Tag: schizophrenia

Posted in Community, Uncategorized

Questions…

Posted on by alidware

While everyone eagerly awaits my post which would have posted already were I not at work, I figured I’d pose some questions to all of you lovely people who have joined this journey with me. I’d like to learn more about all of you since I have put so much of myself out there.

1. What is your greatest achievement? I don’t mean this in some superficial, interview question way. I mean this in a “what has really helped you grow?” Way.

2. What is one of your passions? Do you have a particular hobby you wish could be your main source of income? What will it take for that to happen?

3. If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you go and what inspires this decision?

4. Do you have any formal education or vocational training? If not, would you like to? What interests you in the sector of education?

5. How was 2019? What will be different in 2020?

6. Is there any philosophical or mental health related topic you’d like me to cover on this site?

Sometimes I like to remind myself of my passions, hobbies, and things outside of myself that remind me I’m still alive and kicking.

If you’d like to comment below any answers, I’d love to read them and start a conversation with you!

A real post will be up shortly. In the meantime, check out my Instagram handle: @written_in_the_photo and Twitter handle: @philopsychotic for funny memes and more mental health discussion!

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 advocacy, Freedom, Peer Support

When We Can’t Stop Thinking

Posted on by alidware

People say secrets keep us sick.

I’d like to relate this to mental health, but in order to do so, we must read this post with the understanding that I don’t consider our experiences a product of illness or an expression of a sickness. We also must assume this only has to do with secrets in-part. So I suppose it has nothing at all to do with that saying.

What I’m getting at is that there are things we do for ourselves that exacerbate or substantially perpetuate our experiences, and there are things we do for ourselves that foster alleviation. Identifying these things is one of the best ways to care for yourself.

For example, diet plays a huge role in my mental wellness. In one of my most upsetting states, I was eating over 200 grams of sugar a day, an unknown amount of fat, and at least 200-300 grams of carbs. Alongside antipsychotic medication, my weight ballooned. After getting off the medication, radically changing my diet, and implementing a structured exercise routine, my depression lifted for the first time in my life, my anxiety lessened, and heavy psychotic experiences were less frequent.

If I skip meals and eat foods rich in sugar or carbs, my experiences worsen again.

Some of us don’t realize what we put in our body effects our mental state. Some of us know, but struggle in the transition. Some of us just don’t want to transition. None of those ways are right or wrong. But they have different consequences.

Some people have learned to take care of themselves through other peers, others with lived mental health experience. I mention this specifically because it’s what I attribute a lot of my own learning to, and also because it’s part of awareness and advocacy; we’ve been on that kick for a couple days now on this site.

What I’ve noticed is that telling your story can be both freeing and suffocating. There are some people who are able to write a blog about themselves, or speak about themselves, or start a small non-profit advocacy program and live a healthy life. There are others who do the same, but are engrossed on the internet and social media, who tell their story so much that their entire life is dedicated to mental health.

I don’t think that’s a bad thing, either. But what I notice is that it doesn’t seem healthy for everyone. I think it becomes detrimental when all you talk about is your bad days, or your good days, your experiences, what makes life difficult, and all these things that only serve to remind you how different and/or limited you are. The more that mindset is fed, the less life is lived.

What I mean by that is when you separate yourself from the whole of society, in a good way or a bad way, you start forgetting you’re apart of that society.

I remember being so engrossed in my depression and anxiety, before I experienced any altered states. And it wasn’t just the experience taking up all my time, because depression and anxiety are both all-encompassing, but it was the fact that I spent all my time thinking about both. I’d think about it in a positive light too. I’d blog my experience and talk to others about it; we’d relate and it was a positive moment in a lot of darkness. But it kept my thoughts trapped in this bubble.

People also like to say in mental health that “We are not our illness”. Again, assume that for this post, and for any post on this site, I do not adhere to the terminology “illness”, “disorder” or “sickness”, but the fact is if you spend all of your time talking about your experiences, in a positive or negative light, you are basically your “illness”.

NOT being your “illness” would entail you living life. It would entail you understanding that yes, sometimes things are hard, but that doesn’t make you special.

That’s another thing about certain advocates. Everything is about mental health–everything. Why focus so much on the hardships? Why not focus on the things you’ve been able to do because you’ve gotten support and found a healthy path? Why not show people what they could potentially do were they to also find their path? That would encourage me, at least. What doesn’t encourage me is people saying #depresssionfeelslike.

I gained a lot of freedom from getting involved in other things besides mental health and from hanging around friends without mental health struggles. Every once in a while I’ll talk about things, express views, but I do it at appropriate times and if people are willing to hear.

Sometimes people think I don’t blurt my diagnosis or experiences because I’m ashamed. Really it’s because I’m not a sum of any diagnosis or any experience. I don’t need to say, “yes I graduated with schizoaffective”. I just graduated. And that’s the whole of it.

Travel. Show yourself you can do something unrelated to the terror in your mind. Volunteer. Find a passion. Reignite a passion. Meet people. If people are too much, maybe a hobby. I’ve had to push myself away from reading fiction books with mental health characters because I want to remind myself I’m still in the world, even when I feel like I’m not.

I want to remind myself there is so much more out there than what’s just in my head.

I think we often forget that.

Would you like to continue the conversation, see silly (and beautiful) potos, or nonsensical two-second videos? Great! Follow me:

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*New* Twitter: @Philopsychotic

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If you liked this article, please share it, hit the like button, reblog, and follow ThePhilosophicalPsychotic. I appreciate every reader and commentator. You give me more reason to continue this joyous hobby.

Posted in advocacy, Emotions, Peer Support, psychology

Update Post

Posted on by alidware

Tomorrow we will discuss what happens when we get so stuck in our mental health experiences that they become our lives. Sometimes this even leads to forgetting we have a life, or forgetting we have true potential to live the life we’ve always wanted.

Today I have prior engagements to attend to. I have no time to really focus on this post like I want to. Tomorrow will be free.

If you’d like to keep up with me outside of this blog and see how possible it is to live a productive and generally satisfying life with a schizoaffective label, pop on over to my primary social media:

Instagram: @written_in_the_photo

Twitter @Philopsychotic

I talk about struggles, epiphanies, and good days, bad days, and ask questions on Instagram and Twitter. I’d be happy if you joined the journey!

Until tomorrow, dear readers.

Posted in advocacy, Peer Support, Supporting Friends/Family

What Makes Us So Divided?

Posted on by alidware

In yesterday’s post, I mentioned that there is a divide in perspectives about mental health in our little neuro-diverse community, and this can effect how we advocate and what we educate ourselves about.

Currently, there are two major extremes, and I think each has existed since the dawn of mental health “treatment”, since we started categorizing behavior and attempting to quantify it. This divide became more noticeable after the cure-all lobotomies were deemed medically unfit, opiates for anxiety and psychosis became too addicting, and the development of Thorazine (I.e the chemical lobotomy) hit the shelves. Patients were more controllable, malleable, and more people were able to leave Asylums and enter society.

The problem with Thorazine and E.C.T, the next best treatment for depression and psychosis, was the damage they caused. No one really knew how medication worked, other than later observing a few chemicals in some people, a few others in other people, and never being able to come to a solid conclusion. We still don’t have one. E.C.T fried some people, disintegrated their personality, shredded their memory, but some were content with this because they weren’t really able to have any other feelings about it.

Drugs made money. Did I forget to mention that? A lot of it.

And eventually groups of people who felt outpatient treatments like medication, and inpatient treatments like E.C.T and solitary confinement, were inhumane, united and developed into the Anti-Psychiatry group.

Now, as time has passed, we have made mental health treatment look very pretty. Hospitals are (mostly) clean, medication is monitored more closely, and drugs like Thorazine are not as widely used in the continental U.S. I can’t speak for Europe or Canada or South America. I know Africa doesn’t have much of a choice but to use the older drugs like Haldol and Thorazine because they don’t ever get monetary assistance with anything. People are still chained to poles in the middle of psychosis in some parts of Africa.

But just because something looks pretty here in the U.S doesn’t mean it’s better. E.C.T is still popular. People say it saves their lives and maybe it does. But to send pulses of electricity through someone’s brain without fully and scientifically understanding the consequences (I.e why does it cause memory loss? Why does it effect some people’s personality?), and without fully and scientifically understanding how the depression is relieved (is it because the brain is being damaged or because their personality is so fried they could care less to be depressed?) is probably one of the least ethical ways to go about treating other humans.

The APA specifies that benefits must outweigh the risks for treatments like this to continue. I’m not convinced they do.

The same goes for medication: it’s researched (barely), results end up skewed (publication bias) and no one actually knows the long term effects for the “updated” ones.

So I understand the mistrust, the disdain, and the need for something better, something that feels compassionate and reasonable and ethical. That’s the driving force of most anti-psychiatry believers. I know because when I read Brain Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry by Peter Breggin M.D at 14, I started reading research (I had friends in college with access to databases) and was appalled. I declared myself anti-psychiatry.

The other extreme side is the medical model. Most people who believe in this model also believe that having the drugs is better than having their lives in shambles because of psychosis or mania or depression or whatever. The risks, for them, DO outweigh the benefits. Many believe that their doctors do the best they can.

They also tend to believe that our experiences are the result of chemical imbalances. They agree that these experiences are brain diseases.

Now, I have no issue with either view. Do I tend to lean toward hypothesizing our experiences are more so a variation of the human mind over hypothesizing chemicals (that have no stable baseline to be compared to) and brain deterioration causes “mental disorders”? Yes, I do. But since neither have been proven absolutely wrong, I can’t say I believe one over the other.

The issue with this division is that it impacts what and how we advocate.

When we should be advocating for whole person care and individualized approaches, we waste time convincing the world that we’re “sick” and therefore need compassion (but not too much because we don’t need pity). We don’t want people seeing our “illness” as us, but flaunt the diagnostic label and call ourselves “just the same as everyone else, but different.” When we should be empowering each other, when we should be guiding each other on how to adapt to our experiences, we waste time hating the medical model and spouting all the reasons it’s wrong.

We’re just going in circles. It’s asinine.

I don’t think we all need to ascribe to each other’s beliefs. That’s one reason why I encourage everyone to read research; when done correctly and ethically, science will tell you facts and you can dispute them, but that doesn’t change them. We can disagree on everything else. But not facts.

Now, it’s another thing when the science is wonky.

But in terms of advocacy, being on the same page is pertinent. Otherwise, we’re only impeding each other’s progress; I’ve been witness to consumers putting other consumers down because they don’t believe in diagnosis, or they do believe in diagnosis. Suddenly wanting off medication and believing that you can live a life off medication is a cardinal mental health sin. Suddenly gaining benefit from medication and feeling more comfortable on it is a cardinal mental health sin.

We need to remember that we’re all on the same side. But we also need to pay attention to facts. When we advocate, it’s not about diagnosis. It’s not about being different. It’s not about how corrupt the pharmaceutical industry is. It’s not about how psychiatrists are over-medicating and over-diagnosing. It’s not about the lack of available facilities, or sub-par care. It’s not even about our own experiences. Let me say why.

A lot of these are issues we want to address are serious issues. But they will be addressed naturally if what we present are coherent arguments and factual knowledge, all with compassionate nudging. If we prove that we are a strong, united forced, if we prove that we have insight to what we need for our mental health improvement, we can work alongside healthcare instead of against it or in spite of it. We can do things besides push medication on each other. We can do things besides convince each other medication is poison.

We can recreate the whole mental health system. And I’m sure we can all agree it needs a serious make-over.

And so I say, when you post on your site, on your social media, or when you’re giving talks, keep this in mind. Keep in mind that it’s not just about your diagnosis or labels in general. It’s about all of us. It’s about integrating into the system and becoming a part of it. If you want things to change, if you want to really be heard, if you want compassionate care for us all, that is the way to do it.

#MentalHealthAwarenessWeek just isn’t going to cut it.

Would you like to continue the conversation, see silly (and beautiful) photos, or nonsensical two-second videos? Great! Follow me:

Instagram: @written_in_the_photo

*New* Twitter: @philopsychotic

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If you liked this article, please share it, hit the like button, reblog, and follow ThePhilosophicalPsychotic. I appreciate every reader and commentator. You give me more reason to continue this joyous hobby.

Posted in Peer Support, Supporting Friends/Family

Who Advocates For Us?

Posted on by alidware

Because the internet is my happy place (not really, but I’m online a lot), I see a lot of what becomes popular as soon as it becomes popular. I don’t follow trends or imitate them, but I do observe and one thing I observe from the Pop-Mental-Health culture, as I call it, is the individuals who become Insta-famous or YouTube famous for expressing views about mental health.

I click on these advocates with a new hope. And every time I’m disappointed.

The thing about being a pop-advocate is that everything you say is really heard. And when you’re really heard and you say something controversial, you may lose your following and For some of these advocates, an online presence is their lively-hood.

I don’t think anyone advocates for the money–what money? You don’t get money for being positive about mental health. You may if you’re on YouTube with a couple million followers, but how many mental health advocates are there with that status? I do think this gives people purpose though, and combined with the drive to offer support and the hope of wellness to others, it becomes their livelihood.

What makes this an issue though, is if you’re a YouTuber with an okay following, your channel can blow up if you talk for ten minutes about how transparent you want to be with your audience and spill your mental health secrets.

It reminds me of Dave Chappelle’s recent acceptance speech when he won the Mark Twain award. Toward the end, he said something like “And one more thing–I’d like to say that I’m gay. Can’t wait to see what that does for my career here now.”

We almost fetishize this idea of being different. It’s become “a thing” now. The day we truly accept everyone is the day someone doesn’t need to come out and say they’re gay or bi or trans or anything on the spectrum. The day we truly accept everyone is the day we don’t have to feel the need to “film our panic attacks” or us talking to our hallucinations.

In the meantime, our greatest advocates have become a lot of professionals. Which is great–we need professionals. But they’re starting blogs and YouTube channels and talking about what’s good for us. As if they know.

I rarely see a primary source on their social media or their channels or their blogs. A primary source would be a mental health consumer.

I’m not against anyone advocating. In fact, I welcome everyone to stand up and say something about mental health. But to purport that you know what we need just because you have a family member who has struggled, or just because you spent 3,000 hours getting your license (for California), doesn’t make sense. You have no idea what we need.

You can ask us what we need. You can advocate for us by spreading the word that we are individuals who deserve respect and compassion and for the majority of the time are not as helpless as we’re made out to be. You can advocate for research. You can advocate for better understandings of psychosis. You can advocate for women whose anxiety is never taken seriously. You can advocate for men whose depression is never talked about. You can share your own experience. But don’t generalize any of that into “this is how to help someone.” Because you have no idea what’s helped.

Maybe medication has calmed your son down. Great! So you advocate for medication without understanding what that means. Maybe your daughter getting off medication has saved her life. Great! So you spread the word that medication is poison without understanding what that means.

So, let’s talk about what advocacy has turned into lately. I’ll list some things, and we’ll discuss the pros and cons.

What I’ve noticed is that advocacy has turned into two things:

From professionals, we get:

  1. Mental illness.
  2. They’re ill
  3. Mental illness doesn’t make you weak
  4. But you’re sick
  5. Don’t get mad at them. It’s because they’re sick.
  6. Anxiety this
  7. Depression that
  8. Anxiety this
  9. Depression that
  10. Oh, and there’s a bunch of severe ones we don’t advocate for. Because those people are REALLY sick and less common.

From the Pop-advocate world of professionals, Insta-influencers, Tweeters, Facebookers, and whoever else, we get:

  1. Today is another day. Let’s make it a good day.
  2. You can choose happiness.
  3. Here’s a video of me having a -Insert Mental Health Experience-. I just wanted to be transparent #mentalhealth #advocacy; followed by comments of “Omg this is exactly what happens to me, thank you for sharing.”
  4. You are not alone.
  5. We need to end stigma.
  6. Let’s end stigma by talking about how different we are and also saying we need to be treated like everyone else.
  7. #Shareyourstory
  8. #Mentalhealthawareness
  9. Anxiety sucks, but you’re not alone.
  10. I’m not my illness.

The good things about this is that at least there is conversation. Something is started. We have realized that a lot of people deal with anxiety and depression and this can help prevent suicide. We are making an attempt to remind people that pain can be temporary and that a lot of us struggle in the same ways–we’re relating to each other. That’s wonderful.

The bad thing? We’re still tied to this idea that we’re sick. We’re also tied to this idea that other people know what’s best for us. In some cases, this can be true. If you think someone has implanted a microchip in your head and you want to dig it out of your brain, someone stopping you is probably your best bet. But in terms of your care, your treatment, and how you want to live your life? No one knows that for you.

We also negate a lot of topics. We negate the trauma that hospitals cause and ride it off as “I needed to be there”. Perhaps you did. But that doesn’t mean coercion and force is the way to help you get better. We negate research that contradicts a lot of what’s being spread about mental health and these things we label as disorders. For example, the DSM 5 was many years late. Why?

Personality disorders. The only disorder that has been RELIABLY diagnosed (doesn’t mean it’s proven as a disorder of the mind) is Borderline Personality. It doesn’t really have any research backing as a disorder. The experiences are very real. But it’s speculated that has a lot to do with whatever trauma that person was put through, and those experiences being a result of the brain having to learn to process all of it.

The rest of the personality disorders? They’re rarely diagnosed reliably and there is no evidence backing them. And so the committee of old, bald, white men struggled in what to do about this for the DSM 5. In the end, nothing was really done. Subcategories and Axis diagnostic criteria were removed.

But does anyone hear about this? No. No one who needs to, at least. I cite my research professor as my secondary source of information. Could he be wrong? Possibly. But if he’s not, think about what that means.

I think it’s wonderful people want to share their stories. I share mine too. But advocacy is so much more than cheesy positive tweets, some random LCSW on YouTube talking about ways to help someone who is struggling, or people who think it’s cool to video tape their crisis or everyday struggle.

Advocacy is supposed to be about information and support. It’s supposed to be about relating to each other while also showing the general public that not everything they believe is accurate. Advocacy is supposed to also be about lifting each other up, and yet we’re divided in the mental health community right now.

I’ve been questioned on Instagram many times by those who consider themselves anti-psychiatry. I have an article on Mad In America called “A System Built On Fear”. I have labeled myself as anti-psychiatry in the past. I’ve shed all my labels now. I have no faith in the medical model and no faith in anti-psychiatry because neither relies on research or truth or science. Both have sprinkles of it here and there. But the medical model relies on the gullibility of the general public, and Anti-psychiatry relies on personal horror stories.

Both are valid. Neither are helping.

So who advocates for us? Right now, I get the sense it’s mostly professionals and family members. I hear our voices in there too, but they’re drowned out by false perceptions, media distorting research, and labels. They’re being distorted by pop-advocates who are really only catering to the medical model, and extremists only catering to anti-psychiatry.

Where do we go from here?

What do you think? Who advocates for you? How does it feel when you tell your story?

Would you like to continue the conversation, see silly (and beautiful) photos, or nonsensical two second videos? Great! Follow me:

Instagram: @written_in_the_photo

*New* Twitter: @philopsychotic

Snapchat: @FabulousIRLTho

If you liked this article, please share it, hit the like button, and follow ThePhilosophicalPsychotic. I appreciate every reader and commentator. You give me more reason to continue this joyous hobby.

Posted in Emotions, Peer Support, psychology, Uncategorized

Quick Post

Posted on by alidware

Hey everyone.

In an effort to keep this blog rolling and the momentum up, I just wanted to send out an update that because of some bad obsessive anxiety and the resulting paranoia, I won’t be able to crank out my usual post for the day. It was going to be about who we let speak for us in mental health advocacy.

As much as I’d love to do that, I need to take some time today and possibly tomorrow to get myself well again.

In the meantime though, please feel free to give a read to yesterday’s post, “What Is Trauma?” And any of the popular featured posts!

If anyone wants to send some positive vibes on my social media accounts or below In the comments, that’s welcome too. I’ll be tweeting and posting an actual explanation on my Instagram, if you’re curious.

I will resume my usual schedule on Thursday, Jan 9th.

Here’s to all of our wellness and the hard work it takes for us to sustain stability. Thank you to my newly dedicated readers and commentators. You’ve truly been another driving force for me these last few months.

If you’d like to join me on social media, they’re here:

Instagram: @Written_in_the_photo

Twitter: @Philopsychotic

Posted in Emotions, Supporting Friends/Family, Therapy

What Is Trauma?

Posted on by alidware

Today I’m switching up the format a bit. I’ve been doing lists and tips for the past few days because I feel the information has been important and also relevant to many of our lives (if this is an inaccurate perception, please let me know in the comments below). But today has a different vibe to it.

For the longest time, I believed trauma could only exist in the form of a sudden, violent, physical instance, like a car accident or molestation/rape or physical child abuse. It wasn’t until I was 21 did I learn consistently being told to shut up, to not speak, was a form of trauma. It wasn’t until I was 21 did I learn the three years I spent homeless during my childhood was a trauma. I also didn’t know that growing up with an alcoholic and an addict was a very specific type of trauma.

So what exactly IS trauma?

Trauma Is:

Any kind of repeated emotional, verbal, or physical abuse/manipulation that has caused lasting effects. This could range from something seemingly simple like your mother nudging you to lose weight and consistently commenting on what you eat, how much you eat, and what kind of clothes you wear, to your father threatening to kill you if you told the teacher he gave you a black eye.

The thing about trauma is that it doesn’t effect any two people the same way. Not every person who has experienced sexual abuse becomes a drug addict. Not every person who was verbally accosted spends a lifetime struggling with their self-worth. Not every person who was physically abused grows up to be physically abusive.

Many people develop their own ways to process (or not process) their trauma. Some people want to pretend it never happened, and there are times where that helps them move on. We hear a lot that everyone should process their feelings, but as a grief study in Europe showed, sometimes people move on easier and still in a healthy way by just getting back to life rather than diving deep into their feelings. (I will put proper citation for that study when I can find a full copy; I learned of it through my previous professor).

Some people relive the events everyday and it cripples them. It invades their relationships, their school, their work, their own sense of peace.

Some people, like me, don’t really recognize where the trauma has effected their life or how. I think I talked a little about the trauma around my learning to speak for myself in this post, On Mental Health and Freedom.

Some people are in the middle and can function well, but are haunted from time to time with flashbacks or residual effects of their trauma.

Where Is Trauma Located?

Maybe that sounds weird.

What I mean is, where do you feel the trauma?

Often with mental health, we’re told “it’s just in your head”, and with trauma that’s not always the case. As a hypothesis, trauma can also be felt in your body as physical memories. Now, I don’t have a research paper sitting in front of me to back me up with this, all I have is my personal experience of certain physical attributes presenting when preparing certain memories for EMDR therapy.

When I find a paper that has studied this with a proper research method, I will update everyone.

But, if you have experienced trauma, you may get what I’m talking about. You feel certain things in your body. You may feel yourself separating from your body as the result of a specific memory–we call this dissociation. There may be certain words or attitudes or body language from someone else that may activate a tightening in your stomach or nausea or hot flashes with seemingly no explanation.

For me, one of these things is the “inner child”. The last therapist who asked me to talk to my inner child pulled some kind of deep seeded darkness into the light and whenever someone says the words or I think about it, I break down crying. I’m not sad, it’s just my body’s response. I’ll get warm and my chest will tighten and I have no full explanation for it.

So, it’s not “all in your head”, from my personal experience.

We talked a bit about this at a Hearing Voices Network workshop a couple years ago. We talked about how trauma can cause our mind to separate from our body and how that relates to and can be a catalyst for psychosis.

What this means is that, in approaching trauma, we must consider the whole body experience. We must consider reconnecting the mind with the body and this is often done with grounding techniques, similar to those used for anxiety and panic attacks: reminding yourself you are safe, feeling your feet on the ground, pinpointing areas of your body and focusing on them, or pinpointing objects in the room and saying them out loud.

Is EMDR A Proven Therapy?

NO. You’d be surprised to find that mindfulness isn’t either.

For those who don’t know, EMDR (Eye Movement and Desensitization Reprocessing) is a type of specific trauma therapy in which a traumatized patient is guided by someone trained with specific skills in asking particular questions about a traumatic memory (some of which can feel like CBT therapy) while they move a wand back and forth or flash moving lights. The hypothesis here is that eye movement helps your brain process the memory as a whole.

What I will say, for EMDR, is that studies have shown it works for the majority of people. The problem with the majority of the studies is that they often don’t separate the actual therapeutic content (the therapist leading you, asking questions, guiding you to feel your feelings) from the little lights and wand and all that.

So, in order for a valid study to prove that this therapy works, it would need to be compared with CBT with no lights/wand, Lights/wand with no CBT, the full EMDR package of lights/wand, and guiding CBT questions, and of course a control group of no treatment. Haven’t yet read a study like that. (If you know of one, please send it to me or put it down below in the comments! Please link the FULL research article or at the very least the abstract, not a secondary source).

EMDR is very popular. But so is Debriefing Therapy done after a serious natural disaster/crisis and studies have shown that actually makes people worse.

So POPULAR does not equal PROVEN.

What I will say from my current EMDR experience, is that it’s brought up a lot of pain but it also helped me process an incident at work very quickly. And had I not done that, I think the incident would have stuck with me in a different way. A hindering way.

What is Dissociation Like?

Dissociation can become a way of life for those traumatized, and it can also be a savior. It can pull you through tough moments. I’ve been dissociating regularly, and heavily, since I was 14 and I can say the first few years it bothered me. It bothered me mostly because I wasn’t so aware of it happening until I was told I walked into four lanes of traffic and 3 miles home without responding to anyone.

A lot of the time it feels like you, your essence, is somewhere far away and your body is stuck down here in muddy waters. Other forms of dissociation make you feel like your body isn’t real or that none of the earthly objects around you are real. This can be terrifying for a lot of people, and upsetting.

I’ve been experimenting with turning my dissociation into a profit. Not a monetary profit, but a mental profit. Dissociating has helped me learn to share power with my voices and given me a space I can retreat safely when needed.

Am I Traumatized?

Are you? I don’t know. If you experience some of the aforementioned things, perhaps. I’m not going to tell you what you are and what you aren’t, though. If you feel that there are things in the past that hinder your daily activities today or effect your mood or how you interact with people, it may be worth finding someone to talk to about it.

It took me years to realize that the reason I struggled interacting with people wasn’t because I was strange, weird, or a freak, but because I’d been taught my words were invalid, my thoughts were useless, and I didn’t have any right to speak. That mentality has continued to follow me into my adulthood, and it’s only been in the past year I’ve been able to rationally confront it.

So, as terrifying as facing pain can be, if it’s something you feel you need to get off your chest, if it’s something that’s been keeping you from living the life you want to live, it may be worth working toward gaining a new perspective and reaching out for guidance.

I don’t think I’ll want to talk about all my trauma for all of my life. I’d get tired of being weary over it. But a couple sessions of half-ass studied EMDR won’t hurt.

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Posted in Peer Support, psychology, Supporting Friends/Family, Voices

How To Support A Loved One’s Mental Health Journey

Posted on by alidware

Chances are, if your loved one is struggling, you’re overwhelmed, they’re overwhelmed, and you all just want time to stop so you can breathe.

Unfortunately, we experience time in a linear fashion because of our physicality. Sorry.

What we can do is learn, adapt, and have a meaningful existence.

So, let’s start with something simple:

Tip #1: Offer an ear

The easiest thing to do, which can also become one of the hardest things to stay consistent with and have patience for, is be an ear for your loved one.

Understand you are not their therapist, you are not their treatment center and you are not their savior. What you are is a confidant, a safe person. You don’t have to solve any problems and if your loved one is asking you to, kindly remind them that solutions aren’t always the answer: sometimes you just need to ride the waves, feel the pain, and learn to adapt. They will know this instinctually, but sometimes the pain is so great that we just want relief. That’s why gentle reminders, patience, and compassionate words are the best a friend or parent or partner or sibling can do.

Depressive phrases like “I just want to die” can be startling and sometimes your first instinct is to ask “are you safe?”. Refrain from that. For the love of God, refrain from that.

A lot of the times in my suicidal ideation I needed to vent and get the heavy burden off my shoulders. I needed someone to hear me. I didn’t need someone to panic and make me doubt I had any control over myself.

If your loved one talks about suicide often, concern is valid. Fear is valid. But not everyone benefits from multiple 3 day hospitalizations just because they’re thinking about killing themselves.

Instead sit with them. If they have a mental health team, maybe connect with them. Ask what you can do to help. You’ll probably get a response of “nothing” or “I don’t know, I just don’t want to be here anymore”. And that’s okay. You can’t control their actions or their thoughts and sometimes space for the seriousness and the authenticity of the pain helps release the tension.

Remember yourself in this too. Your loved one is in pain and you don’t like that. You want to help. You want to pull them out. But you can’t do everything, and that’s killing you. Sometimes you get so angry you want to pull your hair out. Sometimes you just want to give up. And so do they. They don’t want to feel like a burden to everyone around them and a way to show them that they aren’t is to make sure you take care of your own mental wellbeing. Show them you will be okay.

Their feelings are not your responsibility. That doesn’t make you selfish or careless. It makes you an individual mind.

So, in short: offer an ear, really hear them, and restrain your panic. Keep firm boundaries—your friend can’t be calling every ten seconds for you to rescue them, they need to find their own footing and be less dependent. You can foster this with healthy support, a compassionate ear, and voicing your own struggle if their pain becomes too much to bear.

Tip #2: Stay Educated

This will be important particularly if your child is affected. There is tons of research coming out every day on all these labels we’ve created and a lot of the real research is in stark contradiction to what you find on your average health website or mental health forum. If this is all new to you, I’d suggest checking out my previous post, How to Read a Psychological Research Paper, so you know what to look for.

It’s nice to read personal stories of individuals who are also affected; that’s often why we tell our stories is so that people can understand where we’re coming from. If your son bursts in your room and says something like “why the fuck would you say that? Get away from me”, you might start to doubt your coping abilities, you might start feeing like you have to walk on eggshells, and you’ll eventually just blame his mental health.

The problem with just blaming the experience is that you lack the understanding necessary to actually be compassionate. You can learn to not take things personal, you can earn to ignore harsh words and phrases, but all that does is discount the experience. Let me explain.

In personal stories you may read that someone once thought his mother was part of the CIA and transmitting his thoughts back to headquarters, commenting on his movements and locations, and so he’d yell at his mom or break things or do strange things to disrupt her telepathy. In the story you might read about the fear he felt, the terror, how scared he was despite how angry he appeared.

And that’s the key. If you don’t understand that your loved one, in this state, is much more sacred and confused than angry, you’ll be more inclined to yell back or try and present evidence in an attempt to break a delusion.

Not everyone has the luxury of being able to discuss what’s going on with their loved one in this state. But if you do, if there are substantial moments of clarity, especially in altered states like this that aren’t a crisis, it can be transformative for both to explore some of the fear and terror and brainstorm some ways to help your loved one reality check when things get intense.

In order to do that, you’ll need to know some things about altered states. Read some personal stories, read some valid research, and involve your loved one in all of this. Introduce some stories to them, discuss some of the research if that’s possible at the time, and help them know they aren’t alone. Express to them your fears and your confusion. Maybe saying something like “when you do this, I get confused because . . .” And create a dialogue around confusion. For those of us with anxiety and psychosis and even depression it can be very helpful when we know where we stand with someone.

Tip #3: Be Involved

Maybe you can’t do all of this for just a friend all the time. But if you could join them at a support group or help them get to an appointment, that can really be a great tangible way of showing you care. And, again, boundaries are important; if you take your friend to her weekly appointment once, and she keeps asking for a ride every week, find a time to remind her face to face that you have responsibilities of your own. Offer to help her find a bus pass or teach her how to use Uber/Lyft. But ultimately she needs to find her own way for some of the time.

Ask what kind of involvement your loved one would like. I know when my parents came to my therapy appointments, even if it was just my mother sitting outside, I didn’t like it. It was supposed to be my own personal space, my own personal time to get my own personal thoughts out. Unless your loved one is incapable of speaking for themselves, you should give them as much space as they want so they can develop their sense of being again.

Do not take control. Reach compromises with your loved one. Discuss things. Don’t talk about things with your loved one’s doctor without your loved one present. We have a saying in the peer community: Nothing About Us, Without Us. When this isn’t honored, we feel cheated, betrayed, out of control and this can fuel paranoia for those of us dealing with psychosis; suddenly, you’re working for the CIA again and you have no idea why.

If the doctor insists talking about things without his/her actual patient involved, resist and stand up for your loved one, particularly if they aren’t in the room to do so themselves.

This is important because supporting us in empowering ourselves instead of supporting our dependence or helplessness is what becomes eventual motivation for us to find stability. In fact, it’s essential in finding stability.

You might feel that your loved one can’t do anything on their own, and maybe in a crisis that’s true. Helping has its time and place as all things. But you have to understand that a hospital doesn’t foster individualism. It fosters helplessness. And if that attitude is continued outside of the hospital, and after the crisis, there will be little motivation and little belief that things can ever change.

The belief is the key factor here.

My parents were never involved much in my health or my crises. That may have saved me, because they never treated me any different. They assumed me to be well, they assumed me to be able to feed myself and clothe myself and bathe. When I didn’t, when I went into crisis mode and was in a hospital that did all those things for me—reminders at least—and I came home to zero reminders, zero help, after a while I knew that I wasn’t going to get that kind of dependent support. I never suffered with the belief that I was incapable. Even when I wasn’t showering in a depressive episode. I didn’t believe I couldn’t, I didn’t believe it was “just too hard”, I just believed the pain was too great to pay attention to that kind of crap right then.

So, be involved, but don’t suffocate. Reach a compromise with your loved one. This may take some wrangling, and both of you may need some patience. It takes a while to figure this stuff out. A single conversation isn’t going to be enough.

Tip #4: Breathe

The best thing you can do for your loved one is be well.

There’s not much else to say about that.

And this isn’t to be well for them. This isn’t to be well so you can be their caretaker. This is for you to be well for you. This is to promote your own healthy state of mind and live your life with your loved one. It’s possible to have a peaceful existence. It’s just not possible to have it without some hiccups along the way. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It all depends on how you adapt.

A Final Thought:

These tips are built from things I wished people had done with me. Anxiety crippled me as a kid, and into adulthood; depression buried me my teenage years, and psychosis has given me insight to the universe, and not in a delusional sense. It would have been nice having close family or close friends along that entire journey with me.

And so, my parting word is this: walk with your loved one—not in front of them, not behind them, but beside them.

Would you like to continue the conversation, see silly (and beautiful) photos, or nonsensical two-second videos? Great! Follow me:

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Posted in Peer Support, psychology, science, Therapy

How To Read A Psychological Research Paper

Posted on by alidware

One thing I notice a lot of advocacy websites falling victim to is citing research without really understanding what that research means. A lot of the time they’re pulling from secondary, third, fourth, or fifth resources because the information they get comes from news reports that are also reporting information from secondary, third, fourth, or fifth resources. A secondary resource, for example, would be a textbook or another article describing the research findings.

The issue with this is very rarely do these articles go into detail about the research procedure, the methods, or any resulting confounding variables. The issue with THAT is the only information YOU receive are the results. And when the results say something like “Eating a Grapefruit Everyday Will Cure Your Anxiety”, you want to believe it. What you’re missing is that the study had 20 subjects, no control variable, and the subjects–by the way–were worms.

I’ll cover some basic ways to judge whether or not a paper you read–and you should be reading the actual paper–is a valid result or something that needs a lot more investigation.

First, if you haven’t yet read any of the series Is Psychology A Science posted here on this website, you can find the first in the 4-article series right here at this link. It will give you background information on why this is important from a scientific perspective.

Contrary to what you may believe, you don’t need to be a seasoned researcher to read these papers. You don’t need to know how to do an ANOVA test or a Chi Squared test. You don’t need to know what p <.05 really means. You don’t even need to know a lot on the subject the paper reports on. All you need is some basic knowledge. Let’s go step by step.

What does a paper consist of?

What’s great about research papers is that you always know what to expect. There will be the first paragraph, which is called an Abstract that tells you what the paper is about and often contains one sentence describing the results.

Often a full-length introduction is followed. This is important when the study is backed by, or has a lot of reference for, other experiments. Here you will find the importance of the subject and what other researchers have found and how this study will differ.

Next commonly comes Methods. This is where all the materials are listed and the procedure (including participants) are described. This is done in great detail so that peer review and (if/when published) practitioners and psychologists and everyone who SHOULD be reading the study, can determine validity. Here, you will learn the ins and outs of the experiment and/or the outside resources used to gather data.

The Results follow. Here you find the final statistics. You will find step-by-step results for how each participant (or group of participants) and sometimes you will see charts, graphs, info-graphics of all types that represent the data.

Discussion comes last. Here you find what those results mean and any recommendations for further research. This is where you will find confounding variables (discussed below) and another place to scrutinize the validity of the study.

Afterward comes acknowledgements, often who financially supported the research. This can be particularly important when reading studies about medication; if the pharmaceutical company that makes Risperdal (Johnson & Johnson) is providing funding for Risperdal research, the paper is subject to publication bias. This can be harder to detect and won’t be discussed here. I will be writing a separate post on this.

Then the reference list, which are other studies cited in the paper.

This layout is important. If the paper you’re reading isn’t like this, it’s not a research paper and what you’re reading is a secondary source, meaning a summation of the original research. This could be so far from the actual research finding, that it’s completely useless.

Is this studying what the researchers meant to study?

When reading a paper, it’s important to sniff out whether what’s been observed is what was actually meant to be observed.

This is known as construct validity. Research in psychology can be tricky because most of the time you’re observing behavior and behavior can be caused by many factors. For example, if we’re trying to study whether or not television violence influences real violence in young children, we need to define what violence is and what constitutes aggressive behavior. If we don’t, trying to find a relationship between behavior and the amount of violent television being watched will be hopeless; you won’t see any relationship, you’ll just see aggressiveness and violent television as separate entities. They may look correlated, but when properly studied you may see different results.

If a paper related to television violence and children do not have operational definitions (the definitions of the behavior we’re looking for), than it’s safe to say that paper isn’t really showing much.

A lot of the time this gets twisted in the media. For example, you’ll read statistics everywhere that those labeled with schizophrenia have a shorter life span of about ten years. A lot of people take that as “schizophrenia kills”. But is that really what reports and studies are saying?

No. There are other factors: taking hardcore, organ-destroying medication for decades is one of them. Less access to proper healthcare–many with the label are homeless and struggling with drugs or just at the mercy of their mind. Disability money doesn’t necessarily fund a heart healthy, body healthy diet either; most organic foods and healthy foods are hard to sustain for those on limited income and no support. Suicide rates are also higher. So this idea that some mythical chemical imbalance causes some mythical disease that slowly kills the brain like some kind of hallucinogenic Alzheimer’s is incorrect. Or rather, it’s never been proven.

This leads us into:

What Are The Confounding Variables?

These are factors which could muck up research findings.

For example, a lot of the papers I referenced in Is Schizophrenia a Brain Disease? had their confounding factors clearly listed. They said blatantly that much of their research has no definitive results. One paper even urged people not to take their results as proof that a chemical imbalance explains what people experience. So where does this idea that this label is a disease come from?

From people taking the one line of results and posting it in the New York Times or a CNN reporter giving a brief run-down of the study on national television. Belief is where this idea comes from. Science says otherwise.

I think one of the most famous incidents of this is the idea of the schizophrenogenic mother.

There was a time doctors and patients believed it was the mother’s bad parenting that created the experiences now labeled as schizophrenia. To test this, one researcher took a group of mothers who had children who matched the diagnosis and studied how they interacted.

She concluded a mother’s behavior can create ‘schizophrenic behavior’. Then she listed that in order to be an official and valid study, she would have to also study mothers who don’t have labeled children and their interactions; her confounding variable was no control group.

So what happened? The results were taken and spread to newspapers, to doctors, to psychologists and psychiatrists and for a while people really believed the mother was to blame for madness.

Because the general public, and even some doctors, didn’t understand how to read research papers. And also because it was an answer and they didn’t have any other answers. Rather than be scientific, they followed their intuition. It’s something that still plagues psychology today.

That’s why

Control Groups

Are super important.

Say you’re reading a paper on the medication Abilify and its relation to a reduction in psychotic symptoms at a dosage of 20mg. You read in the procedure section that thirty five people (an okay sample size) were recruited and given Abilify and you read in the Results section that 89% of the participants reported a reduction in symptoms within the four week time period. You also read in the discussion section that the researchers conclude Abilify has effectiveness at the dosage of 20mg on psychosis.

This sounds legitimate. And any average person who read that paper would probably feel that Abilify really does have an effectiveness on psychosis at 20mg.

What would be some problems with this, though?

One striking thing would be–where is the comparison? In order to see any level of effectiveness, we need to compare it to a group that doesn’t receive the treatment, a group that isn’t manipulated. This is a control group.

We’d also need to know how the participants were randomly chosen. We’d need to know the symptoms which were reduced and whether that was sustained. I’d criticize the four week trial period. Was there also a follow up? If so, what were the results? And, if you are like me and extra-critical, you’d wonder why they didn’t cite all the research in the introduction which says there is no efficacy for an Abilify dose over 10mg.

This can make certain things hard to study ethically and practically. There are many ways around that, but we won’t discuss all that here. If you are reading a paper and have trouble finding what they compared their manipulated variable to, or if their comparison group seems shoddy, search for some more research.

I’d like to point out had that research example I gave above actually been published, hell would have frozen over. There are some shoddy papers out there, but a lot are caught in peer review.

Last but not least:

Results are results. Interpretation is interpretation. Secondary sources are not results.

Media attempts to get things right. But often they don’t.

If you are on an advocacy site for mental health and you read a sentence that says “research shows”, and they don’t list a reference, ask for it. If they do list a reference, click on that reference. If that reference is another secondary source, and that secondary source doesn’t list a primary source, like the actual research paper, than you can’t be sure how accurate that “research shows” statistic is.

I’m not saying we should start mistrusting our fellow advocates. I’m saying as advocates the information we should put out must be backed by facts, not opinion or interpretation. Most of us who advocate are peers, meaning we have lived mental health experience. Great! We already have an advantage by having inside knowledge on experiences that most doctors don’t. Let’s boost that advantage with also having scientific knowledge and thinking critically.

Even I’m guilty of saying “research shows” in previous posts on my old blog and perhaps even this one already. It’s hard work finding these papers and reading them and citing them and analyzing them. But did anything come from soft work? No.

If you want to advocate, help empower us by criticizing research, reading research, and sharing research. Open a discussion about what’s being studied. Push clinical psychologists and psychiatrists to actually read what’s been coming out.

Together, we can change the perspective of mental health in society.

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