In 1991 my mother admitted to me during my second inpatient stay for suicide that she had suffered depression and suicidal ideation all her life.
In 1999, ten years after my dual diagnosis of manic depression and schizo affective my sister went inpatient on the opposite side of the country for a suicide attempt. She was diagnosed with Bipolar.
As we move through the year 2008 I look back on the fact that I have been depression, mania, self injury , voices and delusion free for over ten years.
How is this possible you might ask?
If you are familiar with my blog content and videos on youtube then you know how.
I secluded myself from other people with mental health issues and practiced meditation full time for years.
After the first year of that lifestyle I achieved a milestone marker of the first year without cyclical suicidal depression. Now over ten years have passed and I remain symptom free.
Some folks would not think breathing exercises and navel gazing could have that effect but that is because they are not up to date on the latest in meditation and brain imaging research.
So I make the following predictions. I must have these bipolar/schizoid biomarkers. I must have this unique bipolar brain signature. At 33 years old having had my first suicidal ideation nearly 25 years ago there must be some observable level of brain volume decrease.
Unless I have reversed that brain volume decrease. According to the meditation studies meditation builds the brain up increasing brain volume and density.
So we can make a few generalized conclusions.
Either meditation cured me of mental illness and there is no evidence in my brain whatsoever of the alleged brain destroying powers of bipolar and schizophrenia.
Or I still have these disorders and they are completely held in stasis by meditation.
Now either of those conclusions are medically and scientifically significant.
Meditation won’t put a dime in Big Pharma’s bank account but it is definitely important information to the ongoing study of psychology and perhaps psychiatry as well.
I make this offer. I am willing to submit to brain imaging while meditating and not meditating.
After 20 years of meditation experience I can make my brain light up the same way Tibetan and Buddhist Monks do I guarantee it.
I would also like to make a few other predictions or speculations about these brain images and biomarkers.
The first is this.
Biomarkers occur as a result of prolonged mental illness symptoms.
It is a correlation not a cause.
Biomarkers would eventually disappear if the symptoms went into remission long enough.
This is similar to the *chemical imbalance* theory.
Genetic chemical imbalances do not cause mental illness. The chemical imbalance is an effect of prolonged suffering of symptoms. Such chemical imbalances would restore themselves if the symptoms went into remission long enough.
Brain cell death and brain volume decreases associated with Bipolars and Schizoids are a result of the treatments for the illness, not the illness itself.
For Bipolars and Schizo that self medicate, the years of alcohol and drug abuse cause brain volume decreases.
For Bipolars and Schizoids that use polypharmacy the probable cause of this brain volume decrease is their meds more specifically neuroleptics.
That is not to say mental illness has no appreciable effect on brain volume.
There is the saying, if you don’t use it you lose it. Certainly if you fail to control or try to control your mental health symptoms then the natural brain functions that would instill stability become stunted and atrophy.
However in learning to manage mental illness symptoms without drugs I am guessing those areas of my brain are in reality much more developed than you might expect. Perhaps more developed than in those who never suffered from mental illness because it is an area of the brain I had to work at constantly to achieve stability and wellness.
My conclusions.
Biomarkers and chemical imbalances are the snapshot of ongoing mental illness. They are an effect of the illness, not a cause or a predictor. These imbalances and markers would disappear with remission of symptoms.
Bipolar Disorder and Schizophrenia do have a cure. Meditation is that cure. I think the MRI and PET scans will prove this unambiguously.
If you weigh the risk-reward ration for taking five years out of your life in order to meditate until your emotional and cognitive controls are established. You compare that to a life spent with unmitigated mental health issues or a life spent on polypharmacy dependency than you will quickly realize that interrupting your career and lifestyle in order to cure your mental health problems permanently is more advantageous than a life spent keeping symptoms at bay with drugs while developing diabetes, obesity, tardives dyskinesia, nervous system ataxia, thyroid imbalances, kidney failure and psych med addiction for life.
Who is willing to take five years out of their life to meditate until they have inner peace?
Only the most eccentric, the most desperate and the most intelligent of people.
You have to have a certain level of foresight to see the benefits. Most people are too hung up trying to consume and move up Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to slow down and do what it takes to make lasting changes in themselves. They would rather pop a pill and keep on surfing the web than sit down by a river or in the silence of their bedroom and sit quietly until they have mastered their mental landscape. It is too much work to heal yourself. That and all the bullshit pharmaganda would have people believe that it is not possible and they don’t have anything to take responsibility for. (except getting that scrip filled right away!)
Big Pharma takes advantage of that and profits. People tell themselves it is worth it as long as the pills keep their credit lines active and roof over their head.
Another predication I make is that the mental illness reversing powers of meditation work better the younger you are when you start. The more severe the symptoms, the sooner you need to check out of life and meditate.
People in their 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond will have decades of inertia to overcome if they have been suffering all that time.
People in their teens, 20s and 30s that take this work seriously can make huge leaps in mental health sanitation if they take it seriously and stick with it.
The longer you go without meditation the harder it will be do reverse your mental illness with it.
Not to say it is impossible, just much more difficult. I started serious meditation at the age of 21 a year after my last suicide attempt. That may have made a major difference in my recovery.
In the meantime, I would like to see future imaging studies of the brain to include whether or not the subjects being imaged have been on meds, what meds those are and how long they have been on them
I want to see controls in these studies such as scans of brains of people with bipolar and schizophrenia that are not on meds at all and compare them to scans of people on meds. I want clarifications and more details about these brain shrinkage studies.
So to further the cause of science and psychology I offer myself for brain imaging studies as a meditator who has cured themselves of manic depression and schizophrenia. I am also willing to take the bipolar and schizophrenic biomarker tests at anytime.
Remember, if I have the biomarkers, than my symptom remission is scientifically valuable information
If I do not have these biomarkers while my sister continues to receive treatment for bipolar and my mother continues to go without it than this is scientifically significant. Given that I had Manic Depression and Schizophrenia with multiple suicidal and psychotic episodes.
Gene expression is an interesting thing. Stress, hormones, sickness and health all turn genes off or on. My guess is that gene expression for mental illness is not set in stone but is merely a snapshot of the current situation, not a reason or a predictor but an effect.
After sending out my personal accounting of my experiences with psychopathological behaviour and how I recovered from it to a few brave volunteers I have decided to save this for the book.
In a nutshell, years of abuse at home and at school combined with abandonment and life in state institutions left me with major anti social problems. I did some scary things to people. Stuff I don’t want splogs generators or Fuller Torrey getting their hands on without proper context and background.
There is every indication I suffered recurring bouts of Brief Psychotic Disorder caused by traumatic events and abusive or toxic places. Years of untreated mental illness graduated into ever increasingly manic or disturbing behaviors which crossed the line from brief psychosis or psychotic mania into psychopathology. That was an issue in and of itself that sprang from the soil of clinical depression and ptsd. Psychopathology is not currently diagnosed in psychiatry but it is in fact a forensic label. The closest psych label is anti social personality disorder.A disorder which can be comorbid with another illness such as a mood disorder i.e. bipolar.
That is not a label I ever received from professional psychologist or psychiatrist. Bearing in mind, diagnosis is based on symptoms presented. Psychotic or psychopathic states in me were triggered by specific events and did not represent any ongoing condition like depression. It was definitely not something I would dare admit to for fear of being locked away permanently.
As a result of careful consideration of people’s reactions to and advice concerning my *confession* I will not be posting that accounting on this blog and the psychosis section is closed for now.
First, I am sorry Marian, Spirtual Emergency and Dumdumwit for going silent on the comments section. I have been writing like mad and could not stop.
The good news is I finished a very sanitized account of my own psychotic/sociopathic/manic episodes. It is 10,000 words long.
The bad news is I am not sure yet if there would be legal issues I am unaware of or what other ramifications posting this would incur. I have not decided to post it yet. It is pretty dark and awful. If you want a private screening of it and perhaps offer me some feedback I am open to advice on what to do with it.
Having thus finished this awful and emotionally draining accounting there is only more thing to talk about before my blogging phase winds down.
The next major post will be an accounting of the meditation experience which changed my life.
Once that is done I can get started on compiling and editing the book!
For those wondering what is going on with the blog this week.
I merged the youtube page with the projects page to reform it as the new Writings page.
This was so I could dedicate a section to psychosis and psychopathology.
Not sure where it’s going at the moment.
What happened is, Sean Blackwell, the author of the wonderful new book ‘The Quiet Mind’ recently asked that those of us with psychotic stories be more forthcoming in order to further the dialog on these experiences.
He recently asked me in personal correspondence if I had had any experience with psychosis and what I would do with someone experiencing psychosis.
My short answer was that it really depends on the nature of the presenting symptoms of psychosis.
Not everyone experiences psychosis as an ego collapse or a spiritual evolution. The kind of psychosis I had was really scary and very embarrassing and stigmatizing. So I risk quite a bit to speak of it.
Today my goal is to finish up my section on psychosis with my own *confession* about it.
I am sorry in advance if I don’t swiftly craft replies to incoming comments. Bear with me.
The author of the site posts their personal view of the definition (one that I don’t entirely agree with but that’s neither here nor there.)
They have a page dedicated to stories of recovery that buck the biopsychiatric prognosis for those suffering severe psychosis. Towards the bottom VoR leaves a series of interview style questions for the reader to ponder when sharing their own recovery story. I snagged the questions and responded to them here.
Some of the questions are not focused or explicit and more open to interpretation so I choose my own spin on the meaning.
Who knows if I will ever have to do spur of the moment interviews but it could not hurt to practice as an exercise.
An Interview with Jane Alexander about her mental health recovery.
# When did this begin for you?
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When did I know I had issues? Around the age of seven a drew a detailed color drawing depicting suicide and gave it to my parents. Soon after I began on again off again therapy until I turned 18.
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When did I really start recovery? I really hit the lowest point at age 20 with my sixth suicide attempt in the early spring of 1995. Surviving it entailed a near death experience which prompted me to slow down and reexamine my life. As soon as I began living one day at a time, I had begun the long slow creep back to the human race.
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# What sort of “symptoms” were you experiencing on a physical, emotional, mental, spiritual level?
All of them. I am not exaggerating. Self hate, self injury, suicide, depression, psychosis, recurring anxiety, ocd like behaviors, narcissism, triggers, flashbacks, delusions, you name it I had it. I was a lost soul.
# What else was going on in your life at that time?
At the time I began recovery, there was nothing going on in my life at all. I had shut my life down and said my goodbyes. There was nothing left to do. Prior to reaching that point I had had a great deal of unprocessed stress in my life. I came from an overbearingly Catholic family. We had a pair of insane child abusers as parents to grow up with. Later both sides of my family abandoned me to the State.
I spent time in psychiatric hospitals, juvenile mental health lockdown, residential group homes, foster care, transitional homes and spent the first two years of my adult life at the poverty level struggling to stay alive pay check to paycheck.
I needed a major vacation from growing up but instead I was thrust without support or family at age 18 on my own. Ridden by my neuroses and plagued by past demons and an unresolved backlog of traumatic and horrible events in my life, at age 20 I was quite troubled.
# Was there any link between the events in your life and the symptoms you were having/experience you were having?
No none whatsoever. /sarcasm
# What was it like to go through that experience?
It was like knowing, fundamentally, deep down that you are seriously broken and yet powerless to do anything about it.
# Were you scared? sad? elated?
Yes always.
# Were there any spiritual or numinous aspects to your experience?
Some believe that we are spirits inhabiting a shell. From that paradigm everything about it was spiritual.
In terms of a healing, releasing spiritual emergency that some get out of their more extreme states there was none of that. Most of my major psychotic experiences had dark, powerfully violent overtones.
There were peak meditation experiences during my recovery that were the very definition of spiritual.
# What was the response of those around you to your experience?
Those the knew me saw me as a kind of slow motion train wreck. In my late teens and early adult life my family on both sides was of the opinion that it was only a matter of time until I crashed. Where that wreckage ended up, inpatient, in jail, in rehab, on the street was anyone’s guess. Know one ever knew or guessed the extant of how far gone I really was back then. They had no idea.
# Were you hospitalized? Medicated?
Six months of involuntary medication between 14 and 15. Two hospitalizations in my teens at 14 and at 16, a brief hospitalization at age 20.
# Did you find this helpful/unhelpful? Why?
I found life under polypharmacy to be as useful as a crowbar to the skull and worse then being dead.
I experienced being chemically violated and forced to take drugs that not only endangered my physical health but also my mental health short term and long term. The combination of drugs was a kind of slow death of personality. I was supposed to take them for the rest of my life.
Psychiatric drugs are toxic, addictive, damaging substances that do not resolve the reasons for becoming mentally ill in the first place.
It’s like taking an aspirin for a headache ad infinitum while being given bleeding ulcers from the aspirin. If you stop taking the aspirin, the reason for the headache remains there, unresolved and now you have other health problems to go with it.
From my experience, meds are a lose-lose proposition that effect no cure. I really can not in good conscious recommend them for anyone except in jest.
The only people that truly *need* meds are those that unintentionally became severely addicted to them to the point were withdrawal presents such a major threat to mental instability that going off meds would guarantee a trip to emergency psychiatric services or a relapse.
# What labels were applied to your experience, either by yourself or those around you?
I was labeled with Bipolar Disorder during the changeover from Manic Depression. There was no Bipolar 1, 2 or cyclothymia back then. Just Bipolar and Bipolar with psychotic features which is what I presented. This was comorbid with schizophrenia, often designated as schizo affective disorder when in the presence of a mood disorder like Bipolar.
I also had severe PTSD. I self diagnosed it right out of the DSM when I was 14 and before I went inpatient. I was in outpatient therapy and my therapist was a family psychologist who specialized in working with troubled teens. He decided I had depression and concluded something else was going on.
I was reading the DSM in his office and I pointed out the PTSD entry. I said those symptoms are what I experience every day without let up. I have PTSD. My doctor negated me entirely despite knowing about my abusive childhood. He told me straight there was no way I had PTSD because only war veterans had PTSD.
Three maybe four years later as I was transitioning out of mental health services into the real world as an adult it was well known and recognized that children from abusive homes suffered major behavioral problems because of ongoing stress reactions that continue to manifest after trauma. So I never had access to the interesting PTSD treatments they use on kids or vets these days. Aside from meds that is.
# How did you feel about those words?
I laugh at all those labels. They have no power over me. I certainly owned the PTSD for awhile but I never believed in or identified myself as bipolar or schizophrenic. I refused to internalize it. But if you are a good psych patient then the term for my thinking was and still is denial of my *true* condition.
# What happened next? Were you able to quickly return to a state of productivity, e.g., returning to school or work?
After a fashion. I had no support and money does not grow on trees so I needed to find some kind of menial form of supporting myself that would encroach upon on my mental health minimally while allowing me enough financial power to effect recovery. I did work because I had no choice in the matter.
# How did you feel about your experience at this time? Confused? Ashamed? Concerned? Elated?
I felt acceptance. I had very little control over anything it seemed, So I gave up trying to control everything. I surrendered my fate to the universe and let the universe guide me day by day. I was very unstable at the beginning of recovery.
# Was there anything of value in your experience?
Of course there was plenty of value. Most of it not entirely appreciated until reflection.
# Do you think anything could have prevented your experience from happening?
Short of not being born? I doubt it. Perhaps if I had been the only daughter of a rich Jewish family and had been loved, supported and never abused I might have had a very different life.
# When did you begin to “recover”?
I did not start measuring my own recovery until age 22. That was when the first year had passed without depression and suicidal ideation. In some ways recovery began soon after my last suicide attempt at 20.
# What factors were helpful to you at that time?
Living alone, living one day at a time. Having peace and quiet and predictability in my own home for awhile.
# What role did hope play in your recovery?
At first none. But after that one year milestone I experienced a whole new level of hope when I realized I had perhaps stumbled onto something with my lifestyle.
# Can you identify any breakthrough points in your recovery?
There was the first year depression and suicide free at age 22. Then closing in on my 26th birthday, between November and December off 2000 as I recall. I had my last spiritual crisis. I went on a meditation retreat by myself for two weeks to resolve it.
It resulted in an experience, unlooked for and unasked of profound internal equilibrium and inner stillness. I finally acquired self love. I was still not perfect but I was past treacherous water and it was smoother sailing from then on out.
# Where did your best forms of support come from — family members? friends? peers? professionals?
From myself. I had no support whatsoever. There were a few *guides* as they say in New Age speak. I had some meditation teachers periodically. Largely I depended on no one but myself.
# What did you most need at that time? Did you get it?
I needed to be left alone and I got that in spades.
# What role did medication or therapy play in your recovery?
None whatsoever. Therapy had had little value as a teen. It was forced onto me by the circumstance of being a minor in the juvenile mental health system. The fact that I was not ready to open up, not ready to talk, not ready to heal never occurred to anyone. It was just taken for granted, I had issues ergo, I had to spend X amount of hours in therapy per week.
Regarding meds. In a fit of rage I went off them cold turkey without supervision when I read the Patient’s Bill of Rights. I learned that they could not legally force them on me at age 15 unless I was a threat to myself or others. As soon as I read that I began a deadly serious game of learning to hide my problems with an impenetrable mask of lies.
I suppose I am supposed to say some obligatory line about how dangerous and unwise it is to quit psych meds cold turkey. But I am not going to. Life is full of risks, maybes and possibilities. It is possible you can quit psych meds without major adverse events. As it was, no one ever discussed withdrawal strategies or possible consequences with me. There was no plan for me coming off them so I took the initiative and handled it myself.
Also, I did my first 24 hours of psych med withdrawal while an escapee from the facility. Then I spent the remaining withdrawal period under constant 24 hour a day supervision back at the facility when I was captured. If I was going to have physical or behavioural issues from cold turkey withdrawal I was less than 100 feet from the nurses station at all times.
# What would you recommend to other people who are reaching for recovery?
Daily meditation, daily time alone, good diet and daily exercise. Remove yourself from abusive situations, toxic people and maintain distance from people you know are not going to benefit you. The boiling water will never cool off if you keep the pot on a hot stove. You have to shake loose people that are worse off than you to give yourself space to heal.
Misery loves company. If you have major issues, you can not have a life where you are constantly forced to confront other people with major issues as well. It is just going to keep destabilizing you over and over. Then live one day at a time and have a whole lot of patience.
# How do you feel about your experience now? Has it changed you?
The longer I am alive the harder it is to remember and or identify with the person I use to be. I have changed more than most people would think possible for normal folks never mind the severely mentally ill.
# What have you learned as a result of your experience?
The most important things about life of course.
I learned who I was, what I was and what I wanted out of life. I learned my unique position under God and heaven as they say. I learned that my sensitivity is my strength as much as a weakness and to accept it completely. I learned to forgive myself my failures and I learned to let go my traumas.
I learned to love myself unconditionally, unambiguously and I became quite happy and content living simply and alone. That is something you have to do for yourself. You can not attain that kind of balance from sitting on a therapist’s couch for years. It definitely does not come from a pill.
Recently I became aware (thanks Marian!) that there is an inherent limitation to blogging myself as Bipolar Recovery. There is some potentially useful information to those in a spiritual search or networking for personal and existential issues.
Those that did not identify as Bipolar might pass on the blog at first glance.
It gave me an opportunity to experiment with the competitive features built into WordPress and Blogspot. It is immediately clear there are both pros and cons as each publisher does offer some unique functions or limitations.
I have noticed some people keep more than one blog or have several similar blogs linked by name, subject or title.
It offers some redundancy, back up, additional exposure and greater flexibility in terms of outreaching and visibility as well as other advantages.
Now if I can only get one of those splogbots to crawl my own content and copypaste it to the other blog so I don’t have to do it manually. It has to be easy. My akismet spam blocker tells me that a few times a day some crawler bot snags my writings, edits them slightly and reposts them on other blogs.
My day to day babble that I may or may not post here won’t be copied over. Just my more polished and edited writings. I am making my own backup archive after a fashion. Other than being simpler, more polished, less interactable but easier on the orbs it will largely be the same writings I post here.
I don’t want to referee comments between two blogs so comments are off there, sorry!
“Jane, do you believe that some people may be beyond recovery?”
On the heels of my last post about the Definition of Recovery and the ongoing debate about what should fairly constitute recovery in the context of mental illness I thought I would examine the question.
When I look back at how far down I was I consider myself recovered.
From planning my own suicide a year in advance at age 19 to being depression free for 7 years at age 29.
From my first suicide gesture at age 14, to ten years later when I had experienced my second year without crippling depression and the second year without finding myself suicidal between the end of winter and the beginning of spring.
From being homeless at age 20 to being in college, employed and in a relationship at age 30
From having seductive whispering voices telling me that I should just die that came when I was just 7 years old to the eventual forging of the One Ruling Voice at age 23 and the eventual Great Stillness and freedom from all voices at age 26.
I have indeed come a long way back home to the place I was before life came crashing down.
In my enthusiasm of sharing my story I always say, anyone can do this if they but only try. If they stop chewing on fanciful parables and inspiring quotes and affirmations and get right into the heart of doing solid mental work, then anyone can achieve a similar state of being free.
That is true to a point. There are several reasons why any given individual will never get exactly where I went using my methods.
They quit meditation early because it’s hard.
They quit meditation because they can not sit still and never launch an investigation into why that might be.
They never learn how to meditate properly or spend enough time at it.
They never learn how to deal with triggers, personal blocks, tormenting demons or even moments of psychosis that come up in the process. Thus, they break down from meditation practice and never resolve to finish what they started.
Some folks have contacted me to tell me they have been depressed longer than I have been alive. They want to know if I think they are beyond recovery.
The interesting thing is, my elders and betters always ask my opinion of whether or not there may be hope for them
Young people under 20-25 rarely express ambiguity or wonder what I think, they flat out tell me they are beyond hope or recovery.
Others, like Pat Deegan come to believe they are their illness and that it’s natural, unchangeable and they learn to accept it.
I will say this once in this post. If you accept mental illness, if you are afraid to change and let it go and if you are already certain there is no hope for you, then, there is no hope, period.
If you refuse to accept that it is how God made you or that your mental illness is a lesson from God in humility then there is hope. If you believe you can change and you want to change and you intend on changing, then there is much hope indeed. You have between now and your last breath to change.
That may sound philosophically comforting and politically even handed but is it true?
I don’t think so.
I think that taking off from life in my early 20s was the smartest thing I have ever done. Had I failed to do that, had I waited and tried to carry on in denial as though there was nothing wrong with me then I might had slipped beyond hope too.
Think of mental illness in terms of distance traveled. The longer you drive down the road of mental illness, the deeper you go and further in to the Country of Mental Illness, the longer the drive back out again.
Another way to look at it is it took about one year of reflection and decompression to process five years of unprocessed existence.
By age 25 or so, I had taken 5 years to process 25 years. Starting at age 20 processing the first 20 years.
If you don’t get started until age 50 or 60 then you have a lot of work to do. Depending on how *deviant* your issues are overcoming that inertia and moving in the opposite direction is going to take a long time.
Your body eventually gets used to being ill, especially with depression. These days, people’s bodies get acclimated to years, decades, of drug maintenance and have literally lost the cognitive emotional processing circuits needed to deal with life’s stress thanks to the drugs. Without they drugs they become even more vulnerable. If you don’t use it, you will lose it. It’s just a matter of time.
So there are those that have been literally wedded to their depressions for decades and others that have entered the realm of *bat shit crazy* with mania, ocd, terminal narcissism and deluded thinking.
In my last post I said you can’t diagnose a mental disorder by briefly listening to someone’s voice and scrutinizing their facial reactions but I was wrong. I meant that, in my videos I try come off reasonably organized and I look what I know what I am about. I get folks that look at the title of my video be it about bipolar and schizophrenia, they skip watching the video entirely in a rush to comment about how I have a schizophrenic face or a manic demeanor without realizing they have no idea what they are talking about at all.
There are videos on youtube which highlight people who are so far gone due to depression, psychosis, mania, schizophrenia and the like, that they may indeed be beyond hope and who knows, maybe Fuller Torrey is right about this group and forced meds might be the only way the can be made to stop hurting themselves or others.
Alternately it becomes clear that sometimes meds, forced or otherwise, have no effects on people seriously mentally ill. For that I am sure if TAC could find a legal way to keep such people flat on their backs in a permanent drug induced coma as the cheapest and safest alternative to permitting such people the freedom to interact with society they would be all for it. In the name of progress of course.
In my *professional* opinion one thing is obvious. Kristin, Mel and Liz are all talking about their illness while Bipolar Mom, Heather and CrazyGirlOnTrain’s illnesses are being talked about by others.
I think in terms of a road to recovery, if Mel, Liz and Kristin could get past their acceptance of the biopsychiatric paradigm then they would be prime candidates for recovery. Unfortunately I do not think it would ever occur to them to take up a regular practice of introspective and concentration meditation.
They fall under the currently meaningless mental health definition of recovery. Since they are not currently in acute care and they are taking their meds as directed some consider them recovered or recovering. Others would not consider them recovered or recovering but merely in treatment, such as it is.
If they were able to begin meditation and they followed some fairly universal rules for recovery then there is hope for all three of them. They are fully aware and cognizant that they have issues.
However MyBipolarMom, CrazyGirlOnTrain and DisorganizedHeather are probably not going to effect recovery in this lifetime.
Certain definitive changes are going on in their brains. Something, somehow, some combination of life events led them straight into madness. I would be willing to be that if you looked at childhood pictures of them or heard them speak back in the day, that there was a point when there might have been hope for them.
Incidentally, Heather, GirlonTrain and Bipolar Mom are not isolated samples. If you wander the buses and rails of San Francisco or Sacramento long enough, you will run into CrazyManonTrain, MyBipolarBrother and DisorganizedEddy. If you use public transportation daily, you will run into people like that of all ages all the time.
Such encounters do not always end pleasantly. As much as I agree with people railing against Fuller Torrey and his stigmatizing of the mentally ill and caricaturizing schizophrenics as violent it happens.
People with mental illness and bipolar and schizophrenia do become violent. I was a violent person when I was bipolar and schizoid. The emotionally disturbed teens I met in adolescent group homes were violent. The neighbors I had living in low income neighborhoods were violent. The people I met psychiatric care were violent. Both my crazy parents were violent. Homeless, mentally ill people can be violent too. Partly because of lingering ptsd. People in the street are often victims of trauma and abuse in homeless shelters, food lines, police cells, psychiatric lockdowns, and living on the street. As a result they too develop ptsd on top of the load of other mental issues.
It is hard to imagine Liz, Kristin or Mel as violent, but I have been attacked by people like Crazygirlontrain and my own bipolar mother, who sounds like namegoeshere’s bipolar mother, and who was a violent abuser when we were growing up and I eventually stood up to her and physically stopped her from attacking me.
Mentally ill people do become violent. I myself have been assaulted by people with mental illness tons of times in my life. Towards my late teens and as an adult it generally tends to be a hilariously one sided encounter in my favour because I will not allow myself to be battered by mentally ill people.
I digress.
The fact is Crazygirlontrain is probably beyond recovery. Disorganized Heather is beyond recovery and MyBipolarMother is beyond recovery.
There is nothing I can do for them. There is probably nothing psychologists can do for them. Short of a permanently induced coma. I can not see too many options other than confinement with or without industrial strength meds unless they are not a danger to themselves or others. How many other options do you think would work? Do you think these are spiritual awakenings going on here? Do you think they could be helped if given a short healing space to just be psychotic until they got over it? What if they just don’t get over it?
You really are looking for means to manage them because treating them has minimal to no lasting benefit. Even forced meds, for some just slow them down somewhat without completely diminishing or removing symptoms.
I can’t be behind forced drugging or enforced confinement for the crime of mental illness. I really don’t know what the solution is to handling the terminally mentally ill. You really don’t want to know what my solutions would be. I err towards survival and pragmatism which may clash with ideals taught in humanities classes.
Heather seems somewhat benign, unlikely to be physical, but MyBipolarMom sounds like she would be happy poisoning your drink and CrazyGirlOnTrain came within a millimeter of physical assault. As it was she was threatening passengers with assault and battery, violating personal space, verbally and emotionally assaulting people.
At any rate. I do think some people are definitely beyond recovery. Including the woman in this video as a late addition to clips of people on youtube likely never to recover from mental illness at the level that is discussed on this blog and on my videos.
Also, what is the relationship between religion and mental illness? Joan of Arc spoke with St Catherine. Pat Deegan is on a mission from a higher power. The woman in the video above talks about Jesus. Mel’sBasketcase is obsessed with the bible.
My own mother was chronically mentally ill and every other word out of her mouth has some kind of holy spin on it. You could not have a conversation with her that ultimately did not come down to religion or religious overtones. Even in my last correspondence with my mother was there several references to prayer and god on her end.
If you idle in San Francisco streets or ride buses round here it is only a matter of time before you run into someone ranting about Jesus. When I mean ranting it could be quiet constant under the breath muttering on the bus to outright screaming in the middle of the street downtown about God, Sin, Satan, etc, etc. Why are mentally ill people obsessed with religion? What is the relationship between paranoid delusions and hearing god, demons, angels or saints?
In the final analysis for some people a full recovery is just not possible with the limits of psychiatry and medical science. To effect a recovery at the level discussed here requires a certain amount of intelligence, it requires personal responsibility and brutal self honesty. If you don’t have all three lined up, contemplative discipline is not going to work for you.
I recently had the pleasure to see a video of the amazing and productive activist and advocate, Pat Deegan on youtube (thanks Gianna) and what I’d like to do is point out a few observations about her presentation.
So at 1:40 or so she mentions freaking out during lectures and taping the lecture and listening to it at home in her own space. That is a brilliant work around on the retention end. Knowing your limits and coping with it.
Then around 2:00 in she says it was like lifting weights growing the skills needed to sit still in class and learn despite the voices and so on. Kind of like in meditation too, you have to grow an ability to sit still amongst the noise and distractions of your inner world. You build up strength to do it.
Further along she talks about several hospitalizations occurring during her education.
Around 2:40 she says, “as I get older I guess I just learned to accept myself”
Immediately you think yeah! woot! That resonates with me! That’s how it goes! You nod your head and think you are on the same page. Great stuff.
Then she says at 2:47“I hear voices there is just no getting around it”
Then all that empathy I had built up from her previous statement is suspended in air without nothing underneath it and I realize we are not really on the same page.
She comes back with, ” I can’t take big crowds or I get explosively angry”
I am back! I totally so totally lived that! She is talking about me and she is so refreshingly honest.
Then “I have unresolved trauma issues I have been in a bazillion hours of therapy”
I’ve been there…
then ‘It’s not schizophrenia, it’s not a symptom”
Once again I am back in her corner, yea girl you tell em, you aint no product of the DSM, you think to yourself, Pat’s brave to say such a thing in the face of modern psychiatry. She is already breaking the rules and risking her reputation and she’s almost anti-pysch by way of throwing off and disowning the label. All good stuff! Positively out of the box.
Then, ” I have come to the conclusion that it’s just me. That’s how God made me. That’s just how I am”
I beg pardon? She’s lost me again. No way that’s how God made you. I have said before but that attitude is useless to a person bent on recovery. I said that beliefs like that have to go in my 12 steps to bipolar recovery video and blog post. I said it again just recently about the Dark Night of the Soul.
“Then I learned to embrace it and stop trying to change myself”
I took that as, I learned to accept the the symptoms and quit trying to get rid of them.
Based on the statements she says afterward she could be speaking in the broader sense of changing herself to fit some social norms, expectations and pressures.
I agree, be yourself and don’t let society mold you, accept yourself and embrace yourself.
But I get the distinct feeling that by reframing her issues (voices, agitation, explosive anger) as just being the way God made her and accepting it, she is really no longer working on them.
She confirms this at 4:47 with But I am not going to be able to make it go away and why even try? It’s just me
Bingo, that is misidentification of self.
This is who I am she says.
“I am not going to be able to make it go away.” she says.
Who told you that Pat? Have you tried everything? Therapy and psyche meds did not get rid of my traumas or voices either but I did not stop there.
In no way do I mean to minimize or denigrate Pat Deegan’s accomplishment of getting a PhD. It’s amazing is what it is. It certainly goes a long way in showing what someone with mental illness can do. It’s inspiring. Her insights into the people on the other side of the fence in mental health is classic. Finding out the PhDs had plenty of problems of their own. Wonderful stuff. There is no doubt we need more Pat Deegans in the world.
Except she is on a mission from God.
I don’t know anything about that personally.
I say this because I too have had a bazillion hours of therapy for past abuse issues. I have felt the pressure from the crowd of people making me feel like my head space was being violated, a sense that if I could just explode a little, it would knock everyone in a complete radius around me far enough away to give me space. Mounting fury at my proximity to lot of strangers. I have had the voices too.
The therapy did not do much good for me either Pat, largely because like you, I was afraid to let go of my traumas and past. I was not ready to heal and let go. Like you I needed my pain and memories too. You needed them for compassion, I needed them to be safe.
However, I believe I was exposed to a philosophy that you were not. Between Buddhism and Taoism I understand that who and what I was was understandable and controllable. That you did not simply have to accept your limitations.
Buddhism and Taoism taught me that underneath the suffering was the real me. In Buddhism they go into great detail about all the different kinds of illusions and suffering that is part of the unenlightened human condition. From Taoism I realized that everything changes including our selves and it is a lack of change or an inability to allow or accept change that causes suffering.
You can gain and keep compassion for others by opening and keeping open your heart. You don’t need the flashbacks and memories as a goad. An open heart has compassion for others. Maybe some people do need their goads. I entertained the possibility of life without the presence of those goads. I imagined what I would be like without them. I realized I could reclaim a lot of emotional energy and cut some puppet strings by dissolving my attachment to my traumas. I am very glad I took the time to finish the healing process and to allow healing to occur. If I had not, I would still be scarred to this day.
As I said I don’t mean to denounce her accomplishments or bring her down in any way.
It just seems like she is more of an example of a highly functioning person with ongoing but non-disabling mental illness symptoms.
The only recovery I can compare to is mine.
I use to be suicidal. Now I am not
I use to be depressed. Now I am not
I use to be violently pathologically psychotic. Now I am not.
I use to self injure. Now I do not.
I use to have flashbacks. Now they are gone
I use to have noise, chaos, inner babble and command Voices. Now they are gone.
I use to have thought broadcasting delusion. Now I don’t
I use to hate every inch of my being. Now I love myself
I use to be hypomanic. Not anymore.
I have been deeply manic. Now I am not.
By no means am I perfect. I am not an exalted sage. I am no Lama or Enlightened One. I still make mistakes. I still make occasionally bad judgments. I can still get irritated and annoyed. I can still get angry.
You would not agree with my political or religious views (or lack of )
I don’t have a halo. Don’t put me on a pedestal because as soon as you find out I am all too human and still flawed, your disappointment at that discovery will be directly proportionate to the degree that you developed in inaccurate impression of where I am.
Meditation did not make me into a super being it really just made me human.
Meditation did rid me of my suffering. Meditation changed me. I was able to do something about it. About my inner demons, my traumas and so on.
So while Pat is indeed a highly intelligent, highly functioning, successful person, she is not entirely recovered.
Not in comparison to my recovery.
In psychiatry they consider ’symptom clusters’ and measure ‘deviancy’.
They say it is not a mental illness unless the symptom is persistently disabling and effecting quality of life. It’s a problem if you are looking for help for it.
When I say I am ‘cured’ of mental illness. I look at psychiatry’s own definition of it! According the symptom prevalences and deviation from the norm I am totally free from mental illness, completely recovered.
But apparently psychiatry itself does not recognize recovery from mental illness. Rather, psychiatry’s view of mental health recovery is that no cure is possible and that functioning can occur despite ongoing symptoms and Deegan’s own words are part of the current redefinition of recovery in mental health advocacy.
Here are some other definitions of recovery dug up from various sources.
Another thing patients will tell you is that recovery exists, or can exist, within the context of illness. In other words, recovery doesn’t mean cure. It means living with the illness, managing it and getting better within certain limitations. “I define recovery as the development of new meaning and purpose as one grows beyond the catastrophe of mental illness,” says William Anthony, director of Boston University’s Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation. “My feeling is you can have episodic symptoms and still believe and feel you’re recovering. It is a matter of moving beyond the debilitating phases of the illness.”
The idea that recovery doesn’t usually mean the removal of all symptoms is a novel and distinctly un-American way of looking at psychiatric illness, and illness in general. The fact remains, however, that most major psychiatric illnesses are episodic but chronic. Recovery involves both coming to terms with symptoms — one hopes in the context of their gradual moderation, but that’s not always the case — and finding a meaningful life in their midst.
Well, no one told me about all that when I was sitting at the edge of the American River at four a.m. practicing meditation and ridding myself of my problems. After being told mental illness was a life sentence and after removing mental illness from my day to day existence. I find my mildly amused at the idea of accepting all my past instability as being ‘just me’. Sounds like a job half done to me. To moderate that statement, I have learned that not all people are capable of finishing the job. Some people are so married to their ailments that they have long since spent any time imagining life without them. They come up with all sorts of justifications in order to put a positive spin on something the have come to believe is beyond change or hope.
Kind of like, ” I may be a prisoner in this dungeon for the rest of my life but looking at the positive aspects, I have all the time in the world to make thoughtful, deeply moving gothic emo poetry about my dungeon that will resonate with other people that feel like I do.”
Seems others have similar definitions of recovery.
Recovery really is the subjective experience of being well again. Not neccessarily an established state of normalcy, but free from internal or psychological suffering. While I can certainly accept partial recoveries. I just can’t wrap my head around the idea that if you are still suffering mental illness that you are recovered. If you having painful flashbacks, recurring depression and the like, then you still have issues whether you have a accolades, academic achievements or your own corporation.
The declaration: “I can’t change myself or my problems so I give up trying” is heretical at this blog.
I know, I know, Ms Deegan is accomplished, she is well liked,she is famous after a fashion, she has way more credibility and reputation than me. Who am I to judge and criticize? I am just some former BiPD/SZ chick writing down my notes for a book. So don’t listen to me, I have not *been around* as long as these others folks so what do I know about recovery eh?
Incidentally, I would like to make a prediction. If they ever start talking about this blog or reviewing my book when it comes out then I am going to get a certain crowd. The really brainwashed pro-psychiatry masses that compare Bipolar Disorder to Diabetes where, if you don’t take your meds you die.
These are the people that cry, ‘Abandon all hope ye who don’t take meds’. If you are Bipolar and not on meds you are cycling. I told someone recently that I had been off my meds since 1990 and the first thing out of her mouth is “It’s your right to not take meds, but don’t you want to be stable instead of up down and all over the place? She never even asked me how I was feeling! Just assumed, bipolar off meds, must by cycling!
The ‘my bipolar made me do it’ people. The Once bipolar, always bipolar people. Yes that crowd. They will try to use two avenues of attack to invalidate my message.
The first thing they will do is invalidate my Bipolar/Schizophrenia street cred. They will use variations of the No True Scotsman logical fallacy to determine that all those months spent in top notch psychiatric lock down under the care of my extensive treatment team of psychiatrists, psychologists and counselors resulted in a misdiagnoses. Because Bipolar and schizophrenia can not be cured ergo, you never had them in the fist place.
The other option to deconstruct me will be to micro analyze my message, my words, my speech and say “See how grandiose and manic she is? you can’t control mania! Its biological you poor deluded fool! See she is still manic because she has such grand plans and so not down to earth. They will say I have a schizophrenic face (yes I got that as a comment on a video the other day). They will tell me I am denial. They will say: “Just wait until it comes back! And it will Jane!!! Then what are you going to do?” They will say that because I talk about spiritual subjects or awareness of energy that I must be still delusional. They will grasp at straws and really reach for some other explanation other than accept that when it comes to Bipolar and Schizophrenia, you are really not as helpless as you have been trained to think you are.
Those that are not ready to hear my story are going to tune out the specifics and details and see what they want to see.
They will invalidate my message by saying I was never one of them.
They will validate my Dx and say I still have the disorder.
What they will fail to factor in is that having a schizophrenic face or talking like a hypomaniac is not a medicatable disease. It does not mean I need critical care. it does need mean I still have *the disease*. It does not mean I will need meds sooner or later. Because you have to have symptom clusters and marked deviance for prolonged time to have a psychiatric disorder! You have to be markedly impaired in life! You have to be a threat to yourself and or others and so on and so forth. You can not micro scrutinize my voice or facial expressions and determine that I am suffering from an impairing level of deviant symptoms!
I know this because I have already been through this on youtube. I’ve already been told I am must still be Bipolar ( an offhand validation) and they have told me, without access to my medical records, that I must have been misdiagnosed.
That is because my story and psychiatry’s prognosis of Bipolars and Schizophrenics causes cognitive dissonance. Rather than simply accept that I am no longer bat shit crazy. They will say, hmm, Well there is no cure for bipolar, ergo she must not be cured! or.. hmm there is no cure for bipolar ergo, you were never bipolar!
That is how the faceless masses of youtube that love being bipolar, that were saved by their meds, that identify themselves by their labels deal with the cognitive dissonance created by the existence of my story.
So when my book is finally on Amazon and purchasers begin to give me 1 star reviews, know in advance, that I know it’s coming, I know why and I fully expect it. I certainly hope I rattle some cages out there.
The Pat Deegan video and some of the info I turned up at The Hearing Voices Movement went along ways towards explaining some people’s attitudes about recovery.
If you can tune out the satanic voices and listen to the angelic ones then all the power to you. If you can survive and prosper despite illness, great.
For me, I felt I could change, I felt I had to change and I pursued a path of inner stillness that results in both change and inner peace. I had this grandiose, pie in the sky, manic idea that I might be able to free myself of my inner prison and past. So I that is what I am about. That is the level of recovery we talk about here. A cessation, a complete remission and remittance from disabling mental illness. In short, a cure.
Now, you have seen me present my testimony on being *cured*.
You’ve seen the establishment’s definition of recovery.
There very much is an ongoing debate about the term recovery as it used mental health circles.
Ron Unger posts in favour of a more conservative definition of recovery. He posits that recovery is used to loosely to include people that arguably are not recovered at all. The looser boundaries that allow for this term, the less meaning it will have. If people who live in group homes medicated to the gills and in therapy four days a week, can we really say they are recovered? Are they even in recovery?
It pleases me to see other people arguing in favour of bringing some narrowing limits to what recovery and recovered really mean in the realm of mental health. There are different degrees of recovery.
Here is some excerpts from Ron’s post that say basically the same thing I am saying but somehow he pulls it off without sounding as officious and judgmental as I do.
> It would make sense to talk about degrees of recovery, and to talk about what part of recovery it makes sense to focus on first. Certainly the overall focus should be on quality of life and getting a meaningful life. If a person has a massive physical injury that impairs ability to walk, the most important thing is to become mobile again in the community in some form or another. But a medical system that told a person they were “fully recovered” after they were getting around town in a wheelchair, even while the possibility existed that the person would become able to walk again if given competent assistance, would rightfully be called deceitful and incompetent. I’m afraid that when we allow “full recovery” to be defined as attained while the person still is seen as requiring dangerous medications, we become accomplices in just such a deceit.
>
> In your “three circles” diagram, there is some implication of degrees of recovery. All the way over to the left is where people are seriously impaired, in the middle lesser impairment, on the right, not impaired. When people move from the left to the middle, they may still require some kind of treatment, but they have much less impairment. While that is a degree of recovery, it is not full recovery: people should be aware there are further degrees of recovery that are possible, or in your diagram, getting all the way over to the right.
Collection of links leading to more links about the evils of my least favourite class of drug in the world, antipsychotics aka neuroleptics aka chemical mind wipe. If you did not have a chemical imbalance before, this poison will give you one.
