Blog Archives
A Great Accident
While watching Module 4.1 for my “Inspiring Leadership Through Emotional Intelligence” course, Professor Boyatzis briefly told us about how he went back to school to go into management (he was not happy doing the job he had credentials for already). He took an organization management course because the outline said that there would be no quizzes. This course changed his life forever. It is was brought him to where he is today.
This reminded me of my own experience with choosing an education that didn’t seem like a big deal at the time. Back in 2007, when I applied for college and university I applied for Musical Theatre and Social Work. I had meant to go into Psychology due to my mental 
health experience but believe, and in some cases I wasn’t, “smart” enough to go into the program. I was sick for every musical theatre audition which left me only with social work. I accepted Ryerson University’s offer and went to school in September having no idea what I was in for. Turns out I hate psychology and not academically go at it and in fact I LOVE social work and thrive within it!
You never know what is going to happen, where life is going to take you and what taking chances will bring to your life. I am very glad that I found social work (in particular Ryerson’s program) and I can’t imagine doing anything else!
You never know 
Two Types of Mad
I self identify as a Mad person. I am someone who has a psychiatric history and I wear the reclaimed title of Mad with great pride (see where I got my blog name?)
I was very fortunate to have been brought into the amazing world of Madness while in my 3rd year of university. It was here I learned everything that now shapes how I view mental health, mental illness, psychiatry, psychology, social work and myself. The includes learning about the consumer/survivor/ex-patient movement and mad-positive teachings.
It has been a great challenge to try and bring Madness into the classroom, mostly, for now, at Ryerson University where I attended school for social work and where my other Mad activist colleagues/friends are.
Ryerson’s School of Disability Studies offers History of Madness and Mad People’s History and special this year (2012-2013), a course that I helped develop through my past research with the professor, the first ever undergraduate social work mental health course, Critical Mental Health and Madness. We hope this becomes a permanent course in the near future.
Here is a great video by Professor David Reville, from Ryerson, about what Mad People’s History is and why it is so important.
I don’t know how many of you, my amazing followers, know but what we are doing, blogging about our mental health and addiction experiences, sharing how we feel about it, is extremely progressive! We are contributing to the Mad voice that has for so long been ignored! We are doing an amazing thing and we need to keep doing it!
Mad positive, views madness, well, positively! It is about self determination, the person with the experience making decisions. Mad positive means that I define myself, that I have a voice. It does not reject out current medical system but it critiques it, challenges it, it knows that there are more options then what we are being given (way more options) and that those with lived experience need to play an active role in developing those options! The goal is to coexist and support.
I get emotional thinking about what it is to be Mad positive because it has brought me such strength and I do not think I would be the person I am today without it.
Now, I also self identify as a Mad person. I am someone who experiences anger and I’m alright with that.
How are these two Mads coming together? With these buttons.
Professors of Mad positive courses and values have been handing out these buttons to other professors they see around campus. The problem is, some professors are refusing the buttons. Of course it is within their right to not take them but it is the look on their face, the tone in their voice or the actual words they say that take it from simply not wanting a button to not supporting having an inclusive positive space for Mad students and faculty. Some professors are saying that Mad positive is something they “can’t get behind.” Some of these professors are in the disciplines that interact with Mad people such as social work and psychology. It appears that Mad positive is being treated like a silly fad, something not worthy of deep consideration. This is not the case.
Mental health doesn’t need to be all or nothing. We need to stop being so dependent on our current medical model and admit that it does not help everyone and that we need options for those who do not want the medical route. There should be nothing wrong with that.
I am very confused as to how a discipline like social work can support the critical and alternate views of racism, sexism, classism, homophobia but then draw the line at mental health! Why draw the line there? Seriously, why? I can only guess it has something to do with how loyal many professionals are to the medical model.
I have had people without a past diagnosis tell me that my views about my mental health, in terms of being Mad positive, are wrong! Yes, I am being told that I am wrong to have a Mad identity by people who have no history of mental illness. I don’t accept that.
I am a Mad Mad person and I won’t let people tell me that my identity is wrong. They can get as angry as they want but I know who I am and what I want.
More Mad Resources:
WWW Wednesdays: Jan 9
To play along, just answer the following three (3) questions…
• What are you currently reading?
• What did you recently finish reading?
• What do you think you’ll read next?
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More WWW’s!
http://ecsuniverse.blogspot.ca/
http://lillianwheeler.wordpress.com/2013/01/09/www-wednesdays-jan-9/
http://proverbs215.blogspot.ca/2013/01/www-wednesday-january-9-2013.html
http://turnersantics.blogspot.com.au/2013/01/www-wednesdays-13.html
How Psychology, Psychiatry Discriminate Against People with Mental Illness
How Psychology, Psychiatry Discriminate Against People with Mental Illness
By JOHN M. GROHOL, PSYD
Founder & Editor-in-Chief
While attending the 28th Annual Rosalynn Carter Symposium on Mental Health Policy at The Carter Center last week, it occurred to me that mental health professionals are some of the worst when it comes to discriminating against people with mental illness.
They do this in insidious and subtle ways, suggesting a patient can’t do the things others without mental illness can do. Like hold down a job, get into independent housing, interact in social situations or even just go back to school and get a degree.
They also do this in more direct ways, by suggesting to their patients applying for a job or going back to school that, “If they don’t ask about mental illness, don’t volunteer that information.” Why not?
Why are mental health professionals helping to contribute to discrimination and stigma about mental illness by making these suggestions?
I had this insight while Graham Thornicroft, Ph.D., a professor of Community Psychiatry at King’s College London, was giving his keynote. He put up a slide that questioned what we mean when we talk about stigma:
What is stigma?
- Problem of knowledge = ignorance
- Problem of attitudes = prejudice
- Problem of behavior = discrimination
Item 1 is really lot less of a problem nowadays than it was 20 years ago. With the advent and widespread use of the Internet, everyone has access to so much information about these concerns.
Items 2 and 3 are what we are really dealing with today when we talk about the “stigma” of mental illness. It’s really a problem 
of attitudes and behavior, of prejudice and discrimination.
The last place in the world you would expect to find such problems in attitude and behavior are with the very professionals tasked with treatment of mental illness. And yet such prejudice and discrimination is rampant amongst the profession.
Time and time again, I hear stories of therapists and psychiatrists treating people with things like bipolar disorder and schizophreniatelling their patients all the things they can’t do. Instead of being an encouraging support, they are a wet blanket on an individual’s hopes and dreams (yes, people with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia have hopes and dreams just like the rest of us).
Many Professionals Contribute to the Prejudice and Discrimination of Mental Illness
Both healthcare and mental health professionals regularly contribute to reinforcing the prejudice and discrimination that exists for people with mental illness. Perhaps they do so in a paternalistic manner, hoping to spare their patient the pain of rejection or some people’s attitudes in the real world. But patients don’t want paternalism and don’t need to be coddled. They want support, hope and encouragement.
Perhaps the professional honestly believes the patient is simply “too sick” to participate fully in society. But since there’s no objective measure of what this statement is being measured against, it boils down to this — one person’s opinion.
Here’s some of the statements patients have heard uttered from their therapists’ and psychiatrists’ mouths, and my response:
You can’t hold down a job, it requires a regular commitment.While many people in acute psychiatric distress may indeed have troubles going to a job, usually such features are episodic (and less of an issue when a person is stabilized with a treatment regimen that works for them) — not a permanent character trait of that individual. Many employers are more than happy to make allowances for people with mental illness, if only they’re told ahead of time.
You can’t go back to school and get a degree, it’s too stressful.While people with a mental illness should work to avoid stress, the same could be said of everyone. Once a person finds a treatment that works for them, they should have and be encouraged to experience all that the world has to offer — including an education of their choosing.
You can’t live on your own. While some people make benefit from the routine and familiarity of a group home or living at home with their parents, most people with mental illness don’t need the rigid structure and supervision of such places. Virtually anyone can live independently, as long as they are given the support and encouragement to do so.
You can’t become a therapist or doctor. This is the most frustrating form of discrimination I hear from graduate schools. I’m not sure it’s based on reality, but consider this scenario. A graduate school has two equal candidates vying for one slot. One has disclosed a history of mental illness and successful treatment, while the other has not. Which do you believe the graduate program is going to choose?
Anyone with mental illness can do anything they want in life. The key is finding a successful treatment regimen that works for them, whether it’s medication or psychotherapy or some combination of the two.
Instead of encouraging people to not “bring it up if they don’t,” we should all be talking openly and honestly about mental illness. We are a long ways from the dark times when mental illness can’t be discussed. The people who are often holding us back from the light are sometimes the very mental health professionals who are supposed to be helping.
Encouraging people to hide or be ashamed of their mental illness does not help anyone.
Psych Symbol
This is the symbol for Psychology.
Does it look like a person shrugging their shoulders or is it just me? 
The Campaign Against Depression
Quote from Richard Handler, February 20 2012
“Most of us don’t identify in any real way with a cancerous tumour, should it take hold. But we do identify, intensely, with our minds, as representing something about the content of our character.
If our moods have grown poisonous, malignant, we can’t help taking it personally.
Just ask yourself if you can separate the personality of a depressed or highly anxious individual suffering from a mood disorder from the sense you have of that person.
It might be unfair. But a person’s mood disorder is often seen as an intrinsic part of him or her.
In many cases, the only way you can admit to having a mood disorder or a mental illness is to proclaim that you have recovered from it, or that it is so well managed that it’s really not crippling.
This happens, most tellingly, at the very heart of the psychological and psychiatric establishment.
Worthy mental health institutions, like the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, enlist athletes and entertainers to announce that they, or a close family member, suffer from mood disorders.
But would the good doctors and administrators themselves admit to suffering from depression? I think that is highly unlikely.”
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/story/2012/02/20/f-vp-handler.html
Psychological Diagnosis: Dangerous, Desirable, or Both?
This is an article from Psychology Today that I really enjoyed!
I stopped reading PT for awhile because of their idiotic posting on the lack of attractiveness of Black women (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/17/satoshi-kanazawa-black-women-less-attractive_n_863327.html) and a post I read that horribly stereotyped girls which included degrading comments related to mental illnesses (http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/valley-girl-brain/201105/the-four-types-female-friends-avoid my comment is there under my name).
They seem to slowly be learning their lesson that if they want to be a credible scientific magazine they need to stop producing BULLSHIT!!!
I was very happy when I stumbled across this article looks at how being labeled with a mental illness can be both good and bad. This is something I have discussed with friends and colleagues and the points included in the article are ones that we have touched on!
Psychological Diagnosis: Dangerous, Desirable, or Both?
A client of mine, let’s call him Gary, once said something that struck me as startlingly insightful. Gary had had a recurrence of his soon-to-be-fatal cancer. Yet he was informing almost none of his friends of his regrettable medical reality.
“As soon as I tell anyone that I have cancer, all they see when they are with me is CANCER. They no longer see me, Gary, with all my foibles and virtues. All they see is CANCER.”
Gary understood that words have the power to define what we see, potentially blocking us from seeing aspects that differ from the label.
Calling yourself an anxious person, for instance, can put you at risk for ignoring the many times that you feel relaxed, playful, and loving. Label your friend a narcissist and you risk losing sight of the generosity, creativity, and insightfulness that used to draw you toward him.
In addition to screening non-confirmatory data from our view, using a label heightens our awareness of confirmatory data. Label yourself an anxious person and you will be more likely to notice the many times that you feel a flutter of nervousness that in the past you might have ignored.
Here’s another subtle yet potent labeling danger. Calling yourself by a diagnostic label can increase the likelihood that you will continue to act in that manner. Saying that you are depressed increases the likelihood that you will stay home instead of socializing. The label depressed may be a way too that you give yourself permission to stay home and nibble, putting on pounds instead of pushing yourself to go out for your usual exercise regime.
Labeling yourself or others with the potent labels of psychological diagnostic categories also can convey a blanket negative feeling. Old-fashioned character slurs like selfish or lazy had that impact. Similarly, psychological character diagnostic labels like narcissistic convey distinctly pejorative connotations. To most people, narcissistic is a fancy word for selfish.
Once you’ve begun thinking of a friend with the negative label likenarcissistic, for instance, you become at risk for interpreting everything he or she does in a negative light. If a friend you have labeled narcissisticbrings you chicken soup when you’re ill, instead of appreciating the generous gesture you may think to yourself, “She’s just trying to make herself look good.”
Perhaps the biggest problem with labels occurs when pathologizing emotional reactions leads to pills.
Depression, for instance, is a negative emotional state that merits attention. Tallk therapies of various types including insight-oriented, cognitive-behavioral, energy psychology (EFT, TFT, Emotion Code),conflict-resolution visualizations and couple therapy all have strong track records of helping people alleviate depression’s dark cloud. They help by addressing the life problems provoking the negative emotional state.
Unfortunately though most people who are troubled by a depressed emotional state ask their physician rather than a psychotherapy professional what to do. To a man with a hammer, as the saying goes, the world’s a nail. Doctors give pills.
The downside of pills for emotions is their potentially detrimental side effects. Anti-anxietiy drugs can be addictive. Anti-depressants can cause mental cloudiness, dampen feelings of joy, increase appetite which leads to weight gain, decrease sexual interest which can cause marital difficulties, and lead to drug dependence.
Drug dependence means that if people try to stop taking the medicaiton, especially if they wean themselves too abrubtly, removal of the medication triggers a serious depressive episode. Not realizing that the culprit was the drug, not a lurking depression that the drug had been preventing, people then feel locked into to continuing to take the medicaiton forever. The drug companies benefit, but someone who now is mislabeled as having a lifelong underlying depression certainly does not.
The benefits of psychological diagnoses.
Diagnostic labels are helpful though when they lead to more empathic understanding and more effective responses.
Labeling a child ADHD, for instance, may give you more patience with his high energy. It also can enable you to give him a medication that may be life-changing. Now that he can focus and settle down to learn in school, he will be learning successfully, which is likely to enable him to build the foundations in knowledge and self-esteem on which he will be more likely to enjoy successes throughout his adult life. [note: One reader wrote to remind me that Ritalin can also be dangerous: seehttp://www.ritalindeath.com]
Receiving an accurate diagnostic label for a spouse’s difficult behavior can prove similarly life-changing. In one of my current couples, for instance, the wife became increasingly verbally abusive to her husband, emotionally erratic, and certain that everyone and everything was out to get her. Her husband kept trying to keep his head above water and their children safe from his wife’s anger outbursts. Finally he gave up on trying to handle the situation himself and brought his wife for professional help.
The wife’s emergency room diagnosis was amphetamine addiction and drug-induced paranoid psychosis. A month of hospital care plus extensive therapy that included both spouses resulted from this accurate diagnosis, and proved life-saving for them all.
Accurately labeling yourself diagnostically can be helpful as well.
Labeling a jittery feeling state anxious can propel you to pause, identify the dilemma that is triggering the anxious feelings, and focus in on figuring out what to do about the problem.
One morning for instance my client Jan felt anxious. Jan used to get mad at herself for her nervousness. By clinically labeling her feeling anxiety, she was able to use her new knowledge of what to do in the face of specific emotions.
“The best antidote for anxiety,” Jan reminded herself, “is information.” She paused to track down the cause of the anxious feeling and realized that too many projects at work were competing simultaneously for her attention. Thinking further, Jan scheduled specific times for addressing some of the projects, removed others from her current day’s To Do list, and picked one as a primary foreground to get started on right away. Now Jan could move forward with a clear, relaxed and productive focus.
What can enable you to keep your uses of psychological terminology beneficial?
Here’s three principles that can help.
1.Use labels for emotional states as signs that point what road to take to alleviate the problem.
Anger signals that there’s something you want and are not getting or a harm that needs rectification. If you feel angry, find ways to be more effective, preferably by acting in a way that’s collaborative or clever rather than coercive.
Anxiety signifies that there’s a problem ahead that you need to address. Look at it squarely, gather information, and map a plan of action. The anxiety is likely to diminish.
Sadness means there’s been a loss. Acknowledge the loss, allow the sadness to well up like a wave and it’s likely afterwards to abate.
Depression means you experienced a loss of power. Identify the triggering moment. Visualize yourself as big. Then, from a subjective state of feeling bigger, figure out new options. If for instance you feel depressed over the way a friend has treated you, figure out a strategy that will enable you to handle that situation in a new way in the future.
Dear “Experts”
Dear “Experts”,
Sometimes you don’t help.
Sometimes you are the reason people with mental health issues are stigmatized.
You create stigma when you label yourself as experts. Claiming that you know more about my life than I do. You are the reason every person who took a psychology course at one point in their life feels they can now diagnose everyone and understand what mental illness is. I hate it when random people play “expert” and tell me what my symptoms are and what treatments I should consider because “I took a psychology class once.” If you have not lived it you will never get it. When you don’t listen to me when I say that something isn’t working because you can’t trust the judgement of someone who is “crazy”. You create stigma by taking away my right to choose all because you are the “expert”.
When you withhold valuable information on side effects you are creating stigma. You are keeping all knowledge to yourself and not sharing it with those who deserve to hear it; those taking the medications and treatments you offer. You keep us in the dark so we need to look up to you and trust you because we don’t have access to this information ourselves. You have the power. We become powerless.
When you blame the disease and not the drug, you are creating stigma. It is a horrible feeling to think that you are so sick that not even the industries “wonder drugs” can help you. This leads to “common” knowledge being that these medications WILL help and if they do not then you are a lost cause. This also creates a fear for those who have mental health issues but are not on psychiatric medication, such as myself. “Rarer than corpses are the unmedicated Mad” (Terrence McKenna). We must be truly crazy and out of control since we are not on medication. Maybe this is because we’re thrown into an industry that can’t admit it’s flaws. Only patients fail. The Industry can only succeed. Stop spreading this lie.
“Experts”, when you don’t take us seriously you create stigma. I was talking to my Mother last night about my Prozac-induced suicide attempt at 16 years old and how I’m afraid to talk about it on national TV. She began telling me that the hospital just waved off my attempt. They had always waved me off claiming it wasn’t a big deal. I got worse. If those who are supposed to help us cannot take us seriously then who will? And why should they?
What, you may ask, should you do about this? “Experts”, stop being experts. Value our insight, value our knowledge, value our lives. See us as equals, see us as valid. We should be your partners, your answers to everything you want to know.
We cannot be helped, we cannot recover if those who help us are apart of the problem.
Signed,
Kristen
