The schizophrenia advantage

“If the human race survives, future men will, I suspect, look back on our enlightened epoch as a veritable Age of Darkness… They will see that what was considered ‘schizophrenic’ was one of the forms in which, often through quite ordinary people, the light began to break into our all-too-closed minds.” _Dr. R.D. Laing.

Terri instructs us all

Gianna Kali at Beyond Meds republished a post a couple of days ago in which she commends how sensitively Al Siebert talked to a newly arrived young woman in a psychiatric hospital and laments her own treatment at a different institution under similar circumstances, which is the norm today for just about anybody entering a psychiatric hospital and given a serious mental health label. Al Siebert listened and respectfully discussed the young woman's mystical union with God.

I have a friend I'll call "Terri" who was very much like this young woman, and so many other young men and women today who are sensing that there is a powerful meaning behind life and are struggling to know how live with this growing feeling. Always a very "good" child, when Terri entered her teenage years, she became religiously observant and found herself praying a lot. She also was convinced that she was a sinner and needed to do good works to atone for her increasingly agitated thoughts. This was quite a few years ago and Terri wasn't living in a Western industrialized country in any case, so she was actually encouraged by her admittedly alarmed family to continue her ritualistic praying with the hopes that maybe she would eventually find her vocation. Instead of ostracizing her, her family considered her passions perhaps a sign of something worth encouraging.

Terri spent the next few years refining her ideas of prayer, praying so much that she figured out that there was a right way and a wrong way to have a union with God. The right way is to start with silence, and to hold silence around you as much as possible, in order to clear the mind to allow God's grace to eventually penetrate the soul. She knew nothing about Buddhism or Eastern meditation practices. She focused her prayers on on the body of Christ. Make no mistake about it. Terri is odd by to our Western industrialized concept of what a person her age should be doing. She could get away with doing so little by today's upward mobility standards because she was living communally and her expenses were few. Her family was proud of her if they thought of her at all.

Over time, Terri perfected her ideas about prayer, which weren't just ideas, they were her lived experience. She sees union with God as a teachable process, informed by suffering and devotion.

She's very, very old now, and she even has a prayer about how to be old gracefully It involves not filling the air with idle talk at every opportunity or telling other people how to run their lives.

Luckily for  "Terri," her unusual proclivities weren't pathologized and forcefully treated as "mental illness,"  otherwise her story may have been very different. There are many versions of her fascinating internal life, but here is an official one.

Respite care - the times they are a changin'

Here is an excellent interview with Dr. Michael Cornwall and Yana Jacobs on peer-run respite care. We are in the middle of a perfect storm that will eventually see these models establish themselves in most larger centers.

Hearing voices is complex

http://theamericanscholar.org/living-with-voices/

Good article about the Hearing Voices Network, but disturbing because of the insistence that the Hearing Voices Network claims that childhood sexual abuse is almost always at the root of psychosis. Doesn't the complexity of human experience defy simple answers?

Mother Bear Community Action Network

I'm not a joiner by nature, but occasionally, I find a cause worth joining. One of these is the Mother Bear Community Action Network, or Mother Bear CAN. This network of not just mothers, by the way, is a grassroots response to the hijacking of mental health care by professional psychiatry and psychopharmacology. That's my own spin on the work that this network does. The Network has an excellent resource section with a reading list that includes Robert Whitaker's Anatomy of an Epidemic, Thomas Szasz's The Myth of Mental Illness, and Peter Breggin's book, Your Drug May be Your Problem. Please read some highlights from the site that I have reprinted below, and sign up to their newsletter for your regular dose of positive and empathetic knowledge about helping to navigate the recovery process for a family member.

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Hope is real
by Larry Drain:

We are all much more than any label. A diagnosis is simply a word used to describe the distress you, a family member or friend may struggle with every day or perhaps only for a short while. Diagnoses can he helpful as a way of making meaning, but they can be harmful for the very same reason. We often give labels far too much power. We let them determine the course of our lives. We hold on to them even when they are no longer useful or true.

We are all much more than our distress. What we value, who and what we care about are central to our lives regardless of our struggles. Our hopes, dreams, strengths and talents say much more about us than whatever makes us a “patient."

Human beings are resilient. Life is a constant process of change, adjustment and growth. Human beings are designed to face challenges and find new ways to adapt. We can learn to handle life’s challenges by meeting life in each moment. We can ask ourselves, what would be helpful in this moment? What is the next best step? When we get there, we ask again. And again. And again.

Over time we find that we have increased our capacity for change, and we are no longer so fearful of it. Change happens, so does recovery


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At the Core of Mother Bear

Your family should not face a mental health challenge alone. When families come together to support each other, we tap into our instinctual protective and loving power to make mental health care choices that restore hope and promote real and lasting recovery.

Our Mother Bear CAN families embrace the following recovery values:

• Recovery is not only possible; it is expected.

• Emotional distress has many causes and many possible solutions.

• All family members deserve support and education for their own emotional distress.

• Individual and family empowerment are essential for recovery.

• Families, with honest education and support, can play a powerful role in recovery.

• The role and decision to use medication should be carefully considered including documented studies of risks.

• Recovery is a universal human experience that requires patience, hope and encouragement.

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Mother Bear CAN Advisory Committee

Our advisory committee is composed of a diverse group of family members and individuals with lived experience, mental health reform advocates, recovery movement leaders, peer support counselors, recovery and peer-led organization leaders, family recovery education specialists, philanthropists, scientists, and recovery-oriented providers including psychiatrists, psychologists and counselors.

We are grateful to have the support and guidance of many wise bears including those affiliated with

• Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation at Boston University

• Center for the Study of Empathic Therapy, Education & Living

• CooperRiis Healing Community

• Foundation for Excellence in Mental Health Care

• Icarus Project

• International Network of Integrative Mental Health

• International Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry

• Family Outreach and Response Program

• MindFreedom International

• National Empowerment Center

• Utah Youth Village

Mother Bear CAN actively seeks partnerships with recovery- and family-oriented organizations that share our vision of helping families recover and thrive—emotionally, physically and socially.

Summing up the Occupy Torrey Tirade

I wasn't at the Heritage Foundation presentation, but I watched the live streaming. Dr. E. Fuller Torrey advocated making mental health care a state responsibility, not a federal one. That argument  strikes me as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, but then Torrey complicated his point further by arguing for benchmarks and incentives that institutions must comply with or they will lose their funding, the carrot and stick approach which he thinks will lead to "good mental health outcomes." Carrot and stick (emphasis on the stick) technique is also typical of his coercive brand of mental health activism. This strikes me as the same dubious technique used in the educational system, which is called "teaching to the test." Teaching to the test has all kinds of perverse outcomes.

One positive thing that I took away from the presentation was how Robert Whitaker's book, Anatomy of an Epidemic, is making inroads. Psychiatrist Sally Satel was talking as if for decades now, people have been encouraged to be on the lowest possible dose of medication, and she went on as if it is perfectly well known that many, if not most, people should be encouraged to get off their drugs. Huh? Well, it wasn't so long ago, eight years ago in fact, that I was told all kinds of nonsense about the drugs being needed for life, and there were plenty of people around who were on and probably still are on high doses of a antipychotic cocktails. I noticed that E. Fuller Torrey conspicuously avoided looking in Satel's direction when she was expressing herself. E. Fuller Torrey has done more than most psychiatrists to imbed the image in the mind of the public of a schizophrenic as always needing medication. This is serious mental illness, after all!

Another great positive from the presentation was the dedicated group of people who showed up to make the point that medications, not the federal/state situation, are the real reasons the mental health system and its patients are messed up. What the activists had to say directly contradicted the revisionist history that Dr. Satel was painting. Alaska attorney Jim Gottstein introduced this point, and said that people are dying on average twenty-five years early due to the drugs, and if they're not dead, they are often disabled. Gottstein and others were there to remind Torrey, Satel, and the Heritage Foundation that psychiatry as practiced has victims. Lawyer Diane Engster made a poignant statement directed to Torrey that she followed his advice, she took her drugs, she used to be thin like Dr. Torrey, but she is one hundred pounds overweight and is disabled because of complications from the drugs. She would love to make the kind of money that Torrey and the others do, but she can't work because she swallowed what Torrey was dishing out. Dr. Torrey played with his ear while she was speaking. Maybe he was trying to turn down the volume.

There was a lot of discussion about ACT (assisted community treatment) and PACT, and how ACT doesn't act as well as its enthusiasts tell you it does.

Activist Daniel Hazen from Glens Falls, NY got in the last word. He respectfully disrupted the proceedings to tell the psychiatrists that, contrary to what they were saying, there is mental health care inside the prison system, and it's coercive. Here's an animation put together by Lauren Tenney that gives his intervention verbatim.

We owe an immense debt of gratitude to Jim Gottstein, Daniel Hazen, Daniel Fisher, Diane Engster and Yvonne Z. Smith for speaking up on our behalf.

WATCH Dr. E. Fuller Torrey explain coercive health care - today at noon Eastern Standard Time

For people who would like to view the presentation, click the WATCH ONLINE button at the Heritage Foundation site. A reminder e-mail will be sent by the Foundation.

The presentation will begin at 12:00 p.m. EST (6 p.m. Central European Time and 5 p.m. in Great Britain/United Kingdom).

With America’s jails and prisons crowded with mentally ill inmates, Medicaid costs soaring, and mentally disabled homeless Americans wandering the streets, it is clear that our mental health system is dysfunctional. What began as a grand and noble experiment has become a costly failure, both in terms of human lives and in terms of dollars. But what needs to be done? E. Fuller Torrey, M.D., a leading psychiatrist and researcher, has written extensively on the problems of U.S. mental health policy and urges fundamental reform based on returning primary responsibility to the states.