I have heard many ways people can connect deeply.
One is just an intuitive, empathetic connection that sometimes happens when people understand each other.
I also believe we can cultivate an ability to listen and connect deeply, to set aside judgments about how other people express themselves or react to a situation. When I do that, it often makes a real conversation possible. I’m not always successful at it, but I keep trying to learn.
Programs that Help People Connect Deeply
Soteria helps people connect deeply.
Ombudsperson programs, Soteria, and Open Dialogue all seem like practices that have
Continue reading Tina Minkowitz on How to Connect Deeply and Relate to a Person
People need good information. and less fighting over medication..
Editor’s note: As the author says, Wellness Wordworks is for good mental health information, and truly informed consent regarding psych meds. That must include information about alternatives to medicine, and dangerous long-term side effects. IT MEANS TRYING ALTERNATIVES TO MEDICATION FIRST, NOT AS AN AFTER-THOUGHT.
We are against “diagnosis and medication first for everyone for life,” which is still standard practice in mental health today. We believe most so-called mental illness comes from previous trauma, isolation, invalidation, and loss, which are not diseases, and do not respond to psych
Continue reading By Elvia Knoll – I’m for Good Information, Not For or Against Psych Meds
A blind person did not choose to be blind, but can choose limitations blindness places on his life. That’s even more true of limitations caused by emotional distress. We can’t prevent the trauma that triggers it, but can choose limitations it imposes on our lives. Many people enjoy reliving their negative experience. To see their experience as somehow positive would seem would absurd to them.
There’s a saying, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”
If you’re not ready to see or accept that we don’t choose to be blind, crippled, or post-traumatic, but can choose limitations such
Continue reading By Imogene Joseph – We can’t choose handicaps, but can choose limitations
Editor’s note: We got this recovery story from Jared, the webmaster of SchizLife.com. He’s a true mental health escapee or psych survivor, but we were his first contact with the recovery movement. We’ll repost his blog here with mental health civil rights information in brackets. This will be an interesting note to show the difference between mainstream mental health information, which was all Jared had found to this point. He’s progressing rapidly, though, now that he’s got contact with advocates who know a different type of schizophrenia recovery story.
We Fall to Gain a Frame of Reference – My Schizophrenia
Continue reading Jared – My Schizophrenia Recovery Story
Editors note: This is an essay written by Yvette McShan taken with her permission from a Facebook discussion group. For a comprehensive treatment of this topic, along with many personal stories, check out http://www.psychdiagnosis.net/
Labeling is Harmful because It Costs People Rights: Parental rights Right to bear arms Right for employment in certain fields. Social stigma.
Introduce yourself to a prospective mother-in-law with a mental illness label. Tell the police that you are X disease, and you want them to know. It’s dangerous being known as a club members of the DSM.
I do not hide that I am in
Continue reading By Yvonne Smith – Why Mental Illness Labeling is Harmful
Editors note: We recently got challenged by one of our supporters who is a medication user and wants people to stop invalidating medication users. We are going to intersperse our challenger with data to make sure people can weigh both sides of the story.
Our challenger:
Psych med critics who practically say all psychiatric medications are bad for everyone all the time –dismiss the experiences of apparently millions of people, who take psych meds, as merely personal anecdotes. Psychiatric survivors talk about their negative personal experiences with psych meds all the time.
So, yes, there is another side of the
Continue reading Medication users call for respect from psych med critics
Volunteering for International Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry (ISEPP) is my way of giving back. I feel I have been very blessed. It was very difficult for me to find providers who offered alternatives to mainstream psychiatry, and it was even more difficult to find a psychiatrist who would work with me s to try to taper off psych meds. ISEPP helps people connect with alternatives to mainstream psychiatry and psych meds.
ISEPP supports alternatives to conventional psychiatry and medication.
Volunteering for ISEPP gives me an opportunity to help provide support to mental health professionals who are open-minded
Continue reading Maria Mangicaro – ISEPP is My Type of Mental Health Advocacy
This is a comment originally posted on http://MadinAmerica.com that deserved some further attention.
If we consider the broad spectrum of issues regarding mental/behavioral/emotional health care, we start to realize there are many shades of grey in the “mental illness” epidemic and debate. But what if mental health advocates could identify certain issues that are purely black and white, right or wrong, and focus on just a few we agree on?
Mental health advocates should unite around a few issues they agree on.
We could start to create transparency among advocates. For example, I am sure you are familiar with
Continue reading Maria Mangicaro – Can Mental Health Advocates Advocates Agree on a Message?
We are one as humans, all infinitely interconnected. Therefore, we are certainly responsible for ourselves, and need to reduce the normal, human emotional distress people have created and can solve. Our true voice would never leave us if we were all treated as worthy, not “sufferers,” or victims, who have been labeled, ridiculed, or violently squashed in forced treatment — who currently can’t hear their true voices.
We want the healer within us, that others have available.
Elegant, almost scientific, evidence that there is no real separation between you and me, that we are interconnected infinitely with all humans (and
Continue reading Ann Burgess – Why Only Some Emotional Distress is Called a Disease
Editor’s note: This came from a discussion in an email group for all the peer support centers in Missouri. Bonnie Castro is a peer support specialist.
Some Peers Change Lives
So many folks in the system right now still remain in the “life is limited” stage despite consumer-run programs or clinical services that are offered to them. It’s not the services destroying the system so much. It’s the people delivering those services that change lives.
Recovery Rocks 2011 – Conference with many peer specialists where Bonnie was a speaker
I have met case managers that are really good
Continue reading Bonnie Castro – People, Not Treatment Models, Change Lives
We need to keep creating and developing options beyond alternative treatments, an “underground railroad” of peer respites for crisis opportunities, instead of the same old warehousing, involving hopelessly long and deep interruptions that just lead people to decay and death.
What’s amazing is that we are doing much of this in some places on a shoestring. It is remarkable that people and organizations are stepping forward for a hand up, rather than a hand out. That is the neighborly, paying-it-forward thing to do, not wasting our human resources, which costs everybody.
Combat Arts KC – Beyond Alternative Treatments
Continue reading By Ann Burgess, Tina Minkowitz, and Pat Risser – We must go beyond alternative treatments
Editors note: Much of this post came from a comment previously published on MadInAmerica.com. The comment was by Marian Goldstein. Because comment copyright ownership is still a matter of debate in the internet era, we’ll be glad to pull this if anyone objects.
It is my experience that whenever our immediate reaction to something is, when we say “You’re“crazy!” we’re actually dealing we’re our own craziness, a block in our own consciousness, usually produced by fear, not another person’s craziness.
We can quote studies and statistics, and understand with our rational mind, “This or that percentage of all children in
Continue reading “You’re Crazy” Can Be a Compliment
Editors note: Much of this post came from a comment previously published on MadInAmerica.com. The comment was by Maria Mangicaro. Because comment copyright ownership is still a matter of debate in the internet era, we’ll be glad to pull this if anyone objects.
Sticker found in Kansas City. What really defines psychiatric symptoms?
I am concerned with the “Chinese menu” approach, or using the DSM just to match people up with psychiatric symptoms:
1. Are certain individuals in our mental health care system. suffering from underlying medical conditions misdiagnosed as schizophrenia or bipolar? Are they being forced to accept
Continue reading Maria Mangicaro – Check for Physical Causes of Psychiatric Symptoms First
After I experienced a lot of psych med weight gain, I realized how I’ve been seeing myself and other women.
I’ve been looking at myself, I’ve been looking at other women, everywhere – on buses, in the streets, restaurants, stores, cinemas, you name it – and thinking that the thinner ones were prettier than me, more advantaged than me, and what’s more – on some level I am ashamed to admit I’ve sunk to – looking at the women bigger than me, and secretly congratulatiing myself and stroking my ego because I had a smaller body! But that was before
Continue reading How psych med weight gain taught me to stop objectifying women
Editors note: This story is written by Ken Braiterman’s neighbor, Karen, about her natural lupus recovery. She uses and sells homeopathic and nutrient products to manage her own natural lupus recovery and her son’s alleged ADHD. Both refuse prescription medicine, which their doctors say is impossible.
If you have ever felt chronic pain and or fatigue in your life, it masters its way into becoming a full time job in your life to defeat it. You keep your ears open to those around you who have been experiencing the same JUST IN CASE you might catch them talking about
Continue reading Karen Young: All Natural Lupus Recovery
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