Tag: mental health blogger

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

The Line Up for Sharing Your Story this Mental Health Month.

Posted on by alidware

Hello friends!

I have some time before work to put out the writing schedule of this months posts, all dedicated to learning more about DSM diagnoses and the research that backs them up (or doesn’t). I’m also asking for people’s experiences so that we may add a personal aspect to all of the clinical madness.

If you want to submit your story (200 words or more), you can find my contact information on my HOME page (click here) or you can reach me on my social media handles (below).

Each post will go live on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday each week of May. The Line Up is as follows:

Week of May 4th: Anxiety Disorders, Obsessive/compulsive and related disorders, and Trauma and Stressor related disorders.

Week of May 11th: Schizophrenia, Bipolar, and Dissociative disorders.

Week of May 18th: Somatic disorders, Eating disorders, and Depressive disorders.

Week of May 25: Gender Dysphoria, Neurodevelopmental disorders, and Personality Disorders.

On Monday, May 31st, we will give a quick summary, explore feelings that may come up, and find ways we can celebrate and inform people about mental health every day, not just one month out of the year.

For submitting your story:

If you would like to present something 200 words or more, your story will be posted separately from the main article, but on the SAME DAY as your topic. For example, if you want to submit your story about anxiety, it will be posted within an hour of the main post this Thursday.

If you would like to provide a quote or small paragraph (less than 200 words) it will be included in the main post at relevant points.

For both types of submissions, I can link your blog, social media, name, or anything else that you’d like. For longer stories, if you want to write a bio, I will put it at the end of your post.

Please share this information with friends, family, and anyone you feel would want to participate. If you yourself wants to participate, please contact me.

Social Media:

Instagram: @written_in_the_photo

Twitter: @philopsychotic

Let’s empower each other and remind the world why we matter.

Posted in Emotions, Peer Support

My Experience With Schizoaffective

Posted on by alidware

I did not talk in school. Violence, arguing, and substance use permeated my home. I wet myself multiple times because my anxiety wouldn’t let me raise my hand to ask to go to the bathroom. I fainted in fourth grade when asked to solve a math problem on the board. My demeanor was spotted, as far as my knowledge goes, in Kindergarten. It would have been in the years 2000-2001. My parents were informed I’d “grow out of it”. I didn’t.

I started self-harming (cutting, burning, hitting) when I was 11, just a few months before we wound up homeless. The last time was two years ago, about age 22.

Marijuana made things tolerable in high school. If I smoked all day, I wasn’t anxious or depressed. I smoked from 7am until I went to sleep. I’d leave school to smoke, cut class to smoke, and if I didn’t have it, I was thinking about it.

My internal world was very rich, and I hypothesis my severe withdrawal is why many of my voices are internal.

Cars were the first thing to talk to me. They told me jokes and had very different personalities. I’d sit on the floor of our studio, right in front of the door and just laugh and laugh. I learned I didn’t have to talk out loud to them, they could hear me when I thought my answers too.

But, I was a kid. Many kids are imaginative and I was particularly so.

The first time I heard an external voice that startled me was sometime in my freshman year of college. I’d been through psychiatrists and therapists already for depression, anxiety, and PTSD. This voice wasn’t much of a voice. She just screamed. She’d scream at night in particular.

I didn’t sleep a lot, and in high school this was because of anxiety. In college, I just didn’t need to sleep. I spent some time conducting fake studies and believing I’d cured all illness with a simple frequency level. I took physics, calculus, and chemistry to learn more and lost sight of my actual major. I knew I had a path, and with each new direction I took, a new feeling would tell me THAT, that right THERE, THAT’S my path. I’m being guided.

I dipped in some more depressions, on and off. Severe ones. They landed me in crisis units. I didn’t bathe, I quit jobs, I wouldn’t clean my room and by the end of an episode, my ankles would be buried on my floor in junk–clothes, paper, scribbles, drawings, poems, trash, trash, and more trash.

I’d hear voices, the screaming woman still, and a male. He told me I was a dead man walking. He’d call my name and laugh when I turned to look for him. I also had voices interrupting my thoughts. I didn’t know they were voices then, and they’d tell me I wasn’t crazy.

Things took a darker turn quickly. People started being possessed–my classmates, my new coworkers. This was around the time I started working at the Peer Respite. Possessed by demons, the voices, and it was their talking I fell asleep to at night.

They didn’t just communicate with me externally or internally. They left signs around the world for me: messages with news casters, trash, online ads, television shows and commercials. Then they showed me hell.

I don’t believe in hell, but I didn’t have another word for what they showed me, so I called it that. They showed me torture boards where they stood beside my latched body, laughing, turning gears so my limbs could be pulled from my body. They took the form of clowns in my room at night and my childhood fear of sleeping in the dark returned.

I believed they manipulated my dreams as well. They were there with me sometimes, I could hear them, and they sent the Day Walker after me. This became a reoccurring dream for me: a man who killed in broad daylight. He chopped off his victims heads and stuck them on stakes, which he then scattered around town as signs to me. The last dream I ever had of the Day Walker (named so by my voices), he’d found me hiding underneath a car. I smelled the mud on his boots. I never saw his face.

I awoke drenched in sweat and tears. I was used to my dreams being permeated in blood, rape, murder, mutilation, dismemberment, and terror. But something about this one was different. The voices said he was coming for me, and so were they. I then determined they were demons.

When the Las Vegas shooting happened, and the investigators couldn’t find a motive, I knew my demons were right: they’d possessed that man and killed those people as a message to me. The message was: we’re going to thwart your reason for existence, because your reason for existence is light and our reason is dark.

I don’t remember a lot about this time. I’d entered a silent war, a war whose outcome would determine my fate and the fate of the earth, given my future importance. I was constantly told I’d be killed. This scared me. I was anxious all the time, withdrawn, confused mostly, losing track of time, school, and work.

At home I stayed in my room. I’ve always been withdrawn from my parents, and this time was no different for them. It was when the sheriffs showed up to their door, though.

Eventually I threatened I kill myself because the demons wouldn’t stop. This prompted a 911 call, unknown to my parents, and I was taken away in the back of the sheriffs car in handcuffs to the hospital I hated being in.

I called home incessantly, demanding to know what they were telling my parents–which was nothing. I paced and paced and was sent an hour from home to a new hospital. A better one, in my opinion.

I got sleep there, something I hadn’t had in so long. And when I came out, sedated and still very confused, loopy, I followed butterflies who told me I should follow them. I spent hours walking without knowing I was walking. I took up a habit of wood burning and carving.

What I find most interesting about my journey is how it is to put into words all the things I experienced, so many of which I only have snippets of clear memories of. I have vivid feeling-memories of pain and voices and confusion, mostly. I tried to kill myself again, this time actively, but was saved. That was the loudest my voices ever became, and that was the result of stopping (all) my medication too quickly–a SSRI, an antipsychotic, and some anxiety med.

I have another voice, usually external but sometimes internal, who will ask me how I am. He’ll check up on me when I’m having a particularly hard day. That was the beginning of me seeing the benevolent side of these so-called demons, who I now refer to as false angels. He emerged when I started learning how to get in touch with my feelings.

So, I didn’t do anything drastic. I never ran down the street or screamed at people or openly talked to myself or to others so incoherently. So much of my experience in early life was internal, as protection, that my mental health expressed itself internally as well. It was rare my anxiety showed, or my depression. I have people to this day tell me I don’t “look” anxious, or behave anxiously–there are some people who I can see it in; they walk into class shaking or tapping as a soothing technique. They ask clarifying questions constantly or confirm their answer constantly, fearful of being wrong.

I didn’t know how to put my childhood into words, particularly not as a child.

One of the misconceptions about psychosis is that we’re all the same level of “obvious”. But that’s what we see in the news, or read about in people’s stories. It’s how we get killed by police using improper force out of fear. But not all of us go kicking and screaming into the hospital. My terror petrifies me, and so being fearful only paralyzed me. I didn’t talk to anyone, I didn’t fight the nurses, I sat in my corner of the hospital and listened to my brain rampage.

I wanted to share this so everyone knows where I’m coming from when I write these posts. It’s a place of understanding and also a place of not understanding; I’ve never been thrown on a cot and injected. I’ve never walked down the street with no shoes, homeless, talking to my voices and being arrested for trespassing. I’m still very disconnected from the very people I share so much in common with.

I think it’s worth celebrating the differences in our experiences, not just the similarities. Psychosis is notorious for taking over. It’s notorious for being unpredictable and obvious. It’s got some subtle undertones in some of us though, and sometimes it feels wrong to express this, given the hospital trauma–like cot injections– so many of us experience.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

Would you like to continue the conversation? Great! Follow me:

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 this joyous hobby.

Posted in Uncategorized

Totally Inconsistent

Posted on by alidware

My writing schedule has been all over the place this last week and I apologize to those who have dedicated time to reading these posts. I work two overnight shifts in a row (Sunday and Monday) regularly, but have also gained a new connection in the mental health sector who I am interviewing with, and am planning a trip to a national park this weekend, so it’s been a little difficult to squeeze in quality writing time.

So, posts may be later throughout this week and into next. Today, this late post will be about how to manage panic attacks, and how to work through them. It’s something I think many of us have experienced at one time and the feeling of being out of control and unhinged is almost like a trauma.

So, stay tuned! Do not give up on me yet.

I haven’t been posting as much to my Instagram handle @written_in_the_photo, or my Twitter: @Philopsychotic either, but come and follow me there for more discussion and funny memes. We all love memes, right?

Thanks to everyone for joining this site as a follower recently! It’s great to have you all on this journey with me!

If you have any topic you’d like me to write about, you can send me a DM on Instagram or Twitter, or find my email in my CONTACT ME page.

Remember, wellness is possible.

You are more than enough, and anyone who says otherwise has no conception of your true self.

Posted in Late Night Thoughts, psychology

Are People With Mental Health Issues More Creative?

Posted on by alidware

I feel this is a question constantly fueled by confirmation bias. That is, we believe that this is true, or want to believe so, and so if we are an artist or musician or whatever, we say that yes, a lot of our most creative works comes from our struggle.

My personal experience has been that there are moments where my creativity is boundless and other moments it is stagnant. It depends on my mood or my thoughts, and I think that’s how it goes for a lot of people.

I think why people get this impression is that those of us who have struggled with our mental health, in any form, are often forced to look at life and existence differently. We’re going to have some trippy insight or thought provoking ideas because we think a lot, too much most of the time, and we’ve investigated many different avenues for many different perceptions.

In the past, my depressive episodes consisted of no showers, too much food, sleep at peak sunlight hours and awake at peak sleep hours. I also wrote a lot of poetry.

I hate poetry.

Okay, that’s a strong word. I don’t hate poetry. But it’s never appealed to me as an art form. I could stomach reading really beautiful poetry, but if it wasn’t unique and full of meaning I didn’t like it. And so to belt out poems about sadness and the crushing weight of reality was very unlike me.

I wouldn’t say the depression enhanced my creativity. I would say it pushed me into another realm of expression. And really, poetry saved my life many times.

My psychosis introduced another art form I’d never considered: wood carving and burning. I designed, carved, burned, and painted the pieces for a good two months after getting out of the hospital. Something about following the lines and having that strict order, something to focus so heavily on, let my thoughts wander freely while keeping my body anchored and centered. When that form of expression was no longer needed, I just kind of abandoned it. I haven’t touched the equipment in over a year.

I did a lot of nonsense writing as well. I made dark drawings of creatures created in my mind and discovered when I focused, I could whip out some detailed designs. I don’t draw, either

And so what I think happens is our mind is so starved of understanding when we’re in these states because we fight it so hard. We fight the depression to stay happy, we fight the psychosis to say coherent, we fight the anxiety to stop shaking, we fight the mania so we don’t break the bank. But, in a way, these states are a type of expression. And when we stifle that expression, it finds another avenue. For many of us, we translate that struggle into music or art or writing or projects and hobbies. It makes us look like creative geniuses.

What could depression possibly be expressing? What could psychosis? It was only a few decades ago that psychiatric professionals believed delusions completely incoherent and meaningless. It’s only been recently that studies and observations have hypothesized that many delusions and ramblings are indeed coming from real pain and fear anchored in the patient’s past or present, or from something witnessed in the world.

For example, my “delusions” often revolve around possession. In the worst of it, I feel everyone is an imposter, that everyone is lying, and that if I let my guard slip I will be harmed. My soul will be stolen and trapped in the deepest depths of the most hellish hell.

None of that, so doctors say, is reality.

But, I grew up in a very unstable household with one parent heavy into mind altering substances–hard drugs and alcohol–and so one moment could be full of laughter and joy, the next full of tears and violence. And because I was quiet and sheltered, I never really interacted with other children to learn I could trust them. So instead, I learned to trust no one.

My lack of trust is the foundation of every delusion I’ve entertained. Now, when my thoughts turn in this direction, when everything is a message, when every death is a sign, when dead celebrities are lifting me up and pushing my career forward to trap me, I don’t try and reason myself out of it because I’ll only reason myself into it. Instead, I focus on trust. What, besides someone being possessed and meaning harm to me, is another reason I’m having trouble trusting and interacting with this person?

This steals a lot of power from the delusion sometimes, and also helps me notice that my brain is jumping to extreme conclusions as a way to express its distress. And that means I should pay attention.

Our brains are always finding weird ways to exist in this life. Humans are inherently creative, but we sometimes categorize said creativity and contain it. Instead, we should see it from all angles, even the dark ones.

Posted in psychology, science, Voices

Is Schizophrenia a Brain Disease?

Posted on by alidware

This is hard to write.

I’m sitting here enraged. Confused. Fearful, even, of what I’m about to share.

I told myself I’d only start another blog if I had important things to say, and we’ve covered some very important topics, most recently pertinent information in the series Is Psychology A Science? where we concluded the subject’s only scientific attributes are being ignored and/or underutilized due to political and monetary factors such as an APA president calling randomized clinical trials “fundamentally insane”.

These last few weeks have been incredibly tough for me, hence my lack of posting–because trust me, I have plenty to say–and I’ve spent too much time this week in my head, not exercising, falling into old eating habits and connecting dots that shouldn’t be connected. There are enough thoughts in my mind right now to fill an Olympic pool and they’re not rushing like Olympic swimmers, but they are kind of clustered like when all the palm leaves from the tree near your pool cover the surface until you finally get your lazy ass off the couch to scoop them out.

Jokes aside, there were a few nights I considered voluntarily committing myself. Things have been broadcasted to me, twins are following me, Juice WRLD died not because of Percocet and whatever the fuck “lean” is (I know what it is but because it’s so stupid I just can’t comprehend it’s actual existence), but because of possession, a sign to me–then I remembered I have shitty, low tier health insurance and don’t want medication. So I’m somewhat functioning here in what I’m starting to feel is purgatory. Part of this is stress. My lack of tending to myself. The other part is the effects of Klonopin which does indeed act upon serotonin–I researched it–and had that psychiatrist I ranted about last time listened to my incessant pleas that drugs which so much as touch my serotonin really mess with me–anyway.

In studying for my final, my distracted mind wondered about randomized clinical trials and about psychosis. I wondered if the studies done on those experiencing psychosis for the first time, un-medicated, before the *possible* structural changes due to antipsychotic use, showed structural changes.

This is important. Why?

Well, a disease isn’t a disease unless there is definitive (i.e substantial, valid, reviewed and repeated) proof physical abnormalities are attributed to the alleged progression of the alleged disease.

And so I went onto my favorite place to find psychological research papers. And no, it’s not Healthyplace.com. It’s not some person’s Instagram. It’s not The Mighty or anything related to any kind of advocacy because advocacy is very rarely based in research. It’s NCBI, otherwise known as the National Center for Biotechnology Information. I find myself most often in the PMC section because it’s free and I can use the paper references to find the full length articles in a database. There’s great neuroscience and clinical psychological research articles there, including the PubMed database.

So I’m sure we’ve all heard that “severe mental disorders” like Schizophrenia have notable brain abnormalities such as deformed (enlarged or constricted) ventricles, changes (reduction or increase ) in gray matter, or white matter, or certain neurotransmitters, or this, or that, up, or down, right, or left–and that’s about how accurate all the information you hear is.

Most of it is coming from secondary sources like a textbook or from what I like to call Triple-Source advocacy websites like HealthyPlace that continuously vomit basic and quite honestly uninformed opinions labeled as facts. And I’m not talking about personal stories. I’m talking about those faux information pages that blurt lists of symptoms that pretty much overlap with normal shit and make people worry that hearing their name called in a store means schizophrenia. Here, kind of like this page. Beautiful example of a well-structured, well-written, horribly basic-bitch attempt at explaining something we have no real understanding of.

That’s what I hate the most about advocacy pages I think. I love personal stories and empowerment. I hate the perpetuation of the idea that we really know what’s going on physically in our heads. We don’t. If someone tells you we do, they’re either in the middle of a delusion of grandeur or they’re lying.

And so my first topic to research revolved around first-episode psychosis because that psychosis is *mostly* untouched by heavy psychiatric medications. I researched under the assumption that psychiatric medications influence the structure of our brains and could very well be presenting the “structural abnormalities” which are being used as “evidence” of a “brain disease”. You will find studies that support this. You will find studies that don’t support this. And I found a study tonight, which you can read here, which concluded we don’t really have solid evidence for either hypothesis.

Next post we’ll talk about how to read these papers and determine whether a study has a proper operational definition (is the measurement procedure correct?) and construct validity (is the study measuring what it claims to be?) and how to spot confounding variables (which should be NOTED).

In 2017, a review paper entitled Structural brain changes at different stages of the illness: a selective review of longitudinal magnetic resonance imaging studies concluded there is “adequate evidence that schizophrenia is associated with progressive grey-matter abnormalities particularly during the initial stages of the illness”. These results were concluded after reviewing studies done on patients labeled as “pre-clinical stage” patients, first-episode psychosis patients, and patients labeled with “chronic schizophrenia”.

Even in the abstract, which you can get on the NCBI, they WARN AGAINST using these results as a way to EXPLAIN symptoms of patients. They even mention their confounding variable: antipsychotic medication and long-term treatment.

In 2011, a study entitled Lack of progression of brain abnormalities in first-episode psychosis: a longitudinal magnetic resonance imaging study concluded there were no ventricle abnormalities which could be contributing to symptoms, and that the gray matter abnormalities found have the potential to be easily reversed.

Because they did not list their confounding variables in an easy to find place, and it’s 10:30pm at night as I write this, I searched their references for a study which could either contradict or confirm their findings. I found this study, which you can download as a PDF from Google Scholar. IT concluded gray matter decreases were due to both the natural progression of the illness and use of antipsychotic medication.

They gathered 34 patients labeled with schizophrenia who had been taking medication for 0-16 weeks and compared them, over a year span, to a control group of “healthy” participants. 24 had never taken medication. Those who had taken medication had been taking them for 16 weeks or less. In their conclusion, they admit their findings are in agreement with some studies, but not others, perhaps due to rating differences, group differences, focus differences, and even mental state; some studies, they said, found that the patient’s mental state may have influenced the outcome of the brain volume measurements–those studies I’d like to read too.

I’ve spent the last three hours painstakingly reading variables, reading evidence for grey matter changes, against grey matter changes, for ventricle changes, against ventricle changes, longitudinal studies, short studies, childhood-onset schizophrenia studies, chronic schizophrenia studies, and studies which measured whether or not medication is destroying brain matter.

This was hard to write because I knew there was no definitive answer. And I wanted the answer to be an obvious, valid, no.

But the reality of science is that your wants don’t matter. The reality of science is you read the facts and you either accept them or you start a basic-bitch advocacy site.

What it seems, at this day and age, is that we’ve accepted a bunch of opinion and ignored the facts. My hypothesis? Even as we continue to study this, we will only conclude the same thing as the grief studies in Europe: individual variation is the only certain thing with schizophrenia.

Grief studies showed that some people recovered better by distracting themselves, and others by going into therapy. Both recovered at the same rate when allowed to choose what was best for them.

I purport we’ll find the same for psychosis. Some will do better with medication. Others will do better without medication. We’ll find that medication isn’t the only factor playing the game here, especially if mindset has any influence on brain measurement.

So, is Schizophrenia a disease? As of right now?

There’s no solid evidence pointing in either direction.

What does that mean?

Well, for me it means I need to keep doing what I’m doing, caring for myself in the way that’s been working. Because there’s no study which has proved that won’t help me recover.

For the general public, it probably means ignore all the evidence and keep fighting for mental health to be treated like physical health, as if it isn’t already: in the doctor’s door, out the doctor’s door, five minutes tops.

Posted in Emotions

Self-Care During the Holidays

Posted on by alidware

Hey all. It’s been a couple days since I’ve written. The last post was the conclusion of our investigation into whether psychology is a science. We conceded, I think, on the view that it has scientific potential but isn’t quite there yet.

I had another post prepared for today, but in light of the coming Holidays, I’ve foregone my usually cynical direction and decided to engage in some positivity today.

I’m not sure how it is for you all, but for me Holidays are difficult. I didn’t know they were difficult until I realized my moods seemed to fluctuate more viciously during this time. I also realized I’ve been taken into the hospital in October/November three years in a row and last year stayed at the respite house which I work for.

And so, to celebrate the second year of not going into the hospital, I figured I’d share some ways to engage in self-care during these busy times.

Disengage When Necessary

I think what adds to the stress is this weird social pressure that comes along with being in relationships, friendships, or just apart of a family. There are parties, gatherings, The Spawn of Satan Activity a.k.a Secret Santa at work. You’re seen as weird if you don’t go, and if you’re awkward like me, weird when you do go.

Sometimes family is the exact opposite of who you need to be around. And if you have the ability to stay away, if that is what’s best for your health, than by all means stay away. If you must go, keep in mind it’s just for the holidays. Enjoy those who you are comfortable around and remember those who seem malicious toward you may have other things going on in their lives. The holidays are stressful for everyone, not just you. They might not want to be there either.

If you have a significant other who insists you pretend to want to be there, make sure that you take care of yourself while you are there. If there is too much conversation, politely excuse yourself; go for a walk maybe, or find an area with less people. Bring some music if that’s soothing to you and separate from the madness so you can gather yourself. Nothing is more important than your mental health, and if someone doesn’t understand that than you probably shouldn’t be going to parties with them.

Treat Yourself, But be Careful of Indulgence

Black Friday in particular can trigger me into spending way more money than I should. I’ve avoided spending thousands, but I think I spent a good couple hundred and it isn’t even Cyber Monday yet.

I also notice as the weather’s gotten colder (and as I’m still unsure of my back’s abilities) I haven’t been going to the gym and I haven’t been eating correctly, not with Thanksgiving and sweets and potatoes and other such delicious things being just an arm stretch away. In combination with the stress of the holidays, finals, and ridding my body of those pain meds, I can feel a shift in my mood. I’m fluctuating a lot between depression and euphoria and there’s some intense paranoia that intensifies and lessens.

And so as delicious as the food is, I need to remember to watch my sugar intake and carbohydrate intake. I need to get back into my gym routine, rain or shine, and keep away from anymore medications. My presentation this week is already torturing my anxiety enough, I don’t need any other weight.

And neither do you. If you feel yourself taking some cheat nibbles here and there, don’t spend hours hating yourself. If you spend or party or whatever, push against that guilt. It’s okay to enjoy the little things in life. When it starts affecting your body and your mental well-being, maybe then it’s time to take a look at how it could be affecting you and whether you need to adjust things.

Remind Yourself You’re Doing Enough

We often forget, in the bustle of the season, that we are doing all we can. And so we try and do more and that’s where the breakdowns come from. Maybe work picks up during this time and people go on vacation and you’re covering shifts you don’t normally do. It’s okay to make a little extra money, but be mindful of your mentality. Are you more angry than usual? More depressed? Anxious? Paranoia? Frustrated? If so, scaling away from work could do some good; your employer isn’t going to die without you. Their job is to keep their business running. Your job is to keep yourself running.

If you aren’t working right now, sometimes it can feel like you can’t contribute as much as everyone else because of income restraints or other inconveniences. Remember that whatever you can do, regardless of gossip, regardless of your own anxiety, is fantastic and someone in someway will appreciate it. Even if that someone is just you. You being appreciative of yourself is powerful.

If you’re a busy family and you’re running around throwing gatherings and planning trips or other ways to organize the kid’s winter break, remember to breathe. You can’t do everything all the time, and next year does exist. Time is something we may not always have, but we do happen to have a lot of it.

Take Some Time To Assess Why

What is it about the holidays that stress you out the most? Is it the anxiety in the air? The crazy drivers? Is there trauma around these days? The gift-giving insecurity? Work?

For me, holidays were always filled with arguments, violence, and drunken rages. When my dad still played music, he was gone every holiday at gigs so I missed him. But when he came home, there was always a lot of arguing and fights because he was drunk and/or high and got angry at little things that would have made no difference otherwise. When he stopped playing music, he was drinking at 9am and I usually woke up to things breaking and more arguing. So, no one would talk to each other for the duration of the holiday. It’s been a full three years since that has happened. So I’m just not getting used to this idea of “being together” on the holidays.

I notice that a lot of those experiences have shaped my perspective of the holidays. I turn away from parties and gatherings and family things because it’s not what I’m used to. I’m used to doing my own thing by myself.

So for me, it’s been trauma. The memories of the stress are still in my body. My body knows when November is here even if I don’t know it is. Because this is the beginning of it all. And so this year I’m remembering that my past hurt but that it’s not like that anymore. That I can embrace celebration and enjoy the time that I have with my dad sober, even though his health is in a decline and his short-term memory is deeply bruised. We can have a new tradition and that won’t be possible if we all resist it.

The point of identifying the source of your holiday stress is so that you may put your attention there, not to wallow in it but to nurture it and coddle it and respect its existence. Doing so lets you see the gap between what may have happened last year or as far back into your childhood, versus what this year could be. It reminds you to mold your perspective a bit. If it’s the crazy driving, try and identify times where drivers aren’t so crazy. If it’s parties, maybe choose a few not to go to. If it’s gift-giving, maybe investigate those you wish to give gifts more than you usually would, or opt to remember gift receipts; if this is a route you choose, and the person returns the item, resist the urge to blame yourself. If this is a regular pattern of there’s, maybe a gift card is best.

But most importantly everyone, identify what makes you happiest during these stressful times and embrace that. Take care of you. Tis the season of giving, so give yourself a little love.

Posted in psychology, science, Voices

Is Psychology A Science? Part 4

Posted on by alidware

We’ve arrived to the conclusion of this series, and bullet point number two: psychology is the quantum physics of human study.

There is valid psychological research out there. The world has learned many things thanks to proper psychological researchers following proper scientific methods and procedures. Politics and bureaucracy, warped ethics and poorly developed philosophy has given much of psychology and psychiatry a bad name. The fact of the matter is psychology is the study of the mind, the mind studying itself, and it takes a certain level of scientific measure to do so.

There are many aspects for why there won’t be a yes or no answer to the title. We find ways to quantify behavior of everything we observe in psychology and other sciences; that’s the point, really, to quantify our observations so that we can logically and mathematically find systems and patterns and create better understanding. It’s how the DSM should be developed, but it hasn’t been. In fact, there isn’t much science involved in that infamous book. None of the members of the board are researchers or scientists.

Emil Kraepelinian, a german psychiatrist and researcher who furthered much psychiatric thought in his time pushed for empirical evidence in clinical study when it came to mental conditions. His love of philosophy sputtered a bit, as he focused more on the natural science of the mind; realism became his muse. Psychiatry, he said, and the science of it, should focus on what is presented, what is seen, and what is really “real”, observed and reported objectively.

He pushed for diagnostic causes, the scientific philosophy that is supposed to be backed by the DSM. That is, each diagnostic label is used as explanation for the behavior observed, a cause. He said “cases arising from the same causes would always have to present the same symptoms and the same post-mortem result”.

What I find interesting about almost anyone who supports the medical model, and almost anyone who advocates for anti-psychiatry, is this idea that any of this is based in absolutes. As if something as complicated as the human brain, something which is as unique chemically as a fingerprint, could present the same symptoms and the same post-mortem result. As if chemicals in the brain don’t play any role at all. As if genes don’t. As if environment doesn’t. As if individual variation in perception of life, in thought, in personality, doesn’t. As if we will ever be able to quantify exactly what a combination of all of that means.

So why do I call psychology the quantum physics of human study? Normally it would be a compliment, a toast to the complexity and beauty of psychology, but until the science of it actually starts behaving as such, I refuse to compliment it.

My reasoning can be summed up in one simple, and pretty obvious word: probability.

You can calculate the trajectory of a ball and where it will land based on the height the ball starts and the force which propels it. You’ll look at angles and velocity. It’s pretty straight forward classical physics, just like you can take a look at a particular chemical structure in the brain and label it dopamine, serotonin, or GABA; when you see each structure, you can accurately predict the label, just as you can accurately predict where the ball will land as long as you can do math.

But when you get into particles that seem to appear chaotically, randomly, and pop out of existence just as suddenly as they’ve popped into existence, when you can’t observe the actions with the naked eye, things become less obvious. When you start attempting to measure when serotonin will be released, how, where, and the effects that will cause, with the same types of stipulations, things also become less obvious.

As much as they tell you serotonin causes anxiety, there is no certainty in this. There’s no certainty in the dopamine hypothesis or even the entire “theory” of chemical imbalance. There is some research, often funded by pharmaceutical companies, which claim reliable and valid results with a minimally valid sample size that allows them to generalize, or predict, that for many people, a rise or decrease in serotonin (there’s been research showing both instances) can cause anxiety and/or depression.

Statistics gives an idea of how many of these pop-up particles will/can appear at a given time, in a given space, but it will never be 100% accurate. Statistics gives us an idea of how many people will experience a given “symptom” compared with their genetics, their neurochemistry, and their life experiences. But because we don’t have solid understanding of any of those categories, the predictions and statistical significance must still be taken with a grain of salt.

So what does this mean? If we can only observe a small amount of our physical existence, if that can only be quantified using a symbolic system which is also only based in our observable spectrum of the universe, than does anything matter? If we can never be sure of anything, what’s the point?

Curiosity, I suppose. Curiosity and acceptance.

Part of the philosophy behind the Uncertainty Principal and the paradoxes within, which we discussed here, is that we must, particularly within the study of ourselves, of the universe, find acceptance in our limitations because we are inherently limited by our physicality. We will never see with our own objective, naked eyes whether that photon’s interference pattern is being influenced by the light we use to see said interference pattern, or if the photon indeed behaves as both a wave and a particle depending on observation.

There is indeed always a confounding variable we can never control for: our humanity.

And so I say, my friends, don’t take things so seriously. I lose myself in delusions quite consistently. It’s terrifying. Sometimes it’s beautiful. Sometimes the terror is beautiful and I’m not sure when I was able to see that beauty, but I’m thankful for the psychosis showing me the light side of the dark–and by this, I don’t mean “the bright side” or “the light at the end of the tunnel”. There is a lightness nestled within the darkness, and you have to go very deep to find it. But it’s there. It’s there because the same darkness lies deep within the light.

I laughed at myself the other day because most people I speak with who have experienced psychosis have found some kind of light, spiritual light in all of this, been pained by demons and blessed by God (or Gods) and I’ve been quite the opposite. I’ve embraced the demons and the darkness and recognized their validity. I’ve called them my protectors more than once this last week, terrified that they’ve been steering me purposefully this whole time and I’ve been resisting out of fear and misunderstanding.

They’ve become false angels–angelic in their intent but false in their goodness and I can appreciate a being which can drop its pride and admit the unity of good/bad which churns inside them. If you’re curious of this, and my thoughts on my voices/where my beliefs come from, I’ll write a post explaining it all. It’s quite detailed.

Hell, even if you’re not interested, I’ll probably write on it.

And so psychology is as science as philosophy in the sense that thoughts/ideas can never be proven and neither can the theory of chemical imbalance.

We can provide enough evidence to disprove it.

And I promise, we will.

P.S: It is inherently and philosophically inaccurate to call this theory a chemical “imbalance” as there is no “balance” to compare it to. And so I say we will disprove the imbalance aspect not because I don’t believe chemicals play a role, but because I recognize that there is no standard for comparison. Neurotransmitters and neurons change and grow depending on experience and variation, and therefore we can never have a generalized “true north” version of our chemical make-up.

Posted in Peer Support, psychology, science, Therapy

Is Psychology A Science? Part 3

Posted on by alidware

You’re here–great! This post would have been here yesterday, but I took an extra two shifts at work this week and am worn out for other reasons.

In the last post, we talked about the Clinical Method and the Actuarial method, and declared the Actuarial method more accurate. We are still under bullet point number 1: practitioners and their intuition/expertise, or what I’ve been calling Clinical Arrogance for years.

Now, why is there such a level of clinical arrogance out there? Well, it probably has something to do with the lack of push for randomized clinical trials in psychology and this idea that case studies are the best way to identify/predict other client’s behavior.

For example, Ronald Fox, a previous president of the APA is quoted with:

“Psychologists do not have to apologize for their treatments. Nor is there any actual need to prove their effectiveness.”

Why Many People Perceive the Study of Human Behavior Unscientific

For those unaware, the APA is the American Psychological Association. They argue over the DSM and other irrelevant things.

There was a push for randomized clinical trials to become a staple for the understanding of the mind, for understanding better avenues of treatment for mental health adversities, but this would have sprung detailed instructions for treatments (backed by the research) and standardized treatments. Psychologists had a somewhat valid argument, that there needs to be some flexibility in treatment. Standardized tests are shit, and I believe there’s probably a huge chance standardized treatment could end in the same category. However, I’m not sure if the standardized tests given in school are backed by any research saying they are accurate predictors of a student’s knowledge. These standardized treatments would be developed based solely on the research.

But clinical psychologists disagreed for other really stupid reasons too, rest assured. They believed psychology is an art, not a science. It doesn’t need to measure variables. Intensive case study analysis gives better understanding and insight anyway.

They’re quoted with:

“Alternative ways of knowing [case study, intuition], for which the scientific method is irrelevant, should be valued and supported in the practice of clinical psychology.”

Defining Psychology: is it worth the trouble?

Another APA president was found to say starting up randomized clinical trials would be “fundamentally insane” .

Why is this a thing? Well, I could think of many reasons. Some reasons revolve around the fact that psychologists are educated in psychology minus research. They take a couple courses maybe in their career, but there is no effort put into helping them really understand the value research has in their practice, and so we have many clinical psychologists who firmly believe psychotherapy techniques emerge from experience. Research says differently: there are certain techniques, like CBT, that work better for certain adversities, but because no one reads the research, no one implements the technique when it’s most appropriate.

This provides for a very naive group of professionals. And what does naivete strengthen?

Well, drug companies for one. They could have research that says a medication has zero efficacy and it will still be prescribed by practitioners.

For example, Abilify has no efficacy above 10mg. It’s in the physicians desk reference. I read it. Back when I was on medication, my psychiatrist kept pushing me to 20mg because it would “help my voices”.

She obviously doesn’t read, obviously doesn’t know much about Abilify, and obviously doesn’t understand anything about the spectrum of voices.

It’s a well known fact that insurance companies, drug companies, and the APA are all very connected. That can be another series I’ll push out when I’m less worn out. It’s a very tangled web.

The issue with ignoring research which says certain treatments are more likely to have an effect over others is that psychologists never learn from their mistakes–mostly because they don’t know they’re making any mistakes. If a treatment doesn’t work, it’s because the client isn’t focused. The client isn’t “putting in the work”. While that can be the case, it can also be the case that the psychologist hasn’t kept updated with the information in their field and therefore has some build up clinical arrogance.

There was a push in 1990 for evidence based practices to be the center of psychological practice. The APA’s response? Let’s lower what it means to have “evidence”; more things will be approved and more treatments will be made.

A group of scientists and researchers realized their efforts to drill logic and intelligence into the APA was vain. They then formed the APS, the Association for Psychological Science.

In the same way that Peer Respites and peer alternative programs were started out of the need for compassion in mental health care, the APS was started out of the need for competent practitioners and valid research in psychology. They sponsor science-based clinical psychology and there are many universities in the united states which hold their Psychological Clinical Science Accreditation. More are being accredited each year. UC Berkeley is one. I mention them only because I plan to attend that program for graduate school assuming I continue with psychological research.

So there are many elements of science within psychology. The issue isn’t with whether or not it’s a science. The issue is with whether or not the science is embraced and whether or not we are too limited in our human ability to learn anything worth while. Is human variation too much of an obstacle? Is that what pushes clinical psychologists to believe their intuition can outsmart a math formula? Math formulas, after all, can only describe what we observe and what we observe is inherently limited. We can generalize behavior from a sample size, we can generate neurological predictions when observing the behavior of neurotransmitters but none of it ever seems to be certain; even what we’ve studied, the effects we see, are simply based in probability.

Sound familiar?

Tomorrow we’ll talk about bullet point number 2: how this probability relates to other sciences and why I call psychology the quantum physics of human study.

Posted in Freedom

To Be A Mental Health Consumer

Posted on by alidware

Yesterday I said today’s post would be about whether or not psychology is a science and how certain types of philosophy play into the ideals psychologists and M.D’s are trained with, but right now I don’t have access to the notes I made in regard to that topic. So today will be kind of an introduction.

We’ll talk about the importance of education and its scary insignificance.

If you’ve ever taken an introductory psychology course, you have most likely heard the story of “Little Albert”. In using classical conditioning, John Watson and Rosalie Rayner conditioned Albert to have a fear of a white rat. They did this, according to my recollection, by making loud, sudden, scary noises when presenting the white rat.

Now, if you’ve taken a recent introductory psychology course which covered this case, and you are not in California, there is a slim chance you were not told what I was told. I’m betting you were, though.

I took General Psychology 5 years ago and was informed that the experimenters discovered this infamous baby known as Little Albert had also been conditioned to fear white things in general. Fluffy, white, harmless things like a puffy rabbit or a dust bunny. My class was then told this fear persisted throughout this child’s life, and that fears could be unconditioned as well. This example is used as evidence to prove that classical conditioning in humans perpetuates specific phobias.

The study was referenced in a few other courses as well, all with similar conclusions. The textbooks were no different.

So, imagine my surprise when my research course revealed Little Albert had been fearful for ten days. After that, his reactions subsided. When they attempted to recondition the fears, his responses were lessened than the first time and the fears did not stick. My research professor said he had never learned this until he actually read the paper Watson and Rayner published.

And so this brings up many serious issues, one of which I’ll talk about tomorrow.

But for today, we can just focus on one main issue: if we can’t trust our education, how can we trust our practical training? Are they following research or intuition? Are they creating programs and trainings that are based in research topics but finalized by idealism?

This doesn’t mean we flush our meds down the toilet and spit at our therapists. Maybe it means that for some people but for me it means self-research is probably one of the most important things I can do for myself as a mental health consumer. I don’t like to say “question everything” because that implies a lack of trust and in order for people to trust you, you also must sacrifice some vulnerability and offer trust. What I say instead is “research everything.”

Get a new diagnosis? Great! It matters to you, it explains what you feel and how you think and you really identify with it. Learn about it, if that’s something that matters to you. And that doesn’t mean googling “schizophrenia” and reading about how your negative symptoms will take over your life after medication quiets the positive symptoms and how medication is the recommended long-term treatment and how some people can still live meaningful lives (after the author spent six pages ripping your self-esteem to shreds).

Learn about negative symptoms if you want. Learn about positive symptoms. Learn about different medications, different therapies (usually CBT) used to help people cope with confused thoughts. Learn about why the dopamine hypothesis is only a hypothesis. Learn about how medications work and how they don’t work. Learn about support groups. Learn about alternative treatments. Learn about how they work and how they don’t work. Learn about hearing voices (if applicable) and learn about the Hearing Voices Network, and affiliated organizations/movements. And most importantly, be objective.

Don’t just swallow the information you’re provided and internalize it. Not even the information in this post: research it for yourself.

This is hard to do when you’re in a crisis. That’s when we’re at our most vulnerable. That’s when we put up defenses and refuse help that may be useful. Or that’s when we’re so outside of ourselves that we have no defenses and so we absorb any help, and sometimes that means forceful and hurtful help.

It took me years of mental growth supported (sometimes unknowingly) by the connections I’ve made at the Peer Respite house I work for, and my own inner revelations, my own retraction from society and sanity, to really learn things which I would have never known had I not had a few questions and some hours of research.

And so the second lesson here is patience. While you go through the horror and the terror and wallow in darkness, look around. Touch the walls you’re trapped in. Smell the air that’s tainted and stale. Feel the ache in your heart. Hear your own screams. Explore the desolation because there is nothing more all-encompassing. And when something is all-encompassing, there is no escaping. So don’t run. Melt into it.

Let me give an example.

I was part of a cultural competency training/story telling event for the company which helps run and fund the respite house. There were other providers from within the company who attended, nurses and clinicians from other mental health and housing programs. (For some background, the company runs 100+ other programs and the Respite is the only fully peer program).

I was one of three who was scheduled to tell my mental health story and how I interacted with providers during the worst of my crisis. This was to provide them a view from the other side.

However, public speaking isn’t usually my thing. I used to faint in elementary school when I had to stand up in front of people, and this fear continued through high school and college until about a year ago. It still makes me intensely nervous, but I’ve gotten just a smidgen better at controlling my body and my thoughts during my presentations.

And so my anxiety sky rocketed the moment I stepped into the building. What this usually means is I go sit somewhere quietly and ignore the room and put some music in my ears and try not to listen to my own self-criticism or voices.

What it meant this time was understanding my limits and using my crutch to further develop my own skills. I took some valium I’d been prescribed for my back. This doesn’t last very long in my body with my metabolism, but it lasted just enough to calm my body. I wear a Google Wear smartwatch that tracks my heart rate religiously and I use it as a biofeedback because biofeedback was what helped me see how my mind exaggerates my feelings.

When the medication kicked in, my heart rate went from 109 to 68. And in this period I felt it. I felt my body and my hands and how cold they were. I felt my eyes moving in their sockets and my tongue brushing across my lips. All the while my mind panicked.

And so I focused my awareness on that disconnect. I spoke with my brain and my body and I told my brain: do you see how the body feels right now? It’s okay. This situation is okay. Feel how grounded we are right now? Feel how I’m leaning on the counter top? See, you made that person laugh. You’re having conversations. Do you feel how loose the body is?

And so I didn’t run. I dove into the discomfort and identified the disconnect that perpetuated my fears. I will and do talk quite a lot of shit about medication. It’s understudied and should not be cleared for long-term use in any one human being or animal. It is studied for short-term usage, all of it (meaning 4 weeks to 3 months) and the only medication I am comfortable with my body enduring is as-needed medication for panic. And the only way I will take one is if I recognize I won’t learn anything from the panic if I can’t get out of my body and into my mind. I have to reconnect the two, and one needs to be isolated (calm) in order for me to show the other one everything is okay.

I quite enjoyed my talk. I’m sure there are many things I could have done better, things I could have said better maybe. But it was the first time I spoke to a room of people without pouring sweat, stumbling over words, or fainting. By the time the talk started, the Valium had left my system.

The key notes to take from this post?

  1. Be Objective.
  2. Have Patience
  3. Don’t Run