I’ll be back. I’m struggling with things myself. But I’ll be back. In the meantime, thank you for what you’ve said.
At first I hesitated in bringing attention here to J.'s plight and also to my own. I realize that words, even the best intended are suggestive and evocative and may infect.
Interspersed academics–
“While it is ‘necessary’ to view schizophrenia as an organic process, this perspective is not ‘sufficient’, and the common belief that this illness is nothing more than an organic toxic affliction visited on an otherwise ‘normal’ person, his family and society,is both incorrect and misleading.” (Robbins 1993).
About me–
Experience of unreality at age 5.
Episode of major depression at 21. Hospitalized, released. My sister who took me in told me that because I smoked and liked “girlie” magazines, I was possessed with a demon of lust. My psychiatrist told her she was living in the middle ages and told me that I read too many “deep” books.
Recurrent, minor episodes, costing me full expression of creative abilites.
Episode of major depression at 51, 4 weeks hospitalization, several recurrences and hospitalizations aferwards.
Applied for SSD. Was denied because of my former ability to earn degrees and to keep working in menial jobs for 30 years. Stayed drunk a year. Lived with friends who eventually couldn’t tolerate me.
Finally was able to get SS early retirement.
Many years spent in paranoia, obsessive compulsive reactions, agoraphobia, panic attacks, etc.
I was criticzed for showing up at AA meetings and therapy sessions drunk. I usually had more information from reading than my doctors or therapists had.
Now? Fragile, but hopeful. I respond to poetry, music and art and have not lost my deep love of people.
My reaction to this is to not allow a label of who or what you are to take on much weight. Life it hard, you felt it hard and it doesn’t sound to me like you were in contexts where being different was accepted. So it can be easy to think you have a mental illness or something fundamentally wrong with you. Hell, you might be having problems because something is right with you - not that this means, hey party time, everythings great.
That you love those things you listed is incredibly important - in a sense, symbolically and in feelings they go to the same place in us that alcohol does. IOW you can self-medicate with poetry musics and people you love. I mean that ironically. It wouldn’t be self-medicating but rather what self-medicating had been trying to imitate all along. Find social connections through music and poetry. Take it light at first. Online, yes, but people in person is very important. May come slow. Poetry slams, poetry readings, take creative writing courses, find a community radio station that has a poetry hour, see if you can connect through any of these things to humans where you share something. Some of these poets and musicians will seem to be coming from places you have come from, places with lots of emotions. Perhaps you will find peers. Just see if you can let that expand to where you find people you can be open with and who do not think you are nuts or weird for having strong feelings in this world. Then the strong feelings get more relaxed less crazy. See how that channel depression into rage at specific targets in art.
I am not saying throw whatever medication you may be on in the garbage. Who knows, it might be a good balancing for you until you have real support and the life that feels better. Maybe past that. I don’t know. But I don’t think you have some disease, for what that’s worth and the drug/psychiatric model is missing something. Head for that something.
that you know what you love is huge, follow that. Baby steps and for God’s sake be nice to yourself even if that seems wrong.
Thanks, Moreno, for the caring advice. Maybe some of my downfall is due to excessive empathy. I was always attracted to the “street people”, who hang onto slender threads of selfhood by using drugs and attending to whatever help an unwilling society will offer. We infect each other and support the common consensus that we are somehow less human than others are.
My favorite therapist was a young man named Steve. In our sessions he would listen to comedy and music tapes I made. When he wrote his thesis, I proofread it and offerred suggestions. Once I told him that a distinction should be made beween selfishness and the fact that illnesses cause one to withdraw into the self. He said I taught him something! His advice, given my limited options, was to cope as I could; and when I couldn’t, to check myself into the crisis center.
When young I was able to get poems published in literary journals. Now I still ocassionally write them, but don’t try for any sort of recognition. I’ve written several novel drafts and hundreds of pages on philosophy. The writing is a solitary endeavor. I was raised by folks who thought “If you’re so smart, why aint you rich?” It’s hard to undo the damage.
It may be hard, but it’s not impossible. Moreno and I have both suggested you seek out human contact–real, not virtual! You need some positive strokes, Mr. ierrrellus. Seek and ye shall find.
Glad to see you back, Liz. Hope you are OK.
About human contact–we in this situation seem doomed to seek help mostly from each other. Both Torrey and Robbins note that the system for helping MI sufferers is as insane as those needing the help. So where do we go? To dysfunctional families and social services?
Robbins, in a case study, tells why we often become street people or gravitate toward street people. The so-called “dregs of society” survive on the edge by giving up the luxury of hypocrisy. They do not hide their abuses of self and others.
When I walk, without fear, into the “drug district” of our city, thinking,“What can they do to me that has not already been done?”, a young man approaches me and asks, “Are you OK?” “I’m fine”, I reply, having no need or desire for street drugs.
Around election time our local police round up druggies and prostitutes and place them in the temporary housing of overcrowded jails. The local newspaper lauds this ritual “cleansing”. At a 12-step meeting, when the discussion was about who would represent whom during the meetings at a weekend retreat, I said, “I’ll represent the druggies and prostitutes.” I did not go to the retreat.
There is no way I can romanticize the lifestyles of street people. I can only note the personal bonding and lack of judgmentalism that seems to flourish among them.
Much more on J., C. and me.
Have you ever read about the lives of hobos back in the 1920s and 30s? I’m not trying to equate them with today’'s ‘street people’–I really don’t know that much about ‘street people.’ But hobos had a strict moral code. They were also hobos in order to have the mobility (riding the ‘rails’) in order to look for work. While some had drug problems, usually alcohol, not all of them did. They kept themselves clean whenever they could. A lot of them went on to become famous–either as authors or entertainers.
Today’s homeless seem prone to addictions, mental health issues, and, because of that, the inability to work. Their inability to work stems from their homelessness and their other issues. There was a homeless man who frequented the library where I worked, once. He apparently hadn’t taken his meds for years. (Yes, he had MI problems.) He lived in the service bay of a gas station (the owner let him) and was given money and shoes by a local fire house–all of whom, I’m sure, tried to convince him to get help. But he wouldn’t–until he almost died.
He contracted a disease that started eating the flesh of his legs. The smell was awful. Someone finally noticed blood running down his pant legs and into his shoes and called 911. Last I heard, he was on his meds and had finally allowed his aunt to care for him. I understand he’s doing well now–although he probably would be back on the streets had he had no one to care for him.
We’re caught up in so many laws–we cannot get aid for someone unless we have their consent, for example–we’re torn between giving anything to the homeless begging on the streets because we can’t be sure they won’t use what we give them to feed their addictions. And there’s fraud in the streets, as there is everywhere else, it seems. I had a dentist who treated an entire extended family of immigrants, pro bono, because they had no work. Shortly afterwards, he learned that they’d bought a lake front home and were actually doing quite well.
When you learn about such things, you can become very reluctant to use even a small part of your income to help. Or, at least, are very wary–if not skeptical.
I read, today, that famine relief aid to Somalia had been stolen by Somali tribesmen so their own people wouldn’t know it was food aid or where it came from. That way, the thieves could sell it as "largesse’ from whatever tribal chief had stolen it.
It’s all a damned hard thing to figure out, ier. How is the circle to be broken?
Most MI sufferers turn into “hobos” at one point in their lives. J.‘s experiences are typical almost to the point of stereotype–breakdown, hospitalization, halfway house, the streets, the Y, tawdry apartments, better apartments.
We MI sufferers havea patron saint–Dymphna. (natishrinstdympha.org/history.php.)
In the early years of this new century a social worker took me to a meeting of the Gheel Society. The society is based on a lady, Dymphna, who cared for the mentally ill and for the town of Gheel where her successes in helping us became known worldwide.
But–Gheel in the USA seems to be another stab at an ethical subculture, like Gaskins’ Farm in Tenn. And–on another level, it’s meetings become like 12 step programs and the streets–just another place of escape from a society that believes profit is more important than health. The glue of understanding in these places is that there still exists a them and an us and that our fragile hope may rely mostly on us.
Yes, but does it need to be?
As I said above, the true hobo rode the rails in order to find work; they were, in many ways, the itinerant farm worker of today. As they were able to, they switched to cars and brought their families with them. Along the West Coast, the Federal government built roads, US 99, for example, to make it easier for them to follow the crops north from California to Canada and back south again. President Reagan, as a good Republican, made sweeping changes to social programs in the US, including Federal funding for mental hospitals. I’m not going to say he was wrong to do so, but it meant the states couldn’t keep up with the rising costs of treating the mentally ill. One of the unanticipated consequences was that it left the MI with no place to go other than the streets.
While hobos tried to keep to an ethical code and developed a singular, sub-culture language very like the language of the Underground Railroad, the MI, because they are mentally ill, can’t. They aren’t looking for work, because they can’t. If they’ve developed a language, and I don’t see how that’s possible, it’s unknown. If their ethical code is to take ‘care’ of each other because no one else will–they’re right! But are they really “taking care” of each other?
Not all homeless people are mentally ill, but a lot of them are; and more homelessness will be created as states cut their budgets as the result of the financial melt down.
This is what needs to be stopped. It isn’t socialism to maintain social programs–it’s maintaining the health and well-fare of those who need it most.
Yep, I understand about the hobos of the 20s & 30s. In the last century their camps near the railroad tracks were widely known and, by some, respected. They had a common goal. They looked out for each other. So my analogy of street people may not be quite accurate. Street people bond in mutual harm, in obsessions and cravings that afford no healthy remedial progress. They are trapped in the vicious cycles of addiction, lack of self-respect, social bias, etc.
The tragedy of J. is that she really wants to work, but cannot fill out an application. Trying to cope with her lose/lose situation, she spends much time in the escapes of delusion. Recently, she has talked of wanting to die, of welcoming death as release. I try hard to combat this type of thinking. It may be that her voices realize they must die. What is happening with her now, and this may be more positive than she can at present believe, is that she is becoming more aware of reality that can be communicated. She has been able to tell me that she has an illness, when it began and how it affected her family. I’ll describe the physical effects of her illness later. As for now, she is overwhemed by the pains of healing. And her family seems not to want contact with me due to lack of trust. They seem to see her “boyfriends” who come and go as just another part of their mother’s “crazy” life.
Robbins describes his frustration with his patient Celia about the “authority”’ of her hallucinated voices:
“‘They’, a Greek chorus of female voices that at times she could localize (and at times visualize), seemed to control her life, requiring that she deprive herself of food, sleep, and contact with me, or else she would suffer terror and disorientation and would have to be punished and make restitution. Our sessions consisted of a curious triadic relation among Celia, myself and ‘them’. But only she could talk with ‘them’ and ‘they’ had ultimate authority.”
Reading this case study, I’m amazed at how many thoughts and actions Celia and J. share. Both state that someone forces them to eat human flesh. Both claim that their mothers have taken possession of their minds. Both express a painful “inner” conflict between claims of wanting to live as others do and the known comfort of escapism into alcohol numbness or thoughts of death as the ultimate remedy for pain. Both believe that those who would care enough to help them do so at the expense of harming someone they love. For J., if she listens to me, her children will suffer torture. Both express misplaced hostility toward those who would challenge their self-destructive tendencies. Both are too comfortable with seeing negation of self-respect as more important than the painful business of healing their minds.
1 of 4:
By the 1970s psychotherapy had split into two, often opposing, camps of thought. On the one hand some doctors concluded that MI is totally biological, i.e., due to genetic/brain malfunctions. This conclusion was bolstered by the acendency of neuroscience with its findings that certain drugs relieved certain symptoms. On the other hand some doctors concluded that MI is a natural reaction to social and familial negations of one’s personal integrity.
The rift between psychiatrists who advocate chemical therapy and those who advocate talk therapy owes much to the lingering Cartesian concept of a mind/body dichotomy. It is easily seen in debate forums that most debate is between “physicalists” and “mentalists”. In such a situtation, as exemplified in debates over diagnosis and therapy for MIs, little future is offered for concerted effort toward relief for MI sufferers.
Below, I’ll quote from “talk” therapists, who, I believe, have some good points to make and whose case I’ve not adequately presented here due to my own biases.
J. does not get “talk” therapy.
Maybe it’s too soon for J. to get talk therapy. She may not yet be stabilized enough. Don’t assume. There are times when all the doctors can do is relieve symptoms–as with viruses–because “There’s no cure for the common cold.” Talk therapy is give and take, isn’t it? Doesn’t that mean being rational enough to both give and take?
Does ‘rationality’ mean you have to be able to recognize irrationality first and understand the difference between the two?
Maybe it’s too soon for J. to get talk therapy. She may not yet be stabilized enough. Don’t assume. There are times when all the doctors can do is relieve symptoms–as with viruses–because “There’s no cure for the common cold.” Talk therapy is give and take, isn’t it? Doesn’t that mean being rational enough to both give and take?
J. talks of 17 years of med-therapy. So, it’s not too soon to do the complementary self/other work that talk therapy requires. Also, even in my bungling attempts to hear her out, without being invasive or judgmental, she has confided in me such things as “My mind tells me lies.” and “If you weren’t around,I’d probably be dead by now.” A caring psychotherapist could work with her on those understandings. I am not trying to get her to be overly dependent on me and will discourage that in favor of any self-assertions she can make. My own self-examinations here have to do with both evidence of her progress and critique of my own expectations and reactions to these.
I’m going further into the “rift” of therapies here simply because I don’t believe I did justice to some professional takes on this, especially on such things as what Szasz was actually saying when he claimed MI is a myth.
I don’t see a “rational”/"irrational divide except in interpretations of experiences that actually complement.
If J. has gone through 17 yrs of med therapy and has been taking her meds faithfully for all 17 of those yrs. how did she end up ‘on the streets?’ Why would she still be saying the things you say she says? This is what I mean by perhaps it’s too soon for J. to go through the honest introspection needed for successful talk therapy. Yes, a caring psychotherapist could “work with her on those understandings,” but how many of those are around, particularly in a state/federally funded MI program?
You were going to talk about talk therapy. Sorry I interrupted you. Please go on.
I haven’t yet read much of what Szasz has written–but I do wonder about this–
I think MI has been used too often in criminal defense pleas. Take Ted Bundy as an example. The man came from a normal family and had a normal childhood. He wasn’t deprived nor was he abused. He was intelligent, educated, and extremely functional and articulate. And he was a serial rapist and killer.
In his final interview, the night before he was executed, he used what the media had given him as an explanation–his over-use of pornographic magazines. Yet there was no pornography ever found in his premises that would foster or bolster such a belief. Neuroscientists postulated a malfunction of the amygdala, but they still don’t know.
Szasz wrote in the 1960s; Ted Bundy raped and killed during the 1970s. How would Szasz have categorized Bundy?
Before getting into my recent discoveries about what Szasz was actually saying and the challenge of the current rift between psychotherapists who are all med. and those who are all talk, let me say a few things about J. and about the “insanity defense”.
On the latter, IMHO, any crime, such as murder, rape or pedophile activities could be excused on the grounds of mental illness in that they go against social concepts of sanity as “you don’t do such things unless you are crazy.” The courts are still battling over this issue–take, for instance the Texas woman who killed her children in order to save them from Satan! She is probably now housed in a prison for the criminally insane–housed, fed, taken care of.
Bundy blamed his crimes on pornography! That’s a very rational consideration. So, what part of him gave in to acting out a conflict of lust/aversion to women?
About J.–Yes she was on the streets prior to any medical interventions. The best advice I’ve got concerning my relationship with her came from a close friend who told me not to expect more than she is able to do right now.
All quotes cited below are from Wm. Glasser’s “Reality Therapy in Action” (2000). I think the quotes will show how the “antipsychiatrists” (google), such as Laing and Szasz remain influential. Somewhere in my meanderings here I met a Laing fan. I wish he or she would contribute to our discussion. Glasser,in this book, mentions Szasz, but not Laing. That may be because, as Torrey noted, Lang recanted his anti-med therapy stance and succumbed to alcoholism. As far as I know, Szasz has stuck to his guns.
Breggin* in the preface:
“Nothing has harmed the quality of individual life in modern society more than the misbegotten belief that human suiffering is driven by biological and genetic causes and can be rectified by taking drugs or undergoing shock therapy.”
“If I wanted to ruin someone’s life, I would convince the person that biological psychiatry is right–that relationships mean nothing,that the mechanisms of a broken brain reign over our emotions and conduct.”
If I wanted to impair an individual’s capacity to create empathic, loving relationships, I would prescribe psychiatric drugs, all of which blunt our highest psychological and spiritual functions."
Life has no meaning if we fail to see that the good life is made of loving relationships. Life has no hope if we do not know how to live by conscious decision making based on sound principles. To take responsibility for ouselves, rather than to control other people, is one of these principles. To offer ourselves, rather than to critisize or carp, is yet another"
*
"Peter B. Breggin, M.D.,Director,International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psycholgy, Author, with David Cohen, Phd, of the 1999 book,“Your Drug May Be Your Problem: How and Why To Stop Taking Psychiatic Medications.”
Breggin also wrote “Toxic Psychiatry” (1991).
- Glasser
Quotes are statements made by Wm. Glasser, Glasser Institute,(wwwglasserinst.com), author of “Reality Therapy”(1965), “Choice Theory” (1998) and other works. The movie Glasser uses to express his opinions is “As Perfect As It Gets”, starring Jack Nicholson.
“On the basis of my 1998 book, 'Choice Theory”, I contend that we choose everything we do, including the behaviors commonly called mental illness. Although I explain how this concept of choice applies to every client I see, it is still a radical idea. In ‘Reality Therapy’ I agree with Thomas Szasz* that mental illness, as it was enderstood then {1965} did not exist. What existed in 1965 was a theory of mental illness that was based on Freud’s explanations of unresolved, unconscious conflicts. Contrary to that belief, I contended in ‘Reality Therapy’ that clients were not sick. They were responsible for their behavior and should not be labeled mentally ill."
“What has yet to be accepted is my continuing belief that it is wrong to label people mentally ill.”
Psychiatrists, who used to be trained to do psychotherapy, now mostly prescribe drugs."
“In this book {'Reality Therapy”} I demonstrate that when clients begin to make better and more need-satisfying choices, the symptoms disappear. Brain scan research shows that the brain’s chemistry changes reflect these more effective choices."
“In his 1991 book, 'Toxic Psychiatry”, psychiatrist Peter Breggin cites research to support his statement that mental ‘illnesses’, like schizophrenia, depression, manic-depressive (bipolar) disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and even attention deficit disorder have never been proved to be genetic or physical in origin."
“To quote from Dr. Peter R. Breggin’s book,‘Toxic Psychiatry’, 'Psychiatric drugs and electriuc shock therapy are spreading an epidemic of permanent brain damage.”
- T.S. Szasz,“the Myth of Mental Illness”,1961.