icarus image

icarus image
We are the same as plants, as trees,
as other people, as the rain that falls.
We consist of that which is around us;
we are the same as everything.
- Buddha

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

'imbalance' does not equal 'insane'!

People do not belong in grids and boxes of rootless lonely monocultures. Humans are adaptable creatures, and while a lot of people learn to adapt, some of us can’t handle the modern world no matter how many psych drugs or years of school or behavior modification programs we’ve been put through. Any realistic model of mental health has to begin by accepting that there is no standard model for a mind and that none of us are single units designed for convenience and efficiency. No matter how alienated you are by the world around you, no matter how out of step or depressed and discon­nected you might feel: you are not alone. Your life is supported by the lives of countless other beings, from the microbes in your eyelashes to the men who paved your street. The world is so much more complicated and beautiful than it appears on the surface.


Many of us out here feel the world with thin skin and heavy hearts, who get called 'crazy' because we’re too full of fire and pain, who knows that other worlds exist and aren’t comfortable in this version of reality. We’ve been busting up out of sidewalks and blooming all kind of misfit flowers for as long as people have been walking on this Earth. So many of us have access to secret layers of consciousness — you could think of us like dandelion roots that gather minerals from hidden layers of the soil that other plants don’t reach.

Some of us...if we’re lucky, share them with everyone on the surface – because we feel things stronger than the other people around us. We have visions about how things could be different, why they need to be different, and it’s painful to keep them silent. Sometimes we get called sick and sometimes we get called sacred, but no matter how they name us we are a vital part of making this planet whole.

The time has come to connect our underground roots and tell our buried stories, grow up strong and scatter our visions all over the patches of scarred and damaged soil in a society that is so desperately in need of change.

This change begins with the LANGUAGE we use in our every day lives! Yes, indeed it does. Instead of saying, "I'm down and depressed" try saying, "I feel I am down but I will do my best to be happy today." Try one word a day. Then try two. "I'm not 'bipolar', as they say, I just have an imbalance I have to balance out." Viola! Everyone has imbalances... whatever 'diagnoses' or 'disorders' they have brainwashed you to believe you have, are just imbalances (biological, psychological, social imbalances - holistic body approach). Your job, along with your trusted friend or alternative doctor, would be to pinpoint all your imbalances (in your whole body) and start from there. Because life throws us curve balls all the time! And it's easy to get out of kilter. All we have to do is find the balance and it may take time.

Yes, we do get out of balance when a love leaves us or when a marriage ends. We do get out of balance when we lose our loved ones or a job we've had for over 20 years! This is life! This is not a 'disorder'. This is the tough shit that happens... and for some sensitive souls it's too much to handle. We need time to grieve. Perhaps, we need a lifestyle change. We need to re-balance ourselves and take another look at what is really going on in this insane world... because after all, we are the same beings that we were born to be... it is the world around us that is changing...and getting more insane each day.

Thursday, April 8, 2010

do you see my reality doc? or just your's?

This article reminds me of the time I worked at a county mental health facility. I guess I had the gift in me because I always felt a kindred spirit connecting me with my patients; and so, I always engaged in their reality, no matter what they saw or heard. In my reality, I couldn’t see or hear what they were seeing or hearing, but my open-mind never doubted that they could be 100% accurate with their senses, as I was with mine. And so it was…I made my patients my friends by engaging in their realities…I bought cars through my dealer Oscar, had lunch in the meadow with Frieda, and saw the darkness of suicide through Sasha’s eyes. Their voices called out to me and through their eyes I saw their souls.


I wonder if therapists take the time to see their patients’ souls? After all, why are they called psychotherapists (psyche = soul, therapist)?? Do psychiatrists take the time?…those who proclaim they treat the souls…or do they just medicate the symptoms and never hear the patient talk?


Making Peace with Auditory Hallucinations
By Garry Cooper, from www.PsychotherapyNetworker.org March/April 2010

Recent trends in therapy, especially those emphasizing mindfulness, encourage clients to turn their attention toward, and accept, emotions or "parts" of themselves that may initially seem frightening. Although that approach isn't new—Gestalt therapy advocated this years ago—the prevailing view has been that encouraging psychotic people to acknowledge different aspects of them as real encourages splitting and further psychosis. Now a study by a team of British psychologists led by Jasmine Chin of the University of Surrey, reported in the March 2009 Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, suggests that instead of targeting schizophrenics' auditory hallucinations as symptoms to be eliminated, therapists should consider helping them develop a relationship with their voices.

It's a counterintuitive and controversial idea. Not only might this approach potentially support the psychotic symptom, but even Chin's study finds that most people who hear voices don't want to develop a further relationship with them. But want it or not, the study points out, people with auditory hallucinations already have a relationship with their voices, usually a difficult one, and they expend much time and energy trying to control them.

The study asked 10 psychotic people suffering considerable distress with their voices how they understood the relationship. Most personified their voices, assigning gender or names. (This urge was so strong that the few who didn't personify them fought the urge to do so). They usually experienced themselves as engaged in a struggle for power and control. "The voices magnify whatever it is I'm concerned about, or they'll comment on something I'm concerned about, which . . . often makes me more stressed than I was," one patient reported. But some voices served a potentially healthy function, reminding people they'd made good decisions in the past, or encouraging them to practice their social skills with the voices so they could go out into the world.

Along with these tangential supports for the notion of helping people with schizophrenia come into better relationships with their voices, Chin points out another reason. A study in the November 2004 Psychological Medicine, led by British psychologist Max Birchwood, found that people's relationships with their inner voices mirrored their social relationships with the external world, often reflecting their sense of being powerless and controlled by others. Chin speculates that when therapists, along with everyone else in schizophrenics' world, try to drive a wedge between them and their inner voices, it may actually reinforce this internalization of social stigma.

Richard Schwartz, the originator of Internal Family Systems Therapy, who's worked with nonpsychotic clients who hear voices, thinks there may be something to Chin's idea. "Once they realize that I'm neither afraid of nor pathologizing their voices," he says, "most clients are better able to relate to them from a less fearful and more curious, confident, and even compassionate place."

Saturday, April 3, 2010

our Human Right!

In reading Gianna's blog about her being frustrated, disappointed and angered by the left’s neglect of the human rights of those who have been psychiatrized, I've come to realize that I'm not alone!!

As Gianna, I also "tend not to emphasize my politics outside the political issues surrounding mental health because regardless of our political views outside of this issue, many of us come together here on this particular issue of human rights abuse and it would only divide us to concentrate on other political issues."  However, like her, I also cannot remain silent today about what seems like a major form of unconscious hypocrisy on the part of liberals and feminists who in general claim to be concerned about the human rights of all individuals but don't recognize that patients are the victims of torture and blatant disregard by society of their human and civil rights when it come to psychiatry.


Human rights belong to all of us. The right to be treated like a human being is our birthright and it does not matter if we call ourselves liberal, conservative, hindi, or bisexual. We should all have the right to say “no!” to coercive and forced “treatments” of any kinds. We also have the right to be told the truth by the media and other information outlets, including our doctors, and that is that recovery rates among those left unmedicated and supported in other ways are HIGHER than for people who are given drugs, especially neuroleptics (antipsychotics.) The truth also is that these drugs are horrible neuro-toxins that cause serious, sometimes life-threatening, metabolic issues, epilepsy, cardiac arrest, stroke, homicidal and suicidal ideation and action, massive weight gain, sexual dysfunction and the killing of our spirits among many other things. They also often cause additional psychiatric symptoms that then get blamed on the “underlying” psychiatric disorder rather than the drug.

For some of the facts surrounding these issues, listen to Robert Whitaker on Madness Radio whose next book looks at this reality—people given psych meds on the whole deteriorate over time–they do not improve AND those who are given support in other ways without long-term use of psychotropics do most often, make complete recoveries. His first book on the topic if you want a history of the dehumanization that is psychiatry: Mad In America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine, and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill.

Dr. Loren Mosher’s work at Soteria is where we can bare witness to the astronomically high rates of recovery among the “seriously mentally ill,” when they are treated as the traumatized human beings that they are rather than as a biological brain disorder that relegates them to being sub-human. For more of an in depth study of Soteria, read the book.