Tag: schizophrenia

Posted in Freedom, Peer Support, Therapy, Voices

A Different Way To Hear Voices: Tips and Tricks

Posted on by alidware

We ask doctors what we’re supposed to do about them, how we’re supposed to manage them, how we can make them go away and often the doctors don’t have a very good answer not because they aren’t book-smart (because they’ve certainly proven time and time again they are VERY book-smart) but because they have no idea what they’re dealing with. That’s the truth.

Medication works for some of us—makes them fainter, or less intrusive at the least. But rarely will you hear someone comment their voices have gone away completely.

Couple that with fleeting thoughts that seem to come from that one area of your mind you never open the doors to, and your ability to focus is reduced to the attention span of a goldfish, literally.

What are some other ways we can deal with this?

Get Involved!

I hear that Support Groups can be helpful. You meet people who you can form (perhaps) life-long friendships with, people who understand where you are and meet you there rather than try and pull you where they are. I’ve personally never got much from group therapy or support groups. I find it difficult to be truly open with people, even after a year of acquaintanceship, and so I stray from this option.

But if it sounds like something which may be good for you, I suggest looking into your local NAMI chapter (if you’re in the United States). I would also suggest searching for alternative groups and using other language besides “mental illness” or “disorder” in your search engine. By doing that, I found a list of wellness groups 45 minutes from me with names like “Support group for those with voices and visions”. These kind of groups offer the same type of peer support, but through a different lens.

It can be transformative to engage with people who have different perspectives. Through them, you learn more about your beliefs and form a more solid understand of yourself. I find this to be pertinent in getting grounded because we lose part of our identity when falling through a crisis. We have people telling us what to do, when to do it, how do it it, how to get healthy, why we are aren’t healthy, and kind of become the property of those around us and the terror in our head.

We want to reclaim some of who we are. Sometimes that means discovering ourselves for the first time. Sometimes that means reinventing who we once were. In either scenario, solidifying your beliefs, your passions, and remembering what it feels like to be respected and give respect are all things which help us build ourselves outside of others expectations.

Explore the Unknown!

This is probably a less sought-after option because it doesn’t involve immediate relief. If anything, you’ll be in more pain for a while.

What I mean by explore the unknown is actually listen to the voices. Don’t abide by them or agree with them (all the time) or allow yourself to be convinced of something you know for a fact isn’t true. That sounds a lot easier and more practical than it actually is. But it’s worked in many ways for me.

Stop yelling back. What does yelling usually do? Make them louder, right? Your voices aren’t some shy kids on the playground who you can bully. Most of the time, they won’t submit. And maybe they don’t need to submit. Maybe they’re there to teach patience and understanding and resiliency. Maybe they’re there to teach you life lessons your parents couldn’t. Or maybe they’re just there to be assholes. I think most people you know could fall into one or all of these categories. The point is, you’ll never really know the correct category (for both people and voices) if you don’t listen.

I explained in my previous post, How Philosophy Helped Me Process Psychosis, that I lived under the impression that my voices were demons from a hell I didn’t believe in, here to prevent me from serving my one true purpose. I didn’t just snap out of this one day from medication or extra sleep or hospitalization. It took a couple years of exploring and pain and horror for me to come to any coherent realization.

Seeing how others dealt with their voices was helpful, which is why I recommended support groups at the beginning of this post. In giving myself a chance to hear others, I also gave myself a chance to hear myself. I heard that I was wanted dead. I heard that I was doomed. I also heard I was the light of the earth and I was protected. I got a lot of mixed messages.

What does listening to these messages do, besides cause you more distress?

Well, what does listening to your friend do when they’re stressed out? Sometimes, if you’re attentive and listening closely, it escalates their pain and they scream or cry and they get it all out. Then they’re quiet, they’re thankful, and they might even ask how you’re doing. This leads me into my next tip:

Start a Dialogue!

Let’s be clear here: when I say listen to them, I don’t mean ignore them. Let them vent, yes. Let them vent the commands, the violence, the sadness, the happiness, the grandiosity, whatever their M.O is, and then ask a question or two. Make a reflection. If they are telling you to kill yourself, ask them why. If they respond with an answer that sounds reasonable to you in the moment, something like “no one loves you” or “they all hate you,” consider a compassionate response like “you’re in pain; I am too. Can we figure this out together? I don’t really want to die.”

Why?

What I kept hearing over and over again was the importance of showing yourself compassion. It’s no different than what people with depression or anxiety are told: be kind to yourself.

And if you don’t believe your voices are apart of you, if you believe they are outside of yourself as I believed, remember that we’re all an extension of the universe, and that’s not some mystical hippie stuff, that’s science. We’re all made of the same material, within the same cosmos. We are all each other. Be kind to the earth because earth is an extension of you. Be kind to your children because your children are an extension of you. Be kind to your voices because your voices are an extension of you.

No therapist or friend has (hopefully) ever supported you by screaming back at you and swearing to end you, even if you yelled first or insulted them, or threatened them. And so don’t support yourself that way. Support yourself with compassion and patience and kindness, and remember that you are sharing a space with these things, these voices. You’re all in this body together. This brings up the final tip:

Create A Space for Them!

This is better illustrated with a quick story.

Last night a wave of confusion hit me. My thoughts circled around my impending death and nothing I read made sense. I could barely respond to text messages. I knew something was upsetting my system, and a familiar voice told me to go for a drive. So I did, for two hours.

I headed to some cliffs. I realized I was fighting a lot, fighting the confusion, fighting the voices telling me this drive would be my last, fighting the belief that they’d trigger a heart attack if I parked by the cliffs, and fighting the fact that none of my fighting reaped any benefits. And so I checked out.

I gave them some space. I stopped arguing with the thoughts. I also stopped being fearful of them, and I stopped feeding them with attention. I dissociated and only remember a few snippets of my drive. I did reach the cliffs, but didn’t park partly because of fear and partly because I didn’t want to sit near other cars.

While weaving down some roads I didn’t know very well, I realized my body felt a little lighter I wasn’t as stressed, and some of the thoughts of death had gone away because I’d faced my fear. One of my more familiar voices told me, “See? We know what’s best for you.”

Did they know what was best for me? I didn’t think so. I disagreed and asked why, then, do you keep telling me I’m going to die? Why do you keep feeding my anxiety? His answer?

“Pain is necessary.”

We all know that pain is unavoidable in life, but this struck me so deeply because of all the duality I mentioned in my previous post, that they were here to both lift me up and pull me down and that’s what makes them no better than me, no better than any human. That’s what makes us able to relate. That very duality is what makes us able to share this body and live with each other.

This took a few years of confusion and talking and different types of therapy and 8 years on and (finally) off medication. This took a lot of anger and frustration and fear and maybe some risks. But it’s possible.

And in The End…

There is no textbook on how to deal with your voices. There is no doctor or therapist or friend or family member or self-help stranger or medication or amazingly insightful philosophical blog that can tell you what the right path is. The hardship and pain and joy is in finding that yourself.

You do have to live with yourself for the rest of your life. Might as well figure out a way to do so peacefully.

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Posted in Emotions, Freedom, psychology, Voices

How Philosophy Helped Me Process Psychosis

Posted on by alidware

This will be part of my story but also a tribute to the power and destructive properties of thought.

I started cracking up shortly after I took my first philosophy introductory course 5 years ago. We covered everything from determinism to Cogito Ergo Sum to relativisms and categorical imperatives. I suppose I should specify this was a Western Philosophy introduction class.

Mortality and ethics, both western and eastern thought, were the subjects I focused on after that. Why? Well, debates intrigued me and the confusion on whether we’re born with an innate sense of what’s right and wrong or whether it’s developed based upon laws, society, and culture struck me as a paradox; we can’t know what we knew (or if we knew anything) when or before we were born, and therefore have no variable to isolate—we will never know which influences us more; instinct or culture.

Scientifically, as of today, this is impossible to study. Philosophically, the debate rages. And no, your opinion on whether or not morality is innate is not scientific evidence. You could create a viable hypothesis, just know it’s probably not testable in a way that will provide valid results. But, nurture your beliefs anyway. Beliefs keep us alive.

On the journey into the murky, grey waters of morality, I got a sight of hell. I felt the hot breath of demons. They told me I was a dead man walking every time I stepped. They hunted me. And I couldn’t figure out why.

It started with possession. They invaded my body and others near me. This happened, I reasoned, because it was finally time. They’d been watching me all my life, I’d felt them as a child, and now they were trying to throw me off my divine path. I was here to influence the world, thwart their plans. Dead celebrities wrote through me; they’d also been watching me since I was a child. Still, when I hear of deaths, I feel them joined with me.

I turned to ancient Egyptian beliefs and amulets. I felt Thoth on my side, and spent nights creating rituals to talk with him.

Classmates were possessed, armed against me in this spiritual warfare. I dropped classes.

I didn’t believe in hell though, or God, not in the sense of “white Jesus”. I didn’t believe spiritual masters controlling our fate. And because I didn’t believe in any of this, the creatures possessing me, massacring people, were not demons. I realized I’d labeled them as such because I had no better words to do so. They never called themselves demons. And that lead me to Eastern Philosophy.

Unity is what saved me. The unity of all living things, of all emotions, of all concepts, of my body and my mind. There are forces that unify particles and molecules and atoms. Matter is just condensed energy, in the simplest terms, after all. This realization turned me toward The Tao Te Ching specifically, and Daoism; The Way. True Daoism isn’t interested much in this physical world or the conundrums that man spends so much time trying to reason himself through. As someone who was and always has been very logical and scientific, this thought confused me. What else was there in life besides reasoning?

What’s great is that a lot of mystical ideas within Taoism, ideals which could have been scientific had the philosophers not seen analysis as such a waste of time (in a lot of ways it is, though), have been and continue to be paralleled with modern science, particularly physics. The Tao of Physics by physicist Fritjof Capra is a great book to read more on this subject. I read it a few months ago, and it’s the book pictured at the top of this blog.

The Daoist way acknowledges and observes the natural transformation of things in nature, like the blossoming and decaying of a flower. Yes, this is where the T’ai-Chi T’u diagram comes in: it represents the unification of these polar opposites: one must exist for the other to exist. We’re talking, of course, about Yin and Yang. A consequence of life is death (or cellular regeneration if we’re talking freaky single cell organisms) and you cannot have died without once having been alive. In fact, we would have no concept of being alive or living if death did not rear its gentle head. And if we were always dead, well, we wouldn’t know it and words for it wouldn’t exist.

Both Yin (the darker element of existence representative of the earth) and Yang (the creative, heavenly—meaning not of earth—element of existence) have equal importance and balance everything. The symbol’s flowing movement, according to Capra, represents continuous cycles; in other words, these opposites are constantly within each other, influencing each other, and being each other because if they were alone, neither would exist.

This isn’t a Western way of thought. Here, someone is either guilty or innocent. Something is either right, or wrong. The flower is either alive or dead, and we see these things as separate from each other in the same way we see ourselves separate from each other. You can see this disconnect rooted in things like in segregation, in P.C culture, and in Mental Health. And because we don’t ascribe to the idea of fluid existence, of fluid transformation, because everything for us is so hard lined and linear—which is only logical because we experience existence in a physical sense despite knowing Time isn’t linear—we’ve developed an individualist and autonomous society.

That’s not to say it’s wrong. In fact, I stopped believing in the hard sense of right and wrong a long time ago.

And so how can something so abstract apply to life and how in the world did it help me balance madness?

Chuang Tzu explains this beautifully:

“The sayings ‘shall we not follow and honour the right and have nothing to do with the wrong?‘ and ‘shall we not follow and honour those who secure good government and have nothing to do with those who produce disorder?’ Show a want if acquaintance with the principals of Heaven [not of earth; cosmos, spiritual universe] and Earth and with the different qualities of things. It is like following and honouring Heaven and taking no account of Earth; it is like following and honouring the yin and taking no account of the yang.”

Chuang Tzu. Also quoted in The Tao of Physics.

And suddenly life made a lot of sense.

Suddenly I understood why conclusions of morality always felt so contrived. I understood why “staying positive” never worked, and never would. I understood separation and dissociation and, most of all, I understood the fluid duality of everything, including my demons.

They weren’t demons after all, just as I’d suspected. I call them false angels now, because they are good in their badness and bad in their goodness. They couldn’t be demons because according to this natural, fluid transformation and existence of all things in the universe, everything has a polar opposite. Yes, classical physics tells us this, but not in terms of fluidity.

A demon has no goodness. But because I looked through this lens of consistently being unified with all opposites, these voices and spirits had no choice but to be both good and bad. They struggled with the universal order just like every particle, every force, every human.

This concept I have brought into the novel I’ve been working on, and I’m not mentioning how much I processed these thoughts through a first draft years ago, so whenever it gets published and you read it (and you WILL read it) you will see the similarities and thought process. You will think back to this post and say hey, I remember this! I was there! I. Was. There.

I could empathize with being torn apart by duality. I often found myself between sanity and madness. Between the right decision or the wrong decision. Between living and dying. Between happy and sad. And so I empathized with these damaged, clever, and now exposed beings. I saw the path they carved, the fork in the road that they drove me toward, and saw that this was never a battle between light and dark like I interpreted. They were always both protecting and hurting me; it’s the natural order of things.

That’s the real reason I stopped fighting. Not because I couldn’t anymore, not because I was too tired or because a bunch of therapists told me to, but because I recognized the pain and confusion and duality that radiates through the waves of the entire universe. I saw myself in it, and slowly my fear dissolved.

I get frustrated sometimes still at things they say or things I feel they’re influencing. I get swept away sometimes still, too. I mentioned before I thought of voluntarily committing myself some weeks ago. So this has not eliminated the struggle. What it’s done is give it purpose. It’s given it a place in the universe. It’s given me a reason not to feel sorry for myself or tortured or scream “why me!” Into the sky. It’s helped me learn to share my body and mind and the power of thought with whatever it is in my head, whether that’s a few misguided chemicals or actual spiritual contact. Neither are different from each other: they both follow that natural, fluid rotation. They are bound by the chaotic, ordered, unity of opposites.

This is the reason not referring to myself as “mentally ill” or “sick” has always set me free. This is why listening to my body and choosing to stray from medication was the right decision for me.

Philosophy saves lives.

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Posted in Freedom, Peer Support

This Is How We End Stigma

Posted on by alidware

If there’s anything I’m leaving behind in 2019, it’s the teenaged, damaged version of me. I’m leaving behind immaturity and replacing it with realistic observation and contemplation. I’m respecting the graves of my trauma, enough that I can finally leave the cemetery. I’m not looking for anything in 2020. I will understand myself better and I will reach the potential I’ve always had. I will be turning 25 in 2020.

I started my old blog Mental Truths in July 2015. My last post was sometime early 2019. As I read through old posts, I realized how lost and confused and disconnected I was. It was mental health rants sprinkled with a hint of actual coherent thought.

And what I’ve learned between July 2015 and December 2019 is that the complexities of life are not only beautiful, they are terrifying. I learned there is nothing inherently wrong with terror and fear. I learned we often allow ourselves to be controlled by these primal reactions to life. I learned how our body and mind respond to life is dependent on more factors than neurotransmitters or trauma.

I went from an anti-psychiatry extremist to someone who sees more division within the mental health community than in those outside of the community who move against us or refuse to accept us. I learned Stigma is real and also bullshit.

We self-stigmatize more than others stigmatize us. We hold our struggles against others, as if the entire world doesn’t suffer in some way at some point. As if our personal struggle is so great that family, friends, partners, should put our health before their own, and if they don’t, they’re being “unreasonable” or they “don’t care”. As if everything revolves around us.

As if we must force people to accept us. We don’t.

People won’t accept us until we accept ourselves. Until we stop pretending the experience of voices and visions hold more pain and torment and severity than the experience of anxiety and panic. Until we recognize we all hurt.

This holds true for any inequality. I am mixed race, my father is African American, my mother is Caucasian, with her family having immigrated from Poland. Much of my life has been dictated by a cultural identity crisis. I didn’t fit in with the white kids, I didn’t fit in with the black kids, and I felt like I had to fit in with one of them. I was the only non-Hispanic in a college prep class that was supposed to be specified toward low-income, first generation college bound students. Instead, it was geared toward brown students who had a pretty good home life and high income. It took four years for them to integrate other races. And by other races, I mean two white kids.

And so I was very angry. I was sick of watching movies and documentaries in my college prep class ONLY dedicated toward brown students. I was sick of teachers handing me Spanish instructions for my parents and looking at me weird when I said I didn’t speak Spanish.

I felt erased. I felt degraded. Invisible. Ignored. And this is the result of a culture believing pain has hierarchy. A culture that thinks every little mention of skin color or inequality is fulfilling a racist culture. A culture where “you don’t look/act schizophrenic” is actually a sentence that’s uttered.

I had a right to be angry. But looking back, I placed myself on a pedestal. That “I’m more disadvantaged than you” type of superiority that seems to plague every ethnicity and every culture in some way.

Fear is a strong emotion. And psychological research has shown in countless studies that we often misinterpret our own feelings and signals we receive from our body. What may be fear may register as anger or sadness or even arousal. Looking back, I know now that I feared everything not because I didn’t fit in, but because I didn’t know myself. Sometimes arrogance and superiority becomes a barrier against the world.

And that’s happening in the mental health community. We fear our experiences often, we fear the thought of never “getting better”, we fear rejection and misunderstanding. And so we strive to prove we are sick. We strive to prove we are in pain, that we suffer, and in the middle of that battle we engage in friendly fire.

I’ve spent the last three years working on my fear. I was tired of being a prisoner and being sick meant I was a prisoner. Being “okay against my will” as one singer puts it, meant I was a prisoner. And so I dove into fear and terrified myself. I stopped being okay and in not being okay I became even better than okay.

What the mental health community needs right now isn’t stupid stigma campaigns.

What changes would we see in our wonderfully versatile, talented, and strong community if we were to stop seeing ourselves as the broken branches on the tree of society? What changes would we see if we stopped calling ourselves sick and instead called ourselves varied? Experienced? Raw? If we see ourselves as fully human, fully capable, intelligent, fierce, and in a lot of pain, the world will follow.

The world can understand pain. Let’s not make it any more complicated than that.

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Posted in Freedom, Voices

The Advantages of Pain

Posted on by alidware

Let’s have a discussion about the power hidden within struggle.

After the loss of control that a crisis brings, it feels impossible sometimes to regain a sense of self and place in the world. You doubt yourself, you doubt your beliefs, your happiness, or any chance that this darker side of life has anything other than despair and mental anguish to offer.

I see a lot of #mentalhealthawareness tweets and posts on instagram that talk about how hard it is to have anxiety or how depression stops people from living life or how their mental torment holds them back in some way, and because of that the general public should stop using mental health terminology as adjectives, or the general public should “educate themselves” on what it means to have this devastating “mental illness”.

Then, there are other posts which are meant to encourage people stuck in these dark times to remember that they are strong for dealing with the pain that they deal with, and no one can tell them otherwise.

I’m never one to silence a voice, or voices in this case, but I do think we miss the mark a lot. It’s not really about how hard everything is, it’s about what we’re taught from that hardship. If you feel you haven’t learned anything, I encourage you to dig until you hit water.

It’s also not really about you being strong. Everyone struggles. Every single person in the world. And this isn’t to compare pains to one another. This is to say that if there’s one thing the human race shares across borders, it’s pain. We’re built, physically and mentally, to endure a lot of shit. The struggle worsens, though, when you lose faith and trust in your body and/or your mind. When you believe you’re inept to face a challenge, you’re basically telling your body “I don’t trust you to handle this”, and your mind “I don’t trust you to make it through this”.

The problem with that, in my completely hypothetical and unscientific proposition here, is that your body and mind start mistrusting you too. And when you’re out of sync with the two major systems keeping you conscious and alive, than you’re existing in a void.

I think the greatest lesson I have learned in experiencing psychosis is how important my body and mind are to me. I felt such a strong disconnect from my entire self. Nothing made sense. My body had aches and pains I didn’t understand and my mind told me things that didn’t make sense, things that came to me like an idea for a short story and ended up as a first, incoherent draft of a horror manuscript.

Making a decision to come off medication became a catalyst for reuniting myself with my body—the first step in my real recovery. But it wasn’t the physical act of getting off the medication that saved me. It was the fact that I made a decision based on what my body told me. I sat for some weeks and listened to my internal system until the cries were finally recognized. Hearing those cries and abiding by them restored a lot of trust between my body and myself.

My mind came next. I plunged into utter darkness. Voices said I should kill myself, and I tried. I was tackled into safety. No, I was not hospitalized that time.

But for the first time in this darkness, I let it sweep me away. I didn’t shoot arrows or fill my moat. I let evil overrun my castle and I shook its hand. It pulled me down a spiral of agony and I saw the deepest, rotted pits of my mind. I didn’t cry because I was fearful of that. I cried because darkness lead me around these pits and showed me the decaying feelings I’d neglected. The traumas I’d abused. I cried because I’d been hurting myself and I never knew it.

It’s been over a year since my descent, since I stopped taking the medication, since I got back into the gym and nurturing my body. I’ve made space in my physical self and mental self for aches and pains and darkness. I have a voice who reminds me when I’m not okay, or asks me if I’m okay when I feel a little rocky. In fact, with all of the thoughts and voices in my head, I’ve reached a compromise: we either live in this body together or none of us live at all.

I want to live. They want to live. And so we leave space for each other.

“Recovery”, or whatever you’d like to call it, for me isn’t about being strong or resilient or tweeting about how much my life has changed or instagramming paragraphs about why hope should never die. It’s about a willingness to be terrified. It’s about reconnecting myself with what I’d been too fearful to face. Granted, I didn’t do this all on my own. I had friends and therapists and some bad group therapy experiences, all of which lead me back to looking inside of myself.

This is why you will never catch me on social media telling people what they want to hear. What they want to hear is the same script that’s everywhere: you can live a normal life. Take control. Be your best you. It’s possible to live with “mental illness”.

That’s all fine if you just want to exist. But it’s deeper than that for me. Giving up control gave me more freedom than fighting for control. I don’t “live with mental illness” because I’ve been labeled schizoaffective. I just “live with myself” like every other damn human being.

We think we’re so different from others. For some of us, that makes us feel entitled, like we deserve special treatment because “we’re sick”. And then we turn around and demand we also be treated the same as everyone else. Classic identity crisis if you ask me.

For me, that mindset just never quite cut the cake.

So, there is deep beauty in suffering, and deep agony in happiness. Our minds and our bodies are built for adaptation. They’re built to endure. Trust in this.

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Posted in Emotions, Freedom

Tips for being in a relationship with someone and their mental health struggles.

Posted on by alidware

As someone labeled Schizoaffective (although I don’t consider myself disordered, disabled or “mentally ill”), and having read a few other articles online about relationships and mental health, I decided to weigh in on this with a little logic, rationality, and perhaps some harsh realities.

Paranoia, depression, and anxiety ruined a relationship with the person I am currently back together with. I won’t rehash everything. But my paranoia and anxiety wedged a wall between his family and me, and still does. It eventually wedged a wall between us as well. What I’ll share in this post is what we have learned.

Tip number 1: Your Partner is NOT Your Caregiver.

Unless the both of you have formally agreed to one person bearing the weight of taking care of appointments, reminding you to eat, reminding you to shower, reminding you to take your medication, moderating moods or behavior or trying to control behavior, and anything else a nurse or worker would do, this is NOT your job.

This is a harsh reality for many people because the first thing you’re told is your partner struggles with certain things (perhaps some of the things listed above) and may need gentle reminders or constant reminders. And there’s nothing wrong with a little help. The problem arises when this help reinforces the idea of helplessness, the concept of utter disability, both of which further the mindset which fuels depression. If your partner believes they can’t do something because their doctor says it, because you say it, or because all of the family says it, than your partner isn’t going to feel there’s a point to managing independence with their experiences.

This DOES NOT mean support isn’t vital. Support is vital in any relationship. But one person does not deserve to carry the weight of two people. Let’s explore this further.

Tip number 2: The health of both partners is more important than the health of one.

This sounds like “the majority outweighs the minority”, with some residual beliefs utilitarianism, which I’m not a huge fan of, but what I’m getting at here is that both partners must be healthy in order for the relationship to move forward as a whole. And it’s not enough to use that age old excuse of “my partner didn’t ask for this, it’s not fair.”

You’re right. Your partner didn’t ask for this. Who the hell asks for anything that causes struggle in this life? I suppose one could argue that by simple living you’re inviting and encouraging pain, but I have a feeling my readers aren’t wanting to go down that philosophical rabbit hole right now. Just because neither of you asked for this doesn’t mean milk the struggle. It doesn’t mean one persons health and well-being is more important than another’s. What it means is that balance is key. It means you, as the well partner, has a responsibility to care for yourself and your being, just as your partner struggling with their mental health has a responsibility to care for his/herself and his/her being.

In all of my crises I relied a lot on my partner. I was starved for understanding and wanted someone to pull me out of my head. I had psychiatrists, hospital visits, medication, and none of it seemed to make a difference. The weight I placed on his shoulders wasn’t fair. It’s important to communicate feelings. But not when you’re unloading those feelings like you’re a dump truck and he’s the landfill. That’s a classic case of me not having proper outlets or other areas of support. My health is my health, not his health.

Tip number 3: If your partner is the one struggling, be understanding but know when you need space

Know that you are not a savior. You are not there to pull us from our pain. No one expects you to. We have to feel our pain. We have to adapt in ways that work for us. Answers do not lie in you.

Now breathe. Doesn’t it feel good to not have the weight of someone else on your shoulders? Know that most of us are capable of taking care of ourselves the majority of the time, and also know that if we aren’t right now, most of us are capable of learning with a little firm encouragement from the entire mental health team (not just you) and with a little confidence in ourselves, which can take time to build when you’re constantly being told you’re sick and disabled. Remember: research shows thoughts have the power to transform the physical chemistry of the mind.

That being said, ask your partner what are some ways that you can support them in a crisis. Do not be offended if one the answers is “stay away from me”, or something of the sort. It’s not always someone dangerously isolating. Sometimes it’s a necessary space we need to really absorb our feelings, feel them, and help them pass on to the next life. If that causes you to feel ignored or unloved, discuss this with your partner.

Ask your partner when the proper time to get authorities involved is. Hospitalization is often another added trauma, as helpful as it may be. Handcuffs, cots, restraints, unwilling shots, all of it is trauma and can build a lot of mistrust in a lot of ways. If your partner is willing to go for hospitalization, make sure they are able to line up their treatment. Get a Mental Health Advance Directive if hospitalization is a common thing.

Empowerment is key to a confident, independent partner. They are in control, no one else. When they cannot be in control, brainstorm ways with them where their wishes can be honored (that’s an advance directive).

Tip number 4: If you are the partner who struggles, expand your support system.

This can be really hard. I’ve yet to get a steady support system around me that doesn’t involve friends from work or my therapist. And a support system doesn’t always have to be people. It can be things you use when you feel emotions taking over or a crisis budding. It could be a retreat if you have money. It could be a day at the animal shelter, petting animals. It could be local peer support groups, where you can foster connections with people who understand what you’re going through and are there specifically for mutual support.

When I feel I’m struggling, I alert my partner but I also take steps to process the pain. I’ll drive an hour or so away to some woods and a state beach and walk and contemplate and process and dissociate. It seems dangerous to some, and maybe for some people with certain struggles it would be. But for me it’s exactly what I need. To be away. It’s much less likely that I’ll be paranoid about a mountain. It’s much more likely I’ll be paranoid about that group of people across the street taking about my death. I often feel mountains intercept on people’s thoughts the way they interrupt cell phone service; their blockade stops people from hearing my thoughts or me hearing their thoughts.

If you don’t have transportation, which a lot of us do not, see if there are things within walking distance. If you’re comfortable taking public transportation, map out a route that could be helpful for you. Update your partner—remember, communication is key—but don’t send out distress signals unless it’s necessary. It’s important to reconnect with yourself, to learn your limits and push them just a bit, and to get comfortable juggling your pain without reaching for a life raft all the time. It’s the only way to learn how to swim.

Tip number 5: If you really love your partner, remember things will never be perfect and that healing takes time. A lot of it.

A partnership needs balance. It needs compassion and understanding and patience from both people. It needs trauma-informed processing from both people. It needs both parties to really see, hear, and feel each other’s perspective.

Struggling sucks. Trying to deal with other people’s struggles suck. Maybe you feel your partner will never be as independent as you hope. Maybe you feel your partner will never understand you. Maybe you feel your partner isn’t trying enough. Maybe you feel you’re trying your hardest and still not progressing; maybe that makes you feel guilty. Maybe neither of you know what to do.

And that’s okay. There’s a huge learning curve with this. And once every avenue has been exhausted, if either partner isn’t growing in a way that benefits the both of you, that’s okay to. You know why? You have the option to walk away.

No one, except your pain and fear and sorrow, is keeping you with someone who consistently hurts you.

Sometimes time apart is what fosters real growth. And sometimes it doesn’t. The point is you deserve to be happy. If you’re happy with someone who isn’t understanding or you’re happy with someone who is needing constant supervision, great! No one said that’s a bad thing. But the moment it becomes overwhelming, and growth has stopped, its time to reconsider what you’re putting yourself through.

I know

I’m aware this isn’t a typical perspective that’s written about. I’m also aware that everyone is different. There are different skill levels, different levels of lucidity and different levels of tolerance. Love is blind, I also know that.

I know that whatever satisfies your heart and your happiness is the choice for you. This article is not intended to shame or hurt or insult anyone. Its intent is to offer alternative perspective from someone who struggles with mental health issues and is learning to grow with a partner she never wants to lose because of some stupid unrealistic thoughts. It’s also coming from someone who refuses to let any mental health anything prevent her from living a full life.

Everyone is different. The point is to learn how to balance those differences so you can enjoy the best parts of sharing your life with someone.

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Posted in Freedom, psychology, Voices

Misconceptions about Schizophrenia and Psychosis

Posted on by alidware

I’ve decided to write this post because these are found all around the internet and they all say the same things: these people aren’t dangerous, they can live and function just as anyone else, and the general public needs to see people for their character, not their diagnosis.

That’s all fine and dandy and true. But I think there’s a big chunk of information missing from those basic ideas.

Misconception 1: People with psychosis/schizophrenia must be medicated for life.

This is even a prevalent belief within the mental health community. Medication is helpful and for a lot of people necessary, and it often becomes a life sentence because that’s how it’s presented. Studies are beginning to show more and more that after a first episode of psychosis, and any subsequent episodes, medication for a specified amount of time (I’ve read some studies that cite a year as ideal) is most helpful if the person can then be tapered off the medication. Remission rate and functionally surpass those who have stayed on medication for a decade or longer.

Obviously everyone is different and the brain is as complex and individual as a fingerprint. This way may not work for everyone, but to insinuate it would work for no one is a grave case of clinical arrogance and lack of insight of recent research.

If you are someone like me whose body struggles adhering to the chemical fluctuations and disruption of homeostasis psychiatric meds cause, finding a proper physician and psychiatrist who are willing to work with you in the process of tapering may be a great step for you. This is a process that can and should take years.

If you are someone not like me and your medication is what you feel is holding you together (independent of your doctor’s opinion) then I am happy for you. Stay educated and invested in your wellness in the best way your body and mind asks for.

Misconception 2: Psychosis/Schizophrenia is more severe than other mental health experiences.

I hate this hierarchy bullshit.

It’s my largest pet peeve about the medical model and it’s the foundation of why some people get care and others don’t.

Psychosis is terrifying and life altering. But so is anxiety, so is depression, so are mood fluctuations. When we start comparing our pain to others pain, we create this competition and divide among ourselves rather than hold space for all of our pains and worries and fears and recognizing that they aren’t very different from each other; maybe in presentation, but not in origin.

There’s really nothing else to say about that shit.

Misconception 3: Those faced with the label Schizophrenia will have children who experience the same pain.

It’s true that heritability is a thing. It’s also true that that means nothing.

There is a chance your biological child will have similar experiences to you. This chance is actually quite small. It’s similar to the risk of alcoholism in children of alcoholics. One study showed (for boys and fathers at least) that sons of alcoholic fathers had a 20% chance of developing alcoholism. But very rarely did those with that 20% chance actually develop alcoholism.

Heritability for mental health experiences follows the same train of thought. Just because your children may have a higher risk of experiencing these variations of humanity doesn’t mean they will. Genes play a very tiny role. What dictates whether experiences emerge is so much more complicated and ranges from life experiences to the way your child thinks; remember, research shows a single thought changes the chemistry of the mind.

If your child does develop experiences, than you’ll be the best person for that child to be around. You’ve had similar experiences. You’ve felt the fear and confusion and grandiosity. You understand how that can take over and you also understand the other side, the way your thoughts change, the way your perspective of the world changes. You can be there as guidance and the patient, compassionate, understanding person your child will need.

Misconception 4: Medication makes the voices go away.

I’ve met professionals who believe this.

It’s a nice fantasy, but not a reality for most people. Medication can make them fainter or easier to ignore. But that does not eliminate commentary or shouts or fears being expressed daily by voices, if you experience that. In the last post I mentioned the possibility, the hypothesis, that psychosis is another way for the brain to express itself. Voices are an extension of that expression, in this proposal.

What does that mean? Well, in this case it means putting a bandaid on them does nothing. It will do what bandaids do best: cover the open wound, reduce swelling, protect it from the elements and any foreign bodies in the skin. The bandaid does NOT do the healing—the body does.

And same goes for psychosis. The medication can be an important step, push people from their crisis moment. But there is no evidence medication repairs anything, nor is there enough substantial evidence to say it permanently harms the brain. I say this because studies show both hypothesis to be true and false. A meta Analysis would be the best way to reveal the most likely option, but I haven’t read any as of recent.

So, screaming at people to take their medication is probably the wrong way to go about talking to your friend or family member or patient. Because medication only does so much. For me, patience, compassion, and the willingness to have a real conversation is what has helped me maintain a sense of stability. Medication pulled me from crisis. But I had to do the rest of the work.

Misconception 5: People labeled with Schizophrenia can’t live independently.

I think most people know this is a misconception, but maybe not. Just like many facets of life, living independently depends on way more factors than just functionality. Money is a pretty big one.

We don’t focus on providing open, honest, and understanding work environments, and that excludes a lot of people, not just those labeled with particular mental experiences. A closed, harsh, strict environment really influences how things are perceived but those of us with these experiences, and I didn’t realize that until I started working at the peer respite house where things are generally talked about rather than swept under the rug.

So, a lot of people still recovering from crisis go on Social Security Disability here in the United States. Many of those same people get worn down by the message that they’re disabled and lose motivation and hope in working. That lack of purpose and feeling connected to society only exacerbates the mental health experiences and therefore reinforces the idea of disability and “sickness”.

Not to mention disability pay is about enough to buy a stick of celery everyday, let alone pay rent. A lot of people are homeless because their disability pay isn’t enough to survive on and waitlists for housing are in the thousands here in California.

It takes extra work for us to be independent, but it’s possible.

It becomes less possible when everyone tells us it’s not.

This is my Happy Christmas/Holiday/Whatever-you-celebrate-Eve post.

How festive!

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 science, Therapy

Exposure Therapy May Drown You

Posted on by alidware

My absence is attributed, this time, to preparation for a presentation that I did for my research course. We had great fun: saturated the Google Slides with relevent, cheesy memes, and presented our failed experiment data and had a great laugh about it all. I’m quite satisfied.

Finals week is next week, and all of this stress has had me tossing and turning in my sleep (partly because of my still injured back too) and has had me waking in the morning shaking, sweaty, and on edge. The other night I got minimal sleep because I went to bed angry, woke up a few hours later to a quite the slew of annoying voices, broadcasting really, and I could not sleep without some earbuds playing loud, chaotic rap music. I did not sleep soundly.

But it’s got me thinking about exposure therapy for some reason. I’ve been more talkative than usual, and although shaky the morning of my presentation and not quite as coherent as I wished to be, I was able to start out the presentation, get through my portion of the work, and relate my own experience with psychosis to our study on non-verbal cues and the effects it can have on interaction. The professor was surprised, I could see, and very rarely does anything from his students shock him, so that made me giggle internally.

If you remember me from the Mental Truths blog, you’ll have read tons of rants years old about my past battles with anxiety. So I’m not going to regurgitate everything here. Just know it’s been bad since I was about 5 years old. And every therapist I’ve been to has told me “Face your fears”. That’s the only way to rid the social anxiety–show yourself that you can do it. Prove your brain wrong.

It make sense.

Except that it doesn’t. And let me explain why.

Expose therapy, as a technique, has been proven not so much for specific phobias, but for PTSD. And when I say PTSD, I don’t mean emotional traumas. I mean physical traumas like a car crash you survived or a plane crash. It’s been speculated that it can work in other areas, but there’s no definite research with viable, proper experiments.

Remember, experiments can make claims to findings without being legitimate; it all depends on the method they used. An improper method can invalidate the entire study.

And so I’ve tried exposing myself to social situations in the past. Integrating into groups. Being nice to kids in class. And no matter what I did it seemed I always failed. I’d talk to someone or a group and still end up as the outcast. I concluded exposure therapy is a lie.

This time though, things are different. I’m doing the same things I did back then: taking risks, embracing the risks, following through with them, refusing to let the anxiety dictate whether I do something or not. So what’s the difference this time?

Readiness.

If you struggle with social anxiety and have been to a therapist who constantly tells you that the only way to conquer your anxiety is to face your fears, he/she is not entirely wrong. What he/she is wrong about it is pushing you into it.

If you attempt to face your fears with low self-esteem, showing yourself that you can engage successfully with people will look like a failure regardless. If anything, your therapist should be helping prepare your self-esteem. They should be encouraging you toward readiness, not tossing you in the pool without any floaters.

What helped made me get ready had a small fraction to do with the people around me. Some of it was support from friends. Some of it was a particular conversation with my therapist that, without intending to, made me realize I need to give myself permission to speak. So far, I’d been the only one holding myself back. I’d internalized this idea that I was only allowed to speak when spoken to, and that when I did speak it didn’t matter. People could tell me the opposite all they want; if I don’t believe it, them shoving it down my throat won’t make me believe it.

And so I told myself one day: you are allowed to speak.

And I continued to do so.

Over the course of a few months, reminding myself of this, engaging positively with classmates, roping them into my craziness with humor, leading my team toward good ideas, has shown me that I can communicate effectively. Speaking in front of others reminds me that I struggle with coherency sometimes–

Okay, I’ll finish that sentence in a second. I just saw these twin men who I saw the other day who had made direct eye contact with me and that was the night something was broadcasted to me and the fact that they’re walking into the library I’m in right now tripped me out for a second.

Squirrel!

Okay, back to the important stuff.

Speaking in front of others shows me that I still need to work on coherency, and being able to say what I want to say. I always thought Anxiety was the culprit. I always thought it made my mind blank, and it does, but not to the extent I believed it did. Once I stopped believing it was ruining my life, once I worked on my confidence and depression, the effect it’s had has been infinitesimally smaller than it used to be.

In the past, I took my incoherent speaking as a sign I would never improve. Because that was my mindset. Improvement was impossible.

Now that improvement has become possible, the coherency issue hasn’t disappeared but it’s become an obstacle instead of a brick barrier.

What is the point of this post? Well, I want us to do some critical thinking here.

It is true that some people learn to swim by being launched into the deep end of the pool.

It is also true that some people learn by not being launched into the deep end of the pool, but first by gaining confidence to step into the water.

Mindset effects our ability to take advantage of therapeutic techniques which have potential to assist us: that is my hypothesis. As a rough example, were I to test this, I’d do so with those controlled by severe social anxiety as I was. That would be screened with a questionnaire. Those chosen would report their levels of anxiety so we can get a baseline. One group would be given regular, well-defined exposure therapy depending on their greatest social fear. One group would focus on their mindset, specifically their confidence in all aspects of their life with CBT. The third group would be given no technique or put on a waiting list (I know, soooo cruel). This would have to be double blind obviously, considering my intense bias.

At the end of the study, which I would hope I’d have enough resources/money to run this for months, not a puny amount of weeks, I’d ask for a self-report of anxiety but also for them to return to that social situation that makes them the most anxious and rate their anxiety during that time as well.

Would the results be significant? Who knows. I can’t base a generalization to people on how this has helped me. Just as the European study which found people handle grief differently, and that for some “getting back to life” is actually more helpful for them than therapy and being forced into the “five stages of grief”, I would expect to find severe individual variation.

The study I read about non-verbal cues (related to the experiment we did for my course) and their relation to schizophrenia, how patients labeled with such are often influenced by their psychiatrists’ non-verbal cues, is something else I’d like to study. That is, if the psychiatrist is smiling, sitting straight, not monotonous in their tone, their “patients” tend to show a decrease in their symptoms and better satisfaction with their care. I had to find this study from a European research group because there is very little information like this from U.S researchers. That I am capable of finding.

There are so many more things to study in psychology in regards to mental health than pills and there is so much more to mental health awareness than vomiting stale definitions of disorders as “information”.

It’s technique here that makes a difference. That’s another hypothesis I’d like to study. Pit pills and well-researched techniques together and see which comes out on top.

They say that medication and therapy are most successful together. I haven’t read the research on all this yet, but I will. I think there are some things which technique could be better for than medication. This has been shown a few times I believe. But I think it can include certain cases of psychosis.

Post acute episode, of course.

Cognitive Behavior Therapy isn’t going to convince you mid-episode that your neighbor isn’t part of the F.B.I.

Or can it?

Let’s research.

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 psychology, science

Is Psychology A Science? Part 2

Posted on by alidware

Welcome back. Yesterday we touched on clinical arrogance a bit, and discovered that the real problem with it isn’t the arrogance of the provider, but the blockade it provides against learning new techniques and staying updated with proper research. I mentioned I had two examples, one was personal, and one was a more wide-scale issue. You can read about clinical arrogance and my psychiatrist visit here.

I want to start this section of the series off with the second example. We are still under my first bullet point from yesterday: practitioners most often rely on intuition rather than verified and reliable research.

One thing psychologists attempt to do is predict a client’s behavior. This already sounds wishy-washy. No one can predict behavior 100% as we are limited in our understanding of ourselves (more on this once we get to my second bullet point), but there are two main methods which are used: The Actuarial Method and The Clinical Method.

The Actuarial Method

With this method, data is gathered within the range of the target population. That data is then plugged into a formula or some charts or graphs, anything that quantifies the data in some way, and what this yields is a general percentage. That general percentage represents how likely someone is to behave a certain way given the observations of their behavior (or scores on an MMPI, or this or that). So, theoretically, and very simply put, if Johnny is experiencing a psychosis we can use this method to get a general idea of how he may behave and what the best treatment may be given the outcome of others who have experienced similar things.

In trying to predict the rate of degeneration in patients who had been diagnosed with neuro-degenerative diseases, this method was correct 83% of the time.

Why is this important? Well, one thing practitioners may need to predict, especially in the current mental health system and current mental health wards is this concept of “dangerousness”. You hear all the time that people particularly labeled with schizophrenia are dangerous, unpredictable, violent. You also have probably heard that the truth is people with mental health adversaries are more likely to be a victim of a crime than to commit one. So let me tell you why this stereotype continues to persist.

In 1999, a researcher, Liener (I tried to find the full paper, I couldn’t; when I do, I’ll link it) asked clinicians to rate clients’ based on their intake interviews. These clients were hallucinating. The providers were supposed to give an answer for which clients were more likely to become violent. He gave the same case studies to untrained, random high school students and requested the same service. Conclusion?

There was no difference in the predictions. That is, the high school students predicted the same level of danger as the clinicians did, and those who were seen as withdrawn were all rated as most likely to be violent. Research shows the opposite. In fact, when mass amounts of individuals locked in criminally insane wards were let out, 97.3% never got into trouble again. 2.7% wound up back in a hospital or prison.

It’s not the public’s lack of awareness, so you can chill on your lovey-dovey, let’s all unite instagram Mental Health Awareness campaigns. We don’t need as much awareness of experiences as you think–we need research. I’ve been saying this before I even started my college journey. Talked about it every May on my previous blog Mental Truths, in fact. Want to bring awareness to something? Bring awareness to the fact that none of the research is being paid attention to. That’s what needs awareness.

The Clinical Method

In this method, we gather data about the individual and use that information to attempt to predict what the individual will do. There is no real, clear-cut formula for this as far as I’m aware, it’s kind of a guess and check system. Kind of like taking psychiatric meds.

In the neuro-degenerative disease study, it was found that this method was correct 58% of the time. Diagnosis was generally accurate, but judgments and human error lead to incorrect predictions. I mean, 58% isn’t bad, that’s ore than half, but it’s no where near 83%.

And so we see the Actuarial method is quite effective when it comes to doing something human brains on their own can’t always do very well: predict things. We see in some Meta Analysis that there was either no difference in correctness between the two study methods or the actuarial worked better. Never once could the clinical method beat it’s cousin.

You can read more about both methods here.

And still, Practitioners insist that their expertise provides a better prediction. Again, this is what I like to call Clinical Arrogance. And maybe it’s not purposeful–as I said yesterday, they worked hard for their degrees and spent long hours accumulating all that knowledge in their head. Let’s not bash these individuals, a lot of them are very bright and are in the field to support people who really need it. They just can’t read. Kind of like the HumanCentIPad from South Park.

“Why won’t it read!” (22 second clip. Totally worth it.)

I think the most hilarious thing out of all of this is that a lot of pracitioners say they never use the actuarial method, and the majority of them say one reason is because they were never trained in it.

Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ.

And remember now, we’re trying to figure out how much of a science psychology really is. This is a tough question, because so far we see that there are methods which meet the standards for the label of scientific. But they’re not being used, and when they are and the research is done properly, free from bribes by pharmaceutical companies and researchers looking for fame, the results aren’t given any attention. Can something be called a science if it neglects the only aspect of it which is a science?

I want to stop here and let this kind of sink in, because tomorrow we’re going to shoot to the top. We’re going to investigate how this trickles down and make some speculation to why.

It seems like everything is negative, but it’s not. We hear a lot of the positive in most psychology classes, at least the ones I’ve completed, and that’s great. But some of that is misinformation and that’s problematic. This isn’t about focusing on what’s wrong with the industry, this is about awareness. I think it’s great that people feel making a social media page dedicated to a “Safe Space” or whatever can help others–and for people who are super isolated, it probably is nice to see other people experience their pain. But that’s not the kind of awareness that’s going to shift the system. More people knowing the word “Schizophrenia” could indeed perpetuate stigma if you have no research to back it up.

In fact, why not raise awareness about the fact that the dopamine hypothesis is actually kind of a shoddy hypothesis? Why not find some of the studies that point toward the many holes in the chemical imbalance hypothesis? The ones that discount genes as the biggest player in mental health heritability? Where is the awareness of this?

Oh wait. No one reads.

And if someone does read, and they have articles contradicting me, please, please send them. I’m always looking for something challenging! I only ask that the articles either cite actual research so I can find the papers, or are the papers themselves.