who is out fighting for their survival on the streets, posturing, or bearing a cardboard sign beneath the underpass. Those a little more informed of the norms may think of a crowded board and care home with nothing to do but to smoke and drink coffee. Still others in some states imagine a lengthy state hospital stay or transitions through hospital recidivism and homeless shelters. Of course, there will be those who think of shows they’ve seen like Criminal Minds or The Guardian. They may conjure images of mass shooting events that are blasted through the media quicker than our very apparent national homeless crisis.

Of course, as a parent or loved ones there is the stereotype of the fresh-out-of-school social workers supervised by burned out administrators who dehumanizes their patients the minute their backs are turned. Perhaps it is hard to watch this happen and easier just to stay out of it. Perhaps, some of you will shield your kids from this reality and try to take care of them on your own. Meanwhile, much of the public feels that we as a nation were kinder and gentler during industrial times when we provided mental institutions. We all know stereotypes are bad but still they exist are real and scare us.

When Stereotypes Become Real:

I can relate. I worked in mental health and greatly despised the life I saw many of my clients enduring. I respected my supervisors, but it never felt right. When I advanced to be able to work independently, I was so successful at advocating for better care, that it is part of what landed me in a State Hospital myself and discharged to the streets.

“You see Tim,” I was told in my second meeting with my psychiatrist two months into my State Hospital stay, “one time we had someone come in here and say they were being followed by the FBI and we found out they were in fact being followed. They hadn’t done much, but they were under investigation.”

Was she really referencing me? I had tipped to press of to murder and mayhem on several occasions. Yes, many of those stigmatized scenes are real, but they are only a small piece of the picture.

Indeed, I was willing to call myself autistic long before I was willing to call myself the schizophrenic that I am. It took me fifteen years of recovery before I started to embrace the ugly word because the stereotypes were so threatening to me.

Hard Decisions You Face:

Such stereotypes may bring really hard decisions. Your relationship with your loved one, the extent to which you perceive justice in social institutions, and your own stigma about mental health challenges may influence your take on what you are hearing.

Remember, that even though your loved one is in an emergency state potentially flailing around with conspiracy ideas and opinions about you, they know you well enough to know how you will respond. They may sense your response and resent it. Historical problems in the relationship may become exacerbated exponentially. For a minority, there is the potential of real violence while your loved one remains in emergency state? How are you to respond if someone you love suddenly sees you as the root of all evil?

And what will your friends say? How may they judge your parenting or partnership?  How do you handle privacy needs? How have you done this throughout their lives up to this point? Do your actions further shame your loved one? How much credence do you put into the medical diagnosis? What have you heard about the word: recovery? Does your loved one deserve the best treatment, or do they need to be treated fairly, just like everyone else? What is the best treatment? What kind of money and resources do you have to play with? How willing are you to support someone who isn’t behaving appropriately? How much do you value your own safety verses theirs?

Support for You:

Providers will generally refer you to the power structure of NAMI for support and you will mingle with others who have faced these dilemmas for years. If you are even willing to stay involved, you can use these groups to figure the most humane decisions to make.

Often, with this referral comes a clear concept of a chemical imbalance to which your loved one is victim. Suddenly you are surrounded by volunteers who give their time and expect you to do the same and support their views. Accepting the power of the illness, setting behavioral boundaries, imposing medications, and accepting dilapidated housing options may be the standard with which you are encouraged to comply.

Indeed, people and families are very different as are regions and NAMI boards. A variety of things can be helpful.

What it Feels Like to Find Meaning in Stereotypes:

When I was going through dehumanizing stereotypical experiences, I only felt victimized. I had always thought I was critical of dehumanizing practices; but still, I was shocked! Oh, how much worse that horrific, maddening, and dehumanizing treatment seem when you are in an emergency state. No one believed a word I said. I didn’t think I would ever be glad for enduring it. I could see no value to losing all my social standing and being incarcerated in impoverished circumstances. I feared for my future.

Now eighteen years later, I use all those degrading experiences which lasted two years after I was discharged to the streets to convince patients I work with that I know what they are talking about. I still feel overwhelmed when I think of what I went through, but I now can say I went through them for a reason.

I often say that if I had known that my suffering could lead to a lifetime of meaningful work, it wouldn’t have been so terrorizing. Instead of waking up in night terrors, or having urinated in my bed, I could have gone through what I went through more gracefully. And I wouldn’t have been as hard to manage for all the low wage work community that surrounded me. I mean any innocent child who saw me coming would run the other way. My negative energy was quite off-putting.

You May Be Needed to Make it Possible:

Meanwhile, my father had made his opinion known, he felt incarceration and mental health warehousing would be as good as it would get for me. Just like the treatment system at Montana State Hospital which was set up to help me adjust to poverty and disempowerment, it seemed like deep down he wanted to be right about his negative prediction. Still, he gave me a year of economic support to get it together. Though I could have got food stamps, my parents did help! And I still call them weekly. The memory of them being so concerned they were just enabling me while I was biking twenty miles a day to work a forty-hour week still burns.

Thank god it worked! I was able to get back to my career.

Can you imagine how great I feel with a career in mental health, a wife, a dog, and a home?

Many Others Can Do It:

Many others of us who suffer can do a lot of healing and earning of social empowerment by helping each other out. We can do this by using our experiences to reach others who may appear unreachable to outsiders. However, we also need to be paid for our livelihood.

Not only have I been blessed with the opportunity to find meaning from my suffering, I have seen others do it as well. I have helped employ a team of four to use their experiences associated with psychosis to help others. They outreached and learned to run groups in agencies.

What Is Missing for Schizophrenics in America?

Perhaps not everyone who suffers from experiences associated with schizophrenia naturally takes to becoming a therapist the way I have, but the mental health system really lacks a vision for sustainable roles for us schizophrenics to occupy. And I believe the first step towards creating such roles involves seeing schizophrenia as a culture rather than an illness.

In other countries the hearing voices movement has taken hold, healed many, and given people valuable roles. The premise is simple: let people who hear voices from different walks of life get together and share their experiences in un-monitored support groups. Wow, so much can come from that!

For the last eleven years I have run such support groups as a professional who openly reflects on my lived experience with schizophrenia. Like many hearing voices groups, the focus of my groups extends beyond simply hearing voices. I like to include and normalize all kinds of experiences that lead people to alternative thoughts about the way the world works.

I think these kinds of support groups help direct schizophrenics to care about the experiences of their brethren. Mutual learning and coping strategies result. Hence, letting schizophrenics acculturate and be schizophrenics is a marvelous step in the right direction.

The Need for A Living Wage:

However, in my opinion, support groups are just a start to what is needed to give the culture a meaningful role. In Oakland California, services that outreach to homeless encampments, board and care homes, agencies and shelters can invite institutionalized individuals out to support groups. Many of the people I serve off the streets of Oakland, can greatly benefit from having visitors who come and bring the support groups to them in their board and care home. Then, they might then learn to come out to groups in the community and get around some of the obstacles that keep them isolated.

An organization as such can significantly train and employ schizophrenics to develop a variety of skills. It can give them a chance to make meaning from the stereotypes through which they may have lived or to which they feared Thus a training/outreach program can help schizophrenics move on to better and better jobs.

How You Can Help Your Loved Ones Realize this Vision?

I think it is important to end the medicalized view of schizophrenia. Updated research is defining psychosis across diagnostic divides as more of a syndrome or even a neurodevelopmental disorder like autism or dyslexia. This really supports the work of the Hearing Voices Network which contends that voices and other experience do have value and carry real meaning that must be addressed for healing and survival.

Believe me, there can be complex underlying issues to address.

Thus, as you live schizophrenic stereotypes through your loved one, remember that they may be transformed into your child’s mission in life. You cannot possibly be responsible for all the meanness in the system, but you can take updated research and success stories from the Hearing Voices Movement to your NAMI meetings. You can find ways to support employment for schizophrenics through empowering organizations like the one I proposed above. I ran such a program for a year and a half until the temporary funding was done. I know it can be done.

Successful Schizophrenics:

There are many things that can help schizophrenics find roles that utilize their passions and interests. As a culture, schizophrenics are historically oppressed like heretics in western society. However, if we are to explore many traditional societies, we may find many of the skills that are labeled as an illness to be shamanic and spiritual. There are many wise traditions to explore in creating solutions.

I personally do not throw the tradition of psychiatry down the toilet. I myself utilize medication and work with others who do as well. I also admire and champion people who do not. However, we must offer solutions that help heal the localized abuses that have occurred within the medicalized system. One solution does not fit all.

Ultimately, I still wouldn’t mind using another word besides schizophrenia. I call my groups and my program special messages.

The post How to Help Your Loved One Be A Successful Schizophrenic? appeared first on TIM DREBY, MFT.

In Psychotherapy We Trust: Part Four– Trauma Treatment

In summing up my experience with psychotherapy, the last lesson is one I am still working through. It is a lesson I am learning as I am seeking trauma treatment for feeling numb and frozen when I am not at work. This involves rebuilding trust in psychotherapy. It involves building into psychotherapy a significant peer component.

During my first job working at McDonald’s, I worked around the food that I loved. It made it much easier to starve. Especially McDonald’s irresistible french-fries: the more I worked around them, the less appealing they were.

Perhaps that is all that is happening to me as a psychotherapist. I am just working around the lard in the industry and it makes me not want to dine. However, shall I really give up on trusting psychotherapy?

Now there is a new trend pioneered by figures like Bessel van der Kirk and Richard Swartz (Internal Family Systems,) and Karen Shapiro or Laura Parnell (EMDR) These involves new ways to address trauma that are based on “better” scientific understandings of trauma and how it affects the body.

Developing Treatment for Psychosis as a Provider:

When I finally recovered from two years of “psychosis” or what I’ve learned to call special message crisis, I took a long break from seeking psychotherapy services. Instead of receiving services, I provided services.

I worked with other people who suffer from what I went through. It took me six years, but I learned to use my own story and work mutually with program participants. Over time I learned to consider myself to be a wounded healer. I do not pretend that I am not wounded. I am authentic and I believe I get good results.

As a psychotherapist, I have trusted myself. I have learned and grown stronger giving myself and others the liberty to talk about experiences associated with hearing voices or being a targeted individual.

I pioneered professional group therapy for psychosis and developed eclectic strategies to help support people while in psychosis. I work primarily with people who have been severely affected by public warehousing and have suffered homelessness and been institutionalized in shelters and board and care homes.

Providing therapy has helped me more than receiving it. Returning to therapy has been something I have done for a targeted reason, to address trauma.

Here, summing it up will help provide perspective on the mental health system and ways psychotherapy may need to change to become more trustworthy.

Seeking Out Trauma-Treatment:

A year and a half ago, I suffered a back injury and had to be in bed for a week. Then I needed to be out of work as I rehabbed for a month. I decided to seek therapy to try to take the edge off my level of suffering when I didn’t have work to keep me occupied.

I often suffer on the weekends when I am not functioning in a professional capacity. Additionally, I often suffer because I have been unable to build social support that has enabled me to promote my therapy platform as an author.

Curious to learn about EMDR and other trauma therapies like Internal Family Systems, I chose to work with a therapist who appears to be my age and my training level.

This time my therapist acknowledged he has his own lived experience and is open about his religious background and our cultural differences. Finally, he was able to accept my insurance which meant I could afford to see him without feeling financially exploited.

Finding Myself Unresponsive:

In EMDR trauma treatment, there is a process called resourcing. The trainer helps the subject identify wise and protective people in their lives. Also in resourcing it is important to identify safe places. These figures and spaces are used to mentally support the sufferer during the process of bilateral stimulation.

Unfortunately, I found that this task does not come easily for me.

In trying to find supportive and protective people, I found that most people who have supported me have been a lot like the six other therapists I have critiqued up to this point.

While each therapist and support did help me, they also left me with a sense of betrayal. It has been hard for me to believe that my past is riddled with people who I don’t trust. Many have left me because of my mental health struggles and the stigma associated with schizophrenia.

What I found was that because I struggle with the task of resourcing, I am not responsive to the bilateral stimulation. Recently, I heard my therapist say he didn’t think I was a candidate for EMDR because I am not in touch with my feelings.

Lesson Sixteen: True Healers Don’t Make Fun of a Subjugated Group!

Simultaneously, I have taken training that supports my therapy efforts. For example, I took Emotional Freedom Techniques, a scientifically based treatment that incorporates the Eastern practice of tapping on energy meridians and repeating affirmations to help change the level of stress the body experiences.

During the Emotional Freedom Techniques training, I found that in a room full of therapists, I was not able to benefit. The instructor called people like me reversed. He expressed annoyance with such people. ‘Why can’t they just accept help!” “You can spot a reversed person when they come into these rooms from their energy they exude.”

Meanwhile, I progressively realized I was being referenced by these comments. I recognized this as an idea of reference of the sort I experienced during psychosis.

In my own system of treatment, I would call this kind of message a trickster. If I believe in a trickster, it likely to come true. Instead, much like I must do to survive psychosis, I need to use spirituality and exude alternative energy through prayers and mantras and hope that the trickster doesn’t come true.

Even though I knew that I needed to ignore this real situation and change my energy to change the outcome, I fumed. I bitterly stopped hiding the fact that the tapping wasn’t working for me. I noticed that the instructor seemed to avoid my hand and further reject me with angry comments about dissenters and I felt hurt and angry.

As a result, I have surmised that I may live in a slightly disassociated state, perhaps because of my medications, that prevent me from being in touch with my feelings. I believe this state is something I have developed as a psychotherapist who had to work particularly long hours for my license.

For a long time, I told no one about my history until I got my license. Perhaps my supervisors just saw someone who worked seven days a week if they even saw me at all.

I believed if I disclosed, my supervisors would refuse to let me work under their license. It so happened that many of my supervisors said horrible things about people who experience schizophrenia to which I had to silently bear witness.

In like manner, for many years I struggled to get along with my colleagues. First, I tended not to trust other therapists when they complained about people like me who have been institutionalized.

Then, when I self-identified as a therapist with lived experience with psychosis, there were times ridicule made it back to me. Politically I was attacked when I took a job as a peer administrator. One colleague saw this and said I was like Tupac with all eyes on me. I left administration when I was demoted. I went back to my old job and was able to survive the nickname, “Crazy Tim,” and continued working.

The same thing had happened when I sought training years earlier from Bessel van der Kirk, a man touted as the world’s leading trauma expert. In a room of hundreds of upper-middleclass caucazoidal clinicians, he made fun of people who were psychotic. He didn’t do this once. He did it repeatedly. I felt extremely alienated and it follows me into all the trainings I subsequently attend.

Making the Connection:

I think of my behavior in group therapy when psychosis is freely referenced: I am animated, engaged, funny and in touch with my feelings.

I think of the one-time my therapist really tested me to be in touch with my feelings. It was at the end of a long disturbing week.

Even though I can acknowledge that I failed miserably in describing my feelings, I realize I need to contest him that his experience of me doesn’t mean that I am incapable of benefitting from EMDR!

So here, I make the connection that a part of me is putting my therapist in the category with all the trauma experts and past therapists who have rejected me.

I am aware to some extent that I bring significant therapy baggage or negative transference to this therapeutic relationship. As I draft this blog. I never really considered how bad therapy has been for me.

There have been many times in psychotherapy over the past year and a half that I have felt judged or misunderstood. I have worked hard to overlook it and advocate for a better relationship.

While I have tended to give my therapist the benefit of the doubt, I also realize that I am hypervigilant about being judged. Sometimes I have walked away thinking he thinks of me as a narcissist.

Outcome:

When I recently confronted my therapist about his conclusion that I cannot benefit from EMDR, I learned that he is not like the trauma trainers and other therapist colleagues from whom I have observed prejudice against psychosis. My therapist may have been trained by them but he might have alternative views.

I tested him to see if he really thinks I am a narcissist. He did not seem to feel that way about me. I realized that I am blaming him for all he bad therapy I have received over the years. I have not been warm to him. His assessment of me was not his fault.

I think throwing my therapist under the bus and saying that all he ever did was judge me when he said I could not benefit from EMDR is not very rational.

Therapy is not an all or nothing thing. Therapists have strengths and weaknesses just like people who experience “psychosis” or special message crisis. Maybe to find a person who really believes in me, it takes firm self-advocacy!

Therapy that Heals Beyond Social Control:

I think most therapists I have examined in this series have looked at me and felt there is a need to fix something. Many people do not need to be fixed, need only be supported. When I interviewed with Malik Shakur (Tupac’s cousin) on the Knowledge Show to promote my book that was his assessment of me. I was a structured kid, he said. There was nothing wrong with me.

While I don’t feel good about my experiences with therapy, I am responsive to curanderos and other types of healers who try to help me be the kind of person I want to be. I may not choose to need mushrooms or other natural psychedelics, but I like traditional cultures. I have learned that my goal is not to fit in but rather to endure.

Like a good curandero I will help individuals find health despite the goals of the Cabals who advocate for social control and conformity for their own security.

I will persist and trust my therapist who also identifies as a wounded healer. I will try to add music artists who I appreciate to my resource list of people who have not let me down.

I can learn healing skills to regulate my emotions so I can explore traumatic memories and find out more of what I experienced during times of disassociation.

I Am Not Alone:

In the health system there is a new movement to bring peers into the workplace. Indeed peer support and a culture of sustainable recovery suggests that people who have been institutionalized can find meaning and purpose by helping out their brethren in the system.

At the current time, many wise peers are expected to train young staff members just out of school and help each other out without getting any compensation.

For twenty-six years I have seen this go on and I feel that if those wise peers are given training and the right kind of support, they can complete tasks and they have a right to compensation. That’s what I do. I may endure ridicule, but I respond by seeking to outperform my colleagues and sometimes I get respect.

As the Hearing Voices Movement demonstrates, lived experience and stories about managing psychosis and other struggles can be very helpful when shared amongst sufferers. More and more the clinics are hiring peers and including them as members of the treatment team.

Indeed, there are a lot of people like me who know what it is like to repeatedly fail in treatment. I believe we can be utilized to improve services for others. Many others like me have training about what not to do:

Lesson Number One–Don’t Side with Society Over the Sufferer;
Lesson Number Two–Don’t Ignore Problems;
Lesson Number Three–Don’t Engage in Dual Relationships that May Interpreted as Exploitative;
Lesson Number Four—It Is Important to Set Reasonable Expectations;
Lesson Number Five—It is Not Helpful to Make Negative Predictions;
Lesson Number Six—It is Important Not to Ignore Signs of Abuse in Relationships;
Lesson Number Seven—It is Important Not to Attack a Spiritual Tradition;
Lesson Number Eight—Don’t Use Treatment to Attack a Political Ideology;
Lesson Number Nine–Don’t Let the Basis of Your Trust Be Credentials;
Lesson Number Ten–Don’t Make Decisions for the Client;
Lesson Number Eleven–Don’t Presume Everything in a Paranoid Person’s Life is Paranoia;
Lesson Number Twelve–Don’t Predict Permanent Warehousing for a Person in an Emergency;
Lesson Number Thirteen—Don’t Collaborate with Imposed Treatment;
Lesson Number Fourteen—Don’t Expect Psychosis to be Suppressed:
Lesson Number Fifteen—Don’t Impose Your Economic Reality on Your Patient;
Lesson Number Sixteen—True Healers Don’t Make Fun of a Subjugated Group!

The post In Psychotherapy We Trust: Part Four– Trauma Treatment appeared first on TIM DREBY, MFT.

In Psychotherapy We Trust– Trauma Treatment

In summing up my experience with psychotherapy, the last lesson is one I am still working through. It is a lesson I am learning as I am seeking trauma treatment for feeling numb and frozen when I am not at work. This involves rebuilding trust in psychotherapy. It involves building into psychotherapy a significant peer component.

During my first job working at McDonald’s, I worked around the food that I loved. It made it much easier to starve. Especially McDonald’s irresistible french-fries: the more I worked around them, the less appealing they were.

Perhaps that is all that is happening to me as a psychotherapist. I am just working around the lard in the industry and it makes me not want to dine. However, shall I really give up on trusting psychotherapy?

Now there is a new trend pioneered by figures like Bessel van der Kirk and Richard Swartz (Internal Family Systems,) and Karen Shapiro or Laura Parnell (EMDR) These involves new ways to address trauma that are based on “better” scientific understandings of trauma and how it affects the body.

Developing Treatment for Psychosis as a Provider:

When I finally recovered from two years of “psychosis” or what I’ve learned to call special message crisis, I took a long break from seeking psychotherapy services. Instead of receiving services, I provided services.

I worked with other people who suffer from what I went through. It took me six years, but I learned to use my own story and work mutually with program participants. Over time I learned to consider myself to be a wounded healer. I do not pretend that I am not wounded. I am authentic and I believe I get good results.

As a psychotherapist, I have trusted myself. I have learned and grown stronger giving myself and others the liberty to talk about experiences associated with hearing voices or being a targeted individual.

I pioneered professional group therapy for psychosis and developed eclectic strategies to help support people while in psychosis. I work primarily with people who have been severely affected by public warehousing and have suffered homelessness and been institutionalized in shelters and board and care homes.

Providing therapy has helped me more than receiving it. Returning to therapy has been something I have done for a targeted reason, to address trauma.

Here, summing it up will help provide perspective on the mental health system and ways psychotherapy may need to change to become more trustworthy.

Seeking Out Trauma-Treatment:

A year and a half ago, I suffered a back injury and had to be in bed for a week. Then I needed to be out of work as I rehabbed for a month. I decided to seek therapy to try to take the edge off my level of suffering when I didn’t have work to keep me occupied.

I often suffer on the weekends when I am not functioning in a professional capacity. Additionally, I often suffer because I have been unable to build social support that has enabled me to promote my therapy platform as an author.

Curious to learn about EMDR and other trauma therapies like Internal Family Systems, I chose to work with a therapist who appears to be my age and my training level.

This time my therapist acknowledged he has his own lived experience and is open about his religious background and our cultural differences. Finally, he was able to accept my insurance which meant I could afford to see him without feeling financially exploited.

Finding Myself Unresponsive:

In EMDR trauma treatment, there is a process called resourcing. The trainer helps the subject identify wise and protective people in their lives. Also in resourcing it is important to identify safe places. These figures and spaces are used to mentally support the sufferer during the process of bilateral stimulation.

Unfortunately, I found that this task does not come easily for me.

In trying to find supportive and protective people, I found that most people who have supported me have been a lot like the six other therapists I have critiqued up to this point.

While each therapist and support did help me, they also left me with a sense of betrayal. It has been hard for me to believe that my past is riddled with people who I don’t trust. Many have left me because of my mental health struggles and the stigma associated with schizophrenia.

What I found was that because I struggle with the task of resourcing, I am not responsive to the bilateral stimulation. Recently, I heard my therapist say he didn’t think I was a candidate for EMDR because I am not in touch with my feelings.

Lesson Sixteen: True Healers Don’t Make Fun of a Subjugated Group!

Simultaneously, I have taken training that supports my therapy efforts. For example, I took Emotional Freedom Techniques, a scientifically based treatment that incorporates the Eastern practice of tapping on energy meridians and repeating affirmations to help change the level of stress the body experiences.

During the Emotional Freedom Techniques training, I found that in a room full of therapists, I was not able to benefit. The instructor called people like me reversed. He expressed annoyance with such people. ‘Why can’t they just accept help!” “You can spot a reversed person when they come into these rooms from their energy they exude.”

Meanwhile, I progressively realized I was being referenced by these comments. I recognized this as an idea of reference of the sort I experienced during psychosis.

In my own system of treatment, I would call this kind of message a trickster. If I believe in a trickster, it likely to come true. Instead, much like I must do to survive psychosis, I need to use spirituality and exude alternative energy through prayers and mantras and hope that the trickster doesn’t come true.

Even though I knew that I needed to ignore this real situation and change my energy to change the outcome, I fumed. I bitterly stopped hiding the fact that the tapping wasn’t working for me. I noticed that the instructor seemed to avoid my hand and further reject me with angry comments about dissenters and I felt hurt and angry.

As a result, I have surmised that I may live in a slightly disassociated state, perhaps because of my medications, that prevent me from being in touch with my feelings. I believe this state is something I have developed as a psychotherapist who had to work particularly long hours for my license.

For a long time, I told no one about my history until I got my license. Perhaps my supervisors just saw someone who worked seven days a week if they even saw me at all.

I believed if I disclosed, my supervisors would refuse to let me work under their license. It so happened that many of my supervisors said horrible things about people who experience schizophrenia to which I had to silently bear witness.

In like manner, for many years I struggled to get along with my colleagues. First, I tended not to trust other therapists when they complained about people like me who have been institutionalized.

Then, when I self-identified as a therapist with lived experience with psychosis, there were times ridicule made it back to me. Politically I was attacked when I took a job as a peer administrator. One colleague saw this and said I was like Tupac with all eyes on me. I left administration when I was demoted. I went back to my old job and was able to survive the nickname, “Crazy Tim,” and continued working.

The same thing had happened when I sought training years earlier from Bessel van der Kirk, a man touted as the world’s leading trauma expert. In a room of hundreds of upper-middleclass caucazoidal clinicians, he made fun of people who were psychotic. He didn’t do this once. He did it repeatedly. I felt extremely alienated and it follows me into all the trainings I subsequently attend.

Making the Connection:

I think of my behavior in group therapy when psychosis is freely referenced: I am animated, engaged, funny and in touch with my feelings.

I think of the one-time my therapist really tested me to be in touch with my feelings. It was at the end of a long disturbing week.

Even though I can acknowledge that I failed miserably in describing my feelings, I realize I need to contest him that his experience of me doesn’t mean that I am incapable of benefitting from EMDR!

So here, I make the connection that a part of me is putting my therapist in the category with all the trauma experts and past therapists who have rejected me.

I am aware to some extent that I bring significant therapy baggage or negative transference to this therapeutic relationship. As I draft this blog. I never really considered how bad therapy has been for me.

There have been many times in psychotherapy over the past year and a half that I have felt judged or misunderstood. I have worked hard to overlook it and advocate for a better relationship.

While I have tended to give my therapist the benefit of the doubt, I also realize that I am hypervigilant about being judged. Sometimes I have walked away thinking he thinks of me as a narcissist.

Outcome:

When I recently confronted my therapist about his conclusion that I cannot benefit from EMDR, I learned that he is not like the trauma trainers and other therapist colleagues from whom I have observed prejudice against psychosis. My therapist may have been trained by them but he might have alternative views.

I tested him to see if he really thinks I am a narcissist. He did not seem to feel that way about me. I realized that I am blaming him for all he bad therapy I have received over the years. I have not been warm to him. His assessment of me was not his fault.

I think throwing my therapist under the bus and saying that all he ever did was judge me when he said I could not benefit from EMDR is not very rational.

Therapy is not an all or nothing thing. Therapists have strengths and weaknesses just like people who experience “psychosis” or special message crisis. Maybe to find a person who really believes in me, it takes firm self-advocacy!

Therapy that Heals Beyond Social Control:

I think most therapists I have examined in this series have looked at me and felt there is a need to fix something. Many people do not need to be fixed, need only be supported. When I interviewed with Malik Shakur (Tupac’s cousin) on the Knowledge Show to promote my book that was his assessment of me. I was a structured kid, he said. There was nothing wrong with me.

While I don’t feel good about my experiences with therapy, I am responsive to curanderos and other types of healers who try to help me be the kind of person I want to be. I may not choose to need mushrooms or other natural psychedelics, but I like traditional cultures. I have learned that my goal is not to fit in but rather to endure.

Like a good curandero I will help individuals find health despite the goals of the Cabals who advocate for social control and conformity for their own security.

I will persist and trust my therapist who also identifies as a wounded healer. I will try to add music artists who I appreciate to my resource list of people who have not let me down.

I can learn healing skills to regulate my emotions so I can explore traumatic memories and find out more of what I experienced during times of disassociation.

I Am Not Alone:

In the health system there is a new movement to bring peers into the workplace. Indeed peer support and a culture of sustainable recovery suggests that people who have been institutionalized can find meaning and purpose by helping out their brethren in the system.

At the current time, many wise peers are expected to train young staff members just out of school and help each other out without getting any compensation.

For twenty-six years I have seen this go on and I feel that if those wise peers are given training and the right kind of support, they can complete tasks and they have a right to compensation. That’s what I do. I may endure ridicule, but I respond by seeking to outperform my colleagues and sometimes I get respect.

As the Hearing Voices Movement demonstrates, lived experience and stories about managing psychosis and other struggles can be very helpful when shared amongst sufferers. More and more the clinics are hiring peers and including them as members of the treatment team.

Indeed, there are a lot of people like me who know what it is like to repeatedly fail in treatment. I believe we can be utilized to improve services for others. Many others like me have training about what not to do:

Lesson Number One–Don’t Side with Society Over the Sufferer;
Lesson Number Two–Don’t Ignore Problems;
Lesson Number Three–Don’t Engage in Dual Relationships that May Interpreted as Exploitative;
Lesson Number Four—It Is Important to Set Reasonable Expectations;
Lesson Number Five—It is Not Helpful to Make Negative Predictions;
Lesson Number Six—It is Important Not to Ignore Signs of Abuse in Relationships;
Lesson Number Seven—It is Important Not to Attack a Spiritual Tradition;
Lesson Number Eight—Don’t Use Treatment to Attack a Political Ideology;
Lesson Number Nine–Don’t Let the Basis of Your Trust Be Credentials;
Lesson Number Ten–Don’t Make Decisions for the Client;
Lesson Number Eleven–Don’t Presume Everything in a Paranoid Person’s Life is Paranoia;
Lesson Number Twelve–Don’t Predict Permanent Warehousing for a Person in an Emergency;
Lesson Number Thirteen—Don’t Collaborate with Imposed Treatment;
Lesson Number Fourteen—Don’t Expect Psychosis to be Suppressed:
Lesson Number Fifteen—Don’t Impose Your Economic Reality on Your Patient;
Lesson Number Sixteen—True Healers Don’t Make Fun of a Subjugated Group!

The post In Psychotherapy We Trust– Trauma Treatment appeared first on TIM DREBY, MFT.