Tag: writing on mental health

Posted in advocacy, Community, Peer Support

Mental Health Updates During The Apocalypse

Posted on by alidware

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instagram: @written_in_the_photo

Twitter: @philopsychotic

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

Posted in advocacy, Late Night Thoughts

Psychoanalysis, The Locked Ward, and Entropy

Posted on by alidware

Some more thoughts to share, friends. Let’s talk psychoanalysis, the locked ward, and entropy.

No, we will not spend countless paragraphs discrediting psychodynamics and psychoanalysis. The facts are there: Freud’s systematic hypotheses were circular, full of confirmation bias, and untestable. This makes his ideas of Psychoanalysis quite useless, inherently flawed, and simply unscientific. However, modern psychodynamics has come a long way, and if you’ve ever read The Center Cannot Hold, by Elyn Saks (if you haven’t, READ IT!) you know that one of therapists which helped her through her cognitive dysfunction pre-hospitalization was indeed a psychoanalyst. Her therapist often took Elyn’s discombobulated words and reflected them, unbiased, nonjudgmental, back to Elyn. This doesn’t happen often anymore, especially not in hospitals, and we lose this understanding that psychosis is not necessarily meaningless. This idea that it may have meaning is derived from psychoanalysis itself, which is rooted in Psychic Determinism: every thought, action, personality quirk, is there for a reason; nothing is ever accidental.

Anyone who says it’s impossible to communicate with someone in psychosis hasn’t really tried. There was a time I did a regular outreach group at the local psychiatric hospital, in which i’d been as a patient before, and there were often people in my group who were by clinical definition incomprehensible. Sometimes people would wander from the group or I’d end early and someone would want to keep talking. To the average person, and I’m sure many of the workers there, the babble was pointless, but there was one particular man who sought me out every time he saw me. And when he said something like “There isn’t anyway to know the ticking and I don’t know where my home is but I know there’s some fact in that”, I’d say something like “it’s hard when we feel lost and can’t find home” or “there’s a lot we can know in the world, and not know”.

This wasn’t easy. I stumbled a lot over my words, trying to keep up with his thoughts, and maybe nothing I said ever resonated as clearly as these words are registering to you as a reader. I wouldn’t know, I’ve never had someone approach me in this way during my worst moments. But it did something. Sometimes the group was just us, and we’d talk like that, back and forth, for fifty minutes. He’d always shake my hand before I left, and this was one of the people the staff “warned” me about, said he could get unruly, loud, disruptive, and although I can never confirm the way I spoke with him as a clear reason why he never appeared aggressive with me, I can say that our conversations were always even tempered, relaxed, human.

I do not advocate for this as the ONLY form of treatment. Acute episodes are terrifying, traumatic, confusing, they require many things. But staff shouting, tackling people, and being argumentative doesn’t reduce the terror, the trauma, or the confusion. I CAN say that.

So, there are positive things to come out of the idea and possibly the practice of modern psychoanalysis and psychodynamics. Let’s be clear though: Freud was wildly inept as a scientist. All of his hypotheses were derived from case studies and never tested with experiments or even standardized self-report data.

Scrolling along some text in my personality book, some reading for classes during COVID, this author caught my attention when he compared the natural course of entropy in the universe to the entropy of our thoughts. Essentially, entropy focuses on how ordered systems, over long periods of time and inevitably, tend toward disorder. Freud had a similar sense about the mind, says this author, and insisted that we attempt to order our thoughts and lives for the sake of our own creativity and growth. Entropy dooms these efforts.

Freud describes his philosophical understanding of his own hypotheses in terms of libido (NOT just sex drive, but a life energy) and thanatos, (not Thanos as I had read, but a drive toward “death”). Libido described one part of the brain designating energy for a process, and in that time such energy could not be used anywhere else in the brain. We know this not to the be the entire story now. Thanatos was not a wish for death, or a fear of it, but was this very recognizable, a very EASTERN idea that everything contains its opposite.

This is essentially a less developed, disorganized form of YinYang. It’s presented in the textbook as quite a novel idea. But Eastern cultures and indigenous cultures across the globe, have held this collective understanding for centuries. Reading philosophy on the duality of life is what helped me come to terms with my psychosis. Freud didn’t do it first, I promise. If anything, he was super late to the party.

He called his version of YinYang the “doctrine of opposites”. While I refrained from rolling my eyes at this, his “doctrine” maintains that everything requires and implies its opposite. That is, life needs death, sadness needs happiness, and one cannot exist without the other. If you’re curious how this really lines up with YinYang, I’d recommend getting in touch with someone who knows this philosophy well, or reading the basics in this post here.

Why is any of this relevant?

I think what I learned, and am still learning, is that pain is not as simple as we want it to be. There cannot be pain without no pain, and there cannot be no pain without pain. You can’t fix your thoughts with medication, therapy, electric shocks, substance abuse. You can’t be broken without also being together. Unifying the good and the bad, not separating them, not fighting with one over the other, has been the key to many of our successes.

You cannot be ill without also being well. That is the message here. If you identify with mental illness, then you identify, also, with mental wellness; there is harmony in the illness, and disharmony in the wellness. We see this often: there are advantages to being anxious sometimes. For me, I know my anxiety makes me more prepared during stressful events. Because i’m panicking all the time, I don’t panic when others do. I’m often a voice of reason. There are disadvantages to being happy: for me, I get wary of this gentle contentment I’ve come to over the years, because of the imminent threat of not being happy again.

A lot of people view that latter statement as a struggle particularly of clinical depression or bipolar. I don’t see it that way anymore. I recognize that is the duality of things: there is inherent unhappiness in happiness. That’s the nature of things.

Labeling the thoughts as defective is the result of the depression, and part of the struggle. Accepting the truth in pain and the dissatisfaction in wellness is recovery.

What do you think?

Curious about research, news, and a community dedicated to “Eliminating Barriers to the Treatment of Mental Illness”? Check out TreatmentAdvocacyCenter.org for more information, as well as support for COVID-19. This post isn’t sponsored by them, I just stumbled across their site and found it highly useful.

For updates on posts, research, and conversations, follow me:

Instagram: @written_in_the_photo

Twitter: @philopsychotic

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

Posted in advocacy, Community, psychology

Friends, Let’s read

Posted on by alidware

Hello friends, it has been some time.

Writing has been difficult. I hope everyone is staying healthy, safe, and inside their homes.

For those of us with mental health issues, all the panic, the uncertain information and unpredictable future can exacerbate our mind-states. If you are feeling effects from the global death, the misinformation and poor leadership (in some places), know that you are not alone. Many of us are feeling this. We are experiencing a collective trauma. Think of this as beautiful: we are stuck getting through this together as the economy flip-flops, healthcare becomes a war zone, and our sick family members and friends fight for their lives.

It’s obvious we lack some scientific understanding, as I mentioned in my last post, and that becomes scarily evident with the orange, diseased walrus in office (here in the U.S) barking empty threats to pull U.S funding from the WHO, lying about the amount of PPE and testing kits available, and tossing around ideas of re-opening public spaces against medical advice.

In the mean time, though, I browse mental health support pages on Instagram because they are recommended in my feed or I find them through other mental health connections I have on the app. It still baffles me that those of us who advocate for each other aren’t educated in the science of the brain. It’s great that we are experts in our own experience. It’s great that we leave space for others to be experts in their own, and don’t push drugs or not-drugs as an agenda. But how can we do that if we aren’t pulling from both sides?

Science and personal experience are how we exist in the world: our brains react to biology and environment, and both influence each other. Genes play an almost negligible role when it comes to the deciding factors of someone developing mental health symptoms, and yet we still push this idea that things like schizophrenia are inherited. They are not: schizophrenia in particular has a high level of heritability, meaning it swims around in the general population’s gene pool, and you are more likely to develop symptoms as a result of genetic chance than you are receiving it from your parents.

Now, before you say “well, I know that my mom. . .” or “well, my friend’s dad had schizophrenia and he does too . . .”, remember that your personal experience, or your friends’, are not common enough to generalize. Please stop.

As for environment, genes turn on and off in reaction to what the body experiences in this physical world. Brain structure changes. Trauma reroutes cells, wilts some, builds some in different, non-beneficial places. At the end of this pandemic, we will see noticeable changes in society and in the people living in areas hit the hardest. In the United States, New York healthcare works in particular may not be the same. In Italy, those who have been quarantined with the dead bodies of their relatives will not be the same. Trauma will change how they see the world, politics, life, friendship, and in their healing process they will learn new things, understand new things. Some will be okay. Others will not. And this variety of reaction is a testament to the way environment shapes us.

When we, as advocates, focus on spreading this disingenuous positivity, this overly positive positivity, as I call it, and we forfeit spreading facts, we are only harming our own cause. So, in light of that, I’ve been reading some research. Sleep is one thing I struggle with, and in my three-am database search for an interesting read, I came across this article here.

I had had access to a full text version, but right now can only link the abstract. If you have access to pubmed, or found it somewhere else, let me know.

But this article states they’ve found a consistent decrease in melatonin across those diagnosed with schizophrenia. Their participants had already been diagnosed and were not on antipsychotic medication (YES that is a possibility for some). Antipsychotics did not increase melatonin levels when introduced.

Nine people is a poor amount, and not very indicative of the population of us, but I assume a bulk of participants were just not available: how many do you know diagnosed with schizophrenia have the ability to take on their journey without meds? Not many.

This study however, has implications for how sleeplessness could be treated in patients with schizophrenia. What this also reveals is that the sleep you get from your antipsychotics (and I remember mine fondly, because I got LOTS of sleep, and I hadn’t had much in a very long time) is not restful. It’s more like a heroin knock-out, and less of your body’s choice.

Assessing those who were not on antipsychotics allowed these researchers to see a natural reduction in melatonin, not linked to the psych-drug usage, and although we could never say for certain that schizophrenia is the cause, the implication is there. What could be other reasons for the melatonin decrease? Perhaps large doses of antipsychotics when hospitalized had rerouted these patient’s melatonin years before, although unlikely considering doses of these antipsychotics int he experiment did not decrease levels of melatonin further. Perhaps their bodies adapted over the years as they got less and less restful sleep because of their symptoms. Perhaps their pineal glands had always secreted a low level of melatonin and THAT contributed to the development of their symptoms. We could hypothesize for years. We have been.

If you have something on the spectrum of schizophrenia, how would you rate your sleep? I rate mine poorly, particularly in times of stress. It takes me longer to fall asleep and it’s harder to wake up. I also attribute some of this to screens and my incessant need to play video games.

That study was from 1997: there may be updated research on this, or conflicting research. If you’re feeling lazy during quarantine, sad, anxious, scared, whatever your emotion, maybe some good old boring, informational research on schizophrenia could pull you out of your funk. It’d help your advocacy, too.

Also, welcome to the load of new followers I’ve received over the last few weeks. I promise I am much more consistent with my writing than I have been these last two months. Feel free to browse the blog for great past posts like this one about positive thinking and this one about supporting your loved one.

Be healthy, be safe, be mindful.

For updates on posts, research, and conversations, follow me:

Instagram: @written_in_the_photo

Twitter: @philopsychotic

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

Posted in 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 Emotions, Freedom

Caring For The Shattered Self

Posted on by alidware

I did not post yesterday as I was in too much pain. Today is better, although I don’t really have a set topic for today’s post. Self-care would be a good one.

I’ve learned a lot about what that means in just the last six months. Some of it came from the guidance of others, and an equal amount came from me learning my body and my brain and what connects the two of them back together. In regards to psychosis and anxiety, although they tend to be categorized as separate, they have similar attributes. I’d say the biggest difference is anxiety you still recognize your physical and mental place in the world during your disconnect. With psychosis, nothing has a place and you are the center of that nothingness.

But they are similar in that you feel dissociated from the people around you, from life, from everything. Panic can make you believe you’re dying, psychosis can make you believe you’re already dead. Anxiety makes you think badly about yourself, psychosis is lazy and will just let the voices reprimand you. And the biggest part of all of this is that separation between the turmoil in your mind and the placement of your body. This is where the idea of grounding techniques come from; there’s this idea–quite an effective one–that if you can center yourself in your limbs, remind yourself who you are and that you exist in this moment, you become more aware of right now instead of tomorrow or yesterday or the future. That’s great for anxiety.

Grounding probably won’t stop you from believing your dead. But it may help ease the anxiety of the idea of being dead, and in that process you learn to accept death. In learning to accept death and the terror and trauma which may be circling death, you accept the idea of being dead. Once you’re there it becomes a little easier to put some weight to both sides: maybe I’m dead, maybe I’m not dead. Either way, I accept what is. That can take some power from the psychosis.

Professionals talk about wanting to break people from their delusions by presenting facts or evidence or saying “well, if that was true, why is this happening?” but that makes zero sense because in delusion everything has a place. And if it doesn’t have a place, we’ll make it have a place with “I don’t know how it works, but that’s how it works” and you won’t have any evidence (to us) against that solid argument.

And so breaking is an illogical step. Telling your loved one that this can’t happen because of that and then getting frustrated at them because they don’t believe you only adds more stress.

The power of unifying the mind and body, accepting uncomfortable thoughts and ideas, giving Anxiety a place to disperse is my greatest form of self-care. Giving my mind a chance to feel how my body is affected by certain thoughts, giving my body a chance to react to my fear and anxiety my mind tumbles through, gives me a chance to tether the two back together and gives me a sense of being a whole person. Because one thing about both anxiety and psychosis is that you feel shattered. You feel like a million pieces being pulled in a million and one directions and none of the directions make much sense. Or they make perfect sense and in that, make no sense because nothing can be perfect.

Self-care doesn’t always mean “doing what makes you feel good”. Sometimes it means doing what you need to in order to grow. And that can be quite uncomfortable.

Reconnecting your physical and mental selves doesn’t just have to be through mindfulness or meditation or mindful-meditation, I’ve learned. Although those ways are quite useful. For example, music reconnects my mind to my body, especially if I’m in my room and playing it on speakers where I can really feel the vibration of the sound and move with it. Japanese Karaoke, the Karaoke in the private rooms, is one of the best ways my mind and body sync up again, my mind riding waves of emotion and my body, my diaphragm and stomach and throat specifically, capturing those emotions into vocalization.

People wonder why medication doesn’t take their mental pain away and that’s because it can’t. We all know this, and if some of us don’t, well, get comfortable with the idea that there’s no such thing as a quick fix. Medication is a bandage. It will do nothing for your thoughts but numb you from them. It will do nothing for your trauma. For a lot of us, it will do nothing for voices besides make them fainter and easier to ignore (which isn’t a bad thing, it can be quite helpful). But, if all you do is throw some chemicals at your brain and roll some dice, you’re essentially allowing yourself to shatter. You’re blockading a chance to be whole again and maybe that’s because the idea of being whole is so foreign to you. Or maybe it’s too terrifying. Maybe it’s too real and too raw and it’s much easier to hide behind numbness than to face sharpness.

And that’s okay too. If that’s where you are your best, if that’s how you function best, if it’s not going to bite you in the ass ten years down the road, great. For me, I didn’t function being a shattered person. And so I listen to myself. I listen to every pain, every ache, every burst of happiness, every drop of sadness, every small voice, every screaming voice, every immovable belief, because all of it means something. It’s not random and useless. It’s annoying and tiring, but it’s a reflection of turmoil and an indication that I’m separating from myself again. That’s a warning sign.

What happens when we bury those warning signs? Or hide from them? Well, they just seem to multiply. And for me, I’d rather care for myself and nurture one warning than feel trampled by thirty.