I was horribly abused as a child. For many years, I repressed those memories and lived with severe feelings of depression. When the feelings got so overwhelming that I felt suicidal, I acted on those feelings and ended up as a mental patient for many years of my life. I wanted doctors to fix me because I didn't know how else to proceed against something so strong as my feelings at the time. Eventually, I learned that I could choose my actions. Just because I felt suicidal didn't mean I had to go out and act in a suicidal manner because of those feelings. I chose to act otherwise and eventually, I no longer became a person who could be locked up as suicidal.

    While I was seeking help and acting under the false belief that I had to act in a certain way (suicidal) in response to my feelings, I feel as though I surrendered a part of me to the system. I became a mental patient as I placed my faith and trust in them to fix or cure me. The system became my daily living, activity and the focus of my life. I was a mental patient who identified myself by my diagnosis. Eventually, I broke away from the system and "found" or "recovered" myself as I learned how to cope with my distress. I don't believe in mental illness. I hate the term. It is a term of oppression. I consider myself a psychiatric survivor in the sense that some of my friends who became mental patients didn't survive. Some are now dead and some are as good as dead because they are soulless shells of their former selves.

    My recovery was a recovery of myself. It was the result of taking a side path on my walk of life and getting lost on the psychiatric trail until I rediscovered and made my way back to my own personal path of life. When I teach mental patients to "recover" it is aiding them to rediscover for themselves their own chosen path of life.

    We are limited only by ourselves and we must not let the system delude us into thinking otherwise.

    This is who I am...a believer in the power of the individual and the strength of the human spirit...a person who's been clinically dead and has chosen life instead...an advocate who appreciates the forum of madness where folks can share themselves. I'm enjoying life and all it has to offer. Thanks to you all.

-Pat Risser

http://home.att.net/~PatRisser/

    My mother was an incredibly critical person. She is the only parent I ever knew. Consequently, I internalized her criticism and have been working for years to subdue my internal critic which loves to put me down. The hurts which I received at the hands of the mental health system strengthened my critic even more. Fortunately, after years of healing, my critic is getting quieter and there is even a new supportive and forgiving voice which I often hear as well.

    It has taken many years to develop a supportive inner voice. Because my inner critic was so strong, I have often asked friends to appreciate me by telling me when I have done a good job or things they like about me. Even then, it is not always easy to take in what people tell me, but it has helped.

    Lately I am coming to the conclusion that criticism is basically useless. I notice my pull to criticize others is often motivated by a need to elevate myself by putting them down. I have been trying to keep a pact with myself not to criticize others and to instead notice what is going on for me that is causing me to feel critical. Constructive suggestions are much better than criticism. When I get criticized I tend to shut down and get defensive. There are ways to make positive suggestions for making things work better without being critical.

    Internalized oppression works to get us fighting each other instead of fighting to change the oppressive system. As long as we continue to do to each other what has been done to us we will not be very effective in making positive change in our lives or in the world. Some ways I see internalized oppression working is by keeping us isolated and feeling lonely and bad about ourselves. It also makes us feel critical and negative toward each other diverting huge amounts of energy away from social change work.

    I think it is very important for us to all think about how to make things go well. If we have suggestions or other ideas, we can put information out in a positive way without criticizing or attacking others.

    Finally, appreciation and acknowledgment helps build trust among group members and also lends encouragement for folks to keep on working. criticism and attacks, on the other hand, make folks defensive, insecure, and usually result in counterattacks or withdrawal. We need each other too much to do anything other than nurture and support each other. If we take time in our meetings and in our individual relationships to appreciate each other frequently, the payoff is great. Not only do folks feel better, but things go much more smoothly.

    Regardless of how hurt we have all been, we do not have to keep passing the hurt on to others around us. Instead, we can practice giving the respect and appreciation which everyone should have received but didn't get throughout our lives. We have the opportunity to heal ourselves and those around us through appreciation and support. Eliminating attacks and criticism will also help our social change work be more effective.

-Kris Yates

    Many people who have psychiatric disabilities can enhance their recovery efforts through further education, and trained peers can be very effective in supporting them. The Partnership for Development of Supported Education (a project of the Center for Psychiatric Recovery and Rehabilitation Education in Washington state) provides both the technical assistance and support to make Supported Education (SEd) Programs, coordinated by people who have psychiatric disabilities, a reality.

    Many of us have had our education delayed or interrupted by our disorders. Assistance is often needed to decide upon education and job goals; to develop skills, knowledge and confidence; to prepare for GED, adult basic education and college-level courses; to navigate the college assessment, application, registration, and grant processes; to use campus resources and to negotiate reasonable accommodations for the disability in school.

    Supported Education (SEd) Coordinators can help consumer-students with all of these tasks through preparation courses, a peer support group and individual assistance. Supported education programs around the country are seeing scores of people with psychiatric disabilities become successful in attaining their GED’s, improving basic education and achieving higher education by providing the assistance needed. The Partnership is seeing the success of training, employing and supporting people who have psychiatric disabilities for these coordinator positions.

    Upon selection as a Coordinator of a new SEd program, the individual with a psychiatric disability is trained within the Consumer-To-Provider (CTP) Training Program, which includes a ten week classroom training, followed by a fifteen week field placement at Pierce Supported Education Program. The CTP is directed by the author, Jolyn Wells-Moran, Ph.D., and the Pierce Supported Education Program is supervised by Deanne Gilmur, M.Ed., and the Partnership is made up of both Gilmur and Wells-Moran.

    The Partnership provides free ongoing support and technical assistance to the new SEd program and its coordinator. Support and assistance may include: help with initial planning and program development; provision of a comprehensive program manual; continuing Coordinator training; an ongoing Coordinator Support Group; providing generic SEd policies and procedures; assistance with curriculum development, assessment, teaching tools and methods; and help with recruitment of students and development of collaborative relationships. To date, the Partnership has helped to develop, staff and maintain five peer-run SEd programs.

    Together, the coordinators and their programs serve approximately 200 people per year, an estimated 10% of the combined total of consumers served by publicly funded agencies in those counties. Of the SEd students, 30% have gone on to take Adult Basic Education courses, 25% have completed GEDs, 20% have entered college level courses, 10% have gone into specific vocational training courses, 10% are re-taking Supported Education courses and 5% have dropped from the Program but may return with renewed interest in taking college courses. Student satisfaction with these Programs averages 95%. These are comparable outcomes to those noted by Karen Unger and others involved in developing Supported Education programs managed by people without psychiatric disabilities.

    Partnership services for Washington state are funded through a DSHS, Mental Health Division contract and by the Partnership's contribution of volunteer time. The Partnership has offered technical assistance in other states where Supported Education, training and placement programs are recognized needs for consumers to work in the mental health field. Alternatives for coordinator training, when no consumer-provider or supported education programs currently exist in a state, have also been presented by the Partnership in other states. Technical assistance and training is also available through the Center for development of consumer-provider training programs.

    The Partnership can be reached at (206) 935-4861, or email fbrindl@aol.com.

  -Jolyn Wells-Moran, Ph.D., Executive Director of the Center for Psychiatric Recovery and Rehabilitation Education in Washington state, who also has a history of major depression

On Our Own Returns!

The landmark self help book by Judi Chamberlin has been updated and is now back in print. Copies can be ordered through the National Empowerment Center by calling 1-800-POWER2U or online at www.power2u.org

   After starting college, I was 20 years old when, collapsing from the agonizing grief of not being loved, I was picked up by police and sent to a state psychiatric prison. I escaped after four electric shocks, reeling from my head injury and running for my life.

    By the time I made it home a week later, I had hysterical amnesia from the horror of getting my brains knocked out with electricity to horrible to be true. I remembered that I had been locked up and escaped but almost none of the details. In deep psychological shock, terror undulated underneath my hysterical laughter. (It is this hysterical laughter that psychiatry points to and says, "Hear, that laughter; that proves she is now happy.") I remained in deep shock with the feeling of not being there, of seeing the details of what was going on around me and not having any relationship to them, with the feeling of waiting for something, an unknown terror waiting.

    This time they injected drugs until addicted to them, I took them. Now chemicals dysfunctioned my brain. Stoned on the drugs, caring about nothing, separated from any joy or reason for living, the terror, rage and despair built underneath the chemical lid. In periodic drug rages, I whirled in homicidal and suicidal terror and despair. Some people being killed by psychiatry do kill others, more kill themselves, most die from the drugs. I quit the drugs when my body could not tolerate them any longer. Like jerking the lid off a pressure cooker, the dammed up emotions of homicidal and suicidal terror, rage, and despair flooded over me. Becoming drug free, I had taken the first step toward wellness.

-Clover Smith, Survivor of 31 years of psychiatric abuse; Director of Welcome World, Inc.; Author, ESCAPE FROM PSYCHIATRY, the Autobiography of Clover.

 

Information Packets Available

#3 Dual Recovery

Call NEC-West at 1-888-746-4463 PIN 9378 or visit www.necwest.org and click on "Teleconferences".  

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Editor: Carol Patterson

Contributors: Patrick Risser, Kris Yates, Jolyn Wells-Moran, Clover Smith, Sylvia Caras and Kathryn Cohan, Rae Unzicker, and Sunny

Layout: Carol Patterson

Produced with funding from the Center for Mental Health Services

Deadline for submissions for Spring newsletter: April 1, 2002

Send submissions to Carol Patterson, MHCC, 1420 Willow Pass Rd. Suite 120, Concord, CA 94520 or e-mail to: carol@necwest.org

toll free: 1-888-746-4463 PIN 9378

Local: 925-681-0880

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For us, and in the intimate conversations we've had with other mindful people who experience

mood swings, fear, voices and visions, our lives seem not to follow a traditional linear path; our lives appear more to be like advancing spirals. We relapse and

recuperate, we decide and rebuild, we awaken to life and recover/discover, and then we spiral again. This spiral journey is one of renewal and integration.

For some of us, the dynamic nature of this process leads to what can only be described as transformation.

Transformation includes the integration of the "self-as-altered" states we move through with the "self-as-whole" states we also experience. Transformation is the certain knowledge that one experience is not personally valued more than the other. Transformation is a lack of judgment on these diverse parts, and an acceptance of the vulnerable, perhaps less

developed parts of ourselves. Transformation is ownership of the fact of having been changed by complex multiple internal and external processes. Transformation is an experience of being "more" as a result of having had unusual perception and mood experiences and valuing that rather than trying to proceed through life "as if" these things never happened.

Recovery and rehabilitation imply that something was once broken and then was fixed. Transformation implies the proverbial making of lemonade after life hands you lemons... It is the lesson, hard learned, of the opportunity available in the midst of crisis that evokes a substantive change within ourselves.

-Kathryn Cohan and Sylvia Caras, September 28, 1997 Ver 1.0

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