Robert Whitaker, Keynote at Alternatives 2010

Robert Whitaker - Alternatives Keynote from National Empowerment Center on Vimeo.

How to make a shrink shit his pants

Visiting David M. Allan, M.D.'s blog, your first impression might be a rather positive one. He seems to have got at least something. And yes, he has got something. But, alas!, when it comes to so-called "schizophrenia" the guy hasn't got a clue. No more than any other of the drug-pushers in the business. Watch this - the comments. Watch him get increasingly insecure, defensive, and eventually almost hostile *), although I'm really gentle with him, if I may say so myself.

Isn't it just mind-boggling? I mean, wouldn't you expect someone who has dedicated his professional life to helping people to be curious about different perspectives and opinions, instead of being this dismissive of them, and unwilling to give them a thought? Where's the problem, Dr Allen? Oh. I see, two main problems: 1. If I'm right, it means there would basically be no need for you as a shrink anymore. There would be no need for any shrink anymore. You would have to find yourself another job, maybe even give up on the "M.D." as other medical specialities have certain standards... And if you want to stay in the business, you'd have to start from scratch, as all you've been taught so far is how to help society - get rid of people in emotional distress, as discrete, fast and efficient as possible. You haven't been taught how to help people in emotional crises themselves. 2. If I'm right, and you want to stay in the business, you'd have to do something radical about your fear of yourself, your own "issues", or dysfunctionality... Ugh, yeah, that's tough! Especially the latter is a really nasty one. For any narcissist.
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*) Any resemblance with adjectives you might catch Dr Allen scribble down in his "patients'" charts is intentional. :D
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Oh and, note that in his last comment Dr Allen writes "True psychosis is never a normal variant of anything." This statement doesn't really make much sense, unless you take Dr Allan's at this point presumably rather "disturbed" state of mind ("disturbed" as in "psychosis", yup) into consideration. What he seems to try to say is that true "psychosis", that is being truly disturbed (by/about something)..., has got nothing to do with being human. So, when someone is "psychotic" (disturbed, by/about something, my or Dr Allan's statements for instance...) s/he is not really human. Aha. So much for seeing the person, and not the diagnosis. Thank you for clarifying this for us, Dr Allan!

Why Merete Nordentoft's recent research showing "schizophrenics" to do better without drugs won't change a thing about treatment

Well, in short, because the 19% of study participants reported to be "fully recovered" aren't really fully recovered, but rehabilitated.

A follow-up article in the Danish journal Dagens Medicin portrays Mai Pedersen, a 30-year-old with a high school exam (it's the smart ones who do best, remember?), and with some of the most loving and supportive parents imaginable (it's the ones with a truly idyllic family background who do best, remember?), who was labelled "schizophrenic" seven years ago, put into OPUS (Merete Nordentoft's early intervention program) and on drugs, of course, both neuroleptics and "anti-depressants", and who decided to go off the drugs some time ago. The latter actually, and this is the really disturbing part as the article's title, which translates into "Went off medication - and didn't ask for permission before afterwards", indicates, without asking permission from her shrink. Imagine! She didn't ask her shrink before tapering off the drugs!! How incredibly cheeky!*)

Although Mai Pedersen doesn't take any drugs today, she is "symptom-free". So, according to the article, Mai Pedersen is "fully recovered". But is she really? Mai Pedersen has an enemy. The enemy is stress. And it still has that much power over her as to have her weigh everything she does in regard to how the enemy "stress" probably will react to it. Mai Pedersen has, certainly thanks to CBT-rat training (and yes, it may well make training progress come more swiftly and be more lasting if the rat has some brains), and thanks to her wonderfully supportive parents (yes, relatives can play a decisive role when it comes to "insight" and "compliance", the better they manage to hide their own dysfunctionality behind a facade of pure family idyl, the more of a "support" - for biopsychiatric "treatment" - they will be) learned to live as a victim of "schizophrenia", a slave of a chronic brain disease. She has accepted that nothing ever will come as easy to her as it does to her "normal" friends and acquaintances, that she will have to make sacrifices to the "illness" for the rest of her life, that the "illness" dictates what she can and can't do, and that she maybe even will end up in hospital again, and again, and again... - And btw, take a look at the photograph at the top of the article, and note how beautifully it communicates the heavy burden of suffering from "schizophrenia".

Mai Pedersen succeeded in becoming a licensed psychomotrician, and is a member of the OPUS-panel, which "tries to spread information in the community about the many success stories that show also patients with schizophrenia to be able to live rewarding lives." A real success story. Or, as Mai Pedersen puts it herself, "a lousy Danielle Steele novel". Indeed!

Well well, here it is that I ask, how about a panel to try and spread some information in the community about the many real success stories that show labelled people to be able to overcome their crisis, and live a life without "schizophrenia", without constantly having to be on their guard against an enemy called "stress", without massive limitations and sacrifices, and without having the spectre of returning "psychosis" and re-hospitalization hanging over their heads?? How about a panel to try and spread some information in the community about real recovery, real freedom, to be possible??

But alas, such a panel would probably not consist of a bunch of happy and grateful OPUS-patients (and Mai Pedersen is still a patient today, she still sees her shrink on a regular basis, apropos of "fully recovered"...), a bunch of Elyn Sakses, who identify as being "mentally ill", as suffering from a chronic brain disease by the name of "schizophrenia". So, it is rather unlikely that we will see such a panel initiated by the establishment anytime in the foreseeable future. Just as a paradigm shift in the definition and treatment of crisis is unlikely to happen as long as the Mai Pedersens and Elyn Sakses of this world aren't only made slaves of an alleged illness, but also, and even more important, of a system, that (ab-)uses them big time to sell its hopeless messages and harmful "treatment" to the community.

To get back to Merete Nordentoft's research, the rate of 19% "fully recovered" participants is obviously an error, resulting from an erroneous concept of "full recovery". The true figure probably is closer to 0%, as the study apparently was not designed to include participants, who dropped out of "treatment", but seems to exclusively have concentrated on individuals, who stayed in contact with the mh system throughout the entire five years during which they were monitored. If this is the case, and I have a very strong hunch that it is, not least because the article in Dagens Medicin otherwise probably would have portrayed someone else instead of Mai Pedersen, real full recovery of course is excluded in advance from figuring in the results as a possible outcome. I suppose, this is what is called "biased" then.

A high school exam, the ability to think clearly, and a supportive network, family or other, are without doubt useful in the recovery process. But there is one more important thing , maybe the most important of them all, in terms of recovery that isn't mentioned anywhere in context with Merete Nordentoft's research, and that thing is what Al Siebert termed "resilience". The ability to "resile", or resist (without breaking your neck over it), for instance the massive indoctrination labelled people usually face in the mh system. The ability to preserve one's integrity in an environment designed to strip you entirely of it. Mai Pedersen had the high school exam, but unfortunately she didn't have the amount of resilience necessary to achieve real full recovery, and I also wonder if she would have had her family's support in case she had had the necessary amount of resilience, and had chosen to opt for freedom, instead of for slavery.
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*) The title of the article caused some indignation among consumers/survivors, and gave rise to an interesting discussion at a Danish mainstream forum. - Of course I simply had to set the cat among the pigeons... :D - I will write about my thoughts on the matter in a future post here.

Bye bye, Merete! - Some final thoughts about Merete Nordentoft's study on "schizophrenia" outcomes

Bottom line: if people weren't doped up over their eye balls with consciousness reducing, brain damaging drugs, if they weren't told depressing, demoralizing and pacifying lies about a chronic, biological brain disease, but encouraged to look for the existential, spiritual meaning of their personal crisis, there'd be a lot more than 19% who'd recover fully. It's still a long way from these 19% to the 85% of alternatives like Soteria.

Merete Nordentoft wants the period people are "treated" under the OPUS project to be extended from two to five years. Half of the participants in the study were "treated" under OPUS during the first couple of years. The article doesn't say anything about these participants doing better than the other half, on the contrary: "We don't know to what extent the prognosis depends on the treatment, even if some individuals certainly have improved thanks to the treatment." -Merete Nordentoft, in perfect self-contradiction, as well as in perfect contradiction to her own research results.

I'd say, what we'd really need isn't more OPUS, but to have the Danish Fuller Torreys (yes, Merete Nordentoft really believes there's something to Fuller Torrey's cat poop nonsense... ) replaced by Loren Moshers. The whole incompetent (they can't even interpret their own research results) bunch of them. Merete first.
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Related: "New Danish research shows that 'schizophrenics' do better off drugs"

"More about Merete Nordentoft's surprising (NOT!) research results on 'schizophrenia'"

More about Merete Nordentoft's surprising (NOT!) research results on "schizophrenia"

The main emphasis of the article, whose title translates into: "High school certificate a good weapon against schizophrenia", is on the role of education in terms of recovery from so-called "schizophrenia".

The researchers followed 547 people labelled with "schizophrenia" over a 5-year-period.

Results: 19% achieved full recovery, most of them, as mentioned in my previous post, were not "treatment compliant", respectively didn't use psych drugs at all. 15% achieved significant improvement. 53% didn't achieve lasting improvement, but are able to live independently, and without longer hospitalizations. 13% are dependent on assisted housing, or need long-term hospitalization.

Among those who achieved full recovery or significant improvement, a higher education is prevalent, most of them are women, and most of them come from a family background with both parents living together. On the other hand, "negative symptoms" like social withdrawal and passivity indicate a less favorable outcome.

Education: the so far only comment on the article at Dagens Medicin (the journal only allows professionals to comment... ) concludes that a higher education equals to a higher IQ which equals to more benefit from CBT - "something we've known for a long time".

In my opinion, a higher education equals to the ability to search for information on one's own, if necessary - and when it comes to "mental illness" it is necessary, since true information in Danish is thin, to put it mildly - also information in foreign languages like English. Information that may have the individual choose to, by and large, do without neuroleptics, that may have him/her question the (Danish) mh system's messages about a chronic, biological brain disease, and that may have him/her investigate into alternative views of the experience. A higher education often equals to a stronger belief in one's own intellectual capacities, "intellectual self-reliance", so to speak, and thus to less blind confidence in others' - the "experts' - authority.

A higher education often provides tools to think analytically, critically and independently. Invaluable tools when it comes to finding meaning with one's experience, and become an expert on one's own behalf: "I know what's good for me." It's called empowerment, and it's decisive in the recovery process.

Drugs: well, I'd say, it's self-evident that substances which interfere with and reduce cognition, memory, self-/consciousness, etc., which in fact often render researching, googling, reading and understanding unsurmountable challenges, are not helpful in the process of resolving crisis.

Women: in general, women are more socializing than men, and don't have the same reservations against opening up and talking about personal problems. And if people who experience crisis need anything, it is the possibility to communicate their experience to someone they can trust unconditionally.

Family: a somewhat well-functioning family can be a valuable resource of support. Especially if family members are minded to resolve problems rather than to just brush them under the carpet, or run from them.

It doesn't look like the researchers have done much else than gathered statistics about "symptoms" experienced, hospitalizations, education, family background, and whatever else can be observed from the outside. Also this study seems to be a shining example of the lack of empiricism in psychiatric "research" in general. Participants obviously were not asked what in detail was helpful for their individual recovery. As a result, the researchers stand with a bunch of data they, due to their preconceived idea of the nature of "schizophrenia" - it's still referred to as an "illness", of course -, and the resulting preconceived idea of what kind of treatment is indicated, don't really know what to make of.

Probably, their reasoning will not go beyond conclusions like the one mentioned above, that CBT is the decisive factor, while they just as probably will be unlikely to admit the quite logic causality between "treatment" with consciousness reducing, and in the long run brain damaging substances and long-term outcomes. Actually, the article explicitly states, that "antipsychotics" are effective treatment for "psychosis": "Don't draw the 'wrong' conclusions from the research results! Take your meds!" Also, an undertone can be traced in the article that clearly emphasizes that "full recovery" doesn't mean "cured". "Schizophrenia" still is a chronic brain disease: "You're still ill! Don't you dare to believe anything else! You're only as lucky as to be in remission!" So, it is unlikely that this study will change anything about how "schizophrenia" is perceived by the "experts", or how it is being treated. Concerning the fact that most of the fully recovered participants either went off neuroleptics, or never used them, this is probably not interpreted as a precondition for their recovery ("remission"), but rather as a result of it. Just as the article doesn't mention the connection between "negative symptoms" like social withdrawal and passivity on the one hand, and the these "negative symptoms" increasing effects of neuroleptic drugs on the other, with one word.

If at all this study makes it to one of the major journals in the field, I suspect it will suffer the same fate as other long-term outcome studies, and soon be buried in the archives, under a load of crap like Thomas Werge's eugenic "research", that allegedly found the genetic cause of "schizophrenia" to be chromosome mutations which are found in 60 - 90% of the general population... (Can't recall whether I wrote about it here, but well, now you know: 60 - 90% of the general population are genetically predisposed to develop "schizophrenia". In other words: to be a human being predisposes you for "schizophrenia". LMAO.)

BTW: the article calls OPUS a "psycho-social" project. Not by any stretch of imagination can I find much "psycho-social" about a project that explicitly promotes " - psycho education with weight on a biological model (guilt reducing)", and "antipsychotic medical treatment" as "indicated" for "most of the patients".

Let's have it anyway, shall we: Some bipolar-Stan-Grof-Ken-Wilber-élitism with Sean Blackwell from Bipolar Or Waking Up?

I wrote a post about the matter back in January. I took it down because Sean contacted me, and said I'd got it all wrong. Since then, a few e-mails have been sent to and fro, in order to, hopefully, get it all right.

It all started when I came across the comments at Sean's vid about "hallucinations", and got, frankly, pissed off about a reply by Sean to a comment by someone, "abbeyism", who's more or less completely bought into the mainstream "the crazy pick axe killer"-fear mongering: "Oh my God, I hope no seriously ill people hear this, go off their much needed medication for glossier grandiose religious awakenings and become dangerous...again," "abbeyism" wrote.

Well well, we all know that this kind of reasoning, unfortunately, is wide-spread among people, who have no clue what crisis is about but what they've been told by mainstream psychiatry through the mainstream media. So, what I reacted to wasn't that much this comment, although I also left a reply to "abbeyism" at the thread, but, as mentioned, Sean's reply to "abbeyism": "(...) On my previous video on paranoia, I said that in many cases, paranoid people will be better off medicated. (...)" - Btw, I also questioned his viewpoint in the comment thread to his vid on "paranoia".

This is what I wrote in reply to Sean:

An outstanding example of what I call the bipolar-Stan-Grof-Ken-Wilber-élitism. Us and them. The real loonies, and us, the chosen ones.

I think a quite realistic estimation is that about 70 - 80 % (if not more) of ppl labelled "sz" experiences "paranoia". If it were true, that most of them are better off medicated, widely drug-free alternatives like Soteria or Finnish Open Dialog wouldn't have the success they DO have.

Neither would long-term outcome studies time and again suggest, that recovery from "sz" off drugs is far more likely than on them. The truth is, hardly anyone on drugs ever fully recovers. The majority of ppl OFF them does.

John Nash didn't recover and return to Princeton bc he popped the poison, A Beautiful Mind wants us to believe, he popped. He recovered bc he tossed the poison out, and never touched it after 1970. If anyone, HE was "paranoid".

I really love your vids, Sean, but do me a favor, and read up on the science!

In contrast to my reply to "abbeyism", it took some time before this comment was approved of. Maybe Sean wanted to put together an answer to my comment before he put it out there. Fair enough.

Now, in our e-mail exchange Sean said he didn't regard neither himself nor Grof nor Wilber "enlightened", and that it certainly wasn't his intention to discriminate against anyone. I told him, I'd edit my post, and probably also change its title. I won't do the latter though, because élitism is, unfortunately, still what I see is going on here. Pure New Age élitism. As in, for instance, if you suffer from "paranoia" and other distressing experiences during crisis, that may well be a manifestation of the negative, "dark" energies, you're born with. Bad karma, exactly as in bad, "faulty", genes. In other words, if you've suffered severe abuse and neglect during childhood, it's probably because you've been an asshole in a past life. Your own fault, and now you pay for it. Oh, really?? The New Age way of letting the abusers off the hook, and maintain the status quo. Sorry, I don't buy it. And I'd like to see Sean tell this all those many kids who are abused and neglected by their parents and/or other people in their lives to their face: "You know, according to our philosophy, you only get what you deserve. Probably it's because you're a little stupid, spiritually slightly retarded, that you need to go through this. So, stop whining, and get on with your life." Well well well, if this is regarded "awakened", I certainly can do without any awakening.

Anyhow, still in a conciliatory mood, I yesterday ventured to watch Sean's latest vids, "Spiritual Awakening vs. Bipolar Disorder" Part One, Part Two, and Part Three. If nothing else, watch the third part, and pay attention to what Sean says from 09.33 in the vid on, which, as I let Sean know, in my interpretation translates into: "schizophrenics" are less likely to recover than people labelled "bipolar" by psychiatry. Sean did not object to my interpretation.

IMHO, it is utterly snobbish and, indeed, discriminating to tell people, well in fact that they're too stupid, too spiritually retarded to recover, and maybe even turn their experience of profound suffering into personal growth and development, and that they therefor are better off drugged into a stupor. Not to mention that it is plain nonsense, both in the light of the scientific literature, and in that of innumerable personal accounts. As a matter of fact, the more suffering, the more likely recovery becomes. Since suffering acts as an incentive for transformation. It may very well be that, as I wrote to Sean, "[p]eople who've experienced a lot of trauma in their lives from a very early age on probably need more time to work it all out. Indeed, "mania" usually lasts for about a fortnight, on average, doesn't it, "psychosis" for about five to six weeks, which could be seen as correlating with the amount and intensity of trauma the person has experienced. But from there to conclude that people who maybe need more intense support for maybe some longer time than others are less likely to recover..." actually strikes me as some of the worst New-Age-us-and-them-élitism I've ever witnessed, and certainly not as awakened.

Bottom line: Sean's vids are absolutely worth watching. They definitely contributed to my own understanding of my experience. But beware of their dividing holier-than-thou-attitude towards "the schizophrenics", especially those labelled "paranoid".

If you read this, Sean, you'll probably feel deeply injured. You're welcome to comment and tell me that you didn't intend to say that "the schizophrenics", no matter how "paranoid" btw, are less likely to recover than those who received a fancy "bipolar" label from their shrink.
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P.S.: If you remember the original post: the person who got turned down by Grof because of his/her label, that wasn't Sean, no. My mistake. Anyhow, it happened, and it tells something about the great guru's attitude towards people who carry the "wrong" label. The person in question was labelled "schizophrenic"...
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For comments on the original post see here

Recovered to death. How the system's distorted recovery concept kills

Early last month I learned that one of the regular contributers to Outsideren, the user magazine I wrote for in 2007 and 2008, had been found dead in her bed one morning in late November. Dorthe Raffenberg was 41 years old, and in addition to being one of three people forming the group Standup recovery, giving talks about recovery, she also was very much engaged in sports, especially running and skiing. So, you might say, Dorthe was quite fit, physically. But Dorthe was labelled "paranoid schizophrenic", and had been taking drugs for years. Clozaril during the past years. For, you see, Dorthe was a real fighter. She didn't just give up that easily. It took several years in locked wards, uncountable times in restraints, and a considerable dosage of Clozaril to eventually shut her up and break her spirit.

I found a review of one of Standup recovery's talks on the net: "The trio's talk at Skovvænget [assisted housing facility for "the mentally ill"] focussed on that it is possible to recover, but that recovery presupposes acceptance of one's illness", and: "During the talk it became clear that it were several different elements that had been decisive for Dorthe, Christian and Martin each to achieve recovery." The review is dated from May 2006. According to it, Dorthe was recovered in May 2006.

As mentioned, I knew Dorthe in 2007 and 2008, met her regularly at Outsideren's monthly editorial meetings. I remember Dorthe as being clearly sedated. Her thinking and talking (and movements) were remarkably slowed down. And although I've never known her other than under the influence of Clozaril, there was no doubt that what I saw was just the shadow of the Dorthe that could have been, if... If she'd got help instead of Clozaril.

"Dorthe tells a horrible story about abuse, suicide attempts...", the review states. Abuse. I remember, that Dorthe at one editorial meeting spoke about her "delusions". Everybody did. Just for fun. Nothing more funny than to think of just how raving mad one was, in those days, is there? In those days before the Clozaril did it's job, and efficiently ended one's unconscious reactions, to the abuse for instance. Yeah. Everybody was dying laughing at such an amount of incredibly amusing and meaningless madness. Everybody but me. I felt sick, actually. Felt like running away, leaving everybody else to their "insight", the insight that their faulty genes and brain chemistry had been the cause of such an amount of incredibly amusing and meaningless madness. "I acted/thought/felt like this and that because I'm a paranoid schizophrenic, hahaha!" Hilarious, yeah, really. Instead of the "I'm angry, scared, desperate, because I've been abused", that might lead to someone else but one's own genes and neurotransmitters being held responsible. Not quite as amusing, the responsibility-thing, nope.

Probably, the faulty genes and brain chemistry also were to blame for the abuse to have taken place at all: "You (your faulty genes and brain chemistry) made me do this to you." Yeah. Sure.

According to the review it presupposes "acceptance of one's illness" to recover. Dorthe, eventually, gained this acceptance. Acceptingly, she took her daily dose of Clozaril. Dorthe died on November 19th, 2009, 41 years "old", and I'm not a sec in doubt about the cause of death: acceptance of her illness. And the inevitably following, regular ingestion of Clozaril. Dorthe died from having "insight" and being "compliant". She died from having achieved what the mh system has distorted "recovery" to mean.

The last article Dorthe wrote for Outsideren quotes the president of Dansk psykiatrisk selskab, the Danish psychiatric association, Anders Fink-Jensen: "If psychotropic drugs were dangerous that would be very disturbing, and they wouldn't be approved for use,..."
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P.S.: I haven't posted anything lately because I wanted to do this piece before posting anything else, and although I've written about it on my Danish blog several weeks ago, I just couldn't do it here before.

Anyhow, I hope, everybody had great holidays, and a Happy New Year to all of you!

Some thoughts about A Beautiful Mind and I Never Promised You a Rose Garden

Usually, I'm not a big fan of filmatizations. Especially when I've read the book before I watch the movie, and when the book's emphasis is about more complex psychological contexts watching the movie often has been a bit of a comedown. An example of such a, in my opinion, somewhat failed adaption is A Beautiful Mind with its rather exaggerated and twisted presentation of "hallucinations", meant to help the audience understand the phenomenon, but actually more fit for obtaining the very opposite effect. And indeed, some stylistic faux pas, one would think directors like Bergman and Tarkovsky for instance had taught the cinema to avoid a long time ago. But, well, on the one hand we have Bergman's and Tarkovsky's feel for subtle nuances, on the other Hollywood's preference for broader strokes of the brush. Like comparing apples and oranges.

Another thing that can give me a kind of comedown experience is when the movie consciously twists the text's "message", exploiting the book's, author's or protagonist's popularity in order to get its own "message" out. This too, A Beautiful Mind is an outstanding example to illustrate, abusing John Nash's celebrity status, letting his character state, that he takes the "newer medications", while we all know that the real John Nash didn't take neuroleptics other than when he was forced to, like during hospitalizations, and never after 1970.

The producers excused their distorting the historical facts, and said they didn't want people to toss out their drugs. In the meantime, the movie doesn't at any point directly state that John Nash didn't take drugs over longer periods. Thus there should be no need to mention the matter at all. Unless the idea was to exploit John Nash's popularity for the benefit of the psych drug industry. On the contrary, I'd say. Given the fact, that Nash did recover, while recovery on neuroleptics virtually never occurs, the truth should have been mentioned.

So, all in all it was with reservations that I ventured into watching the filmatization of Joanne Greenberg's novel I Never Promised You a Rose Garden the other day.

Except for in a single sequence, the visualization of Deborah's "hallucinations" is created in a more subtle way than John Nash's in A Beautiful Mind, and thus more endurable and credible. Never mind that it left me with vague associations to Timothy Leary and Woodstock, just as the decorations, costumes and requisits represent a somewhat strange blend of the 1950ies and the late 1970ies.

Although the movie's last sequences seem a bit rash - and it has to be considered that the standard length for movies, that rarely was exceeded, was 90 minutes back in 1977, the movie's production year - and, compared to the novel, a little superficially happy-ending-like, the movie manages to avoid the all too broad strokes of the brush, and, and this is really an achievement the subject taken into account, it avoids to descend into the melodramatic.

Based on a novel as complex as Joanne Greenberg's, a filmatization can hardly be anything but fragmentary. Nevertheless, the movie succeeds to make the best of its 96 almost-standard minutes, both because it focusses on some of the most essential themes of the novel, and not least because of the actors' brilliant performance (Kathleen Quinlan, Bibi Andersson - oh well, a Bergman-trained actress...), and I was positively surprised to see the novel's basic "message" unchanged.

A comment at YouTube says what the novel teaches us is "to have COMPASSION with the mentally ill". I replied: "What both the book and the movie teach us is that so-called "mental illness" is a choice (out of necessity though). Not a chronic brain disease. And they both teach us that we should make it possible for people to choose freedom, like Frieda Fromm-Reichmann made it possible for Joanne Greenberg. Instead of indefinitely locking them up in helplessness and dependency with toxic chemicals and hopeless messages about defective genes and chronic brain disorders."

I was surprised, but I'd also forgotten all about the movie's production year, 1977, that is about the fact that the movie was shot at a time in history when psych drugs didn't yet play the everything else overshadowing role they do play today, and when psychological and psycho-social causes still were considered. Interesting and refreshing in this context is that the dialogue doesn't get stuck in diagnoses and other crudenesses. Although "psychotic" appears from time to time, "schizophrenia" for instance isn't mentioned one single time throughout the entire movie. Probably also this a 1977-phenomenon.

Although it can by no means replace reading the novel itself, a filmatization of Joanne Greenberg's autobiographic novel that is well worth watching.

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden at YouTube.

Beyond redemption? - Critique of an article by Peter Stastny on treatment for first "psychotic episodes".

Via Gianna's blog, Beyond Meds, I just came across an interesting article by Peter Stastny on MIWatch.org. Although I widely agree to Peter Stastny's observations, two things bother me about his article. One of them is the misconception I see also Peter Stastny obviously holds, that Scandinavia must be paradise when it comes to services offered by the mh system. This is not so! I left the following comment at the post:

Peter Stastny here makes it sound like living in Scandinavia almost is a guarantee for more humane and recovery-oriented care to be provided when a person goes through a "psychotic" crisis. Nothing could be more wrong. "Need adapted treatment", also called the "Vestlapland's model", is, as the name suggests, restricted to a region in Finland, namely Vestlapland. There have been other recovery-oriented treatment approaches that were inspired by the Vestlapland's model, respectively by Soteria and similar projects. For instance the Swedish Parachute Project. All of them have been geographically restricted to more or less minor areas, and many of them are not employed anymore today.

It is true, that community care widely has replaced especially long-term hospitalizations. However, a closer look at how this community care does - NOT - work, shows that it is in fact nothing but what you might call "hospitalization in the community", or, more precisely, on the margins of community. Today, the biological model and thus the almost exclusive reliance on psychotropic drugs as "treatment" dominates psychiatric "care" in Denmark and Norway entirely. In hospital as well as in the community. People aren't warehoused behind the brick walls of a locked ward. They are chemically restrained warehoused in halfway houses respectively in an assisted living facility - more often than not of poor quality; there have been numerous scandals about gross overmedication as well as intolerably filthy and run-down environments here in Denmark over the past years - or, if they're lucky, in their own apartment and at the nearest drop-in center.

About 90 per cent of those who enter the system and receive a "psychosis" or "schizophrenia" label end up as revolving door patients, and on disability.

De-institutionalization has widely failed in Denmark, because it was (mis-)used in order to save the state money, not in order to provide more recovery-oriented services to people in crisis. In the meantime, the overall failure of community mental health care has Danish politicians ask for the re-establishment of hospital beds on locked and secured wards, for the implementation of AOT-laws, as well as for several other initiatives, such as the re-establishment of seclusion rooms, that inevitably will bomb mental health services in this country back to the good old asylum-days. It doesn't occur to anyone that the problem may not be the form - community instead of hospitalization - but the contents - recovery-oriented services instead of drugs, drugs, and even more drugs.

The situation in Norway, Sweden, and as far as I am informed also in Iceland is that AOT-laws already do exist, and are excessively used, and that at least the mh system in Norway has hospitalization facilities at its disposal so as to be able to incarcerate a vast number of people long-term. Norway also is the European country with most incidents of involuntary hospitalization and "treatment", as far as I know, Denmark holds a sad third or fourth position on this list.

By and large, also the psychiatric establishment in Scandinavia has been successful defending a purely biological, and in addition widely on coercion based, "treatment" model, and preventing alternatives from as much as being publicly discussed, or even becoming known to a broader public. IMHO, our system is anything but a model system. And it looks like it will be even less so in the future.
_______________

The other disagreement I have concerning Peter Stastny's article is that also he, as most professionals, seems to believe that when people first had their second, third, or umpteenth "psychotic break" they're beyond redemption. Why his article entirely focusses on alternative treatment options for first "psychotic episodes". I can't tell you exactly how many times I had a "psychotic break" before I eventually received the guidance that made it possible for me to, I dare say once and for all, resolve crisis, but this last of my crises certainly wasn't my first one.

I have no doubt that crisis is "addictive", and habit-forming. The longer and more often someone employs a certain pattern of behavior, certain coping strategies, the more ingrained, probably also neurologically, it becomes. On the other hand, my compared to a teen or twenty-tear-old relatively more extensive life experience also was a huge advantage to me throughout the process of working things out. I'd say, all in all, my chances to recover were maybe different in kind but no smaller than any "first psychotic break" individual's.

No one should ever be regarded "beyond redemption". Recovery is possible and should be aimed at, no matter how many "psychotic breaks" someone has experienced. The services Peter Stastny, and others, are so eager to make available to people who experience their first crisis ought to be available to everyone, disregarded whether they're going through their first, second, or umpteenth crisis.

"Search inside your heart..."

Facebook group "The incarceration of John"

Conference "Recovery: A Human Right"

My YouTube-comment: "What is traumatizing to human nature? The very normal though also very unnatural circumstances, that alienate it from itself. Unfortunately, violence is just all too normal in our culture. Biopsychiatry being a kind of meta-violence, as it violates those, who react to our culture's violence. (...)"

"Look, even the mentally ill themselves do believe in it!"

This is something, I think I'll never quite get:

Once more, I got into a, luckily very short, but nevertheless, discussion with a person, who identifies as, well, yeah, a consumer, suffering from "manic depression", and, of course, the pills were no less than godsend.

The discussion: Danish psychiatry has made a film, Åbenhed gør stærk - om skizofreni i familien (Strength through openness - about schizophrenia in the family) technically, formally, obviously very much like Daniel Mackler's Take These Broken Wings - cross cutting between sequences of interviews with respectively two young people, Helle and Emil, labelled with "schizophrenia", their relatives, some friends, and, of course, professionals, especially one consultant psychiatrist from the OPUS-project. In regard to the "message" on the other hand, the Danish film, not surprisingly, tells the opposite of what Daniel Mackler's film tells. "Schizophrenia" is a chronic biological brain disease, due to defective genes, that cause abnormalities in brain structure, and the best treatment option is lifelong medication with "antipsychotics".

And the family? Well, it's important to assure the relatives, that it is not their fault. It's all just defective genes. But, of course, it is also very important to involve the relatives, and psycho-educate them - about biological brain diseases, what else?! - so that they can support "treatment" compliance. And when all this is in place, voilà, what a success story! Never mind, that one of the two young people in the film is in need of assisted housing, as she can't take care of herself due to the drugs' side effects. And never mind, that both face a future on disability, and dependent on the system for the rest of their, approximately 25 years shorter than average, life.

Now, during the past couple of weeks I've noticed numerous hits on my Danish blog, search terms "film about schizophrenia", and since I imagine, that it is the above described botched job people are looking for, and not necessarily Daniel Mackler's or Leo Regan's film, I combed the net for reviews, and wrote my own "not-quite-a-review", always just looking to meet the public's needs and desires... Not-quite-a-review, because I haven't seen the film myself, and I don't intend to, since I won't pay as much as one cent for crap like that. I actually won't give as much as one cent for whatever it might be that supports biopsychiatry. Not if I can help it.

And, yeah, right, I do a hatchet job on the film, slamming its message totally as being oppressive, discriminating, and disempowering, calling the "expert's factual information" for a bunch of lies with no scientific evidence to support it, and the filmmakers for fraudulent when they choose to interview a couple of colonized consumers and their just as colonized relatives, only and solely to, as I see it, give the impression that psychiatry's hopeless message is the one and only truth: "Look, even the mentally ill themselves do believe in it!"

The thing is, that even though the film tries to make the viewer believe, that Helle's and Emil's words are their very own words, they are not. They are the system's words. - Actually, this borders to abuse of these two young people. Colonialism controls, displaces or exterminates the original. In order to exploit. Psychiatric colonialism controls, displaces or exterminates its victims' thoughts, emotions and language in order to exploit its victims' capability to talk, making them repeat its own ideology like a parrot. That. is. abuse.

Well, the pain in the neck I am, I let both the filmmakers, the "expert", and the three people, whose hurrays I've based my own review on, know about it. One of them reacts, so far. The "manic depressive" consumer, I mentioned above. She doesn't react commenting on my blog, but by e-mail. Somewhat resentful at the fact, that not all people agree with her on psychiatry and its pills being a godsend, and that some people dare to question that having insight and being "treatment" compliant would be the road to recovery, as she wants to have it in her review of the film.

Now I wonder: what's in for someone like her, that she defends an industry, that ruins people's lives in droves, just to make a profit? I mean, she doesn't make a profit by doing so, as far as I can see. Apart from the purely idealistic profit of a false ego-identification, that is: "I'm manic depressive! I suffer from a real disease!" Does that rotten ego-identification really mean so much more than the lives of millions of people?? I just can't but keep on wondering...

Gianna on Madness Radio

Will Hall has interviewed Gianna Kali of Beyond Meds for Madness Radio. Gianna talks about how she got into the mh system and her experiences with it, about spirituality, psychiatric drug withdrawal, the damage these drugs can do, her blog, and much more. She also reads a couple of posts from her blog. Especially listening to Gianna reading "Undiagnozing myself" was a deeply moving experience for me.

"So now I continue on my journey and I am undiagnosing myself. I am human and I have problems. That is the only diagnosis I am willing to live with now. Human problems. My life has not been easy. It has been no different from that of hundreds of thousands of people labeled bipolar. I still consider all who call themselves bipolar my brothers and sisters. And for that matter anyone else who has ever been labeled with any psychiatric disorder. We are family."

I remember someone once saying to me, that he got the impression, the critics didn't have much else in common than their criticism of the mh system. Well, that seems to be the impression the system communicates. Divide and rule. It seems to be the impression people get, who've never really listened to anyone of us, and who've never met someone like Gianna.

Listen to the interview here: http://www.madnessradio.net/madness-radio-beyond-meds-gianna-kali

Take These Broken Wings. Recovery from Schizophrenia Without Medication. A documentary by Daniel Mackler

Last month, Gianna had a post on her blog, announcing New York-therapist Daniel Mackler's documentary Take These Broken Wings. Recovery from Schizophrenia Without Medication.

I'd been visiting Daniel Mackler's website a couple of times in the past, and thought 'I need to get hold of this, it can only be awesome.'

And awesome it is! The film's main interest is to show that recovery from what psychiatry calls "schizophrenia" is possible, that "schizophrenia" is not per se a lifelong, chronic condition, that needs lifelong - and, by the way, often chronifying - medication. And, in fact, as the documentary looks at both the scientific data, reported by Robert Whitaker, the stories of Joanne Greenberg and Catherine Penney, told by themselves, and the experiences of several professionals, among them Peter Breggin, Ann-Louise Silver, Bertram Karon and Daniel Dorman, it becomes, once more, clear that recovery, full recovery, from "schizophrenia" isn't only possible, but should be expected as a matter of course.



There are especially two among the many aspects in regard to treatment and recovery the film mentions, that are intriguing to me: the difference in quality of a recovery, that is achieved without drugs, compared to a "recovery" on drugs - if at all a recovery, that still requires maintenance medication, can be termed as such - on the one hand,



and the stark discrepancy between today's "best practice" and the kind of help for people in crisis, Peter Breggin among others, advocates for, on the other.



What does it tell me about our society in general, our culture's preferences, that we, in spite of a fundamental lack of proof for its efficacy and in spite of the fact that alternatives, that have been proven to be efficient, are available, nevertheless continue to almost exclusively treat "the most vulnerable people" in the most inhumane way imaginable?

Although the film focusses on psychotherapy as treatment, Daniel Mackler acknowledges, that this is not the one and only way to recover from "schizophrenia". All roads lead to Rome, one might say. All but one.

Just as the stories of most - if not all - people diagnozed with "schizophrenia", also Joanne Greenberg's and Catherine Penney's stories are stories of childhood trauma, while their recovery stories are those of becoming aware of the trauma, working it through, understanding it - and their reaction to it. And, obviously, there are many ways of becoming aware and understanding. While there is one way, that more efficiently than anything else suppresses, even reduces, awareness and understanding, and turns out to be a dead end in the long run: lifelong "maintenance" medication, in combination with the conviction, that "schizophrenia" is a chronic, biological brain disease, caused by a chemical imbalance, its "symptoms" thus being completely without meaning, and not worth being subjected to a closer investigation - with the guidance of a psychotherapist for instance.



Take These Broken Wings is a brilliant defence of not only psychotherapy, but all alternative approaches to crisis, that aim at understanding rather than at the mere suppression of "symptoms". At the same time it manages to, convincingly, debunk the medical model, while it navigates successfully around the trap of carrying on an aggressive controversy against psychiatry, or glorifying crisis as such.




The cutting of Take These Broken Wings with rather rapidly alternating sequences from the various interviews, that serve as the film's basis, and its subtle humour and poetic choice of images, make Take These Broken Wings also on an artistic level a treat to watch.

If there is one thing about this documentary, that is a little disturbing in my opinion, it is the collision of its philosophy with its terminology. And since I regard language as extremely important - as a means of identification - I couldn't but had to let Daniel Mackler know about my concern:

"The whole concept is so refreshingly non-pathologizing, and then, anyway: 'mental illness', 'schizophrenia', 'the schizophrenics'. 

I'd so like to see that label abolished. And the pathologizing of these states of mind, it inevitably comes along with, no matter what. In retrospect, I realized, that all that had happened to me was nothing but a somewhat 'exaggerated normality'. With the extent of exaggeration of my reactions perfectly corresponding to the extent of exaggeration of the circumstances, my experiences were a belated reaction to. That seems pretty natural, even healthy to me. Not at all ill in any way. I'd say, it would have been 'ill' to react less exaggerated. The question is, if 'illness' is something that threatens one's - physical or mental - health (like the traumatizing abusiveness of our civilization), or if it is one's natural, self-preserving reaction to the threat, that is the 'illness'. And where would one draw the line between 'normal' confusion, fear, anger, and 'schizophrenia', i.e. a whole lot of confusion, fear, and anger? Personally, I wouldn't venture to think, that I ever could. Joanne Greenberg says at some point, that 'every schizophrenic knows how sick he is,' and that she thinks, 'he knows how far he is from the center of his own being.' Well, when I look around, I see almost nothing but people, "normal" people, who are miles and miles away from the center of their own being. They're just not aware of it. If 'schizophrenia' exists as an illness, these people are the 'healthy' ones, while those, who are becoming aware, are the 'sick' ones. Definitely. But if being this far away from the center of one's own being is the real illness - and I tend to believe that - then the so-called 'schizophrenics' are the ones, who actually are recovering from this illness called 'normality'.

This maybe sounds a bit far-fetched, but nevertheless I think, it hits the nail on the head: one of Germany's leading experts in horses once said, that there is no horse, who is too sway-backed, too short-legged, too nervous, or too whatever. There only are horses who are sway-backed, short-legged, nervous, etc. Now, 'schizophrenia' sounds to me like 'too afraid, too confused, too angry'. While I think, there is no such thing as 'too' in regard to (human) behavior, in regard to (human) emotions and reactions.

To me, having to label myself explicitly (for holy, indispensable insight's sake...) was maybe the most painful experience throughout the whole therapy process. Just as I'd thought that eventually someone was really seeing me, this someone asked me to close my eyes to myself, to explain myself away, instead of to become aware of myself. Anticlimax."

Well, there is an explanation for the film's choice of terminology. And there also is this guy, at Washington Square Park, who says: "It's a gift, not a mental illness, a gift." He's right. That's what it is.

You can order the film here, and watch the trailers and more clips at Daniel Mackler's YouTube channel.

The Wind Never Lies - Steven Morgan's recovery story

You've probably already read it at Gianna's blog. Anyway, for those here who haven't, or who'd like to enjoy Steven's powerful writing in this no less powerful story once again, here is Steven Morgan's recovery story The Wind Never Lies - original pdf-version here at Vermont Recovery's website.

Thanks to Steven for allowing me to post his account here. And, yes, the diagnosis, Steven gives himself at the end also works for me. The only one, that ever has worked and ever will work for me.

The Wind Never Lies
by Steven Morgan stevenmorganjr(at)gmail(dot)com

When I was young I believed the world spoke to me. Lightning split across the sky to the pulse of my thoughts. Rings around the moon prophesized the apocalypse. My cat winked at me to let me know he understood. Clouds parted like curtains to welcome a shining God.

For most of my youth this deep connection to the Natural world mystified me, pulling me into forests and spinning my imagination wild. Then at age twenty-two I finally discovered its secret.

Earlier that year I had been diagnosed with major mental illness. Suddenly I had wondered – often painfully – how much of my past was led not by free will or cosmic connection, but by disease. As I searched for answers, I absorbed medical texts, self-help books, and bestselling memoirs. I grew increasingly vulnerable to biological explanations for my behavior – Your brain is broken – in part because these theories absolved me of guilt and responsibility for experiences that were shameful. For instance, I was relieved to learn that repeatedly tapping in patterns of three to save my grandmother’s life was caused by an overheating of my caudate nucleus. And I felt less maniacal knowing that six months contemplating death every hour was caused by low serotonin.

Yet the flipside – the explosive creativity, moments of divine insight, periods of super-wit and magnetism, communication with Nature – was not so easily resigned to biological determinism. How was I to make sense of this paradox, that while some mood swings are grave and disabling, others are rich with meaning and evolvement?

According to the respected literature Bipolar Disorder is a disease of the brain. This means I would have to deny scientific reason to cherry-pick which extremities are diseasified and which are not based on their subjective worth.

At the time, I needed answers, not another harrowing epoch of existential angst, so I adopted a mental illness worldview and began to label almost everything that veered up or down in my experiences as caused by pathology in my head. In effect, I re-authored my life story, tossing fragments of my history into clinical categories of mania and depression.

One day I came across text that specifically labeled “believing the wind is communicating with you” as a symptom of Bipolar Disorder. I immediately thought about my friend. She had also felt a deep connection to the world, and she was also diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder. We had shared moments of profound synchronicity in which the wind had danced inside our unmedicated conversations at exactly the right moment, too right to have been a coincidence.

With my new perspective, there was only one explanation for this experience and others of a similar nature. They were simply neurochemical errors devoid of meaning.

From then on, the world still spoke to me, but I stopped listening. When the wind would swarm me at too perfect a moment to be coincidental, I would remind myself, “The wind isn’t speaking to you. You have a mental illness that makes you believe otherwise.” I began to lose trust in my intuition and the significance of my experiences, and the way I made meaning of the world suddenly became a suspect for deceit. Such is the effect of being diagnosed with an illness that presumes to know your mind better than you ever can. You resign your voice and become a doubter.
***
My resignation to a forecast of disability was short-lived, however. I have always harbored a fierce independence that – whether consciously or unconsciously – puppeteers my actions, and eventually we sought to unwed mental illness. But first I had to make major life changes.

At the time I was fulfilling a typical Bipolar prognosis by living at my father’s house as an unemployed artist. My fresh diagnosis was an ace in the hole to excuse inaction, but I felt ashamed and irresponsible for not holding my weight as a man. In an effort to jumpstart my life, I dove into a respectable social program that trains and places promising college graduates as teachers in the poorest areas of the country.

Here was a chance to reclaim my dignity. Here was a challenge to prove I could be successful just like everyone else. Here was an opportunity to show my friends and family I was not a lost cause naïve to the real world and blanketed by idealism. I invested all my pride in the endeavor, throwing away my Bipolar label overnight and the sedating mood stabilizer that came with it.

My training consisted of grueling eighteen-hour work days for five weeks straight. At first I was vivacious, often praised by my colleagues for creativity and energy, but by the end I had completely burned out.

I headed to my assigned region of South Dakota with barely any life-force. In a lonely house along a dirt road, I was overwhelmed by sleeplessness, paranoia, disconnection, feelings of abandonment and utter exhaustion. Despite a desperate attempt to revive myself with exercise and meditation, I eventually fell apart and landed in a hospital.

Here is what I wrote several months after the experience:
When I walked into the hospital, slow as a ghost, my arms bloodied and face covered in agony, I noticed the hospital workers noticing me. It felt very intrusive, and I wore a scared, nervous face in front of their inquisitions, both verbal and silent.
“Soooooooo, how long you been bipolar?” The doctor’s chirpy South Dakotan accent made the question all the more intolerable. I felt like her question was cruel, invasive, insensitive, ignorant, said with a doctor’s ease while I sat there in the gloom of my misery expected to answer in a coherent way.

“What kind of question is that?” I replied. I wasn’t confrontational. Indeed, I was scared because deep down, the question made me feel more insane than I had previously acknowledged.

Even now, I can feel the humiliation of awakening in that rocky bed: eyes weighted with tears, skin torn by teeth marks, throat lined with liquid charcoal, hand punctured by IV, thoughts clouded by haldol, heart stinging with guilt, mind terrified and confused. And I recall the doctor inches away from my face holding a pill between her thumb and index finger. “This will make you feel better,” she smirked with vague condescension, as if the boundless suffering before her was just another Bipolar gone off his meds…shame on him.

I cannot explain in words the trauma of those months. What I can tell you is that for years a mark had been appearing on the center of my chest that changed in color according to my moods. Though it had arrived in a shade of light brown, the year after South Dakota it doubled in size – like a virus spreading – and deepened into a blood red. Every morning thereafter, I saw that mark in the mirror and it reminded me of my utter failure at life, as inescapable as my breath beneath it.

I wanted the rest of the world to see my pain too. One night, after drinking and ripping car keys across my forearm, I took a razor and shaved my head – a highly symbolic act since growing out my hair had led to my first girlfriends – then grabbed a knife and hacked away at my face, chest, and arms.

Alongside a second hospital stay, it was becoming too difficult to deny I had serious problems, and equally as alluring to again accept the bottomline that mental illness explained me. Tired and defeated, I stopped trying to connect the dots and came to see my breakdown in South Dakota as the result of quitting medications, getting manic, and crashing into depression. With that association in mind I became terrified of discontinuing medications ever again. And there were plenty of people to confirm the wisdom of my fear. In fact, I soon discovered that all Bipolar advice orbits around one unshakeable core: Whatever you do, no matter how good or stable you feel, NEVER quit your meds, or else…

This way of thinking is justified by the belief that Bipolar is an incurable chemical imbalance in the brain which medications help restore. Given the overwhelming presence of this theory in the media, medical texts, and amongst professionals and peers, I presumed it was backed by hard science and became invested in taking pills for the rest of my life.

I even began openly expressing to others that I was taking ‘my meds,’ as if the choice made me a ‘good patient’ worthy of inclusion and accolades. However, my emergence into a walking advertisement for the pharmaceutical companies came at the price of repressing internal conflicts. Indeed, no matter how much support and validation people offered, no matter how many times I reminded myself mine was a medical disease ‘like diabetes’ which required medical solutions, the pills never quit instilling within me their unlisted side effects of shame, unnaturalness, isolation, and dependency. It is simply impossible to forget you are crazy when you eat from five bottles of pills every day.

Still, I could not consider quitting medications because I could not think outside my experiences. To survive then, I lowered my expectations and silenced my shame.

And with that I swept away the shards of my identity, aimlessly crawling through a new world where the limit came before the sky, and I solemnly accepted that my mind would forever be prisoner to the punishment of my brain.
***

After a brief relationship resurrected feelings of abandonment, the mark over my chest was aching and my soul was sinking. In response, I sought some project to once again restore my worth. Eventually my efforts transpired into creating a film about Bipolar Disorder. I sold many of my possessions to purchase film equipment, all the while rationalizing a need to push myself into highs and lows to make the movie more realistic.

After months of mad creativity, I recall an evening where I could not form sentences from beginning to end. A couple of days later I wrote a suicide note and tucked it into my mattress, then checked into a hospital.

My previous hospitalization had been relatively helpful, but this stay was pure damage. Having my shoelaces taken away now felt degrading, pointing to stick-figured faces – Happy, Sad, Angry – while setting a daily goal now felt infantilizing, smoking in a cage with other demoralized people now felt depressing, being locked indoors after voluntarily checking-in now felt infuriating, being told not to carry on conversations with the opposite sex now felt discriminating, and being observed every fifteen minutes during my sleepless evenings now felt invasive.

Yet my integrity was buried beneath a need to be liked, so I behaved as a good patient, never connecting my humiliation to external circumstances.

After a week I lied to the psychiatrist about my suicidal status, and upon release I made a vow: I will never return to a psychiatric hospital, no matter what sacrifices are necessary to stay afloat.

To pass each day I drank just enough beers to sedate my thoughts. To pass each night I popped sleeping pills at dusk. Though I remained desiccated by suicidal thoughts for months, I knew from experience that eventually the pain would dissolve.

There was also a reason to be hopeful. While researching the aforementioned film, I had met a woman who raised money for me to attend the state’s Certified Peer Specialist Project, which trains people with psychiatric labels to work in the mental health system from a peer perspective. Though I knew nothing about this line of work, I was encouraged by the prospect of employment.

At the two-week training, I kept my recent hospitalization a secret, and was skilled enough at hiding disillusionment to push through classes for the first week. Then, over the weekend break I hiked eleven miles to a desolate beach. As I stood in front of the ocean, I was desperate to feel the force of Nature as I had in years past, but she was now vacuous and dead.

When I returned to the training I broke down sobbing to the lead facilitator. She listened to my confusion and loss, then revealed some of her own struggles, particularly as a writer. Referring to a creative project she was working on, she said, “If I don’t finish this, I will have failed at life.” At any other time, in any other context, her words would have slipped by, but instead they flipped a switch.

Suddenly I realized I too could fail at life, which meant I too could succeed, which meant that life was not just a careless unfolding but purposeful, and if she could emerge from immense struggles to inhabit meaning, perhaps I could too.

This brief sense of optimism carried me through the second week of training, and upon returning home I began the slow work of moving away from lost causes and toward some kind of intentional, integrated life.
______________________________

Jim was a 60-year old bear of a man, fluff but stern with eyes that frequently watered from inspiration. He sat on a meditation cushion on the floor to look upwards at me as a gesture of humility. There was a seriousness for truth in the air which I immensely valued. He never reduced any of my experiences to mental illness nor used any diagnostic vocabulary, but I still subscribed to those contexts for making meaning.

At our first therapy session, I poured out my Bipolar story while he listened patiently, still as a rock. In the final minutes he responded: “Now, I would like to tell you about myself.” Then he happened upon exactly the right words, in exactly the right no-bullshit tone, with exactly the right conviction: “Steven, I too am a wild man.” And he meant it.

From then on, I knew I would be leaving practicalities at the door. Our work was to map dense forests of archetypes, dreams, gods, love, manhood, and madness. He introduced me to the work of Carl Jung, whose concepts were a lantern in the darkest realms of psyche.
During our fourth meeting together, I haphazardly recalled a dream. I had always dreamed vividly, often shaken in the morning by their complexity of imagery and intensity of message. Though I had derived some truth from them in the past, I had never been able to decode their ultimate function.

The dream I spoke of contained a buffalo, who appeared near the end and told me, “Do not be afraid.” I remember feeling the dream was inconsequential, but Jim treated it with sacredness, remarking, “Steven, there is nothing meaningless about Wakan Tanka.” Wakan Tanka is the name given to the Buffalo/Great Spirit by the Lakota Sioux, whose land I had lived on while in South Dakota. Though I had failed to make the obvious connection, Jim helped me realize that the buffalo’s appearance in my dream meant something. I was being communicated with.

The more I gave attention to my dreams, the more they responded, and soon I was navigating symbols too multifaceted to be trivialized in words. The immediate effect of this experience was profoundly healing. For one, the messages directly opened up locks to expansion and elevation, but more significantly they became an umbilical cord back to God.

While diagnosis had disconnected me from others and my own experiences, my dreams mended this separation by reconnecting me to humanity, the divine, Nature, and also to the inseparableness of the three. Their mythological nature made me feel important again, as if I were decoding a great secret that was inaccessible to – or at least denied by – most people.

There was admittedly a dangerous element of ego-satisfaction (“I’m special!”) built into this process that would need addressing later on, but at the time the pride was absolutely necessary for restoring my sense of value to the world.

Of course, nine months of therapy was not all “Ah ha!” moments. There was grieving over relationships and suffering from opening the floodgates of repression and clearing the spiderwebs to my past. But Jim became a father in these scenarios, validating my secrets and loving me for the volatile creative spirit that so infused my passions yet isolated me from others. He even told me once he loved me, and he meant it, a moment of naked humanity that single-handedly patched a tear in my heart.

All of my work with psyche culminated in a peak experience. I had been reading Eastern spiritual texts for years, but despite a brief flirtation with meditation in South Dakota had yet to actualize it. One night I decided to try again, and as I sat in the moonlight in front of a white wall, a surge of energy transmuted me, presenting a ritualistic dance of truths and visions that shook my consciousness to its core. For the two months that followed, I lived behind a colorful trance through which I could see auras and vivid patterns everywhere. At first, meditation fostered this psychedelic experience, but as the intensity faded it became a vessel for me to a clearer and more direct world.

During this time of evolvement, I used my training as a peer specialist to work at a progressive recovery center for adults with diagnoses. Inspired by the beautiful people who came there, I began to grasp the concept of recovery in mental health. To me, recovery meant that I could live a meaningful life with illness. My self-conception shifted from believing disease fueled my emotions to believing disease fueled some of my emotions, and I graduated my story from I am Bipolar to I have Bipolar. Still, I was locked into psychiatric seermongering that my brain would forever be hostile in its natural state.

Then one day everything changed.
***
After moving to Vermont for a new job, I began attending meetings and trainings with individuals who were leaders in the consumer/survivor/ex-patient movement. At one of these week-long trainings, one of the facilitators was a bright and humane man whose empathic charisma immediately earned my respect. Midway through the week, he revealed he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and was not taking medications. Now, until that moment, despite all my research and conversations, I had never met nor heard of anyone diagnosed with major mental illness who was successfully living without medications.

I was perplexed. I probed for his secret, and he smiled warmly, replying, “I believe that if this is something you want to do, you will find a way.” The integrity in withholding his path empowered me to find my own without his influence. Yet his presence was enough – a living example that life without medications was possible – to inflame my will. The second before I was staying on my chemical regime for life. Now I was interested in quitting.

I approached withdrawing with caution. There was enough distance between my present experiences and past meltdowns to forget the force of cyclonic emotions. I was terrified that my brain would revert to its diseasified operations once relieved of its medicinal police. I cut most of my doses slowly to test the outcome, while maintaining a commitment to a healthy lifestyle as fundamental to staying centered.

The whole process took six months, after which I noticed two shifts: my mind sharpened and my heart opened. Both of these factors were double-edged swords. On the one hand I could think more clearly and feel a wider spectrum of aliveness. On the other hand my restored intellect would once again lead me to face the graveness in our world, and my increased sensitivities would once again produce dense emotions in response.

But the real challenge came to my identity. At first I was too occupied with watching for signs of mental slippage to indulge in existential contemplation. But after a few months, as I realized I was clearer and even relatively grounded, the question inevitably arose: What happened to the chemical imbalance in my brain?

To find answers I started researching heavily. Instead of relying – as I had in the past – on government agencies, major organizations, professionals, and bestselling books for explanations of mental illness, I went straight to the source: to the scientific journals that provide empirical evidence to support or refute psychiatric theories.
***
The first and most striking fact I unearthed was that a chemical imbalance had never been observed in a human brain. Surely, I thought, this must be a mistake, as everything I read elsewhere concluded that an imbalance of neurotransmitters was the cause of mental illness. Such a ubiquitous claim would have to be backed by solid science, right? I then discovered there was no way to measure live neurotransmitter levels in the human brain, so there was no “healthy level” of neurotransmitters by which to even make comparisons. Furthermore, I learned that if chemical imbalances did exist, they could be caused by a person’s experiences. Therefore, if I did have an imbalance, I would have no way of determining whether it had biologically erupted to cause my psychological, spiritual, and emotional crises, or whether it was a biological reflection of them.

Soon enough, I realized that even though the chemical imbalance theory was a gross oversimplification of how the brain and mind operate, it was coasting through the masses on a wave of propaganda designed and funded by pharmaceutical giants, who directly benefitted from its treatment implications.

As my presumptions fell apart, I investigated more into the concept of psychiatric recovery. I found that nearly all long-term studies indicate that the majority of people diagnosed with major mental illness significantly recover over time. That was news. Furthermore, I learned that medications are ineffective and even harmful to a large minority of people with major diagnoses, and that some alternative treatment models which use little or no medications have produced better results than treatment-as-usual. That was news, too.

But if mental illness is a brain problem, and if people who experience mental illness can recover significantly, what happens to their brain problem? Is it fixed? Was mine fixed?

At this juncture I stumbled onto neuroplasticity. In science, neuroplasticity refers to the brain’s natural ability to change, adapt, and heal across the lifespan. I learned that the brain was highly malleable, changing its structure and chemistry in response to both internal and external stimuli – from thinking positively to experiencing trauma. Most importantly, I learned that utilizing the brain’s natural potential to heal, people were recovering from massive strokes, head traumas, overcoming learning disabilities, rewiring obsessive-compulsive behavior, erasing the pain of phantom limbs, restoring memory acuity, enhancing cognitive processing during old age, learning to see without eyesight, strengthening muscles just by thinking about them, using meditation to create lower-stress neurological states, and on and on.

If people could train their brains to overcome these problems, why not major mental illness?

The research base for neuroplasticity and psychiatric recovery was small, but there was enough evidence to strongly suggest that many of the biological abnormalities correlated with psychiatric symptoms were reversible or could be compensated for by other areas of the brain.

And so I quite naturally asked, had my brain physically changed? Had my lifestyle changes reversed my mental illness on a physiological level?

Certainly this was the case with obsessions and compulsions. Whereas I once ‘got stuck’ performing irrational rituals all the time to relieve anxiety, years of challenging my thoughts had equipped me to disengage from habitual mindstreams. With the power to observe and respond in different ways, I completely eliminated most obsessions and compulsions. Studies into Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder have visually documented that such efforts actually rewire the brain.

But Bipolar Disorder was different. It was always presented as chronic, persistent, and lifelong. Was I just in remission like the literature said, an unmedicated brain temporarily strong but ready to surrender at the first invasion of stress?

I was not satisfied with that hopeless hypothesis. It seemed a slick way to firewall psychiatric creed – “No one beats Bipolar Disorder” – against anyone who is well without medications. So I changed the question from Am I still Bipolar? to Who decides what is Bipolar and what is not?

I was amazed that by merely asking a different question, I encountered a hidden world of alternative perspectives. I dove into criticism of psychiatry – most notably into its history – and grew outraged at what I found. I came to realize that mental illness was a culturally-defined construct, prone to bias and judgment. Indeed, I learned that the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual used by professionals to diagnose people had no medical objectivity whatsoever, and was instead a collection of opinions about behavior that changed with social trends.

There was no doubt that people with major diagnoses underwent profound psychological, emotional, and spiritual suffering. Yet the evidence that such suffering was caused by a biological disease was flimsy, no more convincing than the evidence that such suffering was caused by a complex psychological reaction to overwhelming life circumstances. But biological psychiatry had won the rights to define mental illness, in no small measure because it met the ideological needs and financial ambitions of pharmaceutical companies, who in turn funded many of its institutions, scientists, and research grants. The endless other vessels to understanding behavior – sociology, psychology, anthropology, mythology, spirituality, or just plain ol’ individual interpretation – had been overpowered.

As I learned and integrated this information into my worldview, the glue that stuck mental illness to me loosened. I started to wake up to a different reality, one in which I used terms like experiences instead of symptoms, trauma instead of disease, problems instead of illness, and neuroplasticity instead of chemical imbalance. I engaged in a process of re-authoring my life story once again, casting off the disease paradigm and shifting my self-conception from I have Bipolar to I am fully human. At the same time I experienced an incident of painful discrimination that reminded me of my status in society.

I had applied for an expensive scholarship to attend a breathwork retreat with progressive psychiatrist Stanlislov Grof and Buddhist psychologist Jim Kornfield. My scholarship was approved, after which I was sent a standard medical questionnaire. At the top it indicated the workshop was not appropriate for people with certain conditions, including those “with mental illness.” However, I assumed the workshop’s pioneering facilitators would factor in my current health, which I documented in detail as evidence that I was “appropriate.” After a lengthy discourse with Dr. Grof’s assistant in which I further pleaded my case, Dr. Grof personally rejected my scholarship on the grounds I was a risk.

I was totally devastated. My enormous efforts to arise from the restraints of diagnosis were simply not enough to convince others I was not disabled. No matter how I conceived of myself, my psychiatric history would forever follow me. Though I found my ensuing rage challenging to navigate without medications, I was equally thankful that I could feel such intensity again. In the past, I would employ coping skills to eliminate strong feelings, but this time I used them as a catalyst for action and advocacy.

Over the next year, I translated the research I had gathered into written resources and presentations. I worked with other mental health workers to create more recovery-based environments, while bringing my new perspective into support groups as a facilitator and educator. I also began sharing my story publically, and each time I uncovered more and more of my authentic voice.

And something strange happened: that mark over my chest that had gauged my pain for eight years, that had been confirmed by a dermatologist as a stress indicator and not an allergic reaction, that had physically mirrored my mind as it shattered and my heart as it choked, that mark of suffering disappeared.
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It has been nearly two years since I quit medications, nearly four years since I last entered a hospital seeking help, and nearly one year since I first began writing this story. Nothing has been steady, and I have stumbled along a rocky path that is at times overwhelming, at times insightful. Such is life, and I am grateful for it.

Each day, my story grows and changes in unpredictable ways, but one thing has become clear in my understanding: I am not nor have I ever been mentally ill.

Yes, at certain times I fit all the criteria for Bipolar II in the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual, but the conclusions of a small group of academics who create taxonomies of human behavior hardly constitute my truth, thus I grant them no authority. Instead, I perceive my experiences as a complex manifestation of intrinsic character, society and culture, relationships, physical health, biological processes, past experiences, collective energies, and forces beyond my understanding, and each varies in degree depending on the situation.

But none of my experiences are ill.

Indeed, I cannot believe that I have something inside me called Bipolar Disorder, for my thoughts and emotions which could be labeled as such are not separate from my selfhood and therefore I will not postulate them as disordered. That would be denying and perhaps hating myself. All of it – the ups, the downs, the middle ground - is me. I cannot apply the same logic of having a disease like diabetes toward the myriad of feelings and experiences that I essentially am. Otherwise, I would have to split my mental content and emotions – both of which often escape my conscious control – into healthy and unhealthy compartments according to arbitrary judgments from doctors whom I have never met, and to be honest, that’s absurd, dismissive of existential purpose, and detrimental to the integrity of my complex existence. It also breeds more inner conflict.

I believe that in most instances, though not all, the reduction of experiences to biological causality sucks dry the poetry of life and denies that extremes can in fact be the final, necessary, and dangerously unpredictable step before new maturation.

So where does this leave me? Things come up, things go away, and when they do, there I am. The wind blows, but it never lies. When despair arrives, I am despair. When fired up arrives, I am fired up. If I choose to sink back into a witnessing state cultivated by meditative practice, I am witnessing. States of existence – dangerous to judge and painful to deny, rolling on and on and on, each one pushes toward the next by some force which I do not comprehend. It is the Great Mystery, and I feel utterly okay not having figured it out.

This is not to deny the impact of extrinsic events upon well-being. Like nearly everyone who receives a major psychiatric label, traumatic experiences have influenced me and continue to contribute to my suffering. As a society, we all need to wake up to the obvious connection between trauma and psychiatric disorders. But just as I am no longer willing to resign my belief that the wind is communicative to a neurochemical error, I am equally unwilling to resign my emotional states solely to the past. In all truth, there is no way to neatly sum up why I entered a psychiatric hospital in 2004. It all happened on the tail end of 24 years – that’s 756,864,000 seconds – of being alive. And who could possibly understand such an expanse?

What is important to me now is to take full responsibility for what I do, to know that there are storylines that glimpse truth, and to learn and experiment with living in ways that are intuitively authentic. And since intuition and authenticity grows, there is no endpoint, no enlightenment, no final solution to or ultimate recovery from suffering.

And thank God, for what a liberation it is to know that – just like you – I am plainly human: irreducible to theoretical constructs, unfathomable in my fullness, aching and celebrating with pain and love, moving in all directions at once, complex and stacked, an imperfect being and a sliver of God’s perfection.

Alas, it’s a diagnosis that works for me.

"I don't believe in hope" - Some thoughts about hope, powerlessness and recovery

There's a lot of talking about hope. Right now, while I write these lines, people all over the world sit glued to their TV, watching their hope, personified in Barack Obama, coming into power. And Obama himself is talking about hope.

Power - one person's power is another one's powerlessness... Just a thought.

Hope is something you have when you identify as powerless, as the victim.

"I don't actually believe in hope. I think, hope is a very very very very bad thing. Because hope, what it really means, what it really is, is a longing for a future condition over which I have no agency." -Derrick Jensen, on Madness Radio, "Environmental Insanity w/Author Derrick Jensen".

Don't hope, that Obama is going to save you, and the world. Don't hope, that the professionals are going to solve your problems for you. Don't hope for the future. Don't hope for recovery. Be. Now.

More misconceptions, some thoughts about delusions, suicide, and about true suicide prevention

The following are two, slightly edited, replies to a discussion at Beyond Meds. - You have to be a member to view the discussion, so, join! - Gianna suggested, I should post here too, and I decided to post both replies.

1. There's this (mis-)conception, that, whenever it just gets "weird" enough, i.e. no longer easy to get, there must be something really really wrong with a person's head, in a biological way. That idea serves as some kind of "explanation" whenever someone's behavior no longer can be understood and explained without effort in relation to the at any time adopted idea of "normal" human behavior as such. It's not an explanation, though. It's explaining away. What we don't understand, we fear. "Beware of the unknown" is a natural reaction/defence and survival mechanism. Especially of prey animals. And humans are both, predators and prey animals. So, we prefer to explain the unknown away, in order to keep it at a safe distance. One of several reasons why the biological model is so attractive to the majority.

The suffering that people in distress experience is caused by a lack of understanding, a lack of self-/consciousness. Partly the suffering is caused by a lack of understanding of themselves, or of what is happening to them, and partly by a lack of understanding from their surroundings. The fact, that people who receive understanding, empathetic, support, that focusses on helping them to understand their experiences while going through a crisis, usually don't suffer to the same extent as those who don't, who only receive drugs to get numbed out on, and maybe even traumatizing, coercive, "treatment" into the bargain, and that the former fare remarkably better in the long run than the latter, proves this.

Somehow, this is where I see a connection to what you say in your post here. Explaining away seems the safest and easiest way out. But it leads inevitably to more and more suffering. In a qualitative as well as in a quantitative sense. We want perfection. We want to be able to (and we are expected to) perfectly fit the mould. And whenever we don't, we panic. And/or those around us do. Something must be profoundly wrong with us. Let's get it fixed, so we can, perfectly, fit the mould again. What we miss in our tireless struggle to be "perfect" - perfect according to the cultural norms and values of our time (!), that is - is that our imperfection is just perfect. In its imperfection. We are not meant to fit a certain mould. We are meant to just be. Real perfection isn't something that can be defined in terms of "different from". Real perfection is the unity of all dualities. Thus, our culture, while desperately chasing what it supposes to be "perfection", actually loses the real perfection more and more out of sight.
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2. Whenever you want to die, if it's that you think the thought, or if it expresses itself as a voice, telling you to kill yourself (hearing voices is nothing but thinking aloud), you don't want to end being as such. You want to end what is, and make something else be. Death is a symbol for transformation. And the language of the unconscious is pure symbol language.

I don't know if you're familiar with it, but the Delphic Oracle from the Greek mythology for instance never answered any question other than in a more or less symbolic way. You got an answer to whatever your question, but you had to figure out the meaning of the answer yourself. Or: you actually gave the answer to your question yourself. Your unconscious, your intuition, did. The Delphic Oracle is the unconscious projected into the world.

Today, we live in a culture that isn't especially conscious of the unconscious. We are not conscious of symbolism in the same way other cultures are/were. What counts is the literal, the hard facts, science, "rational" thought (with "rational thought" being the kind of thought that is easy to get for everyone else, because everyone else thinks in the same, normative, way). Well, and things like traffic signs. But if I were an adviser, let's say of the Danish Prime Minister, he came to ask me my opinion about his campaign for the next election, and I'd say: "Make your own nature, not the advice of others, your guide in life," I'd probably lose my job, and be regarded, at least, a weirdo.

So, the question always is whom or what you really want to die when you contemplate suicide. One thing is for sure: it is not yourself. Your self (it's not a typo) is who/what you really are, and that is being, life. Life can't die. Death is a part of life, not the opposite. And life is transformation: something ends, "dies", something else begins. Every moment. Life is constant arrival and departure. Nothing actually is stable. There can be balance, but not stability. Total stability (like in "mood-stabilizer"), total unchangeableness and predictability, is a myth. And our culture confuses it with "perfection" - and chases it.

Some people want their outer form, i.e. their body, to die. People who suffer from a terminal illness, for instance. What most people in an existential crisis want to die though, is not the outer form either. It's their ego, i.e. who they think they are, and who they think, others think they are. Nevertheless, the ego partly manifests itself in the outer form of someone. That is, the body becomes a symbol for the ego. There you are: instead of letting go of your ego, and become who/what you really are, you interpret a symbol literally and consequently "let go" of your body, and,voilà: suicide. Literally. And since our culture is as unaware of symbolism as it is, chances are, that you won't find much help among this culture's members (in the mh system) to figure it out. Because everybody probably will interpret in the same literal way as your own thoughts do.

I eventually figured it out, because of the "delusion" that the real me wasn't a human being, but, well, something along the lines of a dryade, i.e. a spirit, nameless, ageless, without a history (all that ever had happened in my life, hadn't happened to me but to the body, the true me was caught in), immaterial, although caught in a - material - body. And what the real me wanted, wasn't to die, but to become free - of this body that represented an ego, a self-image, I've never felt less connected to than during crises.

Another aspect of this are "out-of-body-experiences", that usually also just are explained away as meaningless symptom of a brain disease.

Now, it's characteristic for our culture that people identify with their body, their thoughts, their mind, their life-story, their ego. Our culture teaches us to do so. In eastern philosophy though, there's another dimension beyond this formal, material one: the space wherein the formal, material expresses itself. Who/what you really are, your "true self" with Laing, is this space. So, the "delusion" actually wasn't a delusion, but the very truth.

Eventually, I figured, that letting go of the identification with my body, my ego, my thoughts, etc., meant the freedom, I'd thought, I only could gain through letting go of my body itself. A symbolic suicide, not a literal one. Or: an "egocide", not a suicide. That is the end of suffering. - That is not to say, that I don't suffer anymore. Nothing is forever. "Enlightenment" neither. It is extremely tempting to identify with the ego. Especially in a culture that worships the ego as our culture does. I yield to this temptation, time and again, and then I suffer. But existential suffering is human. It's not an illness. On the contrary, the way to "redemption" often goes through an awful lot of suffering. Without suffering, there would be no need to change anything, no need to develop and grow. Thus, existential suffering actually is more like a blessing than the curse, our culture wants to make it be.

As mentioned, usually people don't get any real help. (Since the "helpers" don't have a clue themselves, how could they help anyone to understand, what they haven't even understood themselves?*) The idea, that existential crises would be brain diseases prevents understanding just as the drugs do, whose prescription and administration only and solely is justifiable when what really is a wake-up call is defined a biological illness of the brain.

The trouble is, that the more your true self has been oppressed, the more you've been asked to identify with and as a false self (who/what others want you to be, but who/what you are not), the deeper the split between who/what you really are and this false ego-identification obviously becomes. The deeper the split becomes, the more you will suffer, and the more you suffer, the louder the wake-up calls will be. Whether you get a label of "OCD", "depression", or "schizophrenia" is not a question of suffering from distinctly different conditions. It's a question of the extent to which someone suffers, and the volume of the wake-up calls, they consequently receive. So-called "psychosis" being the loudest possible wake-up call. And they won't cease coming in, the wake-up calls, before you actually listen to them, and do wake up. This is why the drugs have a chronifying effect on crisis. It will inevitably happen again and again, until the day, you understand. And there is no drug strong enough to silence the unconscious. Drugs can't even target the unconscious. All they do is reducing consciousness. The unconscious is almighty and unassailable. You can't fight it and win. All you can do is turning it from being your master into being a tool of yours, by becoming conscious of it.

* It's actually quite funny, that a lack of ability to interpret things in a symbolic way is listed as a "symptom" of "schizophrenia", while the "experts' " ability to recognize a symbol as a symbol when it's staring them right in the face, equals to zero...