Category: advocacy

Posted in advocacy, Community, Emotions, Peer Support, psychology, science, Uncategorized, Voices, writing

Why I left Social Media Mental Health Advocacy

Posted on by alidware

I got tired of living for my unwellness. It’s as simple as that.

One of the most rampant messages in mental health advocacy among peers is “I am not my illness,” which also requires you to view yourself as ill, which I never have, even with such “damning” diagnoses like Schizoaffective and PTSD. The thing is, if you are not your illness, why is it the focus of your day 24/7? Why are you constantly evaluating your symptoms to the point where simple, normal, everyday reactions are suddenly a product of your “illness” and you post each bad moment (with a sprinkle of good)? Don’t get me wrong, I get that the whole point is to erase stigma, especially when a diagnosis is on the schizophrenia spectrum. We’re seen as dangerous or unpredictable or unfit for society, and to come out and share your story theoretically shows people that we do not fit those labels. You know what else shows that?

Literally living your life.

Literally.

I hate that word literally, but this time I actually mean LITERALLY.

I’ve held a job for the last five years, I go to college, I love reading, art, writing, making music, writing songs, shopping, traveling, driving, going out for a drink once in a while. I enjoy people for the most part, until I’ve had enough of them. Best Buy and other tech stores are my safe haven. I would like to work in a lab one day or maybe as an editor or maybe both. The last thing on my mind is schizoaffective, and not because I don’t deal with bizarre thoughts or anxieties or delusions or voices or voice-thoughts or visual interruptions, but because the more I focus on it, the worse it gets.

If some people want to focus their life around their symptoms, that’s great. For me, I’d rather show neurotypical people that I can live just as normal and full of a life as they can. That discounts the myths of dangerousness and unpredictability more than me selling my face on instagram or Facebook with a caption of “we are not ‘this, this, this or this’.”

Don’t mistake this for hate. I know many people who do just that on Instagram. And you know what? We NEED some of that. We need some people constantly talking about it to keep it in people’s faces. The thing is, I’m just not fit for it. I want to live happily and healthily and focusing on psychosis doesn’t help me do that.

What I will never give up is sharing pertinent information on mental health and discussing the ramifications of the unending fraud of psychological and pharmaceutical research. For example, a ramification of that is everyone actually believing in the poorly supported hypothesis of chemical imbalance. It’s why I’m going to school.

I will also always counter people’s stigma where I find it. I will always promote peer services and maybe one day design research around them. So I’m not giving up being apart of the mental health community. I’m giving up what I thought I was supposed to do: share my story constantly, talk about my symptoms constantly, wrap my whole entire life around my experiences, constantly.

That shit is boring, I’ve realized, and stressful.

I feel this is the last time I will mention my diagnoses on this blog for the sake of my own health. I appreciate people who do share their story and who find solace in it. I, too, found solace in sharing my story when the psychosis hit heavy and I was still in denial and confused and suddenly my entire life was a lie. I needed people to relate to and I had so much to figure out about myself. I’ve gone past that point now. Now it’s time to actually live.

Thanks for reading, guys. I was absent to go to my second viewing/funeral in the last five months, and just needed a few days to let the existentialism quiet down.

Don’t forget to hit that follow button and join me over on instagram @alilivesagain or on twitter @thephilopsychotic.

Posted in advocacy, Community, Late Night Thoughts, Peer Support

Your Role In The mental Health System

Posted on by alidware

This is to all my fellow psychology majors, graduates, and future students. What do you believe your role in the industry is?

To all my fellow mental health consumers, what do you believe your role is?

These are the two simple questions I have. I’ll share mine, and I ask for you to share yours in the comments below!

I am both a major and a mental health consumer, but both roles have shifted dramatically. I thought my role as a worker was to help people. I thought my role as a mental health consumer didn’t exist; I knew I struggled with anxiety, but I believed it was just another hurdle to get over, and I’d gotten over many hurdles before.

I learned my role in the industry as a worker wasn’t to help people, and that people are mostly capable of helping themselves. My role was one of support and guidance so that they may discover what they are capable of. My role has also shifted recently in this aspect. My schooling has shifted from the goal of counseling psychology to the goal of research and clinical education. I know I want to be one to bring science and empirical data to the forefront of the industry. All this glorious information is sitting there wasted because clinicians don’t take the time to read it, and because the system is built in such a way that paying for training and education is ridiculously expensive for clinicians. Research is becoming more biased and doctored and that’s obviously a problem too. I want peer support integrated. I want evidence-based treatment properly understood.

My role in the industry as a consumer has changed as well. It’s bounced back and forth between dependent and utterly independent. It’s bounced between needing professionals and shunning professionals. It’s bounced between feeling hopeless and feeling as if I’m finally healing. I also have learned that my role includes reaching out to others, accepting their help, while also letting others reach out to me.

I look forward to reading your thoughts below.

Or, catch up with me on:

Instagram: @written_in_the_photo

Twitter: @philopsychotic

If you liked this post, please share and follow The Philosophical Psychotic. I appreciated every reader and commentator. You give me more reason to encourage critical thinking about mental health.

Posted in advocacy, Late Night Thoughts, psychology

Learned Helplessness In The Mental Health System

Posted on by alidware

This is a term you may be familiar with if you work in mental health. It’s often used to describe patients who have spent significant time juggling between facilities, programs, and hospitals and as a result struggle with meeting their own basic needs.

It’s no secret that decent mental health care in the United States comes with a high price tag. Community-based programs that are essential for helping shed feelings of isolation and learning social skills (both of which can be necessary for us mental health consumers) are often tagged for those with the thousands of dollars to pay for it. As someone who was working full-time and provided with decent health insurance, I was offered a spot at a program like this free of charge. Unfortunately, the company I work for is switching insurances, and I’m not positive I can work full-time right now anyway.

It’s taken a lot to find that one little place. Through consistent panic attacks, paranoia, nights of hallucinations, I finally got in contact with a hospital who patched me through to a social worker. The social worker took a week to get back to me, just to tell me she didn’t work for that department anymore. She patched me through to a social worker in a different state who found me a program in less than thirty minutes.

Since none of that panned out, since I can’t find any psychiatrists near me and can’t afford holistic care, since I’m not sick enough to be in a hospital but not well enough to be by myself, I’ve resorted to daily breakdowns. My hope for healing waned. My therapist said I was experiencing “learned helplessness.” Let me explain why I’m not and why, if you are ever told this, you should think about it just as deeply.

Learned Helplessness Comes From:

Constant struggle with no perceivable escape.

People with learned helplessness have often accepted that they are unable to care for themselves–they believe they cannot control their outcome. They have been classically conditioned to believe they are inept.

The example my therapist gave me to explain the concept of learned helplessness was that of the experiment by psychologist Martin Seligman. You may know him as a positive psychology backer, and an avid studier of learned helplessness. Seligman and colleagues administered shocks to dogs strapped in a harness in a cage. In this case, the cage represented a trap and the shocks an unavoidable outcome. When the cages were opened, the dogs refused to leave the cage even when escape was made possible. The hypothesis here is that the dogs learned to expect pain and to expect no escape.

If learned helplessness is a result of being trapped, beat down, and losing sight of escape, then the mental health system has been systematically abusing people under the guise of treatment for ages.

When are we going to stop blaming the people who experience mental illness, who are constantly being beat down, held back, vilified, rejected, for feeling hopeless? Why do professionals immediately see fault in the person (just keep trying!) instead of fault in the system of support?

Note: This isn’t to say we should rely on others to pick us up–we’ve got to also work on believing in ourselves and coping properly with our experiences. It’s just a lot easier and healthier to do that with the proper guidance and support. No one can do everything by themselves all the time.

A Possible Reason

In social psychology, there is the concept of external and internal perspectives. There is a term for this I’m blanking on. Those with external perspectives often attribute outcomes to the environment around them, things out of their control, and often come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Those with internal perspectives often attribute outcomes to their attributions, things like their personal drive and work ethic and come from higher socio-economic backgrounds. As you can imagine, there are advantages and disadvantages to both perspectives.

I know people on both ends. I know people who consider themselves successful and attribute that to their constant strive for “something greater”, to their hard work, to their positive thinking, without acknowledging the two-parent home they come from with successful, hardworking role models, without acknowledging the support they had in following their dreams or attending college, without acknowledging the financial opportunities they were provided. I know people who don’t consider themselves successful and attribute that to their traumas, a broken economic/social system, and lack of opportunity without acknowledging their effort has waned.

One advantage to having an internal perspective is that when hardship arises, you are more likely to take proper measures to cope. You are more likely to seek support and utilize the support. The disadvantage is you see others as not trying “hard enough.” You also are less likely to support others in coming up because if you did it “by yourself”, they should be able to as well. You are less likely to take part in the community and less likely to advocate for community-based reform. You may be one of those people who see homeless individuals as useless bums.

One advantage of having an external perspective is that you see the structure of the world around you. You acknowledge (and experience) the pain of a system designed for failure. The disadvantage is depression. The disadvantage is that you give in to what you believe is your fate and struggle in seeing the change that could be made. You are more likely to relate to others who have struggled, and you’re more likely to be involved in helping others because you know what it’s like to feel like you have no one and nothing.

Which perspective do you think most (definitely not all) psychological professionals come from?

Cognitive Dissonance

Psychological professionals are trained to see the system as something there to support and guide their clients. They also go into the profession with the aim of supporting and guiding their clients. If it feels like that goal isn’t being accomplished, it may challenge their self-concept something fierce. This leads to cognitive dissonance: the imbalance between what someone consciously believes about themselves (including their attitudes toward different things) versus how they behave.

This is where I believe professionals need to be a little softer on themselves. Acknowledge that money, attitude, trauma, self-discipline, and outside support are just a few of the things that determine someone’s success in their mental wellness. Sometimes people can’t find help, and when they can’t find help, when they are sad about that, when they are feeling hopeless and defeated and angry, those feelings are valid. The system is often not our friend and we have a right to be angry about that–because no matter how hard we try, we can’t fix that by ourselves.

No matter how much I exercise, no matter how healthy I eat, no matter if I take meds or don’t, no matter how much I meditate, no matter how much I breathe during my panic attacks, no matter how many times I tell myself the pentagram on my ceiling isn’t real, no matter what I do to cope, I will not have thirty thousand dollars a month for personalized, integrated, holistic, community based, science based treatment.

What would give me thirty thousand dollars to blow? A really, really good job. What would give me that kind of job? Mental stability. What would help me achieve mental stability? A lot of support. How do I get a lot of support? Thirty thousand dollars.

Now, there are alternatives, and the system has set this up so that in order to receive these services, you must never aim higher than them.

County services, for example, are often provided to those below a certain income limit–this includes those on disability. If someone is stable enough to get a part-time job, and that job pays ten dollars over the state insurance income limit or disability income limit, that person risks losing the services which have been most helpful to them. No one wants to risk that.

And so you have an escape route, you see, much like the dogs. You can be well, work as many hours as you can and lose your integrated services. But much like the dogs, that escape doesn’t feel safe, not after having been shocked for so long. Inside the cage, at least you know what to expect. In a twisted reality such as this, the cage actually feels safer.

There are too many factors that go into being mentally well for this one-size-fits-all system to be as effective as it purports.

Agree or disagree? Leave it in the comments below, or join the discussion here:

Instagram: @written_in_the_photo

Twitter: @philopsychotic

If you liked this post, please share and follow The Philosophical Psychotic. I appreciate every reader and commentator. You give me more reason to encourage critical thinking about mental health.

Posted in advocacy, Community, psychology, science

Black Mental Health in America

Posted on by alidware

ATTENTION:

If you are black in America right now, you’re probably feeling pretty unsafe, especially if you’re in the south. If you are black in America right now with Schizophrenia, you’re probably feeling pretty unsafe, especially if you don’t have a lot of support. Chances are you don’t have a lot of support.

We know racism has been around. This ain’t nothing new to us. Some places you see it more than others. For example, the South tends to be a prime example of blatant, flamboyant displays of hatred. Here in California, in Santa Cruz, things are more subtle. You’ll have the skinhead clerk ring up your groceries, toss them aside, not ask you if you want a bag, never look you in the eyes, whereas he’ll greet the white woman in front of you and the white man behind you with a pearly smile.

(He works at The Dollar Store on Portola, if you’re reading this and from Santa Cruz. At least, he was. I haven’t seen him in a while.)

If you are biracial or light skinned, you might experience a lesser racism here in Santa Cruz if you keep quiet. If they assume you’re hispanic, you won’t be treated as equal but you’ll be offered more opportunities than your black friends, especially in school. If they are confused of who you are, if they see your brown skin, your curly hair, but don’t hear a thick accent industries have coined as “black”, they will treat you as an unknown. An unknown is just as dangerous. I’ve had four cop cars (a total of eight cops) called on me for a license plate light that wasn’t out. They kept my boyfriend and I sitting in the car for a total of thirty minutes while they ran my license, my insurance, huddled in a group behind my car, flooded us with white light from two SUVs. Had I let my anger or fear show, the night may have ended very differently.

Feeling hunted is a prime experience of paranoia. I think the reason this has not exacerbated my paranoia is because there is valid reason to fear existence right now.

It’s different now. The racists are coming out to play.

A local black woman (catch her page: @bellagmo on IG), someone who has been integral in bringing the community together during this time, was chased down the street on Fourth of July by a white person screaming “I”ll be racist if I want, black bitch!”. She continued her rant, saying she was downtown every day, hunting her–people like her. Black women, men, people. She made active, verbal threats caught on camera, things like, “I will fuck you up!” The police gave her a stern finger wag. A rope tied as a noose was seen hanging on a sign up by our University campus: UCSC.

There is so much hate against us in this county, in the world. And where do we get to go to express this pain?

Our white therapist?

Our white psychiatrist?

Our white Primary Care?

The nearest black therapist accepting patients is over 4 hours away.

There is an inherent feeling of being bonded with people of the same ethnicity. This does not mean other ethnicities can’t be helpful, supporting, or amazingly kind. It just means it’s not the same. My white therapist isn’t going to understand when I say watching people with my skin color and darker, people with my culture, people who talk the same as me, eat the same foods as me, like the same music, the same stories, have the same BLOODLINE as me, getting slaughtered on film makes me feel hunted. They won’t understand when I say it brings up a sadness generations deep. They won’t understand when I say I just want to stay inside, and not just because of COVID. They won’t understand when I say I feel like I’m doing all I can to be involved with my community but that I still don’t feel like it’s enough. They won’t understand when I talk about how invisible I felt growing up in a school system that labeled me hispanic and refused to acknowledge my own culture, who refused to teach the reality of my ancestors. They won’t understand the damage done by people who told me I wasn’t black, that I was Oreo, without even knowing my history.

You know what they’ll tell me?

Maybe it’s time to stay away from the news.

Because they don’t understand that when one of us gets shot, hanged, threatened, I will still know. The news doesn’t need to tell me. I feel it in my heart.

If you think this is just another person whining about inequality, you damn right.

I’m not whining, I’m putting the truth in your face.

I grew up unable to talk, terrified to do so, Selectively Mute. My voice was never encouraged and so I never developed one. And that, my friends, is the definition of genocide: to silence a people until their screams are just as invisible as their being. They’ve done it to Native Americans and indigenous people across the globe. They’ve taken their names, their language, tried to warp their culture, shame them as alcoholics, drug addicts, shove them in the corner of the classroom and forget about them after the bell rings.

I’m tired of walking around with this fucking weight on my chest. It feels like I can’t breathe, and it’s not because of COVID. It’s anxiety. It’s all this anger and confusion and sadness that I’m carrying with my ancestors who marched from their native area of what is now called Tennessee down to the western part of what is now called Mississippi. It’s all this anger and confusion and sadness that I’m carrying with my ancestors who were tossed, chained, onto a boat by pale men who didn’t speak their language, who didn’t respect our pleads for our children, for our lives, for our existence as a culture.

And now you expect me to respect yours?

My mother’s family is Polish. They fled Poland to escape World War 2.

No matter what ancestral part of me you rip into, I’ve been running, fighting, fearful, crying. My first instinct, whenever confronted with a problem, even the smallest thing, is to escape, hide, retreat, survive. A white therapist interprets this as chemical imbalance. Do you see the problem here?

I have been carrying this anger and fear since I can remember forming memories. It’s not just coming out because the racists are. It’s always been here and I’ve never talked about it because I’m supposed to keep my composure. I’m supposed to “let the past be the past.” I’m suppose to “just live in the now.” It’s not something therapists bring up because they have no idea it exists. Now I have voices in my head telling me to kill myself, and I attempted it in 2018. I also have voices that protect me, that feel with me, that make me laugh. I have voices I consider my ancestors and that, to me, isn’t a disorder.

I have anxiety that alerts me when I need to run, which is all the time. I’m constantly running. I’m constantly breathing hard. Just as all my brothers and sisters today, I’m having to carry 400 years of agony.

I remember growing up learning how we are apart of the animals, the Earth, the plants, the air, the sun, way before I learned the physics and math that say the same. I remember learning about both The Christian God and The Creator. I grew up with the last name Dauterive, the name of a man I am not biologically related to; my father’s biological father’s last name is Ware. My family is scattered. My grandmother grew up in Jackson, Mississippi. My father grew up in Sacramento. He moved to Santa Cruz, and we didn’t stay in contact with his family very much. I don’t know much about them other than bits of native history, food recipes, and cultural things my dad passed down. His dad grew up in Louisiana. I will never know what boat his ancestors came off of. I will never know what my name really is.

Dauterive is the last name of four different slave owners in Louisiana.

Who knows what Ware is attached to.

If you are black and have struggled with psychosis, anxiety, depression, bipolar, or any other label, understand that the medications you take (I have taken them in the past as well) are tested on white people for less than four months. If you’ve struggled finding one that works well with your body, or one that has strange side effects no one else seems to get, this may be a reason why. Understand that if you are a black woman, most of the med trials are done with white, middle-aged men. The trainings therapists receive are not culturally aware, they are based on white culture. Understand that it is up to you and I to break down the stigma in our own family and help our older parents understand that our mental health is not just some “defect” or “disorder” or “chemical imbalance”, it’s also the result of our genes being bombarded with environmental, traumatic triggers for 400 years.

This trauma is in our nervous system. We aren’t getting anxious for no reason. There is a reason: never having been safe. Never having been free. Being labeled dangerous, disgusting, dirty, less than human.

To my black, native, and biracial brothers and sisters: we no longer need to keep it in. We no longer need to keep our composure. We have a right to be angry. We have a right to demand change. We have a right to rest when we need to. We have a right to make racists uncomfortable.

We have a right to use our voice.

It’s taken me 25 years to learn this, and I’m not ashamed. I’m angry.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the kind of passion that can come from an angry person. But let me tell you. It’s somethin.

Catch me on Instagram: @written_in_the_photo

Catch me on Twitter: @philopsychotic

If you liked this post, please follow ThePhilosophicalPsychotic and share. I appreciate every reader and commentator. You give me more reason to talk about the things others won’t.

Posted in advocacy, Community, Peer Support

Mental Health Updates During The Apocalypse

Posted on by alidware

Good morning friends. I thought I would give another round of updates, since I’ve been gone for a while again, sorting through my mental health, advocating, and networking. Here is what’s going on, and how you may be able to get involved.

Firstly, I treated myself to a new laptop so that writing blog posts is smoother, school work is more efficient, and I can keep up with the times and the demands of technology.

Secondly, I wanted to voluntarily commit myself so bad, but Coronavirus stopped me. I think what makes staying busy so difficult is that my brain is always running, always talking, always thinking, and so when I have other tasks that need finishing or starting, they feel like a lot more of a burden than they are. So I’ve been struggling with feeling relaxed, I’ve been struggling with what I want to do as a career, and I’ve been exhausted just talking for people for ten minutes. My voices haven’t been bad, which I am both surprised and grateful for. My depression hasn’t come back, but I notice a deep sadness laying dormant in the back of my head.

Thirdly, as I started speaking up more on my Instagram, I’ve met a lot of great people scattered across the internet, from therapists to peers. I’ve gotten involved as an Advocacy member on the network of Students With Psychosis. I will pop a link to them below. Whether you are a student or taking a break, you can be involved too. They have virtual meetings each day of the week, including peer support groups. So if you’ve been isolating because of COVID or you’re having a tough time, they could be a great resource. You can also apply to be apart of their advocacy network or as an intern.

I’ve been featured on a couple mental health pages since I last posted as well. I’ve spoken with NPR (although not sure if my direct voice will be picked yet) and I’ve been participating in local support for the civil rights movement going on and strong right now.

My Instagram account got hacked. All of my messages with people I’ve networked with, particularly surrounding Black Lives Matter topics and African-American mental health topics, were deleted and also muted. Fake links were sent out through my message system, fishing for people to click so their account could also be hacked. I felt invaded, disgusted, and targeted. As someone who consistently struggles with feeling this way, it only intensifies when it actually starts happening. My account is secured now, as well as the rest of my phone. Word is there is a group of possibly white nationalists targeting social justice accounts dealing with Black Lives Matter, protests, and positive change. The organizer of the local protest on Juneteenth was also hacked.

I’ve been juggling a lot of outside stress and working full time for the first time in my life. There’s been so many virtual meetings and trainings that I’m sure I don’t ever want to hear the word “zoom” or “teams” again.

I want to bring more content to this blog again. We had a great thing going during my Mental Health Month series posts. I’d like to talk more about my experience and interpretation of voices and psychosis. I’d like to talk more about the philosophy of the mental health system and why it must also be disbanded and rebooted much like the police force in the United States right now. We have a lot to discuss everyone.

So, that will be the plan for these next upcoming days and weeks: talk more about psychosis and the mental health system, and less about my whiny updates on my convoluted life.

If you’d like to check out Students with Psychosis, you can click here. The group is great and the peer support is REAL!

I’ll provide links to other mental health social media groups, pages, and helpful avenues after some of my posts for those looking to get involved, find support, or just want to be more knowledgable.

If you want to connect with me or inquire about sharing your own story/mental health network here, reach me on:

Instagram: @written_in_the_photo

Twitter: @philopsychotic

If you enjoyed this post, please share, like, and follow ThePhilosophicalPsychotic. I appreciate all of my readers and commentators. You all give me more reason to encourage critical thinking about Mental Health.

Posted in advocacy, Community

A Mental Health Resource for African-Americans

Posted on by alidware

I apologize to those of you who were steadily following my mental health month series. It ended abruptly as a result of the necessary civil unrest spanning the 50 states and select countries worldwide. I have been participating in protests, going to work, and trying to figure out how to take care of my mental health in all of this.

What I’ve learned in this personal process is that much of my childhood silence, my fear of people, my feeling of being small, unimportant, invisible, unwanted, does not only stem from a childhood living with a parent prone to aggressive outbursts while drunk or on drugs, but also from growing up mixed race, African-American, and not really understanding what that means.

I live in a predominantly white and Hispanic town. In all of my years of school (from pre-school into this current year of college–i’m 24) I have had two African-American mixed classmates. I have had no dark-skinned classmates.

I have felt alone my entire life. My father, who is dark, grew up with many siblings and in a predominately black neighborhood. He was subject to a lot of trauma, struggled in his relationship with his own alcoholic father, and in his early adulthood was stabbed six times and jailed for a year on a robbery charge that was later proven to be a false claim; he almost spent his life in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. This is real. I cannot make this stuff up, and it’s happening everywhere. I’m thankful police have never shot him or kneed on his neck.

His trauma becomes mine. His mother’s trauma became his and mine. Her mother’s picking of cotton trauma became her daughter’s trauma, my father’s trauma, and my trauma. HER mother’s mother’s mother’s trauma of being forced down the Trail of Tears became all of our trauma. We are African-American and Native American. This trauma spans over 400 years.

What I notice when I talk to Caucasian people about this is that they logically understand the progression of history and genuinely want to abolish a system that is naturally oppressive against people of color. But they don’t have the same emotional connection. They saw the pain in George Floyd’s eyes in the video, are outraged about the life visibly leaving his body on camera. Their spirits ache at this tragedy. Ours do too, but differently. Together, as a collective, we are feeling each other’s pain. We grieve as if this is a death of a loved one, not just another stranger who deserved to live. This man was family. Breonna Taylor was family. Ahmaud Arbery was family. All of the others in the news were family.

This is a deep-seeded spiritual connection that goes back to the tribes of Africa, that includes those of us with Native history, and when that spirit is in pain, we know. Many of us are still up night spontaneously crying, fatigued, tired, scared, hurting, and for people in a similar environmental situation as me–well, we don’t have anyone to talk to.

On my linked-in this morning, an article shared by the American Psychological Association reminded me that my mental health must be looked at from a particular perspective. So I wanted to share it with all of you in hopes someone may find it useful for themselves, or useful for a friend.

This article was posted on Women’s Health, but this is suitable for all genders of color. The author is a person of color who has had a similar experience to me: restless nights, no sleep, anxious mornings, tense muscles, consistent social media usage, and fear of death. They suggest a few points I’ll summarize below:

  1. Get in contact with therapists who are culturally aware and trained in racial trauma. They put a link to the website Therapy for Black Girls. I checked it out. They have a search bar you can use to find ethnic therapists near you. Every therapist I’ve ever had (6) have been white and only one even touched on generational trauma and how that has perpetuated my feeling silenced. They list some social media pages of black therapists, like @askdrjess, @dr.thema, and @dr.nataliejones, all on Instagram.
  2. They suggest practicing meditation to help maintain a lower level of excitement in your nervous system. They suggest meditating on powerful female ancestors in history. I don’t know how helpful meditating on thoughts of any one person will be, but I do know there are select times in my life where meditation has helped me feel all of my feelings, sit with them, and really absorb their raw juices. Remember, you are healing generations, not just yourself. I’m sorry we are burdened with this. But our ancestors are with us, and if we couldn’t handle it, we wouldn’t be alive right now.
  3. Bring some joy into your life. It’s important to balance reform/social justice work with the rest of your life. Smiles keep us alive. Remember that you’re allowed to be happy. You’re allowed to laugh during this time of pain. It’s a way to heal yourself, too.
  4. Hug people, except that COVID is still rampant so maybe don’t?
  5. Space out time for relaxation and time for working on advocacy. I’ve struggled with this and beat myself up today when my body was so fatigued that I passed out on the couch instead of getting up to go to my forth protest. I want to be involved, I want to be an instrument for change too. I want to make an impact, share my story, have my voice heard, and hopefully inspire others to do the same. But I can’t do everything all the time. I still work four days a week at an emotionally demanding job. Be patient and kind to yourself.
  6. Exercise! I went for a walk with some friends today. It helped.

We don’t often talk about mental health in black families. Many ethnic families don’t. Some cultures across the world still see it as internal weakness. This is a harmful mindset. We cannot heal as a people if we do not address raw feelings. If we do not share with our kids our pain, our knowledge, our past, our present.

Please, if you are a person of color, especially in America at this time, and you are struggling internally with what is going on, you are angry, you are sad, scared, hurt, bleeding, talk to someone. Email me. have a discussion with family, with friends, participate where you can. Educate where you can. We are carrying so much pain on our backs.

So much pain.

If no one’s told you yet: you are allowed to express that.

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Posted in advocacy, Community, Emotions, Freedom, Late Night Thoughts, Peer Support, psychology

Civil Rights Movement 2020

Posted on by alidware

NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE.

This is the slogan circulating social media as I speak.

Los Angeles, San Jose, Oakland, NYC,Atlanta, Minneapolis, Memphis, Louisville. The list continues.

I posted yesterday about the importance of African American mental health support in a time when we are watching ourselves get killed across social media, in a time that is eerily similar to the civil rights movement of 2020–except that now we have video.

Now we have PROOF.

We can watch the brutality, watch the racism, watch the hatred.

We can see the anger, the violence, the threats that result from hundreds of years of oppressive social states.

I think popular opinion is that protesting is okay but looting is overkill. I refuse to take a stance on this because the level of internal anguish that comes from generational trauma cannot be overlooked because a Target burned down.

I do not wish harm on anyone, be it protester, officer, or store clerk. We must keep our focus. We MUST remember the message and focus less on the damage we can cause. Every human can cause destruction. It takes someone truly enlightened to channel that hurt and anger into a passionate, effective message.

I have been crying for hours.

A 19 year old man was killed by officers in a San Jose protest. I live 45 minutes from San Jose. Our protests will be happening this weekend.

I have been crying for hours.

I wonder what George Floyd sees, if he can watch us from the other realm. I don’t know much about him other than community members describing him as a kind, generous man. Was his death what we needed? Is this what transitions our country into a time of healing? We thought change would come with Trump and it indeed has: it’s brought disorganization, divide, and racism to the forefront of our consciousness. This is the 2020 vision we all thought it would be.

I have been crying for hours.

There are videos of eight year old african-american children crying for equality in a room full of people, speaking to adults in charge.

I have been crying for hours.

I don’t think the feelings can be properly explained. I have been feeling invaded and attacked, my paranoia surfacing strong. I am feeling that Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram have been hacking my cell phone because of the message I am spreading. I am trending in social media on Instagram for videos I have found online of necessary violence against protesters who AREN’T looting.

There is an undeniable connection between all of us African-american’s right now. It seems we are always united in pain.

That’s painful.

When this ends, will we go back to killing each other in the name of “honor” or “reputation” in the streets? When this ends, will our style, culture, and way of being in the world be imitated and copied still by musicians, influences, and celebrities who have been SILENT in the face of this revolution? When this ends, will we encourage our kids to be more involved in politics? When this ends, will we still have to identify ourselves as black Americans? Or will we be called simply “Americans?”

When this ends, will we still be united?

What can we do to lift each other up after this? We can’t just destroy buildings and black-owned businesses.

We are always united in pain. How can we maintain our unification in revelation?

I am 24 years old, my birthday in 2 weeks. My father is 61 years old, and was just a kid during the 1960’s civil rights movement. He has been arrested illegally for a robbery he didn’t commit and spent a year in jail until they found out they were wrong. He’s spent his life fighting racist citizens and cops and community to the point that he sleeps with a hunting knife near and is always worried about getting into a fight or someone bursting in our door.

It’s my turn now to experience a racial revolution, to participate, and to find my identity. I am a light-skinned African-American who has been profiled by police, given unjustified tickets, had back-up and four cops called on her while she was simply sitting in the car, hands very visible on the steering wheel. I did not breathe. I grew up in a school with maybe 4 black students, and went on to a college that catered only to Hispanic students (for the record this wasn’t a problem, many Hispanic students need the help, but so do the black students who are systematically underprivileged compared to even Hispanic students).

My chest is tight. I can’t imagine living in the 50s, the 20s, the 1800s.

I’m mixed race; I would have been a product of rape and an eventual sexual object used for humiliation and, in my adulthood, a symbol of rape.

I can’t imagine living in the United States in any other time than this one.

I’d be dead.

Instagram: @written_in_the_photo

Twitter: @philopsychotic

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Posted in advocacy, Emotions, Freedom, Late Night Thoughts, Peer Support, psychology, Supporting Friends/Family, Uncategorized

Mental Health And African-American LIves

Posted on by alidware

There was not a Mental Health Month post on Thursday for Somatic Disorders as I anticipated, not because I ran out of time but because my mind has been engrossed in other disturbing realities and going-ons in America. I will do a post on Somatic Disorders soon. But firstly, we need to discuss something.

For all the mental health websites and advocate pages on Instagram who are American-run and have not mentioned ONE DAMN THING about the riots in Louisville, Kentucky and Minneapolis, Minnesota right now, you should be ashamed of yourselves. ASHAMED.

How dare you claim to be an advocate of mental health and not bring to light the racial issues that are not only causing MORE trauma for today’s generation of colored folks, but is fueled also by the generational trauma of our ancestors.

I am a mixed race individual; my father is African American and my mother is Caucasian. I am light skinned, often mistaken for Mexican, and my mental health and physical health has been impacted by this. Doctors are less attentive. They don’t listen properly. They accuse me of drug use in the middle of my panic attacks.

For African American people in America, there is a lot of grief. There is a lot of trauma, a lot of loss, a lot of pain. We feel unsafe, unheard, tossed aside. That births anger, rage, and perpetuates violence. With the recent murders of George Floyd and Ahmaud Abery and Breonna Taylor (George and Breonna murdered by police; George was already on the ground with three cops on top of him and Breonna was IN HER HOUSE), all of these feelings and this connection we have to each other is growing stronger. Violence is happening because of the angst of hundreds of years of BULLSHIT.

So the fact that so many pages are claiming to talk about Mental Health and are avoiding this issue for political reasons I suspect makes me sick to my stomach. Until this is addressed in all facets, nothing will change. As social media has been circulating: No Justice, No Peace.

Not only does blatantly ignoring this subject aide in the problem rather than the solution, it also sends the message that those of us in the american mental health system who are dark don’t matter as much. We don’t need to talk about this collective pain we feel right now because your page can’t afford arguments in the comments.

I say affectionately, FUCK YOU.

Get off your fucking high horse.

Remember when I said I have made very frank posts on my previous blog? This is one of them.

Get off your fucking high horse and recognize that the deaths of these people, the murders of these people, affect African-American people across this nation. My anxiety, my grief, my voices, my paranoia have all doubled because of what I see happening to the people who are part of my ancestral family. I feel the same for the Native Americans who are hit the hardest with COVID-19 and receiving absolutely no help, except a box of body bags rather than PPE. Part of my family is Native to North America and their suffering has only added to my grief.

This IS a mental health topic. Racism IS a mental health topic. Not because racism is a disorder, but because how it effects people dictates their mental states. To advocate at this time for mental health without reminding followers and subscribers that people of color are collectively struggling mentally with this, to the point that VICE has to be the one magazine to offer self-care tips for African Americans, IS SELFISH.

It’s SELFISH to ignore this as a mental health topic.

I’ve been sick to my stomach all day, lost in my thoughts and my pain and watching Minnesota burn down their police station.

If we truly are all in this together, then where is your support for the black community right now? Where is your acknowledgement of our mental health in a time when we are watching ourselves get killed? Somewhere up your ass?

Good Night.

Posted in advocacy, psychology, science

Mental Health Month: OCD and Related conditions

Posted on by alidware

We’re in day two of our Mental Health Month series where we discuss different DSM-5 diagnoses and the research behind them. Today we’re talking about Obsessive Compulsive and Related Disorders, including Body Dsymorphic Disorder.

What is Obsession?

Let’s distinguish the difference between being obsessed with something and obsession ruling your life.

If you have an obsession with Michael Kors, you probably don’t have a condition.

If you have an obsession with, like, that one show that, like, you stream on Netflix, you probably don’t have a condition.

If you had to touch all of the buttons, one by one, on the television, the remotes, the kitchen appliances, the computer, before you leave the house to prevent a house fire, and this becomes so disruptive you leave the house only twice a week for essentials (even when NOT in a pandemic), then you might think about searching for some support.

But OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder) is not the only condition that exists under this category. There is also:

1.Body Dysmorphic Disorder

2.Hoarding Disorders

3.Trichotillomania (hair pulling)

4. Excoriation (skin-picking)

5. Substance/medication-induced obsessive compulsive and related

6.Obsessive-compulsive and related disorder due to another medical condition.

7. unspecified obsessive-compulsive and related disorder (like obsessional jealousy).

Is Hoarding Like That T.V Show?

Hoarding gained a lot of popularity after A&E came out with their show HOARDERS, which follows the lives of extreme hoarders, often living in squalor beneath their belongings. The people featured are often reluctant to get rid of their material items because of an obsessive emotional attachment to them. This doesn’t just extend into beautiful or valuable items, like a porcelain doll or an antique speaker; most people will be hard-pressed to give away something that has some semblance of importance or function. For the people on hoarders, even garbage or blankets covered in rat droppings and urine are part of their livelihood, either because of memories or because of the simple fact that that item, along with all the other items in the house, fills a void.

Indeed, those with Hoarding Disorder have “persistent difficulty discarding or parting with possessions, regardless of their actual value”, per the criteria of the diagnosis. That difficulty leads to an “accumulation of possessions that congest and clutter active living areas”, much like what you see on Hoarders. This causes “distress or impairment” in all areas of functioning.

We also see a variety of personalities on Hoarders. Some people have what the DSM calls “good or fair insight”. They recognize their hoarding has been causing problems, but feel both trapped and safe among their things. Some people have “poor insight”, in that the clutter isn’t viewed as problematic. As we see in the television show, some people with this level of insight will accept help but fight against losing too much stuff. Some revert back into their old ways after the trauma of losing things all over again. Those with “absent insight/delusional beliefs”, are absolutely convinced nothing is wrong–yes, to the extent of delusion. These are the people you see who halt the process in the show, and the house or yard is cleaned only in a hundred square feet or so.

These behaviors may be related to the temperament of the person, indecisiveness being a leading trait, and also related to some traumatic or stressful event that exacerbates the behavior. Let me give a personal example.

When I was 11, we lived in a two story, two bedroom apartment next to a registered sex offender and across from a drunken, drug-addled manager. My dad, a musician, also spent most of his free time drinking or working on cars, and it was only a matter of time before him and the manager got into an irreparable fight. The problem is, she was the manager and we were the tenants; her words against ours to property management meant nothing. We were evicted.

My parents’ credit was in the tank, and we were not rich, so no other apartments in town would take us and we bounced around from hotels, to a tent, to rooms in houses of family friends—that doesn’t sound terrible, but three years of much more drugs, alcohol, and uncertainty (in every place we stayed) isn’t all that fun.

A two-story, two bedroom apartment can hold a lot of stuff. Everything in my room except important papers and one hand-me-down banana republic plastic shelf went in the dump–bed included. We didn’t have enough space for all my stuff and my parent’s stuff in the small storage locker we rented, so we sacrificed most of our belongings.

I noticed I started clinging to things later when we finally got another apartment. I picked up stuff from the street I didn’t need–like broken street signs, discarded car review mirrors, desks, and even a bent reflector. I kept that bent reflector for ten years. In fact, I kept all of it for ten years. My closet is still full of junk I picked up from the street or things I thought were valuable from the dump. My room itself is cluttered, disorganized, and it took three years of picking through invaluable things with perceived value to keep at least two feet of walk space from my bed to the door. I still haven’t learned how to organize.

This example doesn’t mean I have Hoarding Disorder. I only share this to show that obsessions with material items don’t make people vain or stupid or rude. Loss and grief of any kind can make us cling to whatever solid, certain, undying thing we can find.

I don’t know how much of A&E’s Hoarders is dramatized for television. Sometimes it seems the film is edited to make the people look disgusting and defeated, and then a sob story told to make us feel pity. At the end we’re supposed to feel amazed the house is clean or disappointed in the person if it’s not, without recognizing the uniqueness of each individual’s process. All in all, the people are real. I don’t know about the show, though.

Is Body Dysmorphic Disorder Real?

Yes.

In fact, it’s the first disorder listed in the category. People struggling with this perceive a defect or flaw in their appearance that seems slight to every one else but causes severe preoccupation for the sufferer. This could cause people to go to drastic measures to fix this flaw–which may include several cosmetic plastic surgery interventions, or cause them to remain indoors, trapped behind the fear that everyone will see, ridicule, and be disgusted by their flaw. This is not the same as being preoccupied with ones weight, and it cannot be Body Dysmorphia if the symptoms of an eating disorder are present.

This is linked to people who have relatives with OCD, and has been seen correlated with high rates of childhood neglect and abuse. Females are more likely to have a co-morbid (occuring at the same time) eating disorder and males are more likely to be preoccupied with their genital region. What does all of this mean?

It means life is a living hell. Being in the view of others causes such distress there are people who hide behind their curtains, in their house, for years. And this is, again, not a vain “omg nobody look at me”. This is such a level of heightened anxiety that an entire life is disrupted. I feel that many obsessive conditions get looked at as people being selfish: the person living with OCD can’t take care of their child because the compulsions take up most of the day–that means they don’t care about their kid enough. Or the people with Trichotillomania has pulled a bald spot on their head, but then complains about being nervous of others seeing the bald spot–they need to just stop pulling their hair. And things just aren’t that simple. None of this is vanity or selfishness, it’s anxiety, it’s stress, it’s trauma response.

Here is a great Ted Talk by Meredith Leston that highlights how body image is spread in the world and how troublesome views can lead to great distress and disruptive conditions for some people. Let’s remember: our environment plays a huge role in dictating which genes turn on and off. Everyone has the potential to develop a mental condition at some pointing their life. Why it happens to some and doesn’t to others not only depends on environment, but social factors and genetic make up too. Not so much brain chemistry.

If anyone watched Barcroft on Youtube, you might like this clip on Body Dysmorphia and OCD. I tend not to watch them too often, but sometimes they have okay material. Let me know how real or not real this is.

What Kind of Treatment is Available?

For some of these conditions, like Trichotillomania, there are no drugs that reduce symptoms. Even in cases of severe OCD, psychotropic medications fail miserable. This is a testament to how much we still don’t know and why some researchers are putting more weight on alternative treatments and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, the only psychotherapy which has been tested (with high reliability AND validity) and proven to change the course of people’s thoughts.

This Double-blind, placebo controlled, Cross-over study examined the possibility for Milk Thistle as a treatment for Trichotillomania. They concluded their sample size too small to yield any confident results, and that their evidence only weakly supported the use for Milk Thistle.

This placebo study with Trichotillomania only further showed that 1) change is possible depending on expectations of the participant and 2) easy access, simple treatments for this condition remain elusive and the condition reminds misunderstood on a clinical level.

I will say that OCD itself gets a lot of research while these other disorders fall short of people interested in finding treatments. For OCD there is a long list of possible SSRI treatment, ECT treatment (if you don’t mind losing your memory), different therapies, stimulants, and even EMDR. This is why I speak on the disorders we don’t hear much about. Because for the rest of these unknown, quiet, hidden disorders, sloppy therapy and hopeful medication are thrown at patients. Many suffer in silence.

For a condition like Body Dysmorphic Disorder, other alternatives are being studied too. This experiment examines whether an intranasal dose of Oxytocin could cue a helpful response for BDD. This too failed. It increased self-blame and “other-directed blame”, and the researchers “advise against the use of Oxytocin in BDD patients”. Glad science kept us from THAT mistake.

But, for those diagnosed with BDD and Social Anxiety disorder, this study found that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and attention retaining significantly improved the Body Dysmorphic aspect of the participants life.

There is some progress.

What can we do?

If someone comes to you and tells you they have been struggling with one of these conditions, withhold whatever your initial reaction is. Remind yourself that many who struggle with these types of conditions blame themselves enough. Even those who don’t blame themselves may still feel guilty for the disruption it causes their lives. I feel guilty sometimes for the disruptions my anxiety and Schizoaffective-ness has caused in my life and others lives.

Remember that they are not disgusting or vain or weird. Remember that there may be a whole list of trauma you’ve never learned about. Remember that even clinicians don’t understand this, probably because they’re trying to understand it on a biological level too much–some things need a different perspective in life.

So, this Mental Health Month, let’s keep in mind that there is a lot of suffering going on right now. Let’s not compare our pain to others, but instead use that energy to remind each other we’re not as alone as we feel. If you are suffering in silence, may this space give you the extreme–almost inhumane it feels sometimes– courage it takes to send a text, or call to someone you can trust. You can comment on this blog even, or contact me on my home page; eventually the burden of silence will hurt your back. It’s damn near broke mine before.

I write these posts in this format because I’m tired of articles listing symptoms, bland, over-used, understudied treatments, and urging people to talk to their doctor. It’s a good idea sometimes to seek professional help, but to do so uneducated and so desperate for relief that you’re unable to look at things critically will only trap you in the quantum loop that is the mental health system, especially if you’re in America. Mental Health Month is about education and reducing stigma. We can’t do that if we don’t preach from the side of lived experience AND scientific research.

Tomorrow we cover: Trauma and Stressor related DIsorders.

Next week, we cover: Schizophrenia, Bipolar, and Dissociative disorders. If you’d like to submit your story for any of these, please contact me HERE, or on my social media handles below:

Instagram: @written_in_the_photo

Twitter: @philopsychotic

If you enjoyed this post, please share, like, and follow ThePhilosophicalPsychotic. I appreciate every reader and commentator. You give me more reason to continue reporting poorly executed science.

Posted in advocacy, Community, Peer Support, Supporting Friends/Family, Voices

Broken and Crippled by Mental Illness

Posted on by alidware

*A featured personal story for this MENTAL HEALTH MONTH series.

Some months after my relationship with the boys’ dad ended, I had what can only be described as a ‘break down‘. And that’s exactly what it felt like because, both physically and mentally, I was broken.

Anxious About Anxiety

I started to get these odd sensations; I could feel my heart thumping out of my chest and could hear it pounding in my ears. Lots of jumbled and disturbing thoughts races around in my head and I felt scared all the time, so I was constantly jittery. I was anxious about being anxious again and much of the time I felt like I was on the world’s longest and biggest rollercoaster.

Sometimes, there was so much adrenaline buzzing through my body, my nerves were jangling, and I couldn’t sit still, so I’d pace around my home. At other times, I felt exhausted or gripped vice-like with sheer terror so I couldn’t move.

Drowning in Quicksand

I was having what I now know to be panic attacks – throughout the day and particularly at night keeping me awake until it was time to get the boys ready for school. It felt like how people explained having a heart-attack. My fingers and toes were tingling, and I could feel the colour drain from my face. I was finding it hard to catch a breath it felt like I was drowning in quicksand, so I’d lie rigid until it passed, knowing it would be followed by another, and another.

It was torturous, twenty-four-seven, week on week and with no end in sight, I wished I was dead. Although close friends and family were aware of the break-up, I couldn’t tell anyone what was going through my head, scared they’d think I was mad and that I should be locked away. This was to continue for around eighteen months.

Help was on it’s Way

I’ll be eternally grateful that our GP eventually noticed and taking me aside, he urged “Tell me, what’s the problem? You’ve lost so much weight and though you smile, I think you are very sad.” Once I’d explained and told him that I was devastated by the break-up, he was able to get me to immediate counselling. He actually drove me to our local hospital where he knew the Psychiatric Team.

Fortunately, although I had suicidal thoughts, the psychiatrist and his team were confident that I had no intention of killing myself. I’d told them I knew I couldn’t do that to my sons. I couldn’t possibly leave them with that legacy. Three years of painful weekly counselling followed.

Return to Study

I was on the road to recovery when I realised I wanted to study but I wasn’t sure I was clever enough and I wasn’t sure what to study. I thought I’d test the water and start small, so I took evening and weekend courses in Shiatsu. This was quickly followed by Swedish Massage, Seated Massage, Aromatherapy and finally, Indian Head Massage, where I was trained by the blind guy who invented it (Narendra Mehta). I loved it and so too did my family and friends who I practised on.

I had the massage table, the massage chair, lots of fluffy white towels and a full kit of aromatherapy oils. However, despite passing my exams with distinction in all the above types of massage, I just couldn’t charge anyone. I didn’t like asking for money so all I asked in return was a fluffy towel or an aromatherapy oil.

In February 1997 I learned I was about to be made redundant again, which was fantastic as I’d seen a large advert in the Evening Standard looking for General Nurses to study at my local University and Hospital. This didn’t so much interest me but, right at the bottom of the ad, there was a few lines about becoming a Mental Health Nurse. It felt right, and I believed that my own experience of mental illness would help to make me a good mental health nurse.

My Recovery

So, during my recovery from, what I learnt was, a lengthy psychotic depression, anxiety, panic attacks, and anorexia, I applied to train as a Mental Health Nurse. After three long years of study, I worked successfully as a Mental Health Nurse in various settings before becoming a Ward Manager. I had the honour of meeting thousands of people who shared their chaotic and difficult life stories with me, possibly for the first time ever. I always felt humbled by their often-fraught experiences and journeys through mental illness.

Now Physically Disabled:

I remain extremely passionate about raising mental health awareness, I’m a determined advocate of mental illness and continue to fight the stigma, the social exclusion and discrimination that come with it.

“As one person I cannot change the world, but I can change the world of one person.” – Paul Shane Spear

“Think of the enormous impact if just ONE PERSON improved the world of just ONE PERSON. That alone might change the world. And everyone in the world would be part of the change.” – Samuel Rozenhider

A big THANK YOU to Caz for her willingness to share her story about moving through anxiety. Catch her at THESES LINKS:

For tips on anxiety and panic attacks, you can use my link, here: https://mentalhealthfromtheotherside.com/2020/01/17/10-quick-and-easy-coping-techniques-for-anxiety-and-panic-attacks/

Or use my home page, here: https://mentalhealthfromtheotherside.com/

My twitter feed, here: https://twitter.com/hannahsmiley

Pinterest boards, here: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/800444533760600123/

Read more about today’s anxiety diagnosis and research post for Mental Health Month